TV News LIES

Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth has backed down from previous threats to court-martial retired Navy captain Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Arizona, for his role in a video telling service members they "can refuse illegal orders."

Hegseth instead issued a formal censure to Kelly, the defense secretary announced on X, and has initiated proceedings aiming to demote Kelly in retirement. If demoted, the Arizona senator's military pension would be reduced.

But demoting Kelly requires an administrative process known as officer grade determination, which by law makes its decisions based on an officer's conduct while on active duty. It's not clear how the Navy can legally consider Kelly's post-retirement conduct when making its determination.

According to federal law and Navy regulations, Navy Secretary John Phelan decides the retired rank of officers below the grade of vice admiral. In most cases, an administrative board reviews an officer's conduct before making a recommendation to Phelan.

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Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has ended his reelection bid amid mounting pressure over a fraud scandal that has engulfed his administration in recent weeks.

The move comes days after a handful of Republican state lawmakers asked Walz to leave office, citing reports from a U.S. attorney that at least half of the $18 billion paid through Minnesota's 14 Medicaid waiver programs since 2018 could be fraudulent and after Republicans in Congress called on Walz to testify about his failure to address the scandal.

Walz, the former vice presidential candidate on Kamala Harris' 2024 presidential campaign, spoke about his decision at a news conference Jan. 5, citing the growing pressure as one of the reasons for his decision to leave the race and pushing back on claims that his administration failed to combat fraud.

"As I reflected on this moment with my family and my team over the holidays, I came to the conclusion that I can’t give a political campaign my all," he said, reading from a previously published statement. "I’ve decided to step out of the race and let others worry about the election while I focus on the work."

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Israeli occupation forces carried out a series of invasions, abductions, and movement restrictions across the occupied West Bank on Sunday, targeting communities in Salfit in the central West Bank, Qalqilia in the northwestern West Bank, Ramallah in the central West Bank, Nablus in the northern West Bank, and occupied Jerusalem.

Local sources reported that Israeli forces abducted several young men in the Wadi Qana area near the town of Deir Istiya in the central West Bank district of Salfit.

The men, who were from towns and villages in Qalqilia in the northwestern West Bank, were collecting desert truffles when soldiers invaded the area, detained them, and later abducted them without explanation.

In the central West Bank, Israeli forces invaded the village of Dura al‑Qare‘ north of Ramallah, spreading through several neighborhoods without reporting any abductions or break‑ins.

Similar invasions were carried out in the village of Beitin, east of Ramallah, and in the city of al-Bireh, where military units moved through the al-Jinan neighborhood and Jabal al-Tawil.

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According to Ukrinform, the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces reported this on Facebook, releasing operational information as of 22:00 on Sunday, January 4.

"Since the start of the day, 154 combat engagements have taken place. Today, the occupiers carried out 23 airstrikes, used one missile, and dropped 75 guided aerial bombs. In addition, the Russians employed 4,663 kamikaze drones and conducted 3,057 shelling attacks on the positions of our troops and populated areas," the statement said.

In the Northern Slobozhanshchyna and Kursk sectors, the enemy carried out 93 shelling attacks, including one using multiple launch rocket systems.

In the Southern Slobozhanshchyna sector, Ukrainian troops repelled seven enemy attacks in the areas of Vovchansk, Starytsia, Prylipky, Fyholivka, and toward Izbytske and Kutkivka.

In the Kupiansk sector, the enemy attempted to advance three times during the day in the areas of Stepova Novoselivka, Pershotravneve, and toward Petropavlivka.

In the Lyman sector, Russian invaders attacked Ukrainian positions nine times near the settlements of Novoselivka, Kolodiazne, and Torske. One engagement is still ongoing.

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Europe’s biggest offshore wind developer is taking the Trump administration to court over its decision to suspend work on a $5bn project on the north-east US coast.

Denmark’s Ørsted filed a legal challenge on Thursday against the White House’s decision 10 days ago to suspend the lease for its Revolution Wind site as part of a sweeping move halting all construction of offshore wind.

The attempted injunction is the latest in a series of legal volleys between the renewables industry and Donald Trump, whose administration has sought to block major offshore wind projects from moving ahead since his re-election.

Trump, a vocal supporter of the fossil fuel industry, opposes renewable energy, and wind in particular, saying he finds turbines ugly, costly and inefficient.

On 22 December, officials from the Department of the Interior suspended the leases for five large offshore wind projects that are under construction in US waters over unspecified “national security risks”.

A statement from Ørsted and its partner in the Revolution project, Skyborn Renewables, described the move as a violation of applicable law.

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Amid the immense confusion surrounding the US strikes on Venezuela, the seizure of the president, Nicolás Maduro, and Donald Trump’s announcement that the US will “run” the country and “take back the oil”, one thing is clear – they set a truly chilling precedent.

The US has a grim history of interference, invasion and occupation in the region, but the early hours of Saturday saw its first major military attack on South American land. “American dominance in the western hemisphere will never be questioned again,” Mr Trump declared. The decision to unilaterally attack another country and abduct its leader – days after he publicly sought an off-ramp – has still wider repercussions. It should alarm us all.

Venezuelans have endured a repressive, kleptocratic and incompetent regime under Mr Maduro, widely believed to have stolen the last election. They now face profound uncertainty at best. Mr Trump has suggested that Mr Maduro’s deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, would follow US instructions, and dismissed the rightwing opposition leader and Nobel prize-winner María Corina Machado as a plausible replacement. But Ms Rodríguez, now interim president, has so far struck a defiant tone – and other parts of the decapitated regime are more hardline.

A man who won power promising to abandon foreign wars now says he is “not afraid of boots on the ground”. Rebranding the Department of Defense as the Department of War was more than posturing. He does not see the world’s superpower as policeman; he is turning it into a rogue state. He believes the US’s might allows it to do as it wishes with minimal cost: witness the strikes on Nigeria, on Iran’s nuclear facilities and elsewhere. He promises that Venezuelan oil means this latest episode “won’t cost us a penny”.

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Assata Shakur, a Black liberation activist who was given political asylum in Cuba after her 1979 escape from a U.S. prison where she had been serving a life sentence for killing a police officer, has died, her daughter and the Cuban government said.

Shakur, who went by Joanne Deborah Chesimard before changing her name, died Thursday in the capital city of Havana due to “health conditions and advanced age,” Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement. Shakur’s daughter, Kakuya Shakur, confirmed her mother’s death in a Facebook post.

Officials in New Jersey, where Shakur had been arrested, convicted and imprisoned, said she was 78.

A member of Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army, Shakur’s case had long been emblematic of the fraught relations between the U.S. and Cuba. American authorities, including President Donald Trump during his first term, demanded her return from the communist nation for decades.

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As uncertainty simmers in Venezuela, interim President Delcy Rodríguez has taken the place of her ally President Nicolás Maduro, captured by the United States in a nighttime military operation.

Rodríguez served as Maduro’s vice president since 2018, overseeing much of Venezuela’s oil-dependent economy and its feared intelligence service, and was next in the presidential line of succession.

She’s part of a band of senior officials in Maduro’s administration that now appears to control Venezuela, even as U.S. President Donald Trump and other officials say they will pressure the government to fall in line with its vision for the oil-rich nation.

On Saturday, Venezuela’s high court ordered her to assume the role of interim president, and the leader was backed by Venezuela’s military. In a televised address, Rodríguez gave no indication that she would cooperate with Trump, referring to his government as “extremists.”

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