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The Justice Department indicted an American commentator for Russian television on Thursday as part of a broader effort by the government to crack down on Russia’s attempts to influence American politics ahead of November’s presidential election.

Dimitri K. Simes, who was an adviser to Donald J. Trump’s first presidential campaign, and his wife, Anastasia Simes, were charged with violating economic sanctions against Russia for their work for Channel One, a state-owned television network.

The indictments come as the United States has been cracking down on Russian efforts to spread content from Russian broadcasters among American audiences, often by disguising its origins. Mr. Simes, who owns a home with his wife in Virginia but currently lives in Russia, has hosted a political talk show since 2022 on the network four nights a week on the network and another on Sundays.

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No one should be surprised by what Singh has done and how he chose to do it. NDP labour critic Mathew Green telegraphed publicly that his party had to have “tough conversations” about the deal with the Liberals — including the possibility of opting out of it.

Towards the end of a dull summer of barbecue politics, Singh’s decision to scuttle the agreement to support the Liberals caught many people off guard. But the reality is that this decision was inevitable, and, from a political point of view, well-advised.

. . .

But the deal was a flop at the political box office for the NDP. Instead of getting credit for pushing the Trudeau government on key, progressive issues, the party saw its popularity decline.

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Donald Trump has quietly wound down his presidential campaign in states he was targeting just six weeks ago amid polling evidence showing that Kamala Harris’s entry into the presidential race has put them out of reach and narrowed his path to the White House.

The Republican presidential nominee’s campaign has diverted resources away from Minnesota, Virginia and New Hampshire – states Trump was boasting he could win while Joe Biden was the Democratic candidate – to focus instead on a small number of battleground states.

Money is being poured into the three “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, which were all carried by Biden in 2020 and are seen as vital to the outcome of November’s election.

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As Russian troops approach Pokrovsk, fear mounts over a possible loss of what had long been a key logistic hub tucked away in safety in Donetsk Oblast.

The war has arrived in Pokrovsk, once home to 60,000 people, with the Russians estimated to be about eight kilometers away. Thousands are fleeing the city each week. Russian artillery and FPV drones can now reach Pokrovsk, already affecting the city’s capacity as a logistic hub for the Ukrainian army, experts say.

. . .

Ukraine’s manpower shortage and tactical errors have led to a grinding Russian advance toward Pokrovsk, analysts told the Kyiv Independent. But the analysts are skeptical of a Russian breakthrough further east even if the city falls, as its capture would require significant resources that would likely deplete Russia’s offensive capability, they explained.

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Five Palestinians were killed by an Israeli airstrike on their vehicles early Thursday, Palestinian news media said, as one of the longest and most destructive recent Israeli military raids in the occupied West Bank stretched into a ninth day across several cities.

Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, reported the deaths, in the town of Far’a. They added to the toll of an already devastating military offensive, with at least 39 people killed in the raids and 145 others injured, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

. . .

Such raids have become a near-daily reality for the nearly three million Palestinians who live under Israeli occupation in the West Bank. More than 600 Palestinians have been killed there since the Hamas-led attack on Israel last October, both in military strikes and at the hands of extremist Jewish settlers, according to the United Nations.

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Russian scientists helped make their country a leader in developing cutting-edge missiles that fly at least five times as fast as the speed of sound. Then Russia started calling them traitors.

A Moscow court this week sentenced Alexander Shiplyuk, 57, the director of a Russian physics institute who specializes in hypersonic flight, to 15 years in prison for treason. Though the trial has been shrouded in secrecy, Mr. Shiplyuk’s advocates say he was accused of illegally sharing classified information. It was the latest step in a yearslong crackdown on some leading Russian physicists, a prong of the Russian government’s wide-ranging campaign of repression notable for its overlap with the country’s military industry.

. . .

At least eight other physicists working in fields related to hypersonic and supersonic flight have been arrested since 2015, according to Perviy Otdel, a group of Russian lawyers who specialize in treason and espionage cases.

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The United Nations children’s agency has said that a polio vaccination campaign to inoculate more than 640,000 children in Gaza is surpassing expectations at the end of the first phase of the programme.

Describing the campaign as a “rare bright spot” in almost 11 months of war, Unicef said that 189,000 children had been reached so far as more than 500 teams were deployed across central Gaza this week.

It said Israel and Hamas observed limited pauses in the fighting to facilitate the campaign, with UN agencies involved now hoping to expand the campaign to the harder-hit north and south of the territory for the next two phases.

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A number of high-profile, conservative influencers in the US have said they are “victims” of an alleged Russian disinformation campaign, after the Biden administration accused Moscow of carrying out a sustained campaign to influence the outcome of November’s presidential elections.

Tim Pool and Benny Johnson published statements on Wednesday evening addressing allegations that a US content creation company they were associated with had been provided with nearly $10m from Russian state media employees to publish videos with messages in favour of Moscow’s interests and agenda, including over the war in Ukraine.

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At a crucial juncture of the war against Russia, President Volodymyr Zelensky has undertaken a major reshuffle of his government, insisting "new energy" in government was needed "today."

"These steps are only associated with strengthening our state in various sectors — international politics and diplomacy are no exception," he said on Sept. 4 during a press conference in Kyiv with Irish Prime Minister Simon Harris.

While lawmakers and political analysts close to the president told the Kyiv Independent the reshuffle is a way of bringing "new energy" to a tired government apparatus, those who are critical of Zelensky say it’s more about the President's Office, run by Andriy Yermak, willing to consolidate power even more.

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Shares of former President Donald J. Trump’s social media company have fallen so much that his onetime $6 billion stake is now worth about $2 billion.

The stock price of Trump Media & Technology Group, closed Wednesday at $16.98, and is down more than 74 percent from the high-water mark it hit after Trump Media’s merger in March with a publicly traded shell company.

. . .

The slide in the share price has accelerated over the past few weeks as the presidential campaign has heated up and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, has narrowly overtaken Mr. Trump in most national polls. Shares of Trump Media often have risen and fallen in tandem with investor perception of how Mr. Trump is doing in the presidential race.

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Canada’s New Democratic party says it has “ripped up” a key agreement with prime minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government, sowing uncertainty into the country’s politics as party leaders brace for a possible election.

NDP leader Jagmeet Singh made the surprise announcement on social media on Wednesday afternoon, accusing Trudeau of “caving” to corporate greed. “The Liberals have let people down. They don’t deserve another chance from Canadians,” he said.

After Trudeau’s Liberals won a minority of seats in parliament in 2021, the NDP agreed to support the party in order to shield them from confidence votes that could bring down the government. The deal, called a confidence and supply agreement, was scheduled to run until June 2025.

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The Internet Archive has lost a major legal battle—in a decision that could have a significant impact on the future of internet history. Today, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled against the long-running digital archive, upholding an earlier ruling in Hachette v. Internet Archive that found that one of the Internet Archive’s book digitization projects violated copyright law.

Notably, the appeals court’s ruling rejects the Internet Archive’s argument that its lending practices were shielded by the fair use doctrine, which permits for copyright infringement in certain circumstances, calling it “unpersuasive.”

In March 2020, the Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based nonprofit, launched a program called the National Emergency Library, or NEL. Library closures caused by the pandemic had left students, researchers, and readers unable to access millions of books, and the Internet Archive has said it was responding to calls from regular people and other librarians to help those at home get access to the books they needed.

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