Elon Musk Hit With Lawsuit For Falsely Accusing Man Of Being Part Of Neo-Nazi Brawl

Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and far-right sympathizer, has been hit with a defamation lawsuit after he falsely accused a recent college graduate of being a federal agent involved with a neo-Nazi group.

Ben Brody, a 22-year-old Jewish man from California, filed the lawsuit against Musk on Monday after he said he and his family were forced to flee their home after continued harassment and threats after Musk promoted a dangerous conspiracy against Brody.

Musk ousts X team curbing election disinformation

Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter) said overnight that a global team working on curbing disinformation during elections had been dismissed — a mere two days after being singled out by the EU's digital chief as the online platform with the most falsehoods.

Responding to reports about cuts, the tech mogul said on X, "Oh you mean the 'Election Integrity' Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone."

RNC's Livestream Partner For Republican Debate Is A Haven For Disinformation

NEW YORK (AP) — The second Republican presidential debate will be broadcast Wednesday on Fox Business Network and Univision, but the exclusive online live stream will take place on Rumble, an alternative video-sharing platform that has been criticized for allowing— and at times promoting — far-right extremism, bigotry, election disinformation and conspiracy theories.

By bringing viewers to Rumble to watch the GOP debate, as it did with the first one last month, the Republican National Committee is driving potential voters to a site crawling with content that flouts the rules of more mainstream ones such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

How Misinformation Is Threatening America’s Biggest Foreign Aid Success

Mark Dybul knows the ins and outs of PEPFAR, America’s long-running effort to fight AIDS in Africa, intimately. As a staffer at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he was one of only two non-White House experts to help draw up the original outline of the program early in the George W. Bush administration. From 2006 to 2009, he served as the program’s chief as U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator.

Now two decades old, the program is credited with saving more than 25 million lives. Dybul, however, is worried it may not continue much longer, as misinformation peddled by opponents of abortion rights threatens congressional authorization of the program. 

Measles Outbreaks Are Increasing. Experts Think It’s Because of Anti-Vaxxers on Facebook.

Medical experts warn that the internet could be making more of us sick, pointing to research highlighting how online platforms’ role in boosting vaccination opponents and their baseless theories is fueling infectious disease outbreaks across the world.

Two researchers at the University of Stirling in Scotland released a study last year concluding, based on data from January 2011 to August 2017, that there were “statistically significant positive correlations” between the use of anti-vaccination search terms and falling rates of immunizations, suggesting that online anti-vaxxer activity is having real and potentially deadly consequences.

Fake Russian intel on Lynch-Clinton collusion prompted Comey investigation into Hillary’s emails: report

A dubious Russian intelligence document that purported to show coordination between Hillary Clinton and the U.S. Justice Department, and prompted former FBI Director James Comey to disclose the bureau’s investigation into Clinton’s emails, was “bad intelligence” and “possibly even fake,” the Washington Post reports.

@Kady – No, the party that wins the most seats does not automatically get to form government.

No, not even if Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau — two of the party leaders currently competing for the privilege of doing so — claim otherwise.

In fact, under current constitutional conventions, as the leader of the incumbent government, Stephen Harper would be given the first opportunity to test the confidence of the House after the dust had settled from October 19th — even if the Conservatives came in third.

Harper declines to explain apparent incongruity in Duffy story

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper is dodging an apparent incongruity between his own narrative around the repayment of Senator Mike Duffy’s questionable living expenses and an e-mail written by Nigel Wright, Mr. Harper’s former chief of staff, who dipped into his own bank account to ensure that the money was refunded.

Mr. Wright was on the stand Thursday for the second day at Mr. Duffy’s trial on 31 charges that include bribery, fraud on the government and breach of trust. More than 400 pages of government e-mails pertaining to Mr. Duffy were released publicly this week. In one of them, written May 14, 2013, to a press attaché, Mr. Wright says, “The PM knows, in broad terms only, that I personally assisted Duffy when I was getting him to agree to repay the expenses.”

Ottawa aims to keep lid on details of Saudi arms deal

The Canadian government is refusing to make public the assessments it conducts to determine whether Ottawa’s $15-billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia is compatible with foreign policy or poses a risk to the civilian population in a country notorious for human-rights abuses.

The Department of Foreign Affairs argues it must keep deliberations secret regarding this deal – by far the largest export contract ever brokered by Ottawa – citing the need to protect the “commercial confidentiality” of General Dynamics Land Systems Canada, which makes the light armoured vehicles.

Boehner Makes Republicans 'Tools and Dupes' of Netanyahu's Election Campaign

One of the defining precepts of the American Republic from its earliest days to today has been that the president of the United States represents the country in its dealings with the world. It is a view which the Supreme Court unambiguously endorsed in 1936 in United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp:

"In this vast external realm, with its important, complicated, delicate and manifold problems, the President alone has the power to speak or listen as a representative of the nation. He makes treaties with the advice and consent of the Senate; but he alone negotiates. Into the field of negotiation the Senate cannot intrude, and Congress itself is powerless to invade it. As Marshall said in his great argument of March 7, 1800, in the House of Representatives, 'The President is the sole organ of the nation in its external relations, and its sole representative with foreign nations.'"

The Big Omission In Netanyahu’s Address To Congress

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu slammed the emerging nuclear deal between the United States, Iran, and the major world powers during a drama-filled address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday morning, but failed to offer any alternatives for ensuring that Tehran does not obtain nuclear weapons.

Instead, the Prime Minister of the Jewish state — who spoke for 40 minutes and was interrupted by applause roughly 40 times — hinted that his country could take military action “alone” against Iran in protest of any negotiated agreement.

Was Ottawa 'terror' arrest timed to support repressive new legislation?

When the RCMP announced an Ottawa anti-terrorism arrest this month, the timing could not have been better for a federal government that appears to thrive on national security hysteria. After all, Prime Minister Harper, positioning himself as a wartime leader protecting Canadians from terrorists, had just introduced legislation (C-51) that would vastly increase the powers of Canada's state security agencies, a bill that's met with equal alarm from civil rights groups and the Globe and Mail's editorial board.

Corporate Tax Rates Aren’t The Reason American Companies Flee To Tax Havens

Cutting the corporate tax rate in the U.S. would do little to discourage companies from moving overseas to dodge American taxes, according to a new Reuters analysis of the half-dozen largest companies to launch so-called inversion mergers last year.

The list of six companies includes both Medtronic and Burger King, household names whose inversion plans drew significant press attention to the growth of the business practice in recent years. An inversion allows an American company to merge with a foreign entity then set the corporate headquarters of the merged firm in that other company’s home country, shifting the U.S. firm’s tax residence overseas without requiring any actual realignment of where and how the company does business. The maneuver is entirely legal and “mainly driven by efforts to shift profits out of the U.S. and to access overseas earnings at little or not cost in U.S. tax,” Reuters explains.

Revenue Canada's Call Centres Giving Bad Tax Advice: Report

One of every four business callers who ask for tax help from the Canada Revenue Agency’s call centres gets bad information, an internal survey suggests.

The dismal finding is worse than previous estimates by the agency, and confirms repeated complaints by a small-business group that the call centres are routinely dispensing misleading — and perhaps legally dubious — answers.

The latest survey, specially ordered by the head of the tax organization, tested call-centre workers by asking seven routine questions, phoned in anonymously and randomly by 11 agency employees.

Wisconsin Officials Call Scott Walker’s Budget ‘Nonsensical’

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker unveiled his budget for 2015 in a prime-time speech Tuesday night, telling the state assembly it “will help restore that America Dream right here in Wisconsin.”

But as the Governor struggles to close a nearly $2 billion budget gap, state officials on both sides of the aisle tell ThinkProgress the plan is “nonsensical,” and predict it will trigger public sector layoffs, weaken environmental protections and devastate higher education. State leaders are also blasting the budget as fiscally irresponsible, estimating that one controversial proposal to administer drug tests for food stamp recipients could cost local counties millions.

Harper's Claim About NDP, Liberals Vowing To Scrap Child Care Benefit 'Full Of Baloney'

OTTAWA - "Friends, our opponents have been clear. They would take away the Universal Child Care Benefit. They've said so on many occasions." — Prime Minister Stephen Harper in a speech Sunday prior to the resumption of the House of Commons.

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With the House of Commons returning this week from a five-week break, Prime Minister Stephen Harper set the stage for the 2015 federal election year with a speech to hundreds of supporters Sunday at a suburban Ottawa high school.

Harper Government, PBO Clash Over Foreign Aid Report

OTTAWA - The parliamentary budget office is defending itself from a government attack on its latest report on Canada's plunging overseas development spending.

The Foreign Affairs Department accused the parliamentary budget watchdog of relying on "inaccurate financial information" in a report that said spending on poverty reduction shrank 23 per cent in the first six months of the last fiscal year.

The false debate between freedom of expression and religious extremism

Reading news coverage about the recent attacks on the French satirical magazineCharlie Hebdo left me with many unanswered and uncomfortable questions. A very complex French, European and international event was summarized with simplistic headlines such us: "How remarkable that a humour magazine has led the fight against fanaticism" or "Paris attack illustrates the power of mockery."

After the deadly attack, many cartoonists reduced the event to a confrontation between an armed, bearded jihadist and a pen. A simple representation, yet it is both powerful and misleading.

Bill C-2 spreads Harper's misinformation about harm reduction

Bill C-2, known as the Respect for Communities Act, was drafted by the government in response to the Supreme Court ruling of September 2011 that supported the continued operation of Insite, Vancouver's supervised injection facility.

It has completed first and second readings in the House of Commons and is currently one-third of the way to becoming law.

If passed, Bill C-2 will create substantial barriers to the establishment of safe consumption sites, such as Vancouver's Insite.

Canada: The land of jobless immigrants

Welcome to Canada. We lied about the opportunities.

That is the realistic undertone to the new immigration policy announcement by Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander on October 31, 2014, which declared that Canada aims to welcome as many as 285,000 new permanent residents next year.

The last time Canada admitted as many as 280,000 permanent residents was in 2010. According to the Minister, this is the highest planned total "in recent history," and is designed to "attract skilled immigrants" who will "help contribute to our economy and labour market."