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An eight-count indictment against Israeli professor and think tank co-founder Gal Luft appeared in a small, 137-word item on page 10 of the New York Post. Under the headline “Anti-Biden witness indicted”, it described Mr Luft, 57, as “a key figure in House Republicans' investigation of the Biden family” and said the charges against him are for “arms trafficking and conspiring to flout US sanctions on Iran”. It ended with a line about how Mr Luft claims the case is an attempt to stop him “testifying to Congress about allegations the first family received payments from individuals with ties to Chinese military intelligence and that the Bidens had an FBI mole who shared classified information with their Chinese benefactors”. The low-key treatment was a far cry from how the anti-Biden tabloid covered Mr Luft just days earlier, when Post columnist Miranda Devine – a frequent purveyor of conspiracy theories about President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter – wrote a column exclusively on a video on which Mr Luft claims he is being “hunted” by the FBI and facing “the rest of his life on the run”. Mr Luft’s dispatch to the Post came from parts unknown – as he has been a fugitive since February. He disappeared shortly after posting bail following his arrest by Cypriot authorities pursuant to an Interpol warrant on suspicion of arms trafficking. At the time, he tweeted that the arrest was part of a “politically motivated extradition request” by the US. “I've been arrested in Cyprus on a politically motivated extradition request by the US … claiming I'm an arms dealer. It would be funny if it weren't tragic. I've never been an arms dealer. DOJ is trying to bury me to protect Joe, Jim [and] Hunter Biden,” he said. Mr Luft’s Israeli lawyer, Mordechai Tzivin, told Ynet that his client was being targeted because he provided derogatory information about the Bidens to the FBI in 2019. The accusations "would be a good way to shut him up," Mr Tzivin said, “because he knows a lot of information on Hunter”. He added that it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that prominent Democrats would try to have his client killed. “If this would have happened in Russia, they would have carried out a 'diplomatic car crash,' but luckily, he is in a safe location where no one can hurt him,” he said. Despite Mr Luft’s claim that the arms charges coincide with his emergence as a figure in the Republican-led crusade to tar the Bidens with corruption allegations, it’s not clear from the public record that he ever said a word about Mr Biden or his son prior to his arrest. But the Israeli-American academic – who was once a Lieutenant Colonel in the Israeli Defense Forces and more recently served as co-director of the DC-based Institute for the Analysis of Global Security – has been critical of US foreign policy since Mr Biden took office with the aim of restoring relations with America’s democratic allies. In January, his think tank released a report that accused the US of “pursuing illegal economic policies” by way of an "extremely trigger-happy" use of sanctions, most notably against Russia. And last year, he appeared on CNBC to criticise the Biden administration’s efforts to impose a worldwide oil price cap on Russian oil to keep Moscow from using petrodollars to finance the war in Ukraine. “It's kind of a ridiculous idea in my view,” Mr Luft said. "That's not how the oil market works," he said. "This is a very sophisticated market, you cannot force the prices down." He also spoke to the South China Morning Post in August last year about who the Chinese government would tap to lead its foreign ministry after that year’s Communist Party Congress and last September penned an op-ed for the same publication in which he complained that the Ukraine war had become “a quagmire” and ridiculed Mr Biden’s prediction that US sanctions would have an effect on Moscow’s economy. “To date, Russia’s economy has contracted by 4 per cent – a far cry from President Biden’s suggestion at the beginning of the war that it would halve. If anyone is nearing implosion, it is probably Europe’s heavily indebted economies, facing an unprecedented pre-winter energy crisis, inflation, deindustrialisation and a growing social unrest already causing fissures in the Western alliance,” he said. Indeed, the first mention of Mr Luft’s claims against the Bidens came in his February post-arrest tweet. And though Republicans have now embraced his claims to have been speaking out against the president and his family since 2019, there’s no evidence he voiced his alleged concerns to anyone, even though unproven claims about the Bidens have been a fast-track to stardom in GOP media circles since Donald Trump’s first impeachment. Based on that pattern, it might be reasonable to conclude that Mr Luft is hoping to garner himself enough goodwill in the GOP that, should he remain a fugitive, a future Republican president — perhaps Mr Trump — will pardon him. Read More ‘Whistleblower’ who accused Bidens of corruption is charged with arms trafficking and violating Iran sanctions GOP cries foul over spy charges for Biden ‘whistleblower’ Top Republicans are gearing up to investigate the Hunter Biden case. Here's what to know. Dems call for probe into whether Gal Luft made claims about Biden to help China Biden and Zelenskyy praise each other despite divisions over Ukraine war Finland's new finance minister apologizes for racist comments in 2008 blog post

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It's almost that time of year again, when we see how many hours we've shamelessly spent listening to mortifying music and just playing Taylor Swift on loop. Yes, Spotify Wrapped is almost here again and soon you social media feeds will be full of people either showing you how cool by how much Senegalese lounge Jazz they listen to or embarrassed that they still haven't moved on from The Libertines or The Strokes. Each and every year, even for the most dedicated of music lovers, Spotify Wrapped throws up countless surprises in your top artists and songs leading many to question just how it tallies what you listen to. With the big day somewhere on the horizon (it arrived on November 30 in 2022 and December 1 in 2021) music nerds are curious to know what their Wrapped will look like for 2023. Spotify have never officially said how they compile their data for Wrapped but a Reddit user in 2021 revealed how they believed it works. In the post Hudsonlovestech pointed out six key takeaways that they discovered after downloading their data from the music platform. They were: This year the data was logged from January 1st 00:00 to November 15th 23:59. You have to listen to a song for more than 30 seconds for it to count in your song rankings. Your top songs are calculated by play count rather than total time listened. In your top 100 playlist only the first 10 songs are sorted by play count, the rest are close but sorted by artist. Your total time listening includes podcasts. Your top artists are calculated by total play counts rather than total time listening. If you apply this date to your own listening history then there is a chance you might discover what your Wrapped will look like this year although there is no guarantee. Meanwhile, many users on X/Twitter are posting memes, imagining what their Wrapped will look like this year. To be honest, we're just dreading seeing how much we listened to Ryan Gosling sing 'I'm Just Ken' from the Barbie soundtrack. Sign up to our free indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.