The U.S. military took four of Adel al-Manthari’s family members when an Air Force drone struck his car. Four years later, his doctors say that same strike is about to take his legs. Adel al-Manthari is the sole survivor of a March 2018 American drone strike in Yemen that killed his four cousins and sentenced him to a lifetime of severe health problems. For just a fraction of the cost of one of the $150,000 missiles that an American drone fired at his family, the Defense Department could pay for the complicated surgery Manthari’s doctors say he needs to keep his […]
Adam Rawnsley
35 posts
Since it launched a new invasion of Ukraine, Russia has scrambled to come up with a better narrative to justify its aggression than the “denazification” of a government run by the Jewish descendant of Holocaust survivors. The story Russia has settled on—Ukraine is cooking up secret biological weapons—is worse than nonsense. It’s a rerun. The propaganda about bogus biolab work put out by the Kremlin over the past few days is copy-pasted almost directly from years of similar nonsense stories that covert Kremlin trolls have used to try and discredit legitimate biological research in other former Soviet republics. Before Russia’s invasion, […]
As Russian bombs rain down on Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, volunteers dart through the city, dodging artillery on a mission to save lives. Panicked family members who have fled the city call the operators at Animal Rescue Kharkiv with desperate messages: Our dog is still home, our cat is trapped inside our apartment. Many residents of Kharkiv have already left, risking the journey in hopes of finding a break from the constant bombardment. But even before Russian forces attacked the city, Animal Rescue Kharkiv decided to stay. Russian bombs have struck the group’s adoption center, killing five dogs and leaving […]
Iran launched a dozen ballistic missiles at the Iraqi city of Erbil late Saturday night in the vicinity of an unoccupied American consulate under construction, according to the Associated Press. In a statement released after the attack, the State Department said, “We condemn this outrageous attack and display of violence,” and confirmed that no U.S. personnel or facilities had been damaged. Lawk Ghafuri, a spokesman for the Kurdistan Regional Government, confirmed that 12 missiles had struck Erbil and claimed that they had been launched “from outside Iraq” and produced no casualties. Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi stopped short of attributing the […]
The video shows Russian mercenaries laughing and shouting as they pound a sledgehammer into the bloody hands and feet of a Syrian man, kicking him as he writhes on the ground, screaming in pain. In another clip, the commandos take the torture of their prey to its grisly conclusion: They cut off his head with knives and a trowel and set his body on fire. The mercenaries from Wagner, a Russian private military contractor linked to the Russian Defense Ministry and Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), are accused of murdering Muhammad Taha Ismail Al-Abdullah, also known as “Hamdi Bouta,” in 2017, leaving […]
Facebook says it has cracked down on a shadow hacking group that’s been ramping up its efforts to hack Ukrainian military officials and a number of other targets as Kyiv fends off a Russian invasion. In an announcement early Monday morning, security officials at Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said they’ve “seen increased targeting” of Ukrainian social media users by a hacking group that researchers refer to as “Ghostwriter.” After uncovering a group of phishing websites used by the group, Meta says it blocked the domains across its social media platforms in order to protect users. The cybersecurity firm Mandiant first identified […]
New satellite imagery shows Russian military equipment inching closer to Ukraine’s northern border in the past 24 hours as Moscow has ordered the deployment of troops into Ukraine’s self-declared republics along the country’s eastern border. Radar imagery captured by Capella Space and analyzed by researchers at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies shows a new encampment of Russian military vehicles and tents in a forest 35 miles away from the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. “It’s 20 kilometers from the border, which means it’s in a position to move into Ukraine,” Jeffrey Lewis, director of Middlebury’s East Asia non told The Daily […]
Vladimir Putin says Russia is ordering a “partial” drawdown of troops, but satellites overhead are offering a much more mixed picture of the massive Russian military buildup now menacing Ukraine. Photos taken by the commercial imaging company Planet showed that Russian troops have built a pontoon bridge on Tuesday across the Pripyat river near the Russia-Belarus border. It’s situated near the exclusion zone surrounding the damaged nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in Ukraine, the scene of a 1986 reactor meltdown. The imagery comes as Ukraine and NATO countries remain on edge amidst mixed signals about a Russian military buildup on a scale […]
When Milton Marin Caceres-Molina was arrested in New York for false impersonation—essentially a charge over lying to a police officer about a name or birthdate—his fingerprints showed that he had been deported to his home country of El Salvador in 2010. But by the time authorities figured out who Caceres-Molina was, he was already gone. Federal law enforcement officials tried to locate Caceres-Molina based on selfies he posted to Facebook. But when that effort failed, a U.S. Marshal applied for a warrant to authorize the use of a controversial technology to track down Caceres-Molina. Authorities wanted to use a cellphone tower […]
Meta is warning 50,000 people that they were the targets of “indiscriminate” surveillance carried out by a booming industry of cyber spies for hire who will track, trick, hack targets for the highest bidder. That’s according to two new reports from security researchers at Meta (the company that owns Facebook) and the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which tracks cybersecurity abuses against human rights groups and journalists. In a report issued on Thursday, Meta identified seven firms—including one first identified by The Daily Beast—based in India, Israel, Macedonia, and China engaged in creating fake Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp accounts to spy […]
The MAGA think tank at the vanguard of pro-Trump public intellectuals is recruiting sheriffs with ties to the far right and a dubious devotion to the “rule of law” to be academic “fellows” as part of a new program launched by the conservative institute this week. The Claremont Institute, a far-right research group that’s home to a number of former Trump administration officials, announced a new crop of eight “sheriffs fellows” selected from across the country on the basis of their “character, aptitude, accomplishments, zeal, and community reputation” to visit Claremont’s California campus and study a syllabus of standard conservative political […]
He’s the English-tweeting, shitposting Afghan Taliban fanboy who’s found fame marketing the group’s brutal cultural policies to the far-right in its favorite language of messageboard memes—and Malang Khostay is enjoying his moment. Despite the hype of his myriad Western Twitter followers, Khostay isn’t a member of the Taliban or its spokesman (although he says he’s looking for a job in the new government). But after the Taliban took control over Afghanistan, he rose to demi-celebrity status among a Western far-right audience eager to have its cultural politics affirmed by a group that’s been ascendant against the same institutions it despises. And […]
Facebook has uncovered two hacking groups targeting a range of officials on opposite sides of the political divide in Palestinian politics. On Wednesday, Facebook’s security team announced that it had disrupted a hacking effort linked to the Palestinian Authority-controlled intelligence agency, the Preventive Security Service (PSS), and a campaign targeting the Palestinian Authority linked to a shadowy hacking group known as “Arid Viper.” According to Facebook, the PSS-linked hackers targeted non-governmental journalists and human-rights activists as well as government targets across the region, including in the Palestinian territories, Syria, Libya, Lebanon, and Turkey. The PSS-linked hackers used sock-puppet accounts which posed […]
Facebook says it busted a troll farm run by the Mujahideen-e-Khalq—a dissident Iranian group which lobbies for the overthrow of Iran’s revolutionary government—that used artificial intelligence-generated fake faces to populate sham accounts. The social media company linked the troll farm, based alongside the MEK’s headquarters in Albania, to 300 different assets on Facebook’s platform, including pages, groups and accounts engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior. The Mujahideen-e-Khalq, which began as a Marxist revolutionary organization, opposed Iran’s monarchy in the 1970s and fought alongside the IRGC to overthrow the Shah of Iran. After the revolution, the IRGC cracked down on the MEK and […]
When Oath Keeper Rob Minuta provided security for Roger Stone on the day of the Capitol riot, it wasn’t his first time providing muscle for a top Trump aide. Imagery obtained by The Daily Beast shows Minuta marched alongside former Trump National Security Adviser Mike Flynn when he attended a similar march in Washington, D.C. in December which sought to overturn the 2020 election. His appearance in similar roles for Flynn and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones at pro-Trump rallies after the election highlights the troubling network of connections between members of the far-right militia and some of Trump’s closest advisers and […]
The MAGA mob that ransacked the United States Capitol came to Washington armed with more than just crazy conspiracy theories and a violent sense of entitlement. Scattered throughout over a hundred alleged rioters’ court cases are disturbing hints of the arsenal pro-Trump insurrectionists either brought along or had ready at home. FBI agents say they found a crossbow, assault rifles, knives, tasers, baseball bats, and even bear spray. Many of the weapons, strapped to suspects sporting military helmets and ballistic vests, were used to beat Capitol police and smash into congressional offices, prosecutors say. Others, like a cooler full of Molotov […]
Federal authorities have charged Robert Gieswein as one of the rioters who stormed the Capitol in support of a pro-Trump insurrection on January 6. The Woodland Park, Colorado, resident was seen in photos wearing distinctive patches and military-style equipment on Jan. 5 and on Jan. 6 as he pushed through police barriers at the Capitol and confronted officers in the building alongside a number of rioters wanted by the FBI. He is charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding a federal officer, depredation of U.S. property. obstruction of an official proceeding, and entering a restricted building with the intent to impede official […]
Google booted the MAGA-friendly Twitter clone, Parler, from the Google Play store Friday as tech companies crack down on pro-Trump social media accounts pushing conspiracy theories and threatening violence. In a statement, Google said that it removed Parler from the Play Store because the company’s “longstanding policies require that apps displaying user-generated content have moderation policies and enforcement that removes egregious content like posts that incite violence.” Parler was formed in 2018 but gained in popularity among right-wing Trump supporters over the past year as top tier social media companies like Facebook and Twitter began to crack down on right-wing extremist […]
The feds say the Treasury and Commerce departments have been breached by hackers from leveraging a backdoor planted in a popular network monitoring app. The U.S. is pointing at Moscow as the likely culprit behind the break-ins. But they’re not pointing at the loud, aggressive, and troll-happy military hackers we’ve come to know in the years since they meddled in the 2016 election. Instead, U.S. officials have told reporters that a stealthier, more sophisticated crew—the A-Team of Kremlin hacking—is to blame, potentially signaling a return to the kind of high profile break-ins that the group became notorious for in 2015. These […]
The Treasury Department says it knows the Iranian intelligence officers who kidnapped the former FBI agent Robert Levinson who died in their custody. U.S. officials announced on Monday that two members of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) would be sanctioned for their alleged role in Levinson’s kidnapping and detention. “Senior Iranian officials authorized Levinson’s abduction and detention and launched a disinformation campaign to deflect blame from the Iranian regime,” the statement reads. The Treasury Department identified Mohammad Baseri and Ahmad Khazai as senior Iranian intel officials involved in Levinson’s kidnapping and disappearance. Baseri is allegedly a “high-ranking MOIS officer […]
The claim was far fetched: that the Philly mob delivered thousands of votes for Joe Biden. The person claiming it was even less believable: a known misinformation merchant. A Buffalo blog notorious for peddling election misinformation has captured the attention of top Trump supporters with a bizarre tale of the Philly mob swinging the election for Biden. Matthew Ricchiazzi runs the Buffalo Chronicle, a fake news site that’s been masquerading as a real newspaper since 2014. He hit what counts as the big time for crank sites with a handful of dubious and debunked stories about Canadian elections. Now, thanks to […]
The Iranians trolls who disguised themselves as Proud Boys fans in an attempt to intimidate voters were linked to a disinformation campaign that targeted Israel and Saudi Arabia, according to Facebook. In a press conference on Tuesday, Facebook announced that it took down a handful of accounts on Facebook and Instagram after a tip from the FBI about Iranian election-related meddling. The tip followed an announcement by FBI Director Christopher Wray and Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe that U.S. intelligence had found Iran was behind emails sent to Democratic voters in Florida and Alaska threatening that “You will vote for […]
President Trump dying of coronavirus and handing over power to Mike Pence. Black Lives Matter protesters surrounding the Clintons’ house in New York and firing gunshots. These are a few of the fake scandals that an Israeli news outlet’s hacked Twitter account tried to fool readers into believing for a few brief moments earlier this month. Twitter says the trolls amplifying them are linked to Iran. The incident ended as quickly as it began and the outlet, Israel Hayom, regained control of its account. But the hack wasn’t an isolated event. Over the past year, hackers have broken into a number […]
A coalition of human rights groups have filed a criminal complaint against Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons henchmen for their alleged role in two attacks against civilians in 2013 and 2017 that reportedly killed almost 900 people. Researchers for the groups say they’ve collected enough evidence to identify those responsible for the attacks and that it’s time for officials to act. The three groups—the Justice Initiative, the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression, and the Syrian Archive—filed a complaint with Germany’s public prosecutor accusing senior Syrian officials of using chemical weapons against civilians in a 2013 attack in Ghouta and […]
Facebook booted three troll networks linked to Russian intelligence and the St. Petersburg-based troll farm involved in meddling in the 2016 election. Nathan Gleicher, Facebook’s head of security, told reporters in a press conference that the three networks mainly focused on audiences and issues outside of the U.S. presidential election but that the company had suspended them now out of an abundance of caution because they “could pivot to support a hack-and-leak operation” in the future. While Facebook hasn’t seen any evidence that Russia’s intelligence services planned to use the suspended networks to amplify hacked content in a hack-and-leak operation, the […]
For a time, it seemed like a great gig. Jacinda Chan’s job working for the website Peace Data was everything she’d been looking for. It was paid work writing about her favorite subject—human rights and Latin America—and her editors paid on time. Chan, who was born with spinal muscular atrophy and is a quadriplegic, hadn’t been able to get many good jobs in journalism. “I have difficulty finding employment in the USA because people look at me and wonder how I can work if I’m on a respirator,” she wrote to an editor at the site in July. “That is why […]
Four years ago, Rudy Giuliani took to the stage at the Republican National Convention to deliver a shouty monologue about how his friend Donald Trump would usher in a new era of law and order and end the racial strife prompted by police killings of Black men. Four years later, Giuliani is back at the RNC. He’s still shouty. And this time he’s monologuing about how an unprecedented wave of protests, civil strife, and outrage over yet another new round of police shootings is why we need to re-elect Trump. Claiming that “my city is in shock” over a rise in […]
Facebook has tried its hardest to avoid taking action against posts from President Trump that broke its own rules. But on Wednesday, that long-running effort finally ran aground against a rambling diatribe from the president about children and the coronavirus. It’s a shift that could have an enormous impact on Trump’s re-election effort. While political spending is a small fraction of Facebook’s overall revenue, political ads make up a more significant chunk of campaign spending. Team Trump has made Facebook—with its uneven enforcement of its rules against disinformation—a cornerstone of its campaign, spending more than $35 million in ads on the […]
A Russian hacking group that played a role in breaking into Democratic networks during the 2016 election is now trying to steal coronavirus research, according to officials in the U.S., U.K., and Canada. In a joint cybersecurity advisory released by the three countries, intelligence agencies warned that a Russian hacking ground referred to as “APT29” had “targeted various organisations involved in COVID-19 vaccine development in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, highly likely with the intention of stealing information and intellectual property relating to the development and testing of COVID-19 vaccines.” The group conducted basic vulnerability scanning against specific […]
If you want a hot take about the Middle East, Raphael Badani is your man. As a Newsmax “Insider” columnist, he has thoughts about how Iraq needs to rid itself of Iranian influence to attract investment and why Dubai is an oasis of stability in a turbulent region. His career as a “geopolitical risk consultant and interactive simulation designer” and an “international relations senior analyst” for the Department of Labor have given him plenty of insights about the Middle East. He’s printed those insights at a range of conservative outlets like the Washington Examiner, RealClear Markets, American Thinker, and The National […]
Search for “LAPD scanner” on Twitter right now and you’ll see it—a video showing radio traffic in which two vile racists laugh and joke about killing protesters. “We gotta start shooting to kill, man. Mr Trump said so, shoot to kill,” one voice says. “Come one, come all. $100 a head. Every [n-word] you kill, $100. $50 for a Mexican,” the other responds. On Tiktok, Facebook, and Twitter, the video has racked up over a million views as users have taken the audio and added videos of their reaction to the recording. One problem: it’s not true. While the audio is […]
They’re leaked communications from the Democratic presidential frontrunner and conservatives are already sharing them all over social media in hopes they’ll help Trump’s re-election campaign. It sounds like the final months of the 2016 election—or the height of 2019’s Burisma madness—but the tapes released on Tuesday are from a new breach. Andriy Derkach—a Ukrainian politician with a KGB background, a penchant for conspiracy theories, and a friendly relationship with Rudy Giuliani—released a host of conversations between former Vice President Joe Biden and former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. The leaked talks purport to show the two discussing the firing of a Ukrainian […]
When Paul Manafort walked out of Loretto Federal Correctional Institution on Wednesday, he had about four years left on his sentence. He left behind a number of inmates who weren’t as lucky as he was. David Barren, a fellow inmate at Loretto, isn’t Paul Manafort. He’s African-American. He never worked as a powerful Republican lobbyist or the president’s former campaign manager. And he didn’t commit millions of dollars of tax fraud, violate federal lobbying rules, or commit witness tampering while awaiting trial. Instead, Barren committed non-violent drug offenses and got a sentence of life plus 20 years. Barren was charged with […]
It’s the supposedly rapid test that President Trump claimed was “lightning-fast” and about to usher in “a whole new ballgame” in COVID-19 detection. But since then, the fine print has started to creep into the Trump administration’s rhetoric about Abbott Labs’ diagnostic coronavirus tests and where they can be useful. When asked by Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) about the possibility of rapid testing for meatpackers during a hearing on Tuesday, Assistant Health and Human Services Secretary Admiral Brett Giroir noted that, while Abbott’s test can deliver results in the promised 15 minutes, their low throughput rate, or number of tests they […]
Marissa Guale is like all too many Americans right now. Her husband and father of her two children, Raul, is on a ventilator in a hospital on Long Island, fighting for his life while sick with COVID-19. Raul, a 34-year-old nurse, likely caught the disease while working in a nursing home. When the National Institutes of Health announced an emergency use authorization for the experimental antiviral drug remdesivir, Marissa scrambled friends and family on Facebook to figure out how to get access for Raul, emailing hospital administrators, senators, and doctors. They pressed the Guale family’s case for a potentially lifesaving treatment […]