TV News LIES

The United States will “run” Venezuela following an overnight military operation where Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife were captured and explosions rocked the country’s capital of Caracas, President Donald Trump said Saturday.

"We're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition," Trump said at a press conference from his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. “It has to be judicious, because that's what we are all about.”

The president did not provide details of how the United States will run Venezuela, but said that his administration is determining who will be in charge of the country. He declined to endorse Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025, to lead the country. He also did not provide a timeline for how long the U.S. will run the country, saying that it will be “a period of time” as they rebuild Venezuela’s infrastructure.

More...

The journey that brought Kaohly Her to St. Paul’s mayor’s office started in a bamboo hut some 8,000 miles from Minnesota's capital city.

Her, 52, was born in the mountains of Laos. When she was still young, her family fled war, ending up in the United States as refugees, first in Illinois and Wisconsin and later Minnesota.

On Friday afternoon at St. Catherine University, Her was sworn in as the 56th mayor of St. Paul, becoming the first woman and first person of Hmong ancestry to hold the title.

With her hand on the family Bible and her husband, father and children by her side, she took the oath of office in a ceremony led by the Rev. Daniel Johnson of Park Avenue United Methodist Church in Minneapolis, a family friend.

After she was sworn in, she was greeted by other community leaders and six other “firsts,” including Debbie Montgomery, the first woman to become a St Paul police offer and the first Black woman elected to St. Paul City Council and Choua Lee, the first person of Hmong ancestry elected to a school board seat in the United States.

More...

Billionaires raised fortunes against him. The president threatened to strip his citizenship. Mainstream synagogues slandered him as the spawn of Osama bin Laden and Chairman Mao. But today, Zohran Mamdani became the first socialist mayor of New York City.

For all the hysteria, when I look at Mamdani, I didn’t see some radical departure from the past. I see him as the heir to an old and venerable Jewish tradition – that of Yiddish socialism – which helped build New York.

In some cases, the link is direct. Bruce Vladeck, a member of one of Mamdani’s transition committees, is a well-respected expert on Medicare, but for the sake of this article, his credentials matter less than his surname.

Vladeck is the grandson of Baruch Charney Vladeck, a Marxist troublemaker from the Pale of Settlement, a tract of land in the Russian empire where Jews were permitted to live at a time of rampant antisemitic oppression. Baruch showed up in New York after the failed Russian revolution of 1905 with a Cossack’s saber scars all over his face. He later became a socialist alderman and member of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s housing administration. Vladeck was not actually his birth name. It was rather a nom de guerre, adopted when he joined the Jewish Labor Bund, the socialist, secular and defiantly anti-Zionist movement whose slogan, “here where we live is our country,” would make an apt tagline for Mamdani’s New York.

In our city, exiled revolutionaries like Vladeck found fertile ground. At the dawn of the 20th century, New York was home to nearly 600,000 Jews, making it the largest Jewish city on Earth, a title it still holds. They packed 10 to a room, into the squalid tenements of the Lower East Side, where they toiled in garment sweatshops, and where the fires caused by their in-home piecework businesses mirror those caused by the exploding lithium-ion batteries of e-bikes today. They soon transformed into a clamorous, disputatious and utterly radical proletariat – the same sort of constituency that powered Mamdani’s campaign.

More...

Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR) helped Denis Kapustin, the founder of the Russian Volunteer Corps (RVC) who was announced dead last week, to fake his death before claiming the bounty placed on his head by Russian security services, it said on Thursday.

Kapustin, 41, was previously reported killed by a Russian drone whilst carrying out a combat mission in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia region overnight on Saturday, Dec. 27.

On Jan. 1, HUR said in a post on Telegram that a Russian special service operation ordering his murder, which had allocated a $500,000 bounty to carry out the crime, had successfully been foiled.

It added that it had procured the sum offered to “liquidate” Kapustin by Russia and this money would be used to strengthen Ukrainian drone capabilities against Russian forces.

HUR said that the murder of Kapustin – considered a “personal enemy” by Russian President Vladimir Putin – had been “commissioned by the special services of the aggressor state Russia, which allocated half a million dollars to carry out the crime.”

It added that a special operation lasting more than a month had successfully duped Russian intelligence services into believing that Kapustin was dead.

More...

A gay California man assaulted in what authorities say was a hate crime on Halloween night has died of his injuries. Now his accused attacker is facing a homicide charge.

Sean Wesley Payton Jr., 25, has been held in jail for about two months following the attack in Sacramento around 1:30 a.m. on Nov. 1. Alvin Prasad, the 58-year-old man he's accused of targeting, died of his injuries in the hospital on Sunday, Dec. 28. His daughter, Andrea Prasad, has identified him as gay on the GoFundMe page she created, and Prasad was proudly open in hundreds of social media posts.

Now Payton will be booked on a homicide charge, Sacramento police announced on Monday, Dec. 29.

Prosecutors had not charged Payton with homicide as of Wednesday, Dec. 31, but were "evaluating" doing so in light of Prasad's death, the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office told USA TODAY on Wednesday.

More...

Tatiana Schlossberg, the environmental journalist, author and granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy, has died. She was 35. 

Her death was confirmed Dec. 30 by the The John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, the nonprofit organization that provides financial support and staffing for the former president's library.

"She will always be in our hearts," her parents, siblings, husband and children said in an Instagram post.

Schlossberg, the daughter of Caroline Kennedy and designer Edwin Schlossberg, disclosed her terminal cancer diagnosis in a Nov. 22 essay for the New Yorker.

More...

US senator Bernie Sanders amplified his recent criticism of artificial intelligence on Sunday, explicitly linking the financial ambition of “the richest people in the world” to economic insecurity for millions of Americans – and calling for a potential moratorium on new datacenters.

Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with the Democratic party, said on CNN’s State of the Union that he was “fearful of a lot” when it came to AI. And the senator called it “the most consequential technology in the history of humanity” that will “transform” the US and the world in ways that had not been fully discussed.

“If there are no jobs and humans won’t be needed for most things, how do people get an income to feed their families, to get healthcare or to pay the rent?” Sanders said. “There’s not been one serious word of discussion in the Congress about that reality.”

Days from being scheduled to help swear New York mayor-elect and democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani into office, Sanders said “the richest people in the world” were pushing the technology. He singled out tech moguls Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel while questioning their motives.

“You think they’re staying up nights worrying about working people and how this technology will impact those people?” Sanders said. “They are not. They are doing it to get richer and even more powerful.”

More...

The FBI has deployed additional personnel and investigative resources to Minnesota to “dismantle large-scale fraud schemes exploiting federal programs”, director Kash Patel said on social media on Sunday.

The FBI director said the agency had already dismantled a $250m fraud scheme that stole federal food aid meant for vulnerable children during the Covid pandemic in a case that led to 78 indictments and 57 convictions.

Patel said the FBI believes “this is just the tip of a very large iceberg”. Some of those involved in the alleged scheme are being “referred to immigrations officials for possible further denaturalization and deportation proceedings where eligible”.

Patel’s comments comes after federal prosecutors estimate as much as $9bn has been stolen across schemes linked to the state’s Somalia population, a figure nearly equivalent to Somalia’s entire GDP.

The FBI director also said he was aware of recent social media reports in Minnesota, which appears to refer to an online report by independent journalist Nick Shirley about a daycare center in Minneapolis that received $4m despite reportedly having no enrolled kids. The 42-minute video has been viewed 84m times since it was posted on 26 December.

More...