Hello and welcome to background briefing available 24-7 at background briefing.org. I'm Ian Masters,

and today we'll look into a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with Harvard University standing up to Trump

after others have caved in the face of his extortion and blackmail

based on the lie that a far-right takeover of American academia is needed

because of a nationwide epidemic of anti-Semitism.

Joining us to discuss Trump's vengeance of taking away $2.2 billion in funding and

threatening Harvard's 501C3 tax-agamp status is Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard

University, where he is a professor of government and director of the Center for American

Political Studies, and the founder and director of the Harvard Digital Lab for the Social Sciences

and the Working Group on Political Psychology and Behavior.

He has a number of articles at the Harvard Crimson.

We will discuss, including appeasing Trump damages Harvard and America,

and first they came for Colombia.

Then we'll examine Trump's escalating war on the press as he threatens CBS

over a 60-minute broadcast exposing Russian crimes against humanity in Ukraine,

which Trump failed to criticize while blaming Ukraine for starting the war as he bends over

backwards to appease Putin.

Joining us is Aram Shabanian, the former open source information gathering manager at New Lines Institute.

He recently taught in non-proliferation and terrorism studies at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies at Monterey,

where his research focused on the Cold War and contemporary

histories of Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

...