One month before a purported leak of files from Hunter Biden's laptop, a fake "intelligence" report about him went viral on the right-wing internet, asserting an elaborate conspiracy theory involving former Vice President Joe Biden's son and business in China. That report, a 64-page document that was later disseminated by close associates of President Donald Trump, appears to be the work of a fake "intelligence firm" called Typhoon Investigations, according to researchers and public documents. The author of the report, a self-identified Swiss security analyst named Martin Aspen, is a fabricated identity, according to analysis by disinformation researchers, who also concluded that Aspen's profile picture was created with an artificial intelligence face generator. The intelligence firm that Aspen lists as his previous employer told NBC News that no one by that name had ever worked for their company, and no one by that name lives in Switzerland, according to public records and social media searches. One of the original posters of the report, a blogger and professor named Christopher Balding, took credit for writing parts of the document when asked about it by NBC News, and said that Aspen does not exist.

Malaysia's former leader Mahathir Mohamad tweeted Thursday Muslims had a right "to kill millions of French people" after a deadly attack in Nice, sparking widespread anger and prompting Twitter to delete his post. Three people were killed at a church in the southern French city, with the

The apocalypse wasn’t happening fast enough. “Nov 2nd Boogaloo start date,” one person posted in a private chat group in October 2019. “Bring your kit and weapons to your hotel room just in case.” November 2 came and went without incident. “The Virginia luau kicks off in one month so start training as you fight,” a second person—a then-school security guard—posted a month ahead of a January 2020 pro-gun protest. “Nobody booged today and I am disappointed,” another posted when that event, too, concluded non-violently. By March 2020, desperation was setting in. “I hate to say this but is there a way to ‘make’ this happen or should we let it naturally?” one person wrote.

GLENN GREENWALD’S DECISION to resign from The Intercept stems from a fundamental disagreement over the role of editors in the production of journalism and the nature of censorship. Glenn demands the absolute right to determine what he will publish. He believes that anyone who disagrees with him is corrupt, and anyone who presumes to edit his words is a censor. Thus, the preposterous charge that The Intercept’s editors and reporters, with the lone, noble exception of Glenn Greenwald, have betrayed our mission to engage in fearless investigative journalism because we have been seduced by the lure of a Joe Biden presidency. A brief glance at the stories The Intercept has published on Biden will suffice to refute those claims. The narrative Glenn presents about his departure is teeming with distortions and inaccuracies — all of them designed to make him appear as a victim, rather than a grown person throwing a tantrum. It would take too long to point them all out here, but we intend to correct the record in time. For now, it is important to make clear that our goal in editing his work was to ensure that it would be accurate and fair. While he accuses us of political bias, it was he who was attempting to recycle the dubious claims of a political campaign — the Trump campaign — and launder them as journalism. We have the greatest respect for the journalist Glenn Greenwald used to be, and we remain proud of much of the work we did with him over the past six years. It is Glenn who has strayed from his original journalistic roots, not The Intercept. The defining feature of The Intercept’s work in recent years has been the investigative journalism that came out of painstaking work by our staffers in Washington, D.C., New York, and across the rest of the country. It is the staff of The Intercept that has been carrying out our investigative mission — a mission that has involved a collaborative editing process. We have no doubt that Glenn will go on to launch a new media venture where he will face no collaboration with editors — such is the era of Substack and Patreon. In that context, it makes good business sense for Glenn to position himself as the last true guardian of investigative journalism and to smear his longtime colleagues and friends as partisan hacks. We get it. But facts are facts, and The Intercept’s record of fearless, rigorous, independent journalism speaks for itself.

Co-founder of news site accuses editors of seeking to censor article critical of Joe Biden

Support for Scottish independence has risen to a record 58% in an Ipsos MORI poll released on Wednesday, compared to just 42% who would vote to reject it if another referendum was held. Scots in 2014 voted 55%-45% to reject independence, but Ipsos MORI Chief Executive Ben Page said the poll “suggests Scotland may have shifted decisively in favour of leaving the UK.”

BBC staff who are required to be politically neutral have been told not to attend LGBT pride protests under new impartiality rules announced on Thursday, i has learned. David Jordan, the corporation’s director of editorial policy and standards, told a meeting of senior executives on Wednesday that the new rules include not attending “political protests”, such as Black Lives Matter events and LGBT protests. According to sources, there was pressure to extend the ban to pride events over concerns the BBC could be seen to take a side in the debate around transgender rights.

Former Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. filed a state lawsuit Wednesday against the evangelical school founded by his father, claiming he was wrongly ousted from his leadership post. Falwell had led the school for 13 years before he resigned under pressure in late August amid a series of embarrassing scandals. In a complaint in state court in Lynchburg, Virginia, Falwell's lawyers alleged that Liberty defamed Falwell and breached the former president's contract. "Mr. Falwell has suffered damage to his reputation, damage to his profession, humiliation, and anguish; lost business opportunities; and suffered other pecuniary damage," according to the plaintiff's complaint. Liberty University "would need to read and review a lawsuit before making comment, and as of this moment we have not been served,” the school's senior vice president and spokesman, Scott Lamb, said in a statement to NBC News on Thursday.

Whenever President Donald Trump is confronted with polls he does not like, especially the torrent of national data showing him trailing Democratic challenger Joe Biden in public support, the president’s response is usually the same: Fake news. If the polls were always right, his thinking goes, Hillary Clinton should be running for re-election, not him. The former Democratic presidential candidate consistently led Trump in state and national polls in 2016 before he won the White House, just like Biden does now. But opinion poll experts say there are good reasons to trust this year’s polls more than those of 2016. Here are a few of them.

Federal agents on Thursday arrested two men, including the self-proclaimed leader of the Base, a violent white supremacist group, as part of a continuing crackdown on extremism in Michigan three weeks after the FBI said it thwarted a plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. A team of FBI agents arrested Justen Watkins, 25, of Bad Axe, the self-proclaimed leader of the Base, and Alfred Gorman, 35, of Taylor, during a pair of raids. They are linked to a December 2019 incident in Dexter in which a local family was terrorized by the men, who tried to intimidate a husband and wife and shared their address with members of the Base, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said in a statement.

Three people were stabbed during a demonstration Wednesday night near River Park Shopping Center in northeast Fresno. Fresno police said a man got upset around 6:30 p.m. that some of the demonstrators from the “Stand with Armenia” rally were causing standstill traffic, blocking the flow of the road by parking a couple of cars in the northbound lanes of Blackstone Avenue near Nees Avenue. A confrontation and violence ensued.

There’s been buzz about the Princeton Election Consortium’s win probability for Clinton, which for some time has been in the 98-99% range. Tonight let me walk everyone through how we arrive at this level of confidence. tl;dr: With a more conservative assumption (see discussion) the PEC approach gives a probability of more like 95%. I will also give a caveat on how it is difficult to estimate win probabilities above 90% – and why fine adjustments at this level might not matter for my goals in running this site.

Chancellor Angela Merkel will impose the toughest restrictions on Germany since a national lockdown in the spring, closing bars and restaurants in Europe’s largest economy to regain control of the rapid spread of the coronavirus. The one-month partial shutdown, which will go into effect on Monday, is designed to keep most businesses operating, Merkel said Wednesday after tense talks with the leaders of the country’s 16 states. Officials will gather again in two weeks to assess the impact of the measures. “Today is a difficult day, for policy makers as well,” Merkel said at a press conference in Berlin as she called for a concerted national effort to fight the pandemic. “We know what we’re demanding of the people.” With the public weary of pandemic measures and protests increasing, the government sought to ease pressure by making available up to 10 billion euros ($11.7 billion) in aid for companies affected by the measures, including reimbursing as much as 75% of lost sales in November.

One caller asked whether President Trump’s comments hinting at rampant voter fraud in Philadelphia were true. Another yelled about the inaccurate rumor that poll watchers were being barred from polling places. Still another demanded to know what the city was trying to hide. It was just another day at the office for Al Schmidt, one of Philadelphia’s three city commissioners, a job that includes supervising voter registration and elections. Hundreds of people have called in every day for months, many parroting conspiracy theories about the election and lies about how partisan megadonors own the voting machines. Staff members spend hours shooting down the rumors, he said. “It’s not like we have tens of millions of dollars to spend on communications to battle tsunamis of misinformation that come our way,” said Mr. Schmidt, 49, whose team has been working up to 17-hour days ahead of Election Day on Tuesday. “It wears on all of us.”

Earlier this month, national security officials from the FBI announced that both Russian and Iranian operatives had obtained voter registration data in order to interfere in the U.S. elections. Similar to the tactics employed by Russia during the 2016 election, both countries reportedly hacked information that would aid in sowing doubt, and in at least one case, strike fear, in American voters. So far, there’s no evidence of actual tampering with the voting system itself — but the same can’t be said for Nickelodeon’s recent mock election. On Wednesday night, Nickelodeon announced former Vice President Joe Biden was the winner of the 2020 Kids Pick the President “Kids’ Vote,” despite a bot-driven effort to cheat the results. According to the network, nearly 90,000 kids cast their virtual ballot in the poll, which ran from Oct. 20 to Oct. 26. Biden received 53% of the vote, while the incumbent, President Donald J. Trump, wound up with 47%. But on Wednesday, Oct. 21, Nickelodeon employees overseeing the Kids’ Vote caught wind of an effort to corrupt the authenticity of the results. Murmurs on “online forums” laid out plans to pack the Kids Pick the President site with votes. Nickelodeon subsequently utilized a voter certification tool in order to weed out any bot-generated entries; in the end, more than 130,000 fraudulent votes were discovered.

A new report says five states, including several that are presidential battlegrounds, are at a high risk for activity by armed groups of civilians around the Nov. 3 election. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) and MilitiaWatch warned about such movements leading up to and following the election in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Oregon, especially in state capitals and surrounding towns, medium-sized cities and suburban areas. “Militia groups and other armed non-state actors pose a serious threat to the safety and security of American voters,” the report said. “Throughout the summer and leading up to the general election, these groups have become more assertive, with activities ranging from intervening in protests to organizing kidnapping plots targeting elected officials.” The report, titled “Standing By: Right-Wing Militia Groups and the US Election,” takes its name from President Donald Trump’s response in a recent debate when he was asked to condemn white nationalist groups and militias. Instead, Trump told one group, the Proud Boys, to “stand back and stand by,” which several right-wing groups took as encouragement. Armed groups use “hybrid tactics” ranging from training for urban and rural combat to using public relations and propaganda to acting as “security operations” for events.

Two right-wing political operatives at the center of a robocall scam in Detroit and other U.S. cities have been ordered to call their victims back with a corrective message. Jack Burkman, 54, from Arlington, Virginia and Jacob Wohl, 22, from Los Angeles were ordered by a U.S. district court Wednesday to issue “curative” robocalls to individuals that were previously targeted by an alleged voter-intimidation scheme. The two men have been accused of orchestrating robocalls to suppress votes in multiple U.S. cities -- specifically those with significant minority populations, like Detroit -- for the November election.

FOR THOSE SEARCHING for something loftier than traditional self-help, trade books about Stoicism, an ancient philosophy of individual resilience, have become popular in recent years. The titles that belong to this non-fiction genre are explanatory, self-assured, and optimized for the all-seeing eyes of search engines: Stoicism: How to Stop Fearing and Start Living; The Stoic CEO; The Obstacle Is the Way; How to Think Like a Roman Emperor; How to Be a Stoic; A Guide to the Good Life; The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher’s Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer and More Resilient; How to Keep Your Cool (Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers); Stoicism and the Art of Happiness: Practical Wisdom for Everyday Life. While these books differ in content and style, certain features apply across the board: pithy aphorisms about the power of resilience, rationality and fortitude apply primarily to those with plenty of freedom to make choices already; readers are presumed empty vessels for authors’ edifying wisdom; and emotions are treated as imaginary things that reside only in your head.

Butler County has the worst return rate for mail ballots in the state, and the U.S. Postal Service has been asked to investigate.

I spent my middle and high school years in a small town on Colorado's Western Slope — the sparsely-populated, rugged section of the state across the Continental Divide from Denver, Boulder, and Fort Collins. It's a spectacularly beautiful piece of country, full of ski hamlets, deep river canyons, little farm towns, and vast mountain ranges. It's also likely to be represented in Congress next year by a complete maniac. Lauren Boebert, a far right-wing restaurateur who has never held elected office, successfully primaried the incumbent Republican Scott Tipton, who has represented the 3rd District since 2010, back in July. Now, in the general election, she faces Democrat Diane Mitsch Bush, who lost to Tipton in 2018 by eight points. Though Boebert is probably more likely to lose than Tipton would have been, she has rallied the conservative Western Slope base far more than he ever did. It's a window into the present and probable future of the Republican Party — a movement in which grievance politics have completely swallowed any kind of substantive agenda.