TV News LIES

Russian President Vladimir Putin is coming under rare public criticism at home, a significant signal of how the pressures from the more than four-year war in Ukraine are hurting the country.

Fuel shortages and rising inflation, high-profile attacks against Russian energy infrastructure and cities, and mounting military casualties are prompting prominent figures to start pinning the blame on Putin.

“It is a crisis,” said Vladimir Milov, a Russian economist in exile who served as deputy minister of energy in 2002. “What we are seeing right now is an extreme acceleration of public admissions that we are in trouble.”

German Gref, head of Russia’s largest bank Sberbank, is one of the most high-profile elites in Russia to issue blunt criticism calling for the war to end. 

“I don’t think there’s a single person who isn’t concerned about anything other than a rapid end of hostilities, that’s clear,” he reportedly said on Russian state TV earlier this week, responding to overwhelming negative economic trends.

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President Trump’s talk of boosting U.S. munitions stockpiles is facing the harsh reality of America’s production capacity. 

Even if Congress passes his enormous $1.5 trillion request for defense spending, which is looking less likely with each passing week, defense contractors are simply unable to rapidly refill caches that have been badly depleted during the wars in Ukraine and Iran.

Trump met last week with the CEOs of Lockheed, Boeing and Honeywell, a gathering during which Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg grilled executives over delays on key programs, Reuters reported.

“You’re not doing enough” was the initial message to executives, a source told the outlet.

But the highly sophisticated missiles and interceptors take years to churn out at the mercy of government funding cycles. That means recently announced intentions to expand assembly lines are still years away from yielding tangible results.

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President Trump on Friday issued a “fierce rebuke” of communism as part of his Independence Day kickoff speech, injecting partisan rancor into remarks commemorating America’s 250th birthday with Mount Rushmore as the backdrop. 

Speaking in Keystone, South Dakota, Trump declared that “such doctrines can be given no quarter,” issuing a thinly-veiled dark threat against less than a handful of rising Democratic candidates running as Democratic Socialists and progressives.

“As we approach this magnificent anniversary, we see our American identity under a renewed attack,” Trump warned. 

“There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success,” he continued.

“Communism is the enemy of free people everywhere, everywhere in the world, never works, it’s the enemy of the Constitution, above all, it’s the enemy of July 4, 1776 – it is the enemy indeed.”

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A group of people wearing symbols of the White supremacist organization Patriot Front gathered and paraded in parts of the nation's capital on July 4.

The group was spotted at Union Station and the Eastern Market metro station in Washington, DC, on Independence Day. The Eastern Market station is one of the closest to the Capitol building.

Videos posted on social media captured the individuals marching in their signature blue shirts, chinos and white face coverings. Several wore hats with the Patriot Front logo. The group marched to a drum beat outside Union Station, the city's main train station, and carried flags that included an upside-down American flag and a Confederate flag in a video shared on social media by WTOP reporter Mitchell Miller.

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Plans for President Donald Trump's speech and what he has described as a record-breaking fireworks show are still on after severe thunderstorms wreaked havoc on Fourth of July celebrations in the Eastern United States.

From Washington, D.C., to Boston, Independence Day events are back on after brief delays due to inclement weather as the country marks its 250th anniversary. Trump’s “Salute to America” event was postponed until 11 p.m. due to “approaching severe weather.” In New York, organizers opted to launch fireworks early to beat weather concerns.

Festivities in Western and Central states, meanwhile, are chugging along as planned, with star-studded concert lineups taking the stage in Nashville and Los Angeles.

"Storms bring luck to whatever the occasion," Trump said in a Truth Social post. "They also make events a little bit more exciting! We will wait it out, I don’t care if it’s 2:00 O’Clock in the morning, or in one hour from now. Looks like it is going to pass, they always do. I will be there no matter what, but the “what” usually turns out to be a good thing."

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A United Nations commission this month published a report saying that Israel has deliberately targeted Palestinian children since 7 October 2023, and that it committed genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in the process.

Since then, the UN has come under ferocious attack, while one senior journalist was smeared simply for drawing attention to the report. 

When Alex Crawford of Sky News highlighted the UN findings on X (formerly Twitter), former Jewish Chronicle editor Jake Wallis Simons accused her of “the usual baseless propaganda, amplified by the usual players, serving the usual dark agenda”.

Columnist Stephen Pollard, who writes for the Telegraph and other mainstream outlets, reposted Crawford’s tweet, saying: “Gosh - whoever would have expected @AlexCrawfordSky to post stories that don’t have any evidence supporting them, just to be able to libel the world’s only Jewish state? I’m shocked!”

Israel’s foreign ministry echoed these attacks, calling the UN report a “libellous sham” and “a propaganda piece as outrageous as its previous ones”.

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A devastating Russian guided aerial bomb strike tore through the center of Sumy on Friday, killing at least four people, including a child, and injuring dozens of others, Ukrainian officials reported.

The attack came amid a relentless, multi-pronged aerial campaign by Moscow that simultaneously battered cities across Ukraine’s south and east.

“Efforts to deal with the aftermath of the Russian airstrike are ongoing in Sumy,” President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote in a post on X. “The Russians used guided aerial bombs against ordinary people in the city center.”https://www.kyivpost.com/post/79557

Zelensky confirmed that multiple children were among the wounded and warned that civilians could still be trapped beneath the ruins of a heavily damaged apartment building. He added that many of those hospitalized sustained severe injuries.

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To call this Saturday the nation’s 250th birthday is to indulge a comfortable fiction. 1776 was a declaration, not a birth certificate – and the founders wrote its claims of human equality while this nation enslaved human beings. A truer account of American freedom runs through 1619 and Juneteenth, when Americans forced the country, at last, to begin making its promises answerable to reality.

So I’m not in the mood to celebrate “America 250”, and I’m not alone. The affection is thin this summer: the Pew Research Center found that 69% of Americans were dissatisfied with the country’s direction early this year. That is not ingratitude. Sometimes a sour mood is simply clear vision.

In the final days before 4 July, the US supreme court gave the country a diagnosis of itself. It preserved one of the country’s greatest repairs – birthright citizenship under the 14th amendment – while loosening a guardrail against corruption and weakening another promise of equal protection.

Nearly 250 years later, the US is not a finished monument, but a structure still under repair, still contested – and in places being quietly stripped for parts.

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