All posts tagged: saga

Scooter Braun Tied to Hollywood Smear Saga

Scooter Braun Tied to Hollywood Smear Saga

Published by Daniella Wilson

A new court filing appears to tie Scooter Braun more tightly to the entertainment industry’s emerging smear-site saga. The Hollywood Reporter first exposed the clandestine operation in February. The scandal initially surfaced via a lawsuit connected to Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni’s It Ends with Us legal war, which is slated for trial in May. Brought by publicist Stephanie Jones, the suit alleged a “cottage industry” of defamatory anonymous websites operating from a shared playbook orchestrated by Baldoni’s crisis publicist Melissa Nathan and online fixer Jed Wallace. A second suit filed in February by actress-turned-activist Alexa Nikolas, a target of one of these smear sites, also named Baldoni’s lawyer Bryan Freedman as a defendant. Jones and Nikolas contend they’ve uncovered digital campaigns of discreditation, in which perpetrators destroyed reputations by alleging, without substantiation, that adversaries engaged in — among other activities — prostitution, embezzlement, drug dealing, extortion and human trafficking. These efforts apparently relied on a mix of sock-puppet accounts across social media platforms, which promoted the spurious claims of vilifying websites. In response to …

7 takeaways from Olly Robbins’ evidence on the Peter Mandelson vetting saga – POLITICO

7 takeaways from Olly Robbins’ evidence on the Peter Mandelson vetting saga – POLITICO

Published by Sam Flores

This is particularly wounding for Starmer because Doyle, like Mandelson, has since been embroiled in a scandal over his past association with a pedophile. (Mandelson resigned over the depth of his friendship with the late convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein in September, while Doyle campaigned in 2017 for a friend who had been charged with child sex offenses, and was later convicted.) It was in March 2025, when Robbins was making large numbers of career civil servants redundant in a restructure. He told MPs he was “under strict instruction” from No. 10’s private office not to discuss the offer with then-Foreign Secretary David Lammy. “I felt quite uncomfortable about it and I kept giving advice that I thought this would be very hard for the office, and was hard for me personally to defend,” he added. “I don’t know what the origin of the suggestion was, and I don’t know who exactly was behind it or how serious it was,” he went on. David Lammy speaks to reporters before a “Meeting in Defence of Democracy,” a …

7 reasons Starmer can’t shake off the Mandelson vetting saga – POLITICO

7 reasons Starmer can’t shake off the Mandelson vetting saga – POLITICO

Published by Sam Flores

Starmer announced Monday that he had commissioned a review into any security concerns raised during Mandelson’s tenure. That in itself means the scandal could deepen.  MPs are also asking about just how high a level of top secret documents Mandelson was allowed to see under Britain’s “STRAP” protocol. Access to these highest-level documents is complicated and varies case by case, with each one having an assigned “compartment” of people who see it on a need-to-know basis. Therefore we may never find out what Mandelson saw. 7) What else is waiting to come out? One row that dominated Monday shows anything can come out of left field and disrupt the prime minister’s plans. This time it was a memo to Starmer in November 2024 from former Cabinet Secretary Simon Case, already released by the government weeks ago but not widely seized upon. It recommended Starmer should let civil servants obtain security clearances, due diligence and flag any other issues “before confirming your choice” of ambassador. MPs bombarded Starmer with questions about the Case memo. He had …

Labour In Turmoil As Mandelson Saga Threatens To Take Down PM

Labour In Turmoil As Mandelson Saga Threatens To Take Down PM

Published by Sam Flores

Keir Starmer may be seeing red over the latest Peter Mandelson drama but so are Labour MPs. Three weeks before the May elections – when voters will choose their candidates for the Scottish and Welsh parliaments along with some English councils and mayoralties – the prime minister has been hit with a fresh revelation about the ex-ambassador. It appears security vetting officials advised against hiring Mandelson last year but the Foreign Office decided to give him the job as the UK’s attaché to Washington anyway. The prime minister promptly sacked the Foreign Office’s top civil servant Olly Robbins hours after the Guardian broke the story on Thursday night. Downing Street said neither Starmer nor other government ministers were not aware until this week that Mandelson, former friend to convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, had not passed vetting. Starmer told the press he was “furious” that he had not been told ahead of giving Mandelson the plum post. Meanwhile, his political opponents have accused Starmer of misleading parliament after he previously told MPs “full due process” was …

Pragmata review – soulful sad dad saga in stunning outer space | Games

Pragmata review – soulful sad dad saga in stunning outer space | Games

Published by Sam Flores

When Pragmata was announced alongside the PlayStation 5 in 2020, its shiny trailer promised slick sci-fi action in outer space. While it certainly delivers those futuristic thrills in spades, what I didn’t expect was a tender tale of paternal love. This is Capcom’s belated, surprisingly soulful first entry into gaming’s sad dad genre. In this near-future fiction, a corporation named Delphi has established a research station on the moon’s surface to experiment with advanced 3D printing tech, using “Lunafilament” to easily recreate everything from tools to entire buildings. Predictably, things soon go very wrong. As the station suddenly goes dark, engineer Hugh is sent from Earth to investigate. Right from the off, there’s an engrossingly mournful melancholy to Pragmata. Glistening corridors lead to eerily abandoned laboratories. Half-printed creations stand static, threads of filament protruding uselessly from their unfinished frames, and holograms show recorded conversations from increasingly concerned researchers. Hugh soon discovers that the human workers have met a grisly end, but luckily he doesn’t have to tough it out alone. Attacked by malfunctioning security droids, …

Former Labour councillor denies blackmail over ‘Westminster honeytrap’ saga – POLITICO

Former Labour councillor denies blackmail over ‘Westminster honeytrap’ saga – POLITICO

Published by Sam Flores

A trial lasting two to three weeks is only expected to start in October 2027 in England’s backlogged court system. Steadman is also charged with with five other offences of improper use of a public communications network. He is accused of sending a series of menacing messages to Wragg between February and March 2024, the same dates as the blackmail charge, and of sending an indecent image to each of four people including Luke Evans, Ben Everitt and Ross Thomson, who were Conservative MPs at the time. Steadman did not enter a plea to the other five charges at Southwark Crown Court on Wednesday. The Metropolitan Police launched an investigation in April 2024 after POLITICO revealed that several men in Westminster, including MPs, had received unsolicited WhatsApp messages from users calling themselves alternatively “Abi” or “Charlie.” The series of events was quickly dubbed the “Westminster honeytrap scandal.” Wragg resigned the Tory whip, saying he had leaked colleagues’ personal phone numbers to a person he encountered on the dating app Grindr. He added in a later interview that …

Legal Saga Between Artist Ryder Ripps and Bored Ape Yacht Club is Over

Legal Saga Between Artist Ryder Ripps and Bored Ape Yacht Club is Over

Published by José Betancourt

A long-running legal saga between Yuga Labs, the parent company of Bored Ape Yacht Club, and artist Ryder Ripps and his business partner Jeremy Cahen, has finally ended, with the parties reaching a settlement on Tuesday. While the terms of the settlement are confidential, the parties disclosed that they agreed to a permanent injunction against Ripps and Cahen using any trademarks or images owned by Yuga Labs. The lawsuit stemmed from Ripps’s quest, at the height of the NFT craze in 2022, to prove that the founders of Bored Ape Yacht Club had threaded their NFT series with racist imagery, pointing to the accessories the Apes wear, including Prussian helmets and safari hats, which Ripps contended were tied to alt-right culture. Further, he argued that the BAYC symbol of a white Ape skull resembled a Nazi Totenkopf emblem. Yuga Labs, for its part, repeatedly denied these claims, and emphasized the diverse backgrounds of its founders and primary funder, music mogul Guy Oseary. Related Articles The next step in Ripps’s quest to take down BAYC was …

The Complete Talisman Saga by Aaron Ryan

The Complete Talisman Saga by Aaron Ryan

Published by Jenni Sidey

Reading the complete Talisman Saga from front to back is a strange experience, in the best possible way. You start with a quiet, grounded story about a broken father working in the shadows of American cities. Three books later, you find yourself somewhere on the edge of the omniverse, watching characters you have grown to love stand against forces that should not exist. The strange part is that the journey from one to the other never feels like a leap. It feels like the story was always going there, and you just could not see it from where you started. The Complete Talisman Saga by Aaron Ryan collects all three books in the Talisman trilogy: Talisman: Subterfuge, Talisman: Nexus, and Talisman: Halcyon. Read together, they form one sustained story about grief, deception, and the kind of love that refuses to die quietly. This is one of the more emotionally ambitious independent science fiction series I have come across in recent years, and the omnibus format lets the full shape of the story breathe in a …

“The Forsyte Saga” is about hot men and the money they love

“The Forsyte Saga” is about hot men and the money they love

Published by Sam Flores

What is a Forsyte? Lots of people may ask this question as excitement or dread builds around the PBS debut of “The Forsytes.” That excitement is because it is one of those titles that quietly shaped every period drama and miniseries that came after it. The dread comes from fears of a reinterpretation of John Galsworthy’s Nobel Prize-winning books, collectively known as “The Forsyte Saga,” to suit an audience besotted with “Bridgerton” and other sensual period adaptations. Still, most who try to define a Forsyte do so because they aren’t familiar with these stories. At least, not in book form. That benign ignorance will serve PBS’ highly liberal adaptation of the series very well. “The Forsytes” is inspired by Galsworthy’s family of extremely wealthy stockbrokers in late-Victorian London, an age in which nobility’s influence and social dominance receded with the rise of new money. Nominally headed by its matriarch, Ann Forsyte (Francesca Annis), the series looks at how the overwhelming expectations of the older generation, led by Ann’s two ornery middle-aged sons, bring strife on …

Anthropic wins injunction against Trump administration over Defense Department saga

Anthropic wins injunction against Trump administration over Defense Department saga

Published by skeptic

A federal judge has sided with Anthropic in its twisty legal battle with the Trump administration, awarding the tech company an injunction against the government’s recent order that labeled it a “supply chain risk,” the Wall Street Journal reports. On Thursday, Judge Rita F. Lin of the Northern District of California ordered the Trump administration to rescind its recent designation of Anthropic as a security risk, as well as to back off its order that federal agencies cut ties with the company. “It looks like an attempt to cripple Anthropic,” Lin reportedly said during the court proceedings. Lin ultimately argued that the government’s orders had flouted freespeech protections for the company. The drama between the Pentagon and Anthropic erupted last last month over a dispute concerning guidelines for the government’s usage of the AI company’s software. Anthropic had reportedly sought to enforce certain limits on how the government could use its AI models, such as banning their use in autonomous weapons systems or mass surveillance. The government disagreed with those limitations, ultimately labeling the company …