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Married Gay Couple Runs a Website Dispensing Fake and Extremely Questionable News

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For two residents of Los Angeles’ trendy historic El Royale apartment building in Hancock Park, Sean Adl-Tabatabai, 36, and his husband and business partner, Sinclair Treadway, 24, their commute is rather short by L.A. standards, from their bedroom to the living room to run their three year-old website of “murky fact and slippery spin,” titled, Your News Wire.

Recently profiled by venerable entertainment media outlet The Hollywood Reporter, Adl-Tabatabai and Treadway are used to breaking new ground, albeit maybe not in such a negative fashion. In 2014 they made British history when they were married in London, literally one minute after same-sex marriage became legal in both England and Wales.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, which labeled the pair “alienated liberals,” Adl-Tabatabai and Treadway share a suspicion of established media outlets and their stories and “presumed facts” that border on the radical. Adl-Tabatabai’s views are informed by what he sees as British media’s failures during his formative years — cheerleading the Iraq War, ignoring rumors of BBC host Jimmy Savile’s sexual abuse of children — while Treadway’s are forged by a conviction that Bernie Sanders, whom he ardently supported during the Democratic primary, wasn’t given legitimate consideration by the press.

While they profess to be critical of some of President Donald Trump’s policies including his recent decision to ban transgender military personnel, they seem to regard him as a beneficial populist influence on the American political system.

“He may be a buffoon, and he may make some really bad mistakes during his presidency, but he’s still an anti-establishment figure,” said Adl-Tabatabai. “A vote for him was a vote to smash the system.”

The couple’s website’s coverage, or antics as one media critic had observed, has leveraged itself into an influential player in the era of Trump alt-media along with high-profile Breitbart and Alex Jones’ InfoWars. However such a profile coupled with the content caused Alphabet’s Google’s AdSense division to cut off their ad revenue. Internet fact-checking site Snopes has also put Your News Wire squarely in their sights to debunk its fake news offerings and discredit its incendiary reports. Those efforts have however, done little to discourage the pair. Instead the opposite has occurred as Adl-Tabatabai and his husband seem more energized and focused, or as Treadway said, they would put more effort in “to focus on what people aren’t focusing on — the information that the public isn’t already being told.”

The Reporter also noted that in the months after Trump’s election, several British papers published accounts criticizing YNW as a purveyor of fake news, with one reporting that a European Union task force set up to combat Russian propaganda had classified the outlet as a proxy. While the couple acknowledges that state-sponsored Russia Today (RT) is a favored source (“They have angles,” notes Adl-Tabatabai, “and sometimes their angles vaguely match our angles”), they deny any links to the Kremlin. Such a claim, contends Adl-Tabatabai, is “part of an overall political game that’s being played by big corporate media outlets to purge independents.”

There was a change though for the pair in sourcing RT. The Washington Post and The Hill both reported Wednesday that he Russian government-funded RT announced had that its American arm had been asked by the Justice Department to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The Post reported that RT was singled out this year in an intelligence community report on Kremlin meddling in the 2016 presidential election. “The rapid expansion of RT’s operations and budget and recent candid statements by RT’s leadership point to the channel’s importance to the Kremlin as a messaging tool and indicate a Kremlin directed campaign to undermine faith in the U.S. government and fuel political protest,” the report concluded.

For now the two continue to wage their unrelenting campaign to spread their version of news. But the Reporter also noted that Snopes editor David Mikkelson observes the couple also has a history of publishing what he considers defamatory claims about his own operation, and Snopes’ legal counsel has sent them several cease-and-desist notices.

The newspaper writes that given Snopes’ role as one of Facebook’s official partners in efforts to address the spread of misinformation, Adl-Tabatabai says he has been weighing his options for a campaign against what he sees as a competitor with an unfair stranglehold on dictating reality — a move right out of Trump’s anti-press playbook. “We’re all now questioning reality as it’s being handed down, how it’s interpreted, how it’s portrayed,” Adl-Tabatabai said adding, “The audience itself is already questioning the facts.”

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Conor Lamb Apparent Winner of Pennsylvania US House Special Election

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Democrat Conor Lamb has been declared the apparent winner in the special election for Pennsylvania’s conservative 18th congressional district to replace Republican Rep. Tim Murphy. Lamb beat Trump-endorsed Republican Rick Saccone, a far right wing Christian extremist, who is a state representative.

The vote was so close it had to be decided by absentee ballots. The final tallies have yet to be declared, but networks including MSNBC and CNBC have called it for Lamb.

Trump won the district barely more than a year ago by nearly 20 points. Lamb was recently projected to win, and was up about six points in the final polls.

The president, the Vice President, and the president’s eldest son all endorsed and campaigned in Pennsylvania for Saccone.

“Outside GOP groups have spent $10.7 million supporting Rick Saccone,” Axios on Tuesday reported.

Lamb is a former Assistant U.S. Attorney and a former Marine.

Saccone, already down in the polls, made news late Monday night when he told supporters at a rally that Democrats hate God, America, and Donald Trump.

Lamb supports ObamaCare and a woman’s right to choose (although he personally is against abortion, but says a right is a right.) He has called for stronger background checks but no new gun control laws.

Former Rep. Tim Murphy resigned after it was revealed he had urged his mistress to get an abortion. Murphy is a “pro-life” “family values” Republican.

Last month The Washington Post reported “Republican-allied groups have dramatically outspent their Democratic rivals 17-to-1 in the first congressional race of 2018, a special election in Pennsylvania that both parties have cast as a potential bellwether for the November midterms.”

This is the second major special election in a row in which the Democrat won a seat previously held by a Republican. Many political analysts believe these results reflect how even GOP voters feel about President Trump.

Image via Facebook

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Putin: I Have a New ‘Invincible’ Nuclear Missile

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President Vladimir Putin says Russia has developed a new “invincible” nuclear missile that can “reach anywhere in the world,” according to the BBC.

Claiming the U.S. missile shield that covers Europe and Asia can not stop the new warhead, Putin described it as “a low-flying, difficult-to-spot cruise missile with a nuclear payload with a practically unlimited range and an unpredictable flight path, which can bypass lines of interception and is invincible in the face of all existing and future systems of both missile defence and air defence.”

The Russian Federation leader made his remarks in a campaign speech 17 days before an election which he will win. He faces seven challengers, and his main opponent, Alexei Navalny, was declared ineligible to run.

Putin told the Russian Parliament the West has nothing comparable to this new nuclear missile, and he had it developed “in response to the U.S. withdrawal from a Cold war-era treaty banning missile defenses and U.S. efforts to develop a missile defense system,” CBS News adds.

“No one has listened to us,” Putin, complaining about the U.S., told Russian lawmakers. “You listen to us now.”

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After Calling Kelly ‘General Jackass’ Scaramucci Fears Retaliation From Trump’s Chief of Staff

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Anthony Scaramucci, the man who holds the title for shortest stint as White House Communications Director, is inserting himself into the latest drama at the Trump White House by blasting General John Kelly – the man who fired him. Now he is worrying his reckless behavior will have financial implications.

After discussing the resignation of Hope Hicks and telling CNN Thursday morning there is a “culture of fear” inside the Trump White House, warning morale under John Kelly is “terrible,” Scaramucci spoke with Bloomberg News to continue his war against the Chief of Staff.

“Does the president want to lose everyone because of General Jackass?” Scaramucci asked Bloomberg’s Jennifer Jacobs.

“Scarmucci denied he was backstabbing Kelly — and he told Jacobs that he was proudly ‘front-stabbing’ him,” as Raw Story reports.

But Scaramucci apparently is having second thoughts about just how wise it was to tangle with the retired general.

“Scaramucci says he now fears Kelly will thwart his bid to sell his stake in SkyBridge Capital to China’s HNA Group Co,” Jacobs reports at Bloomberg. “The sale has been stuck at the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., which reviews foreign acquisitions of domestic businesses for security risks.”

“Let’s see what he says about that,” Scaramucci told her. “That’ll be the next food fight.

Scaramucci served 11 days (at most) in Trump’s White House. Kelly fired him after Scaramucci launched into an on-the-record vulgar tirade with a reporter, calling then-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus “a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac.” Scaramucci also falsely accused Priebus of a “felony” – the leaking of his financial disclosure form (which is publicly available).

He also infamously told the reporter, Ryan Lizza, “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own c*ck.”

 

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