It is always difficult to know what news to trust. I have long since accepted the fact that all media outlets have biases and always try to cross reference my information with an array of news articles in order to have a better chance of figuring out what actually happened in the world. But recent court documents in the Paul Manafort prosecution sheds light on a whole different dimension of bias in the media. It appears as if Paul Manafort paid a number of highly reputable public relations firms to portray one of the more prominent politicians in Ukraine as anti-Semitic. According to the Financial Times:
He [Paul Manafort] hired a host of top-tier lobbying and law firms, including Mercury Public Affairs, the Podesta Group, which is now defunct, and Skadden Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. Mr Manafort paid half a dozen firms $11m as he promoted Mr Yanukovich by lobbying politicians, seeding articles in newspapers and discrediting his opponents.
This level of misinformation far exceeds normal bias. These firms are among some of the most reputable firms in the world. Behavior of this sort is criminal.
A well-known political activist in Russia, Pyotr Verzilov, was apparently poisoned and lost the ability to see, to talk, and to walk. Verzilov was the publisher of “Mediazona, a Russian online news outlet which focuses on human rights violations inside Russia’s penal system” and was affiliated with the rock group Pussy Zone. Verzilov has both Russian and Canadian citizenship and he was flown to Berlin, Germany for treatment. Poisoning seems to be the preferred way for Russian authorities to eliminate political dissent, probably because it is so difficult to prove.
World Politics News 
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