Perhaps the most accurate cliché is that if a deal appears too good to be true, then it probably is.
To wit: If a “private investor” of unknown origin approaches you through an intermediary, offering you $400,000 a month to make “four weekly videos” for a politically partisan website and YouTube page, you may want to attempt to follow the money to make certain you’re not being paid by a foreign government as a propagandist.

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From left: Silver medalist Johannes Floors of Team Germany, gold medalist Hunter Woodhall of Team USA, and bronze medalist Olivier Hendriks of Team Netherlands pose for a photo after the men’s para-athletics 400m T62 final race, on day nine of the Paris 2024 Summer Paralympic Games.

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Today’s generative-AI tools can concoct stunning designs and playful prose with the push of a few buttons. That, in turn, has bred fears about how the technology could hurt human artists and writers, and led many, in their defense of humanity, to a well-intentioned but confused claim.

A press conference is a tool for a presidential candidate to get reporters and voters talking about a topic of his or her choice. So why did Donald Trump spend 45 minutes reminding them about some of the many sexual-assault allegations against him?
Late this morning at Trump Tower, the former president took the microphone and spoke at length about the civil case in which he was found liable for sexually abusing the writer E. Jean Carroll.

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When people think of the world of espionage, they probably imagine glamorous foreign capitals, suave undercover operators, and cool gadgets.

When X was blocked in Brazil on Saturday—the result of a legal skirmish between the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, and Alexandre de Moraes, a justice on Brazil’s Supreme Court—a sizable crater was left behind. More than 20 million people lost access to the site, yet the effect was about more than numbers. Brazilian users have played an unusually large role in developing the site’s well-known super-fan culture. Now they’re gone, and they’re not sure whether they’ll get to come back.

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Oksana Masters of Team USA celebrates winning the Women’s H5 Road Race on day eight of the Paris 2024 Summer Paralympic Games, on September 5, 2024. This win is Masters’ second gold medal of the 2024 Paralympic Games, after she placed first in the Para Cycling Road Women’s H4-5 Individual Time Trial the day before.

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In a 1927 Atlantic article, the Episcopal priest Bernard Iddings Bell leveled quite the original insult at college students: They were becoming “mental and ethical jellyfish.” These students were drifters and conformists, Bell complained; they lacked standards and had no real understanding of truth, beauty, or goodness.

Since Starlink first beamed down to Brazil two years ago, hundreds of communities in the Amazon that were previously off the grid found themselves connected to the rest of the world. Here was the purest promise of SpaceX’s satellite internet—to provide connectivity in even the most remote places on Earth—fulfilled. Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, received a medal from the Brazilian government.