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

me and Masters, and today we'll examine a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with an analysis of how the war between Israel and Hamas is impacting electoral politics in the US,

as a new poll indicates a drop of 11% amongst Democratic voters in support for President Biden since the war began in early October.

Joining us from the UK is Andrew Payne,

a lecturer in foreign policy and security at the City University of London,

and formerly the departmental lecturer in international relations at Oxford University,

where he was previously the Headley Bull Research Fellow in International Relations

and a William Golding Jr. research fellow at Brasenose College.

He serves on the board of Chatham House in London and is the author of the new book,

War on the Ballot, How the Election Cycle Shapes Presidential Decision-Making in War.

Then with the New House Speaker, a champion of the Big Lie, having rallied more than 100 of

his colleagues to question the integrity of the 2020 election, and still to this day, will not say

whether Biden won the election. We will speak about the challenges ahead with this information flooding

into the coverage of the war in Gaza from X, enabled by Elon Musk,

and how the 2024 election will be impacted by fake news and deep fakes.

Joining us is Emerson Brooking, a resident senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab

at the Atlantic Council, and co-author of Like War, the weaponization of

social media. He is an expert in the fields of disinformation, terrorist communications, and

internet policy, and recently led an initiative to secure the integrity of the 2020 U.S. election.

Previously, he was a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations where he studied US defense policy.

Then finally we'll look into the big wins for Labor, recently topped by the UAW getting the big three automakers, Ford, GM and Stalantis to agree to new contracts that deliver significant pay raises to end the strike.

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