May 8
Louis Tomlinson’s How Did We Get Here? World Tour brought huge emotion, fan projects, confetti and arena-sized gratitude to Manchester and G
Yes!!!!
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Louis Tomlinson’s How Did We Get Here? World Tour brought huge emotion, fan projects, confetti and arena-sized gratitude to Manchester and G
Yes!!!!
Are we acknowledging Starfleet's hierarchical makeup here, or attempting to cover it up?
While the episode does lead to Starfleet Academy winning a prank war against the War College-with a refocus from Captain Ake reminding her cadets that Starfleet's first goal is to disarm opponents without rising to conflict footing-the questions it opens us up to are never truly resolved. Is the War College meant to be an antagonist that Starfleet Academy can always look good against? Are we relegating military might to one corner of the Federation, away from Starfleet's more lofty goals, so that it can appear untouched? Are we ever going to contend with the hierarchical nature of Starfleet's structure in a more meaningful way that leads us out of military pretension?
It is not just this doomed government but the Labour party itself that is disappearing before our very eyes, says Guardian columnist Aditya
President Trump's second administration has featured a flurry of activity on antisemitism. Jews should be skeptical.
If the president were serious about fighting antisemitism, he would have to break up with his antisemitic friends and fans, including Holocaust deniers like Nicholas Fuentes, Great Replacement conspiracy theorists like Tucker Carlson, and self-described Western Chauvinists like the Proud Boys. This is something he has shown no intention of doing. Instead, he has opted for an act of political theater. But given that his executive order, and the task force newly empowered to enforce it, have the force of law behind them, we can expect them to have pernicious real-world consequences, particularly for international students and workers with precarious legal statuses. We can expect to see instances of racial, religious and political profiling become increasingly commonplace, as the administration puts pressure on universities to identify non-citizen students involved in protests against Israel. Students and staff will be incentivized to report each other to administrators, and administrators pressured to report students and staff to the authorities. We can also expect to witness the repression of pro-Palestinian speech, the censorship of related topics in the classroom, and ever more violent crackdowns on campus protest — all with the administration’s official blessing. It is seriously unlikely that any of these measures will make Jewish students or staff any safer — on or off campus — aimed as they are at suppressing speech rather than combating hatred. If anything, they promise to undermine the intercommunal solidarity on which Jewish safety ultimately depends, creating the impression that prioritizing Jewish interests means adhering to a right-wing agenda with which a majority of Jews disagree. There is no future in which that agenda leads to happy results — for any of us.
“We need to strengthen the conflict between Zaluzhny and Zelensky, along the lines of ‘he intends to fire him,’” one Kremlin political strategist wrote a year ago, after a meeting of senior Russian officials and Moscow spin doctors, according to internal Kremlin documents.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s administration ordered a group of Russian political strategists to use social media and fake news articles to push the theme that Zelensky “is hysterical and weak. … He fears that he will be pushed aside, therefore he is getting rid of the dangerous ones.”
The Kremlin instruction resulted in thousands of social media posts and hundreds of fabricated articles, created by troll farms and circulated in Ukraine and across Europe, that tried to exploit what were then rumored tensions between the two Ukrainian leaders, according to a trove of Kremlin documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post. The files, numbering more than 100 documents, were shared with The Post to expose for the first time the scale of Kremlin propaganda targeting Zelensky with the aim of dividing and destabilizing Ukrainian society — efforts that Moscow dubbed “information psychological operations.”(..)
The documents show how in January 2023 the Kremlin’s first deputy chief of staff, Sergei Kiriyenko, tasked a team of officials and political strategists with establishing a presence on Ukrainian social media to distribute disinformation.
The effort built on an earlier project that Kiriyenko, a longtime Putin aide, had been running to subvert Western support for Ukraine, including in France and Germany, previous reporting by The Post shows. The European propaganda group was overseen by one of Kiriyenko’s deputies, Tatyana Matveeva, head of the Kremlin’s department for developing information and communication technologies, the documents show.(..)
At a Jan. 16, 2023, meeting, Kiriyenko laid out four key objectives for the Ukraine propaganda team: discrediting Kyiv’s military and political leadership, splitting the Ukrainian elite, demoralizing Ukrainian troops and disorienting the Ukrainian population, the documents show.(..)
By early March, dozens of hired trolls were pumping out more than 1,300 texts and 37,000 comments on Ukrainian social media each week, according to one of the dashboard presentations. Records show that employees at troll farms earned 60,000 rubles a month, or $660, for writing 100 comments a day.(..)
The strategists advised developing “a network of Telegram channels in combination with Twitter and Facebook/Instagram” as the most effective way of penetrating Ukraine’s media space, noting that the Telegram audience in Ukraine had grown 600 percent over the previous year. (..)
By the first week of May,a post the Kremlin strategists had planted on Facebook, saying that “Valery Zaluzhny can become the next president of Ukraine,” had garnered 4.3 million views, one of the dashboard presentations shows. The Kremlin then issued orders to create similar posts or “additional reality” — a term used by Russian officials for fake news — including reports that Western leaders were looking for a replacement for Zelensky and that Zaluzhny intended to halt the counteroffensive.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, said in a statement referring to the Russian posts about Zaluzhny and the alleged lack of state aid for the fallen soldier that it had been “monitoring and blocking accounts, Pages and websites run by this campaign” since 2022, “including these two Pages that were quickly detected and disabled by our security team.”
Undeterred, the strategists planted a plethora of articles in Ukraine via social media, with one in May headlined “Zelensky is holding on to the throne. In Ukraine democracy is being liquidated,” the documents show. Another in June sought to play up what it claimed was the prolonged disappearance of Zaluzhny from public view, with bloggers instructed to post comments declaring: “This is why Zaluzhny disappeared: Because he could have and should have taken Zelensky’s place.”
The strategists also sought to exploit Kiriyenko’s campaign in Western Europe by recycling its disinformation for use in Ukraine. The tactics in the European campaign included cloning and usurping media and government websites, such as those for Le Monde and the French Foreign Ministry, and then posting fake content on them denigrating the Ukrainian government, in an operation dubbed Doppelgänger by European Union officials. They also included creating fake accounts on X, or Twitter, for prominent figures including German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. The strategists sought to place stories or posts from those websites or accounts on Ukrainian social media as genuine European reporting or commentary.
After the fake Baerbock account declared in September that “the war in Ukraine will be over in 3 months,” the German authorities launched an investigation and found more than 50,000 fake user accounts coordinating pro-Russian propaganda, including those promoting the tweet. Officials believe the fake accounts were an extension of the Doppelgänger campaign, Der Spiegel reported.
The Doppelgänger operation was first exposed by Meta in September 2022 and then by French authoritieslast summer and tied to Reliable Recent News, a fake news site traced back to two Russian companies, the Social Design Agency and Structura National Technologies. The Kremlin documents show that the heads of Social Design Agency and Structura — Ilya Gambashidze and Nikolai Tupikin — worked directly with Kiriyenko and another Kremlin official, Sofiya Zakharova, who coordinated efforts in Europe and Ukraine.“She is the brain,” a European security official said.
The E.U. imposed sanctions in July on Gambashidze, Structura National Technologies and Social Design Agency for what it said was their role in creating fake webpages and social media accounts “usurping the identity of national media outlets and government websites” as part of “a hybrid campaign by Russia against the EU and member states.” Gambashidze and Tupikin were named by the U.S. State Department in November for their role in Kremlin efforts to spread disinformation in Latin America(..)
Gambashidze, Tupikin and their colleagues proposed narratives they hoped would destroy Zelensky’s image in the West as “the hero of a small country fighting a global evil,” one of the documents sent in April shows. They suggested portraying Zelensky as an actor only capable of following a script written for him by the United States and NATO,and his Western backers as tiring of him. They proposed distributing fake Ukrainian government documents as evidence of corrupt military procurement schemes, and suggesting that Zelensky and his family had Western bank accounts, the document shows.
The plans led to hundreds of articles and thousands of social media posts translated into French, German and English that targeted Zelensky, the document trove shows.
One article, for a French audience, was headlined: “The conductor has gotten bored of Zelensky’s concerts: the actions of the U.S. in Ukraine lead one to believe that Washington soon intends to get rid of Zelensky, without discussing this with Paris.”
On the basis of this article, one of the strategists ordered a troll farm employee to prepare social media posts in French saying, “Washington will replace Zelensky with a more capable president. And France will have to silently continue arming and financing Ukraine.”
Another article described how Zelensky had pushed for Ukrainian forces to defend Bakhmut against Zaluzhny’s wishes, leading, it said, to the deaths of 250,000 Ukrainian troops, a wildly exaggerated death toll in what was nonetheless a brutal battle for the city. The troll farm employees were asked to write comments such as “Why do Ukrainian generals hate Zelensky? PR out of the blood of fighters” and “To shoot the exhausted president? In Ukraine, a generals’ conspiracy is brewing.”
One of the strategists’ aims, European security officials said, was to ensure that the themes placed in European social media filtered back into Ukraine, through reposts and amplification,or by being picked up by Ukrainian politicians keen to boost their profiles with provocative posts.(..)
The strategists also had price lists for planting pro-Russian commentary in prominent Western media and for paying social media “influencers” in the United States and Europe “willing to work with Russian clients.” The documents say the Russians were willing to pay up to $39,000 for the planting of pro-Russian commentary in major media outlets in the West.
“Practically everywhere this will be columnists, leaders of public opinion, former diplomats, officials, professors and so on,” a note attached to the price list states.”
Catherine Belton, “Kremlin runs disinformation campaign to undermine Zelensky, documents show”
Drag Race legend Trixie Mattel has slammed the hateful "grooming" narrative used by far-right politicians to smear LGBTQ+ people.
Mattel explained that drag is varied, and, that while some drag performances are age-appropriate for children, some distinctly are not. Nevertheless, she noted that all drag queens are targeted by the same pernicious slurs.
“It’s interesting how much time is spent focused on ‘drag queens want our children”, Mattel said.
“We don’t think about your children. We think about: ‘I hope my wig stays on. I hope I know my words. I hope the drunk people in the audience are sober enough to clap and not be asleep’. We’re more worried about the behaviour of drunk adults, those are our children.”
Mattel then explained that, contrary to the much-quoted lies that LGBTQ+ people want to influence a child’s sexuality, drag queens simply hope to provide positivity, affirming representation.
“We don’t think about your kids,” she continued. “We don’t hope they’re gay. We don’t hope they turn out trans. We don’t hope they become drag queens.
“What we hope is that, if they are trans or are gay, they find a community faster than many of us did.”
Minneapolis, the site of the women’s Final Four, has long produced outstanding players and rallied around its W.N.B.A. team, the Lynx.
Few Dallas athletes are more recognizable and less understood. Turns out solving the mystery makes for a good story.