TV News LIES

Bruce Springsteen seems equal parts outraged and inspired by the unrest and violence in Minneapolis.

So much so that on Saturday — the same day that Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old intensive care nurse who was fatally shot by federal agents during an Immigration and Customs Enforcement protest — the Boss began writing a song “dedicated to the people” of the city, Springsteen said Wednesday in a post on Bluesky.

“Recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis,” he wrote on the social media platform. “It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Stay free”

Pretti and Good, who was killed earlier this month by an ICE officer, are both name-checked in the lyrics of the song, “Streets Of Minneapolis.” So is “King Trump,” his “federal thugs,” White House senior adviser Stephen Miller and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.

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A framed picture of President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin hangs in the White House, a photo taken by Bloomberg photographer Kent Nishimura in the Palm Room on Tuesday shows.

The Palm Room connects the West Wing to the White House residence and primarily serves as a lobby, according to the New York Times.

The Palm Room connects the West Wing to the White House residence and primarily serves as a lobby, according to the New York Times.

The eyebrow-raising framed photograph in question hangs above a photo of Trump and one of his grandchildren.

Given Trump’s obsession with photos of leaders, it’s almost certainly not an oversight.

According to HuffPost White House correspondent S.V. Dáte, Trump hung up a picture of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in the West Wing in his first term. When he vacated the residence, Trump found a new home for the photo: the bar at Trump Tower in New York.

Last year, Trump had staffers move former President Barack Obama’s official portrait to a corner where most people wouldn’t be able to see it. He did the same with the portraits of former Presidents George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush.

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While canceling Friday's hearing in which acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Todd Lyons was required to appear, a judge in Minnesota gave a scathing review of the agency.

In a court order Wednesday, Chief U.S. District Judge Patrick Schiltz listed 96 instances in 74 cases in which ICE had violated court orders this month.

"This list should give pause to anyone -- no matter his or her political beliefs -- who cares about the rule of law," Schiltz said in the court order. "ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence."

The judge added that future noncompliance could lead to court-ordered “personal appearances of Lyons or other government officials.”

The hearing was canceled because Ecuadorian national Juan Tobay Robles, the petitioner in the case, was released from a Minnesota immigration detention center on Tuesday.

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The FBI on Wednesday searched the election office of a Georgia county that has been central to right-wing conspiracy theories over President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss, acting just one week after the Republican leader predicted prosecutions over a contest he has baselessly insisted was tainted by widespread fraud.

The search at Fulton County’s main election facility in Union City sought records related to the 2020 election, county spokesperson Jessica Corbitt-Dominguez said. It appeared to be the most public step by law enforcement to pursue Trump’s claims of a stolen election, grievances rejected time and again by courts and state and federal officials, who found no evidence of fraud that would have altered the outcome.

It also unfolds against the backdrop of FBI and Justice Department efforts to investigate perceived political enemies of Trump, including former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Trump has for years focused on Fulton, Georgia’s most populous county and a Democratic stronghold, as a key example of what he claims went wrong in the 2020 election. His pressure campaign there culminated in a sweeping state indictment accusing him and 18 others of illegally trying to overturn the vote.

An FBI spokesperson said agents were “executing a court authorized law enforcement action” at the county’s main election office in Union City, just south of Atlanta. The spokesperson declined to provide any further information, citing an ongoing matter.

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Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico fiercely denied a Politico report that said he was “shocked” by President Trump’s state of mind during his visit to Mar-a-Lago in Florida this month.

Politico, citing five unnamed European diplomats, reported that Fico told European Union leaders at a summit in Brussels last week that his meeting with the U.S. president left him concerned about Trump’s “psychological state.

Two of the diplomats said Fico used the word “dangerous” to describe the way Trump came across during the Jan. 17 meeting at Trump’s estate in Florida, according to Politico.

“I must emphatically reject the lies of the POLITICO portal about how I assessed my meeting with US President D. Trump at an informal summit in Brussels,” Fico wrote in a post on the social platform X.

“No one heard anything, no one saw anything, there are no witnesses, but nothing prevented the POLITICO portal from coming up with lies,” he continued.

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Last Tuesday, during the morning rush hour, 15 individuals from a group called Eject Elbit staked positions in the four-lane access road to the headquarters of banking giant Capital One Financial Corporation in McLean, Virginia. They mounted ladders in the road and climbed atop them, unfurling a banner from their perches that read “CAPITAL ONE FUNDS GENOCIDE.” They stretched across the road a second banner, fifty feet wide, that said “DIVEST FROM DEATH.” Another protestor, a disabled woman, blockaded the road while locked to her wheelchair.

Max, a former employee of the company who only used his first name for security reasons, said they flooded the streets to “shake people awake,” regarding Capital One’s $90 million loan to Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems, the largest supplier of the Israeli Defense forces. Elbit produces everything from precision-guided rockets and bombs to state-of-the-art artillery ammunition, guidance systems for aircraft and helicopters, and killer drones that have been deployed in the genocide of Gaza.

Eject Elbit launched its new campaign against Capital One earlier this month across northern Virginia, Boston, Philadelphia, DC, Seattle, and New York City. A thirty-year-old queer activist named Cassian, who was posted atop one of the ladders that blockaded the McLean site last week, helped launch the Eject Elbit campaign in Washington, DC, after years of participating in protests with pro-Palestinian groups. “If the US government was not going to stop sending weapons for the genocide, then the people were going to have to stop it,” Cassian said.

For an hour and a half, the bank’s opulent campus—with its mini-golf course, sculpture garden, baseball field, and concert hall—was inaccessible as traffic backed up and irate motorists leaned on their horns and shouted.

Last September, in a special report titled “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide,” UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese investigated the “corporate machinery sustaining Israel’s settler-colonial project of displacement and replacement of the Palestinians in the occupied territory,” in which Elbit Systems featured as a primary contractor to the Israeli state. Detailing how “the military-industrial complex has become the economic backbone” of Israel, the UN report says that Elbit Systems provides “a critical domestic supply of weaponry, and reinforce[s] Israel’s military alliances through arms exports and joint development of military technology.”

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Israel said Monday that the remains of the last hostage in Gaza had been recovered, clearing the way for the next phase of the ceasefire that stopped the Israel-Hamas war. The announcement came a day after Israel's government said the military was conducting a "large-scale operation" in a cemetery in northern Gaza to locate the remains of Ran Gvili.

The return of all remaining hostages, living or dead, has been a key part of the Gaza ceasefire's first phase, and Gvili's family had urged Israel's government not to enter the second phase until his remains were recovered and returned.

In a statement, the Israel Defense Forces said representatives had informed Gvili's family "that their loved one has been identified and is being buried."

"With this, all of the abductees have been returned from the Gaza Strip," the IDF said.

Israel and Hamas have been under pressure from ceasefire mediators, including the Trump administration, to move into the second phase of the U.S.-brokered truce, which took effect on Oct. 10.

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A new study from a US think tank has found that military casualties from the Kremlin’s nearly four-year unprovoked invasion have approached two million, with the invaders suffering the lion’s share of those dead and injured. The number represents soldiers either killed in action, wounded, or missing.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies announced on Tuesday that its analysts have found that Moscow’s troops have suffered 1.2 million casualties, with about 325,000 dead. 

This roughly coincides with Kyiv’s official estimate of 1.24 Russian casualties, a figure that its updated daily at the top of Kyiv Post’s homepage.

“Combined Russian and Ukrainian casualties may be as high as 1.8 million and could reach two million total casualties by the spring of 2026,” the think tank wrote in its report.

“No major power has suffered anywhere near these numbers of casualties or fatalities in any war since World War II,” CSIS analysts wrote.

The study’s stated goal was to measure the success of Moscow’s campaign in Ukraine. The introduction reads:

“A close look at the data suggests that Russia is hardly winning and, even more interestingly, that Russia is increasingly a declining power. To better understand the state of the war and Russia’s battlefield performance, this analysis asks: How successful has the Russian military been in achieving the Kremlin’s main objectives?

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