Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church says he's working with Vladimir Putin to convene a Church-based inquiry into whether the execution of the royal family by revolutionaries in 1917 was actually a Jewish ritual killing; this appears to be an actual thing the Russian state is about to do, with many details confirmed in a public statement by Moscow's General Prosecutor. Read the rest

"I will put forward my candidacy for the post of president of the Russian federation," announced Russian president Vladimir Putin, who has been in power since 2000. Spoiler alert: he's going to win.

Image: Jedimentat44/Flickr Read the rest

When Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn pled guilty to lying to the FBI about contact with a Russian ambassador, it brought Robert Mueller's investigation right into Trump’s innermost circle.

We don't know what's next in the election meddling probe, but the vice grip on Flynn is tight. Trump can't be comfortable, either. Nor, one imagines, is Jared Kushner, one of the 'senior officials' indicated in the legal filing released today. Read the rest

President Donald Trump “repeatedly urged senior Senate Republicans, including the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to end the panel’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election” earlier this year, according to a New York Times report citing “a half dozen lawmakers and aides.” Read the rest

Five years ago, Benjamin Delpy was working for an unspecified French government agency and teaching himself to program in C, and had discovered a vital flaw in the way that Windows protected its users' passwords. Read the rest

House Democrats just released a trove of data, metadata, Facebook ads, and Twitter accounts run out of the Kremlin’s troll farm. A team of reporters at Daily Beast reports on how ads were created by people working for the Russian government's cyberwar arm, and literally paid for in rubles with no questions asked by Facebook.

Yep, even of those Dank Bernie Memes you shared were Russian.

Russian ads like the ones shown here came from...

...dozens of inflammatory Facebook and Twitter ads from Kremlin-backed fake social media accounts, including several The Daily Beast has already identified, with names like “Being Patriotic,” “Secured Borders,” and “United Muslims of America.” They were released on Wednesday, along with accompanying metadata showing their Russian provenance, not by the companies themselves, but by Democrats on the House intelligence community investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Taken together, the ads and the metadata provide a deeper picture than previously known of one aspect of Russia’s so-called “active measures” disinformation campaign. Hundreds of millions of Americans – nearly 150 million, Facebook acknowledged on Wednesday – didn’t realize online political material they were seeing and sharing came from a foreign adversary. But the Russians, capitalizing on social-media targeting tools made possible by accumulated data from billions of users, knew a tremendous amount about their unsuspecting American audience.

“Russia exploited real vulnerabilities that exist across online platforms and we must identify, expose, and defend ourselves against similar covert influence operations in the future,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, said during a hearing on Wednesday with executives from Facebook, Twitter and Google.

George Papadopoulos is a fairly common Greek name in these United States. Seems the outraged folks on twitter riled a Michagonian George Papadopoulos.

Via NPR:

"For the nth time, I am NOT Trump's foreign policy adviser!" CPA George Papadopoulos said on Twitter on Monday. "I have NO association with the Trump camp! NONE!"

The response to that tweet that was liked the most — and which hints at the tone of Papadopoulos' Twitter stream — reads, "That's what we'd expect you to say."

It was just one interaction on a day in which Papadopoulos tried to tame a tweetstorm. His name shot to sudden prominence after news emerged on Monday that the Trump aide Papadopoulos had met with people murkily identified as "the Professor" and "Putin's niece" in London. That Papadopoulos was working as a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign and was hoping to form ties with Russia and collect "dirt" on Trump's Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Papadopoulos the CPA, who lives and works in Novi, Mich., quickly moved to dispel any confusion.

"Greece is six hours ahead," he said in an email. "I had just finished eating the lunch my mother cooked for me and decided to quickly check online to see how Monday was shaping up. Well, the deluge of tweets, media requests, emails and messages has not stopped."

As of Tuesday morning, Papadopoulos' tweet about not having ties to Trump had been liked 31,000 times.

P.S. the couple who adopted young Webster Long were Katherine Calder-Young Papadopolis and her adoring husband George Papadopolis. Read the rest

Facebook is reported to soon reveal it exposed an estimated 126 million Americans, many of whom voted, to what was effectively Russian state propaganda (served from Russian webservers in Russia) during the runup to the U.S. 2016 presidential election. All of that content favored Trump, who is now President of the United States. Read the rest

Kaspersky -- a respected Russia-based security company -- has been under a cloud since they were accused of stealing NSA cyberweapons on behalf of the Russian government. But the company has a perfectly innocent -- if complicated and at times bizarre explanation for how it came to be in possession of the NSA's crown jewels. Read the rest

A protestor named Ryan Clayton tossed Russian flags at Trump today as the president was walking to a Capitol Hill lunch. The president appeared to respond with a thumbs up.

"Trump is treason!" Clayton yelled. "Why are you talking about tax cuts when you should be talking about treason?"

(ABC News)

Read the rest

Enjoy this dashcam video capturing a meteorological phenomenon in Russia, where road surfacing work is underway. Read the rest

The Department of Homeland Security today revealed which states were targeted by Russian hackers trying to break into voting systems during the 2016 election cycle. DHS said "most" states were unsuccessfully attacked, but didn't make clear how and where the hackers were successful, or whether the sustained cyberattacks helped Donald Trump win the presidency. Read the rest

Model and former basketball player Ekaterina Lisina of Russia boasts the Guinness World Record for World's Longest Legs (female). The 29-year-old stands a total of 6'8.77" and her legs each measure 52 inches (the left one is a tad longer). Read the rest

During his tenure as Donald Trump's campaign chairman, Paul Manafort offered private briefings on the status of the US Presidential election to Kremlin-connected Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, the Washington Post reports.

Via the Washington Post:

Less than two weeks before Donald Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination, his campaign chairman offered to provide briefings on the race to a Russian billionaire closely aligned with the Kremlin, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Paul Manafort made the offer in an email to an overseas intermediary, asking that a message be sent to Oleg Deripaska, an aluminum magnate with whom Manafort had done business in the past, these people said.

“If he needs private briefings we can accommodate,” Manafort wrote in the July 7, 2016, email, portions of which were read to The Washington Post along with other Manafort correspondence from that time.

The emails are among tens of thousands of documents that have been turned over to congressional investigators and Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s team as they probe whether Trump associates coordinated with Russia as part of Moscow’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election.

Russian politician Vyacheslav Nikonov says U.S. “intelligence missed it when Russian intelligence stole the president of the United States.” Read the rest

The Russian army clearly needs to teach its tank drivers not to text and drive.

Read the rest

Felix Sater, a longtime business associate of Donald Trump with organized crime ties, promised in a 2015 email to “engineer a real estate deal with the aid of the president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin, that he said would help Mr. Trump win the presidency,” reports the New York Times today. Read the rest