"I believe the Wests Tigers approached the Pope (C8) to play five-eighth next year," reports Peter Miniutti of Ashbury. "He respectfully declined the offer giving the excuse that not even God could save them."
Trump Used Elaborate Ruse To Fly Out Of Turkey Due To Iran Threat:
WaPo After boarding the legacy Air Force One jet, the president was secretly shuttled minutes later to a smaller plane via an airport catering truck.
What do consultants get paid for?
Prediction Markets Are Wrecking Civil Society
Donald Trump’s sons are building a skyscraper in the Caucasus with a company co-owned by an oligarch who has shady ties to Russia.
Trump Tower Tbilisi, a 70-story luxury apartment complex planned for the capital of Georgia, a former Soviet republic at the far reaches of Eastern Europe, is the latest jewel in the first family’s $2.7 billion property empire. Eric Trump, 42, posted an AI rendering on X in May, gushing that it “marks our first project in the region” and that “we are so excited to bring it to life!”
Shady Russian Network Behind Trump Vanity Project Exposed
Carpenter Ivan, 25, has to work until he is 70 – “Older colleagues are already in pain” Arbetet via machine translation
Donald Trump accuses The Washington Post of treason
Opinion | David Ellison broke months of silence on CNN’s future. His biggest critics won’t be reassured.
Opinion | The Trump administration’s hunt for leakers targets yet another journalist
Opinion | Dana Bash did her job — and RFK Jr. didn’t handle it well
The Top 50+ Most Recommended OSINT Tools
Craig Silverman, Indicator: “The universe of OSINT tools is constantly expanding. There are many tool lists, Start.me pages, and GitHub repos that try to catalogue and categorize them. You could spend hours going from one toolkit to the next, comparing what they suggest and trying to get a sense of which tools are most cited.
The good news is that we’ve done the heavy lifting for you. Indicator analyzed more than 12,000 tools recommended by 19 public OSINT toolkits. We checked which tools are suggested the most and built a top 50 list. (There are actually 57 on the list, because several tools tied at the cutoff, and we kept all of them rather than break the ties arbitrarily.) We gathered the data from OSINT Navigator, the free app Indicator built in collaboration with Tom Vaillant. It aggregates data from 19 popular OSINT toolkits and makes it searchable from one interface.
Enter a query like “How do I find the owner of a website” and Navigator will list the relevant tools, the sources that recommended them, and summarize your options in an AI-generated response. Navigator is powered by an ever-growing, open dataset that checks for new and removed tools each week across the 19 toolkits.
You can learn more about Navigator and view the list of 19 toolkits here. One bit of good news is that all of the most-listed tools are free or have a free version. Many offer a paid tier with additional queries or results, but you can often get good value from the free option. That likely helps explain their popularity. (Though some freemium tools have very limited free tiers.)..”
Under Trump, 90% of ambassador nominations have gone to political supporters
“More than any other president in recent history, Donald Trump is relying on wealthy donors and political loyalists rather than career diplomats to fill ambassadorships, a Washington Post analysis found. The position of U.S. ambassador to Egypt has been held by a career diplomat for decades. But in June the Trump administration proposed a change, nominating a political donor and lawyer who provided legal representation to rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Nick Oberheiden, 48, has no formal diplomatic experience.
Born in Germany, he has no public link to Egypt, either. However, his law firm has defended clients aligned with the administration, and he has donated roughly $1.3 million to political committees that have supported President Donald Trump’s reelection, according to a Washington Post analysis of ambassador nominations and campaign finance data.
The nomination illustrates how Trump — more than any president in recent history — is relying on wealthy donors and political loyalists to fill ambassadorships at U.S. embassies worldwide, The Post’s analysis showed. It comes as the president has overseen a broader shake-up at the State Department, marking a shift away from apolitical norms that have guided American foreign policy for decades, former diplomats and other observers say…”
See also The New Republic – How Donald Trump Made the World Safe for Kleptocrats. “The president is no stranger to corrupt self-dealing. But his second term in office has been about cutting rogues from all over the world in on the action…”
See also This book excerpt is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. For most of human history, trying to identify an oligarchy has been difficult. Part of that has to do with the definition of the term “oligarchy” in the first place.
Aristotle first popularized the word thousands of years ago, pointing out that an oligarchy — which literally means “rule of the few” — is indeed all about a small number of individuals steering a given country, nation, or empire. But even then, Aristotle added, it wasn’t just about the number of individuals that mattered, but also about how much wealth they controlled. In order to have an oligarchy, a state had to be run not just by the few, but by the wealthiest few.
The other part that’s made “oligarchy” such a tricky thing to define is that, for centuries, oligarchic figures tended to operate out of sight, or by playing down their impact on politics. Not always, necessarily; the so-called “robber barons” of the Gilded Age — oligarchs by another name — were front and center in American society in the late 19th and early 20th century. But by and large, oligarchs tended to downplay their influence, and even their wealth.
Since they could operate as the powers behind the throne, they tended to keep themselves (and their wealth) out of the spotlight, making it even trickier to nail down who an oligarch actually is, or what oligarchy looks like when it’s taken over a democracy. Those two factors — the difficulties in defining “oligarchy,” and the struggles in identifying oligarchs themselves — made analyzing the topic, let alone writing a book about it, an uphill battle


