Once more, a voting tech company has settled its defamation lawsuit over false allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election before the start of trial — in this instance, Smartmatic USA’s suit against the conservative network Newsmax.

Thursday’s settlement occurred during the jury selection process. A four-week trial was scheduled to begin in Delaware on Monday.

Neither side made details of the settlement public.

Smartmatic emailed a statement saying it is “very pleased to have secured the completion of the case against Newsmax.” The statement said Smartmatic is now shifting gears to focus on its related suits against Fox News and Fox Corp.

“Lying to the American people has consequences,” the company’s statement said. “Smartmatic will not stop until the perpetrators are held accountable.”

Lawsuits stemming from 2020 election continue

The case is just one in a flurry of lawsuits surrounding false claims about fraud in the 2020 election. In 2023, on the eve of opening arguments, Dominion Voting Systems settled a defamation case against Fox News for $787.5 million.

Dominion also is suing Newsmax in Delaware Superior Court, while Smartmatic is pursuing a case against Fox News in New York.

Smartmatic also settled a similar case against One America News Network earlier this year. The details of that settlement also remain confidential.

Two defamation cases overseen by the same judge

The size of Fox’s record settlement spoke to the gravity of the recurring false claims by the network about Dominion. The presiding judge, Eric M. Davis, had already ruled that Fox News had knowingly and repeatedly defamed Dominion before the settlement. The only question before the jury was to determine actual and punitive damages.

Davis also oversaw the Smartmatic case against Newsmax. He earlier ruled that Smartmatic could not seek punitive damages beyond any direct losses it could show as a result of being defamed. “There is no evidence that Newsmax acted with evil intent towards Smartmatic,” the judge wrote.

Much like Dominion’s case against Fox, Smartmatic’s case against Newsmax centered on false statements made on dozens of television segments in late 2020 in which hosts, producers and guests linked the voting machine company to vote-switching conspiracy theories.

Smartmatic operated only in Los Angeles County during the 2020 elections. No fraud was alleged there. Given California’s strong Democratic tilt, no influence could have affected the broader outcome.

The network’s guests and hosts embraced allegations that Smartmatic software flipped votes during the election that year.

Among the offending segments: Newsmax hosts replayed exchanges from Fox News amplifying conspiracy theories about election fraud promoted by Trump legal adviser Sidney Powell. Newsmax’s Greg Kelly told viewers, “I believe her, and I don’t believe the critics.” Powell was sanctioned by a federal judge in 2021 and subsequently pleaded guilty to election interference in Georgia in 2023.

By late 2020, Newsmax started airing a disclaimer that no evidence linked Dominion or Smartmatic to the manipulation of votes and disavowed other related conspiracy theories. The next year, it broadcast an apology and a retraction to claims about a Dominion employee who faced death threats.

Looming indictments

In legal filings, Newsmax denied that it engaged in any defamatory action toward Smartmatic.

Even so, the further unspooling of its defense strategy may have proven embarrassing for Newsmax. In a day-long pre-trial hearing earlier this month, the network’s lawyers indicated that some of its litigation strategy may have relied on the argument that producers at the cable news channel didn’t didn’t realize Smartmatic and Dominion were two separate companies. The legal briefs also signaled that Newsmax’s on-air personalities weren’t subject to its journalistic standards because those guidelines governed its “writing” more than its broadcasts.

Even before Davis nixed the possibility of punitive damages, there was also some legal sparring over Smartmatic’s changing estimates of how much it was worth. Lawyers acknowledged a “$1 billion swing” in its proposed valuation.

Smartmatic had also received a public black eye this summer with the revelation that federal authorities had indicted several company officials, including its president, for a bribery scheme in the Philippines. Davis had ruled that Newsmax would be allowed to present some evidence about that issue in its defense during trial.

Those developments made the odds more daunting that a trial would yield greater results for Smartmatic than a settlement. And they could come into play in the New York trial against Fox as well.

“Smartmatic unsurprisingly chose to settle its case with Newsmax on the eve of trial after a series of major setbacks devastated its case,” a spokesperson for Fox News Media said in a statement Thursday evening. “Smartmatic’s claims against Fox are similarly impaired, unsupported by the facts and intended to chill First Amendment freedoms.”

The network said it was looking forward to defending its case in court.

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Israel’s military launched new strikes on Beirut and expanded its bombing campaign to the Lebanon-Syria border despite a last-minute diplomatic push for a ceasefire to prevent full-blown war with Hizbollah.

The Israel Defense Forces did not immediately provide details of who the strikes had targeted, but residents of the city said they had heard three blasts in the southern suburb of Dahiyeh, which Hizbollah controls.

The strikes are part of a massive escalation launched by the Israeli military in Lebanon over recent days, which has fuelled fears that the year-long hostilities between Israel and the Lebanese militant group are on the verge of spiralling into a broader regional conflict.

In an effort to defuse tensions, US President Joe Biden and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday put forward a proposal for a 21-day ceasefire between the two sides.

US officials hope that the truce will allow time to negotiate a more durable ceasefire between Israel and Hizbollah, and also put pressure on Hamas to accept the terms of a ceasefire-for-hostages deal with Israel in Gaza.

But Israeli officials quickly poured cold water on hopes of a breakthrough. In a brief statement issued as he headed to New York to address the UN General Assembly, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had not yet responded to the proposal and ordered the Israeli military to keep fighting “at full force”.

Israel’s foreign minister Israel Katz said there would be no ceasefire until Israelis displaced by the fighting had returned home. Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s ultranationalist finance minister, said the country’s campaign should “end in one scenario: crushing Hizbollah and removing its ability to harm the residents of the north”.

“The enemy must not be given time to recover from the heavy blows he received and to reorganise for the continuation of the war in 21 days’ time,” he wrote on X on Thursday morning.

Their comments were echoed by a string of other far-right members of Israel’s government with settlements minister Orit Strock saying there was “no moral mandate for a ceasefire, not for 21 days and not for 21 hours”.

Netanyahu depends on the far-right members of his coalition to remain in power. Ministers from his Likud party also spoke out against the plan.

While the US-French proposal, which was backed by the G7, EU, Australia, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Qatar, did not set a deadline for the two sides to respond, US officials had previously said that they expected the Israeli and Lebanese governments to do so “in the coming hours”.

People familiar with the situation said the US hoped that Netanyahu would use his speech at the UN to announce that Israel’s war in Gaza was moving into a new phase, which might persuade Hizbollah — which has insisted it will not stop firing at Israel until the war in Gaza is over — to agree a temporary truce.

The burst of diplomatic activity follows a major Israeli offensive against Hizbollah. The militant group initiated the hostilities when it began firing rockets at Israel on October 8 in support of Hamas, which had launched its attack on Israel the previous day.

But over the past week, Israel has assassinated a string of senior Hizbollah commanders, and on Monday it launched a broad bombing campaign targeting what it said were the militant group’s weapons stores in Lebanon, killing more than 600 people. On Wednesday, the head of Israel’s army told troops to prepare for a possible ground operation in Lebanon.

The military said on Thursday morning that it had conducted further strikes overnight, hitting 75 Hizbollah targets in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.

Lebanon’s health ministry said 20 people were killed, 19 of them Syrian nationals, in an Israeli attack that levelled a building in the town of Younine in the Bekaa Valley. That was the deadliest strike in a day of bombings that also killed seven others elsewhere in Lebanon’s south, according to a Financial Times tabulation of health ministry statements.

Until this week Israel had rarely targeted the Bekaa Valley, a Hizbollah stronghold along Lebanon’s eastern border with Syria, previously concentrating most strikes in the south.

The IDF said it had also struck targets on Lebanon’s border with Syria relating to Hizbollah weapons transfers, while a Lebanese minister said at least one of the strikes landed on the Syrian side of a bridge connecting the two countries.

Hizbollah has also begun firing deeper into Israel. On Wednesday, it fired a ballistic missile at Tel Aviv, Israel’s commercial hub, for the first time, which was shot down by air defences. On Thursday, it fired a barrage of about 45 rockets at Israel, according to the Israeli army, most of which were intercepted.

Additional reporting by Polina Ivanova in Jerusalem

Data visualisation by Steven Bernard and Alan Smith

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is expected to present the victory plan to his U.S. counterpart Joe Biden at the White House on Sept. 26, a potentially pivotal moment in the long-running saga of Washington’s support for Ukraine.

Zelensky, who is visiting the U.S. this week, has said that the plan is designed to push Russian President Vladimir Putin into a fair peace agreement by boosting Ukraine’s firepower and giving it an upper hand two and a half years into Russia’s full-scale invasion. Zelensky has not publicly specified how it will achieve this.

Here’s what we know so far…

The timing

The announcement that Kyiv was preparing a victory plan came as Ukraine gained momentum following its surprise incursion into Russia’s Kursk Oblast. The ongoing operation, the first significant invasion of Russian territory since World War II, was a significant blow to the Kremlin and Putin.

It exposed Russia’s inability to defend its own territory and challenged Putin’s so-called “red lines” aimed at deterring Ukraine’s Western allies from stepping up weaponry supplies. It also showed Ukraine’s backers that Kyiv could still seize the initiative on the battlefield.

As well as riding the momentum of the Kursk operation, events in the U.S. could also be a big factor in Kyiv’s push to present the plan — the November U.S. presidential election that might bring former President Donald Trump back to the White House and jeopardize the U.S. support for Ukraine.

The content

The fine details of the plan are yet to be made public. It is expected to address military, political, diplomatic, and economic strategies.

A source close to Zelensky told the Kyiv Independent last week that it aims “to create such conditions and such an atmosphere that Russia will no longer be able to ignore the peace formula and the peace summit.”

But some elements have been revealed. The head of the Presidential Office Andriy Yermak earlier this week said that an invitation to join NATO is part of the plan.

According to the information obtained by the Kyiv Independent on Sept. 22, Ukraine would ask for NATO membership within the months, not years.

Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Yermak also said that the five-point victory plan includes both diplomatic and military components.

“I also urged our partners to ignore Russia’s threats of escalation,” he said.

One element certain to be in the plan is the U.S. and other allies’ approval for Ukraine to use long-range weapons including Western-provided missiles to target military sites deep inside Russia.

Kyiv has long been pushing for restrictions to be lifted as it would enable Ukraine to destroy the airfields from which Russian aircraft are taking off to attack Ukrainian civilian infrastructure as well as degrade Russian air defenses.

And we also know one thing that won’t be in the plan – a partial ceasefire.

After a German media report suggested otherwise, Zelensky personally refuted the claim.

“There is not and cannot be any alternative to peace, no freezing of the war or any other manipulations that will simply move Russian aggression to another stage,” Zelensky said in his evening address on Sept. 18.

How has it gone down so far?

The first reports aren’t too positive.

The White House is concerned that Zelensky’s plan lacks a clear strategy to win against Russia, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Sept. 25, citing U.S. and European officials.

Some officials familiar with the plan’s outlines said it focuses too heavily on requesting more weapons and lifting restrictions on long-range missile strikes.

“I’m unimpressed, there’s not much new there,” one senior official told the WSJ.

White House officials are worried that Zelensky’s plan does not offer clear, actionable steps that Biden can support in his four remaining months in office, the WSJ reported.

U.S. and European officials told the WSJ that parts of the plan remain underdeveloped, and that requests related to weapons are the most specific and detailed.

What happens if Biden rejects the plan?

“That’s a horrible thought,” Zelensky said when asked this question by The New Yorker in an interview, published on Sept. 22.

“It would mean that Biden doesn’t want to end the war in any way that denies Russia a victory,” he said.

“And we would end up with a very long war—an impossible, exhausting situation that would kill a tremendous number of people. Having said that, I can’t blame Biden for anything,” Zelensky added.