• Did Manafort meet Assange?

    Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and visited around the time he joined Trump’s campaign, the Guardian has been told. Sources have said Manafort went to see Assange in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016 – during the period when Manafort was made a key figure in Trump’s push for the White House. It is unclear why Manafort wanted to see Assange and what was discussed. But the last meeting is likely to come under scrutiny and could interest Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor who is investigating alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

  • Trump regularly briefed on Manafort-Muller discussions

    A lawyer for Paul Manafort repeatedly briefed President Donald Trump’s lawyers on his client’s discussions with federal investigators after Manafort agreed to cooperate with the special counsel. This highly unusual arrangement intensified tensions between Trump’s team and the special counsel’s office after prosecutors discovered it. Muller’s office discovered that Manafort’s lawyers were regularly updating the Trump team after Manafort began cooperating with Muller’s office two months ago. Some legal experts speculated that it was an attempt by Manafort to secure a presidential pardon even as he worked with the special counsel in hopes of a lighter sentence.

  • Seven commandments of fake news: Exposing the Kremlin’s methods

    A 3-series multimedia project by the New York Times reveals how current Kremlin disinformation campaigns stem from a long tradition of weaponizing information. Titled Operation Infektion, the series tells the story of a “political virus,” invented decades ago by the KGB to “slowly and methodically destroy its enemies from the inside,” and which the Kremlin continues to deliberately spread to this day.

  • How conspiracy theories can kill

    Conspiracy theories, rampant in the United States, have an unusual power to motivate people to action. Some conspiracy theories are associated with various right-wing or left-wing ideologies, while others transcend ideology, like those surrounding the 9/11 attacks or the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Under the right circumstances, such theories can motivate people to violence, especially if the conspiracy theories single out specific people or organizations as the villains. Most extremist movements develop or depend on conspiracy theories to some degree. In the United States, extreme right-wing movements have a particularly close relationship to conspiracy theories.

  • Iran planned to build five 10-Kt bombs by 2003: Nuclear experts

    The Institute for Science and International Security published a paper Tuesday containing new details about Iran’s nuclear weapons program and demanding that the International Atomic Energy Agency ensure that Iran’s nuclear weapons program is “ended in an irretrievable permanent manner.” According to the report, Iranian documents show that Iran had specific plans to build five 10-kiloton nuclear devices by 2003. The plans from the archive show that Iran’s planning for these weapons was very detailed, including expected costs and a timetable.

  • Bolstering extended deterrence in a complex world

    A variety of threats from Russia, China and North Korea makes it critical that U.S. policymakers take a fresh look at what constitutes an effective strategy to deter interstate aggression, a new RAND report finds. The authors argue that growing opportunism in aggression seems less common than desperation through paranoia about growing threats to security or status. Large-scale aggression tends to emerge as a last resort, they find.

  • Virginia bill would let cities ban guns from protests

    The city of Charlottesville, Virginia, was powerless to prevent attendees from carrying guns at last year’s Unite the Right rally. But one of the state’s top officials, Attorney General Mark Herring, thinks he can prevent a similar situation from unfolding in the future.

  • Women’s March founder asks co-chairs to resign over anti-Semitism, bigotry

    The founder of the Women’s March has called on the movement’s current co-chairs to resign over anti-Semitic rhetoric and bigotry, just days after Linda Sarsour suggested American Jews have dual loyalties. Teresa Shook, a retired lawyer based in Hawaii, who first called for a women’s march after the election of United States President Donald Trump, said that board members“ have steered the Movement away from its true course,” as a result of “their refusal to separate themselves” from groups and individuals with “anti-Semitic and homophobic sentiments.”

  • Bishop Richard Williamson reiterates Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism

    In an email to supporters three weeks after the October 2018 death of Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, English traditionalist Catholic bishop Richard Williamson reconfirmed his belief that the Holocaust is a hoax perpetrated by Jews. In his email, Williamson describes Faurisson, who was one of the world’s foremost Holocaust deniers, as a “real hero” who “stood with unfailing courage and scrupulous accuracy for truth.”

     

  • Levitating particles could lift nuclear detective work

    Laser-based ‘optical tweezers’ could levitate uranium and plutonium particles, thus allowing the measurement of nuclear recoil during radioactive decay. This technique, proposed by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, provides a new method for conducting the radioactive particle analysis essential to nuclear forensics.

  • U.S. considering adding Venezuela to state-sponsors of terrorism list

    The United States is reportedly considering adding Venezuela to the list of terrorism-sponsoring states. The move would impose further financial punishment on the already-collapsing Venezuelan economy, which is staggering under the combined weight of hyperinflation, food and medicine shortages, and a mass exodus of citizens.

  • Better forest management won’t end wildfires, but it can reduce the risks – here’s how

    President Donald Trump’s recent comments blaming forest managers for catastrophic California wildfires have been met with outrage and ridicule from the wildland fire and forestry community. Not only were these remarks insensitive to the humanitarian crisis unfolding in California – they also reflected a muddled understanding of the interactions between wildfire and forest management. As scientists who study forest policy and community-based collaboration, here is how we understand this relationship.

  • Bannon's Brexit connection

    A recent report in the New Yorker revealed emails show Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica played a role in pushing Brexit. Their Leave.EU support may have been an incubator for tactics deployed to propel the Trump presidential campaign.

  • U.S. counterterror official: Iran spends $1 billion annually supporting terrorism

    The United States Coordinator for Counterterrorism said that Iran spends nearly $1 billion annually supporting terrorist groups across the Middle East. Of the total, Ambassador Nathan Sales said that Iran gives $700 million to the Lebanon-based terror group Hezbollah; $100 million to Hamas and other “Palestinian terrorist groups;” and unspecified sums to other terrorist organizations.

  • U.S. documents suggest charges filed against WikiLeaks founder Assange

    U.S. court documents suggest WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been criminally charged by prosecutors in a case that could be related to the investigation into Russia’s meddling in the U.S. elections. News outlets report that the disclosure was included as part of a court filing in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, in a case unrelated to Assange.