On Monday, the Russian military warned the world that Ukraine was in the final stages of creating and detonating a dirty bomb that would spread nuclear radiation across Europe. 

According to Russia, Ukraine and the West would then claim the attack was Russia detonating a nuclear bomb and attack. The allegation is absurd because dirty bombs—an explosive attached to chemical or radioactive material—are theoretical. The explosion would cause more damage than any radioactive material. But Russia’s claims are made more ludicrous by the images it used to sell the theory: stills from a 2018 Syrian propaganda film, a 2014 training exercise about disposing radioactive material, and photos from 9/11. 

Moscow published its message on Telegram and Twitter. It attached a slide presentation and linked back to a long explanation from Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the Russian Ministry of Defense’s (MoD) Chief of the Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection Forces of the RF Armed Forces.“According to the information we have, two organizations in Ukraine have specific instructions to create the so-called ‘dirty bomb,’” Kirillov said. “The works are at the final stage.”

The most ludicrous part of the Russia MoD’s dirty bomb presentation was the photos it used to make its points. In a slide about chemical weapons, the Russian MoD posted two images meant to represent chemical weapons attacks in Syria. The first, as Bellingcat’s Eliot Higgins pointed out on Twitter, is a production still from a movie about the chemical attacks in Syria. It even features someone using a clapperboard.

The movie, Revolution Man, was a Russian-funded propaganda movie meant to blame White Helmets—a volunteer humanitarian organization operating in Syria—for Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons. Russia previously used images from the movie in 2018 when trying to claim that the White Helmets were doing the chemical attacks. 

“That's 2022 Russian propaganda using stills from a 2018 Syrian anti-White Helmets propaganda film, which Russian media in 2018 used as direct evidence of the White Helmets creating propaganda,” Higgins said on Twitter. The picture is still up on the movie’s Facebook page.

Higgins went over some more photos from the Russian presentation. One still from a slide purporting to explain Ukrain’s ability to build a dirty bomb seems to show radioactive material in the back of the bag with a drawing of a barrel diagram on top of it above the words “Creation of a Dirty Bomb.” The photo is from a 2014 training exercise involving nuclear material. Another photo purporting to show the civilian impact of a dirty bomb is just a picture from 9/11.

A dirty bomb is a theoretical weapon that no one has ever used. It’s been the plot in multiple movies and causes fear and panic in anyone who hears about it. The idea is that an explosive would be placed next to radioactive or chemical material. “When the charge is detonated, the container is destroyed, and the radioactive substance is sprayed by a shock wave, while creating radioactive contamination of the area over large areas,” Kirillov said.

Again, no dirty bomb has ever been detonated, and nobody is sure how it would actually work. But scientists who study this kind of thing have said that the explosion from a dirty bomb would do more damage than any radioactive material inside it.

“Let me emphasize this. The point of a ‘dirty bomb’ is to contaminate an area with radioactive material. People in the area will ingest some of that material and will need medical treatment, but few will ingest enough to produce radiation sickness,” Cheryl Rofer, a retired nuclear scientist, said on Twitter. “Dispersing material through an explosion is actually difficult. The most effective material for a ‘dirty bomb’ would be some types of hospital irradiation sources, which contain powder.”

Many of the radioactive elements that would make people very sick are heavy and hard to aerosolize, even when part of an explosion. The amount of wind in the detonation area would determine a lot of the scatter pattern and, even then, it would cause more fear than radiation poisoning.

According to Russia’s own presentation, the dirty bomb could contain enriched uranium oxide, uranium-238, uranium-235, or plutonium-239. Russia also gave specific locations where the material would come from. The International Atomic Energy Agency quickly put out a statement after the MoD published its report stating that it hadn’t seen anything weird in any of those locations. 

“The IAEA inspected one of these locations one month ago and all our findings were consistent with Ukraine’s safeguards declarations,” IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said in the statement. “No undeclared nuclear activities or material were found there.” The IAEA has been in and out of Ukraine for the past year, inspecting places like Chernobyl, Ukraine’s power plants, and the contested power plant at Zaporizhzhia.

The Russian MoD’s claim that Ukraine is working on a dirty bomb is the worst kind of propaganda. It’s dumb, scary, and lazy. It uses assets from its past propaganda efforts to tell a story that scares everyone but has no basis in reality.

Former President Donald Trump has always pitched himself as the ultimate New York businessman—brash, in-your-face, and all about flash and cash.

New York is trying to blow that image up. 

State officials have launched both a criminal case and a sweeping civil fraud lawsuit against Trump’s business that may soon eviscerate his status as a New York businessman. Victory would smash Trump’s golf-and-real-estate empire as it presently exists, leave him (and his children) ineligible to run a business in New York ever again, and brand his namesake company, the Trump Organization, a criminal enterprise. 

“The civil and criminal trials in New York are like a double-barrel shotgun to the financial infrastructure of Trump’s businesses,” said Gene Rossi, a former federal prosecutor for the Eastern District of Virginia. “The brand, assets, and the ability to obtain future revenues will be greatly at risk if both cases are successful. CPR may be needed in the end for what is left.”

“The civil and criminal trials in New York are like a double-barrel shotgun to the financial infrastructure of Trump’s businesses.”

In the criminal case, prosecutors accuse Trump’s company of paying employees in an off-the-books scheme to avoid taxes. Trial arguments start this week after the court spent last week selecting a jury. The civil case, unveiled in September and now rolling ahead in court, accuses Trump, his company, and his adult children of lying to banks and insurance providers about the value of Trump’s assets to score financial perks. 

Both cases threaten to isolate the Trump Organization by making other companies, banks, and the government reluctant to work with Trump’s business.  

They’re only part of the tsunami of legal jeopardy towering over Trump, which includes a criminal investigation in Georgia into his attempts to reverse his 2020 election defeat and a probe led by the Department of Justice into whether he violated the Espionage Act by taking sensitive, secret documents to his Palm Beach resort.

But unlike those other probes, New York’s legal assault cuts to the core of the brand Trump has spent a lifetime building: the appearance of wealth and success in the New York real estate game.

Trump’s company has pleaded not guilty in the criminal case and vowed to fight the civil lawsuit. Both James and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg are elected Democrats, and Trump has dismissed the cases they’ve brought as part of a wide-reaching Democrat-run witch hunt. 

The criminal trial is all about alleged “off the books” employee benefits. 

And that’s where the prosecution’s anticipated star witness comes in: Trump’s longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg. 

In August, Weisselberg, 75, pleaded guilty to 15 felonies and admitted to evading taxes on $1.76 million of his income, while the company covered rent for a Manhattan apartment, the lease payments on multiple Mercedes Benzs, and private-school tuition for his grandchildren. 

Weisselberg refused to cooperate fully with the broad-reaching investigations against Trump. But he agreed to testify at this trial, in exchange for a much-reduced sentence of only five months. The judge has warned him he could face up to 15 years if he fails to keep up his end of the bargain and testify truthfully at trial—and Weisselberg won’t be formally sentenced until after the company’s trial ends.

The company is preparing to argue that Weisselberg is lying, a lawyer for the Trump Organization told a hearing last week, according to a transcript seen by Reuters. 

“Weisselberg will testify he believed everything he was doing was wrong,” Trump Org lawyer Susan Necheles said during a video conference. “We think he's lying, and we want to show that.”

The trial may now hinge on whether the jury believes Weisselberg or the company’s lawyers.  

If the company is found guilty, the firm may face a maximum fine of only $1.6 million—which would be peanuts for a company that reported earning hundreds of millions a year during Trump’s presidency. 

But the longer-term consequences of a criminal conviction could deal a lot more harm: Afterward, the government and other vendors may refuse to do business with the firm.

The Trump international hotel is seen in Washington, DC, on February 15, 2022. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

To take just one example, a conviction could upend the lucrative Secret Service contracts Trump’s hotels have enjoyed for years. 

A Ccngressional investigation found that Trump charged “exorbitant” rates to Secret Service agents protecting him, including $1,185 per night at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. 

American taxpayers shelled out a minimum of $1.4 million to house Secret Service agents at Trump properties while protecting Trump and his family, the report found. 

Federal regulations, however, require public spending to be done with an “impeccable standard of conduct.” 

Banks, likewise, may balk at granting loans to a company with an official criminal history.

And all this criminal drama isn’t even the most dangerous legal threat facing Trump’s company. 

The New York Attorney General’s office is pursuing a sweeping, $250 million lawsuit that’s playing out now in the same court complex as the criminal proceedings. 

The lawsuit accuses Trump and his company of including more than 200 false or misleading statements about the value of his properties in 11 statements of financial condition over a period of a decade. Those statements were submitted to banks and insurance companies to win benefits like lower interest rates and premiums. 

“The number of grossly inflated asset values is staggering, affecting most if not all of the real estate holdings in any given year,” the lawsuit states. 

“The number of grossly inflated asset values is staggering, affecting most if not all of the real estate holdings in any given year.”

In just one of many examples, the lawsuit says Trump claimed his Trump Tower penthouse was worth $327 million in 2015 based on its size of over 30,000 square feet. “In reality, the apartment was only 10,996 square feet,” the lawsuit says. 

The case resulted from a three-year probe of Trump’s business practices, during which Trump was personally hauled in for a deposition and forced to invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination hundreds of times—a move he once said was only for guilty people and the mob. 

The civil case could likewise further isolate the company, said Daniel J. Horwitz, who investigated fraud cases as an assistant district attorney in the Manhattan DA’s office before becoming a partner at New York law firm McLaughlin and Stern.

“Any time a company is sued by a regulator over core aspects of its business, that’s really not good,” Horwitz said. “Obviously there are reputational issues for the brand, but more importantly, lenders and insurance companies may very well be reluctant to do business with you.”

The lawsuit seeks to permanently bar Trump and his adult children Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka from serving as an officer or director of any company registered or licensed in New York State. The suit would ban Trump and the Trump Organization from entering into any New York real estate acquisitions for five years and seeks to claw back an estimated $250 million, which the AG’s office said was the approximate amount of financial benefits obtained through fraud.

Earlier this month, James’ office asked a judge to stop Trump and his company from transferring assets without approval from the court in order to protect the funds she said would be needed for the judgment if wins her lawsuit. 

She noted that on the same day in September that her lawsuit was announced, Trump’s company registered a new firm called “Trump Organization II LLC.”

“The Trump Organization has since refused to provide any assurance that it will not seek to move assets out of New York to evade legal accountability,” James’ office wrote in a press release. 

James asked the judge to appoint an independent monitor to oversee the company’s financial disclosures. 

A response filed by Trump attorney Alina Habba called the idea of a monitor “grossly punitive, inequitable, and completely unnecessary.”

But if the company loses the case, that kind of “punitive” measure will be just a first step.

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JERUSALEM – Walking down Ben Yehuda street in Jerusalem on a Saturday night after Shabbat, huge crowds of young people line the streets. At one crowded bus stop hangs a life-sized poster of the far-right Israeli politician Itamar Ben-Gvir, captioned in Hebrew: “Who are the real landlords here? The time has come. Jewish Power.” 

As Israel heads to the polls on Tuesday for its fifth election since April 2019, a sharp rise in right-wing support among young Israelis raises questions about the prospect of a peaceful future.  

A recent analysis by the Israel Democracy Institute, based on numerous surveys conducted this year, shows that about 60 percent of Jewish Israelis identify as right-wing today. But among young people aged 18-24, that number rises to 70 percent. In April 2019, only 46 percent of Jewish Israelis identified as right-wing, across all age groups.  

“There’s no real left in Israel,” Sara Guggenheim, a 27-year-old content developer from Jerusalem, told VICE World News. “The most left-wing party in Israel would be considered a centre-right or right-wing party in Europe.”

This surge of right-wing support among young Israelis didn’t happen in a vacuum. Reactions to last year’s violence in Gaza, religious families’ tendency to vote conservatively and have more children, and deepening polarisation between Israelis and Palestinians are all contributing factors.

But 27-year-old Daniel Goodman, a freelance web designer who lives in Tel Aviv, says the term “right-wing” means something specific in Israel. “When we talk about [right-wing views], we’re mainly talking about security,” he told VICE World News. “Most young Israelis are very left-wing in terms of social issues, like gay rights and women’s rights. But when it comes to security, we need a strong leader like Bibi [the nickname for Benjamin Netanyahu, the former PM and current frontrunner] to keep us safe.”

On the 1st of November, Israel will hold its fifth election in less than four years. Former Prime Minister and Likud party chair Netanyahu, who resigned as party leader last year amid corruption charges, is poised to do well. 

But his comeback relies, in part, on an alliance with one far-right Israeli lawmaker who has captured the country’s attention in recent months.

Ben-Gvir, a 46-year-old US-born rabbi, leads the far-right Otzma Yehudit party and has been accused of being racist and holding extreme political views. Although Ben-Gvir’s party is running independently in the upcoming election, it is considered a faction of the Religious Zionism party, which has called for fully annexing the West Bank, internationally recognised as having been occupied since 1967, as well as dissolving the Oslo Accords – which promised Palestinian self-determination – and giving Israel total control of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Ben-Gvir has threatened to deport all who are "disloyal" to Israel, and a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, the man who massacred 29 Palestinians in a Hebron mosque in 1994, hung in his home until very recently. 

Bezalel Smotrich, the 42-year-old leader of Religious Zionism, will be another critical ally to Netanyahu. Smotrich holds views as radical as Ben-Gvir, advocating a shoot-to-kill policy for the Israeli military when they face stone-throwing Palestinians and for the separation of Jewish and Arab mothers in hospital maternity wards.

Most polls predict Netanyahu’s Likud party and its allies will control the largest bloc of seats in the Knesset, but others show he may fall one or two seats short. Netanyahu, who was PM from 1996 to 1999 and then again from 2009 to 2021, has run a hardline campaign, but his success banks on an alliance with the far-right. If current polls hold, Ben-Gvir’s party could become the second-biggest in Netanyahu’s coalition and the third-largest in the country. And while many in Israel oppose his extreme views, Ben-Gvir has gained support among a growing number of young Israelis. 

“Our only hope is Bibi and Ben-Gvir,” says a young Jewish Israeli woman from Jerusalem who spoke to VICE World News on the condition of anonymity to avoid backlash from her community. “I want them to be my leaders and lead all the people of Israel.”

A generation of young Israelis and Palestinians have known nothing but conflict, and the vision of a shared, safe future feels increasingly beyond reach. The Oslo Accords – often called the “peace process” – marked a milestone in the pursuit of lasting peace between Israel and Palestine. Negotiations eventually came to a halt following the assassination of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. While there have been attempts to revive the peace talks, like the Camp David Summit in 2000 and the Annapolis Conference in 2007, none resulted in lasting peace or progress.

“To some degree, I remember the days of Oslo,” recounts David Daoud, an Israel research analyst at the Atlantic Council. “That kind of heady, naive optimism of ‘We’re gonna go eat hummus in Beirut soon, we’re gonna make peace with Syria, and the conflict is over.’ Instead, we went from the mountaintop all the way down. The failure of Oslo and the Second Intifada fed into the impression that this is a war to the death. And there’s been nothing since to replace that feeling.”

Daoud says the possibility of Netanyahu returning to power joined at the hip with Ben-Gvir reflects a wider, global drift to the hard right. “Today, we’re seeing a Western trend towards illiberal democracy, the rise of an illiberal right-wing – and that trend has now reached Israel.” 

Tuesday’s election comes at a tense time following last year’s 15-day war, recent Israeli raids in East Jerusalem, and new militant groups forming in the West Bank. Young people, in particular, hold increasingly hostile views of each other. A 2021 study of 16-18 year-olds by the aChord Center of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem found that 42 percent of religious Jews and 66 percent of Ultra-orthodox Jewish people “hated” Arabs, while 22 percent of Palestinians “hated” religious and Ultra-Orthodox Jews. In 2021, half of right-wing Israelis said they "believed in the prospect of a common future between Jews and Arabs,” but after last year’s surge of violence, that number has fallen to just 28 percent this year. 

“We have legitimacy as Jewish people to be in this land, but it’s only valid if we realise there are other people in this land,” said Guggenheim, the content developer from Jerusalem. “We have to create more room for [Palestinians] in society, and I think that’s a price many are not willing to pay.”

Yasmine Daas, a young Palestinian woman from Al-Tira, an Arab-majority town in the central district of Israel, says she believes the rise of political extremism is behind the growing divide between this generation of Israelis and Palestinians.

“People are going more extreme,” Daas told VICE World News. “We’re drifting apart instead of coming together, especially with everything that’s happened in the past two years. For example, I know I can never trust what my Jewish-Israeli co-worker thinks of me as a Palestinian. I will always be the Arab Palestinian to her, and she will always be my occupier. We’re trying to live together, but things aren’t under the surface anymore.”

Daas says she and her family fear the rise of the far-right in Israel and what it will do to their place as Palestinian Arabs in society. 

“Bibi never promoted peace,” she added. “His strategy is to make Israelis fear us. My parents are scared. They’re telling me: ‘Shit is going to blow up’… The future is not looking bright; it’s getting darker and more violent. Honestly, I don’t have hope. I’m scared.”

Daas’ hopelessness is echoed by Mahmoud Sou, 54, a Palestinian resident of the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in occupied East Jerusalem. For many Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank or Gaza, daily fears and restrictions on movement are a part of everyday life.

“We don’t have a life,” Sou told VICE World News. “Sometimes, we want to go to the sea like everyone else. But we are always worried. What will happen to our house? It’s been a long time since we even went for a picnic. If the Israeli police see our house empty for a few hours, they can come and take it. Two or three people must be in the house at all times.”

Sou said his 75-year-old mother-in-law had a heart attack following a recent Israeli raid on their home, and his 19-year-old son has been in jail for eight months on charges of throwing rocks at Israeli police. But he says it wasn’t his son who started the fight; he says Israeli police routinely come to their neighbourhood and antagonise them. 

“Under Israeli law, our life is very bad,” Sou said. “Nothing will change with a new Prime Minister. Nothing.”