Anti-vaxxers are now a modern political force

For years, groups at the vanguard of the anti-vaccine movement had been operating with relatively small budgets and only a handful of staff.

Now, they’re awash in cash.

The Covid-19 pandemic has produced a remarkable financial windfall for anti-vaccine nonprofits. Revenue more than doubled for the Informed Consent Action Network and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense in 2021 compared to the year prior, according to a POLITICO analysis of tax filings. The nonprofits that survived on operating budgets of around a few million dollars just a few years prior are now raking in more than $10 million each.

Russell Brand and why the allegations took so long to surface

It came as little surprise that the darker corners of the internet were ablaze with conspiracy theories this week, after Russell Brand used his YouTube channel to call the allegations of sexual assault and rape against him a “coordinated attack” and a “serious and concerted agenda” to control his voice.

But even among more mainstream voices, questions were raised about the timing. Toby Young, a former editor at the Spectator, asked if there was a “more innocent” reason why the Times, the Sunday Times and Channel 4 Dispatches had “waited this long to produce their findings”, while the British business magnate Alan Sugar tweeted that it was “strange” that multiple people had come forward at the same time.

France to withdraw ambassador and troops from Niger

France will withdraw its ambassador from Niger followed by the French military contingent in the next months, Emmanuel Macron has said in the aftermath of the coup in the west African country that ousted the pro-Paris president.

The French president’s announcement appeared to end two months of defiance in which Paris’s ambassador had been kept in place in Niamey despite coup leaders ordering him to leave.

Documents show Putin’s order to move superyacht before Ukraine invasion

Vladimir Putin moved his $100m (£75m) superyacht from a German shipyard to Russia just weeks before he ordered the invasion of Ukraine, according to secret documents released in a new investigation.

A Russian anti-corruption organisation set up by the jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny claims emails show that the Russian president ordered the urgent moving of the 82-metre superyacht, called Graceful, from a shipyard in Hamburg, where it was undergoing a $32m refit, by 1 February 2022.

India Comes To The UN With Diplomatic Mess After Riding Geopolitical High

NEW DELHI (AP) — The Group of 20 Summit, hosted by India earlier this month, couldn’t have gone better for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. His pledge to make the African Union a permanent member became reality. And under his leadership, the fractured grouping signed off on a final statement. It was seen as a foreign policy triumph for Modi and set the tone for India as a great emerging power.

Jack Smith adds war crimes prosecutor — his deputy from the Hague — to special counsel team

Special counsel Jack Smith has added a veteran war crimes prosecutor — who served as Smith’s deputy during his stint at the Hague — to his team as it prepares to put former President Donald Trump on trial in Washington and Florida.

Alex Whiting worked alongside Smith for three years, helping prosecute crimes against humanity that occurred in Kosovo in the late 1990s. The Yale-educated attorney also worked as a prosecutor with the International Criminal Court from 2010 to 2013. He has taught law classes at Harvard since 2007 as well, hired as an assistant professor by then-Dean Elena Kagan — now a Supreme Court justice — and rising to a visiting professorship in 2013.

Trump hits Biden on UAW visit

Former President Donald Trump slammed President Joe Biden’s decision to join the United Auto Workers at the picket lines, calling on the union to endorse him and lambasting the administration’s electric vehicle policies as a “hoax.”

“Crooked Joe sold them down the river with his ridiculous all Electric Car Hoax. This wasn’t Biden’s idea, he can’t put two sentences together. It was the idea of the Radical Left Fascists, Marxists, & Communists who control him and who, in so doing, are DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY! Within 3 years, all of these cars will be made in China,” he wrote on Truth Social late Friday.

Ukraine claims senior Russian navy officers killed, injured in Crimea missile strike

A Ukrainian missile attack on the Russian navy’s Black Sea fleet headquarters on Friday killed and injured “dozens” of Russian troops, including a number of senior officials, Ukraine’s armed forces claimed on Saturday.

The claim, which couldn’t be verified, came as another rocket attack was launched on the Crimean city of Sevastopol, where the fleet is based, on Saturday. The Russia-installed governor of Sevastopol, Mikhail Razvozhayev, said on Telegram that debris from intercepted missiles fell near a pier during the latest assault.

Ukraine targets a key Crimean city a day after striking Russia’s Black Sea Fleet headquarters

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine on Saturday morning launched another missile attack on Sevastopol on the occupied Crimean Peninsula, a Russian-installed official said, a day after an attack on the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet that left a serviceman missing and the main building smoldering.

Sevastopol was put under an air raid alert for about an hour after debris from intercepted missiles fell near a pier, Gov. Mikhail Razvozhayev wrote on the messaging app Telegram. He later added that another missile fragment fell in a park in northern Sevastopol, parts of which had to be cordoned off. Ferry traffic in the area was also halted and later resumed.

Mouths Full of Blood: Trump and His Backers Spread Lies, Violence and Fascism

Former President Donald Trump has achieved a unique status in United States history. He is the first president to be indicted for conspiring to overturn a presidential election, defraud the U.S. and obstruct official proceedings by attempting to subvert the peaceful transfer of power.

It’s now a matter of public record that Trump faces four indictments and 91 felony counts for his criminal behavior. As Alan Feuer and Maggie Haberman point out in The New York Times, the charges clearly depict how “Trump promoted false claims of fraud, sought to bend the Justice Department toward supporting those claims and oversaw a scheme to create false slates of electors pledged to him in states that were actually won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.” And Special Counsel Jack Smith has shown that Trump’s lies played a central role in his “unprecedented assault” on the U.S. Capitol and democracy; indeed, he argues, Trump’s criminal actions were “fueled by lies.”