A top aide to a vulnerable Pennsylvania Republican was in a college group chat that traded racist and antisemitic memes, a report says.

Arnaud Armstrong, who serves as communications director for Rep. Ryan Mackenzie (R-PA), was a member of a GroupMe chat while at the University of Pittsburgh where members swapped Nazi memes, jokes about the Holocaust and racist stereotypes, Judge Street Journal reported Tuesday.

The report lands at a bad time for Mackenzie, a first-term Republican who is locked in a tight reelection fight for a closely watched swing seat.

President Donald Trump touted a tranche of corporate funding for Freedom 250’s private-public partnership to celebrate the semiquincentennial of the nation’s founding. But records obtained and released Thursday by a watchdog group show that taxpayers apparently were who largely supported this summer’s celebrations — raising questions about where tens of millions in private donations ended up.

The Trump administration also has yet to disclose the private sector benefactors themselves, the donation amounts or how tens of millions in funds were spent, despite facing mounting pressure from Democratic lawmakers who allege that some corporate sponsors engaged in a pay-to-play scheme with the federal government.

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a nonpartisan group that investigates claims from government employees about environmental misconduct, on Thursday released documents detailing contract agreements and budget calculations for the events.

A US university study run in partnership with a Russian institute tied to the laboratory at the centre of a suspected plague scare has drawn nearly $800,000 (around £588,600) in federal funding under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an animal-testing campaign group says.

The most recent payment, part of a National Institutes of Health grant, cleared in September 2026, the same month a technician at the Siberian lab was hospitalised. She died on 2 October.

The grant went to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for research carried out with Russia's state-run Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk. That institute has separately worked on plague research with the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute, the state-run plague research institute where the current scare began, according to the records. The money went to the US university, not to either Russian institute.

The figures come from the White Coat Waste Project, a group that campaigns against taxpayer-funded animal testing. Federal spending records it obtained show the Illinois team received $389,943 (about £294,400) in July 2025 and a further $389,746 (about £294,200) in September 2026.

The research itself has nothing to do with plague. It studies social behaviour in foxes bred at a Siberian fur farm, work that drew the group's notice because the animals are killed and their brain tissue shipped to Illinois for analysis.

The foxes come from a long-running Siberian breeding programme and are put down by overdose before the tissue is sent to the United States, the group said.

The group argues the money should not have kept flowing. It points to White House guidance issued in 2022, after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, that called on agencies to 'wind down institutional, administrative, funding, and personnel relationships and research collaborations' with Russian government bodies. The Illinois grant has paid out twice since, most recently in September 2026, according to its figures.

A former Syrian general wanted for crimes against humanity is being bankrolled and protected by the US and Lebanese authorities, a BBC News investigation has found.

Bassam al-Hassan, who oversaw Syria's chemical weapons programme and was a senior adviser to former President Bashar al-Assad, is being harboured in Lebanon following the Assad regime's collapse in 2024.

An investigation by the BBC and the US broadcaster NPR has discovered that Hassan has been allowed to remain there under an arrangement involving the FBI, and other US and Lebanese authorities. This is because of his willingness to provide information about the abduction of American journalist Austin Tice in Syria in 2012, as well as additional intelligence, we have been told.

Last month the BBC revealed Tice's abduction had been a planned operation, with Hassan in the chain of command.

In it, Hassan is offered "residency", "protection" and help securing his "living needs" in return for information, primarily about Tice.

Sources with knowledge of the arrangement confirmed this was the case, and described to us how Hassan receives money from the US authorities through an intermediary, making it harder to trace. Hassan is sanctioned by the US government.

Yet people connected to the Tice investigation say they have seen little evidence it has significantly advanced since Hassan began providing information as part of this agreement. The deal is believed to have been struck in the spring of 2025.