Politics

The more details that emerge about Russia’s “sophisticated” efforts to sway the November election in favor of President Donald Trump, the more ridiculous Sen. Mark Warner’s aggressive rhetoric sounds. But instead of fading away, upcoming testimony from Facebook, Twitter and maybe Google will likely keep the story on life support for the foreseeable future, especially now that Congress has succeeded in browbeating all three of the tech giants mentioned above to admit that Russian agents were buying advertising or otherwise disseminating targeted propaganda on their platforms.

A Turkish court has just fanned the flames of an incipient diplomatic crisis between the US and NATO's most problematic member, when it found a Wall Street Journal reporter guilty of engaging in "terrorist propaganda" in support of a banned Kurdish organization. Ayla Albayrak was sentenced to more than two years in prison for writing a 2015 story about clashes between Turkish security forces and Kurdish separatists in the country’s restive southeast.

Over the past couple of weeks, President Trump has taken a beating in the mainstream media for, among other things, suggesting that the mayor of San Juan had politicized federal disaster relief efforts in response to Hurricane Maria and that it was, in fact, local mayors and residents who were failing to help the recovery effort and not the federal government.  Here are just a couple of the tweets as a refresher on the topic:

Authored by Adam Dick via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

In a new interview with host Jesse Ventura at RT, former United States presidential candidate and House of Representatives Member Dennis Kucinich stressed the importance of the American people challenging the “two-party duopoly that’s committed to war.”

There is a lot of confusion as to what is going on in Spain at this moment, with The Spain Report noting that "TV presenters asking politicians and guests if there has been a declaration of independence or not, and that "Spain confused."

Wikipedia took a more pragmatic approach, and defined Catalonia's independence as lasting all of 9 seconds: from the moments Puidgemont announced independence, to his declaration literally 9 seconds later he was suspending the outcome of the Catalan referendum.

It did not help that moments ago, the following two Bloomberg headlines hit: