ERIK PRINCE

Knowledgeable sources and message exchanges reveal that Venezuela’s government quietly offered last year to release imprisoned Americans in exchange for the U.S. letting go a key financier of President Nicolás Maduro.

Prince, a Trump ally and founder Blackwater Worldwide, said he'll charge extra to transport passengers to the airport from their homes in Kabul.

Blackwater founder Erik Prince is offering an alternative arrangement to evacuate eligible Afghans out of Kabul, but it comes at a hefty price.

The Israeli military said Sunday it targeted the home of Gaza’s top Hamas leader after nearly a week of heavy airstrikes and rocket fire into Israel from the territory ruled by the Islamic militant group. Brig. Gen. Hidai Zilberman, an army spokesman, told Israel’s army radio Sunday that the military targeted the home of Yehiyeh Sinwar, the most senior Hamas leader inside the territory, who is likely in hiding along with the rest of the group's upper echelon.

"My girlfriend" just doesn't have the same ring to it, but comedian John Mulaney is reportedly dating actress Olivia Munn — news that broke shortly after Page Six revealed he's divorcing his wife of six years, Anna Marie Tendler. Munn and Mulaney supposedly met at church, though Munn has admitted she's had her eye on Mulaney for years. In a 2015 HuffPost Live interview resurfaced by Page Six on Friday, she revealed "we were at a wedding together and I was like 'Oh my gosh, do you and your fiancé want to go have dinner or something and go hang out?'" She added that "I was just so obsessed with hanging out with and talking with him," but afterwards, when Munn emailed Mulaney, he never wrote her back. "I might've got the wrong email — probably. That's what I tell myself," she joked. More stories from theweek.comRepublicans' dishonest war against 'critical race theory'There's growing speculation that Meghan Markle and Prince Harry will name their daughter 'Philippa'The Republican theory of unemployment is classic Marx

A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll found that only 17 percent of Republicans thought Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., should have stayed in a leadership position in the House GOP, which stripped her of the post this week.

A man was arrested for sexually assaulting a 67-year-old Asian woman in Fremont, Calif. on Thursday. Caught in the act: Fremont police said the assault was still in progress when they responded to the problem call at approximately 11 a.m. “This was in an exterior portion of a residence, so it was obvious when the officers arrived on scene what was happening,” Sergeant Ricardo Tores said, according to KGO.

Elise Stefanik has been elected as the new chair of the House Republican conference in a secret ballot of party members. Ms Stefanik is now the party’s number three in the House of Representatives, replacing Liz Cheney of Wyoming who was removed from the post earlier this week for her lack of fealty to Donald Trump. There were several other write-in candidates including Ohio’s Jim Jordan, Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, and Cathy McMorris of Washington.

Erik Prince, founder of private security contractor Blackwater and brother of former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, recruited a former British spy in 2016 to professionalize the undercover operatives at Project Veritas, the conservative sting video shop run by James O'Keefe, The New York Times reports, citing documents and people involved in the subsequent operations to discredit perceived "deep state" enemies of former President Donald Trump inside the U.S. government. The ex-undercover British spy, Richard Seddon, trained conservative operatives first at the Prince family ranch in Wyoming, then at a large, $10,000-a-month house near Georgetown University. Female undercover operatives tried to entrap FBI agents, sometimes using fake dating app profiles, and State Department employees, the Times reports. But "one of the most brazen operations of the campaign" was an attempt to take down H.R. McMaster, Trump's second national security adviser. The plan was reportedly to send a female operative to Tosca, a restaurant McMaster frequented, to engage him in drinks and conversation and record him disparaging Trump or making other inappropriate remarks on camera. One of the people involved in the McMaster plot was Barbara Ledeen, a longtime Republican staffer on the Senate Judiciary Committee before retiring, she says, earlier this year. Presented with the details of the operation, Ledeen told the Times she was just a messenger, "not part of a plot." Ledeen said "someone she trusted" contacted her to help with the McMaster operation. "Somebody who had his calendar conveyed to me that he goes to Tosca all the time," she said, and she passed the information on to a man she believed to be a Project Veritas operative with a fake name. The McMaster operation was aborted after he, unrelated to Project Veritas, resigned under pressure from Trump. O'Keefe did not respond to the substance of the Times' report but did accuse the newspaper of running a "smear piece" on Project Veritas. Seddon left the project in 2018, before O'Keefe started releasing low-impact "unmasking the deep state" videos. He was dismayed, three former Project Veritas employees told the Times, with "O'Keefe's desire to produce quick media content rather than to run long-term infiltration operations." Read more about the operation and its cast of characters at The New York Times. More stories from theweek.comThe Republican theory of unemployment is classic MarxThere's growing speculation that Meghan Markle and Prince Harry will name their daughter 'Philippa'A short history of White House cats

In a 28-second video, which was posted to Twitter this week by a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip appeared to launch rocket attacks at Israelis from densely populated civilian areas. At least that is what Netanyahu’s spokesman, Ofir Gendelman, said the video portrayed. But his tweet with the footage, which was shared hundreds of times as the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis escalated, was not from Gaza. It was not even from this week. Instead, the video that he shared, which can be found on many YouTube channels and other video-hosting sites, was from 2018. And according to captions on older versions of the video, it showed militants firing rockets not from Gaza but from Syria or Libya. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times The video was just one piece of misinformation that has circulated on Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, WhatsApp and other social media this week about the rising violence between Israelis and Palestinians, as Israeli military ground forces attacked Gaza early Friday. The false information has included videos, photos and clips of text purported to be from government officials in the region, with posts baselessly claiming early this week that Israeli soldiers had invaded Gaza, or that Palestinian mobs were about to rampage through sleepy Israeli suburbs. The lies have been amplified as they have been shared thousands of times on Twitter and Facebook, spreading to WhatsApp and Telegram groups that have thousands of members, according to an analysis by The New York Times. The effect of the misinformation is potentially deadly, disinformation experts said, inflaming tensions between Israelis and Palestinians when suspicions and distrust have already run high. “A lot of it is rumor and broken telephone, but it is being shared right now because people are desperate to share information about the unfolding situation,” said Arieh Kovler, a political analyst and independent researcher in Jerusalem who studies misinformation. “What makes it more confusing is that it is a mix of false claims and genuine stuff, which is being attributed to the wrong place or the wrong time.” Twitter, TikTok and Facebook, which owns Instagram and WhatsApp, did not respond to requests for comment. Christina LoNigro, a spokeswoman for WhatsApp, said the company had put limits on how many times people could forward a message as a way of clamping down on misinformation. The Times found several pieces of misinformation that spread across Israeli and Palestinian neighborhood and activist WhatsApp groups this week. One, which appeared as a block of Hebrew text or an audio file, contained a warning that Palestinian mobs were preparing to descend on Israeli citizens. “Palestinians are coming, parents protect your children,” read the message, which pointed specifically to several suburban areas north of Tel Aviv. Thousands of people were in one of the Telegram groups where the post was shared; the post then appeared in several WhatsApp groups, which had dozens to hundreds of members. Israeli police did not respond to a request for comment. There were no reports of violence in the areas mentioned in the message. In another post early this week, which was written in Arabic and sent to a WhatsApp group with over 200 members, warnings flashed that Israeli soldiers were set to invade the Gaza Strip. “The invasion is coming,” read the text, which urged people to pray for their families. Arabic and Hebrew-language news sources also appeared to amplify some misinformation. Several Israeli news outlets recently discussed a video that showed a family walking to a funeral with a wrapped body, only to drop the body when a police siren sounded. The video was cited by the news organizations as evidence that Palestinian families were holding fake funerals and exaggerating the number of people killed in the conflict. In fact, the video appeared on YouTube over a year ago and may have shown a Jordanian family holding a fake funeral, according to a caption left on the original video. Clips of another video showing religious Jews tearing their clothing as a sign of devotion also circulated on Arabic-language news sites this week. The clips were cited as evidence that Jews were faking their own injuries in clashes in Jerusalem. That was false. The video had been uploaded to WhatsApp and Facebook several times earlier this year, according to The Times analysis. There is a long history of misinformation being shared among Israeli and Palestinian groups, with false claims and conspiracies spiking during moments of heightened violence in the region. In recent years, Facebook has removed several disinformation campaigns by Iran aimed at stoking tensions among Israelis and Palestinians. Twitter also took down a network of fake accounts in 2019 that was used to smear opponents of Netanyahu. The grainy video that Gendelman shared on Twitter on Wednesday, which purportedly showed Palestinian militants launching rocket attacks at Israelis, was removed Thursday after Twitter labeled it “misleading content.” Gendelman’s office did not respond to a request for comment. Gendelman appears to have mischaracterized the contents of other videos as well. On Tuesday, he posted a video on Twitter showing three adult men being instructed to lie on the floor, with their bodies being arranged by a crowd nearby. Gendelman said the video showed Palestinians staging bodies for a photo opportunity. Kovler, who traced the video back to its source, said the video had been posted in March to TikTok. Its accompanying text said the footage showed people practicing for a bomb drill. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company

In this Dec. 31, 2020, file photo pardoned Blackwater contractor Evan Liberty poses for a photo in Washington. The Blackwater contractors meet none of that criteria. They were convicted in the killings of unarmed Iraqi women and children and have long been defiant in their assertions of innocence. “I feel like I acted correctly,” he said of his conduct in 2007. He says he's grateful to his supporters and to Trump for what he calls a “second chance at life."

FILE - This combination made from file photo shows Blackwater guards, from left, Dustin Heard, Evan Liberty, Nicholas Slatten and Paul Slough. “The infamous Blackwater company killed Iraqi citizens at Nisoor Square. The 2007 killings in the Baghdad traffic circle were among many attacks, large and small, hitting civilians that served to turn even some initial Iraqi supporters of Saddam Hussein's overthrow against Americans. The case against the Blackwater guards ping-ponged across courts in Washington, with a federal appeals court at one point overturning the first-degree murder conviction of one defendant, Nicholas Slatten, and sharply reducing the prison sentences of the three others. In Iraq, said Ford, the former diplomat, the pardons will “necessarily give some ammunition to those who say get the Americans out now."

(CNN) - On the opening day of Roger Stone's trial for allegedly lying to Congress and obstructing its investigation, one mystery appeared to be solved by prosecutors. Prosecutors referenced Prince and the communications during the first day of Stone's trial, which is expected to last three weeks. Prosecutors expect to call members of the Trump campaign but are not planning on calling Prince, according to a person familiar with the plan. Stone told Prince, according to the indictment, that more material would be released that would be damaging to the Clinton campaign. Prince told Congress he had taken the meeting as a "chance encounter" and was not representing Trump in the meeting.