Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, available 24-7 at Background Briefing.org.

I'm me and Masters, and today we'll look into a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with the Harris-Waltz campaign surging ahead of Trump Vance in the polls,

as Trump appears to be trying to weasel out of the ABC debate with Kamala Harris scheduled for

September the 10th. Joining us to discuss how Harris fits into a system that accurately predicts who wins the

presidency is Alan Lickman, a political historian who teaches at American University, who has

studied both the American right and the presidency.

He is the author of The Keys to the White House, a surefire way to predicting the next

president, a prediction system that has correctly predicted the outcomes of all U.S. presidential

elections since 1984, including the 2016 election, when against all odds, he predicted

a Trump victory. His most recent books are The Embattled Vote in America,

a case for impeachment, and 13 cracks,

repairing American democracy after Trump.

And he has a new weekly show at 9 p.m. Eastern on Thursdays

at Alan Lickman YouTube.

Then we'll examine the arrest of the Russian owner of

Telegram in Paris after he had returned from Azerbaijan, where Pavl Doroff was rumored to have met

with Putin. Joining us is Michael Gorham, Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Florida,

and currently the Archie K. Davis

fellow at the National Humanities Center. He's the author of two award-winning books on

language, culture and politics after newspeak, language culture and politics in Russia,

from Gubachov to Putin, and speaking in Soviet tongues, language, culture, and politics

...