TV News LIES

Barely a month appears to go by without Donald Trump making a fresh attempt to destroy the international rules-based order. The US has pulled funding from dozens of international institutions, shut down USAID and withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement. Nato may survive on paper, but Trump has made clear that he has little interest in coming to the aid of any ally that is attacked. The Board of Peace is clearly an attempt to sideline the United Nations.

But the state department’s announcement last week that it wishes to dismantle the international crihttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/24/icc-international-criminal-court-trump-putin-netanyahuminal court “brick by brick” could be Trump’s most frightening move of all.

This is not an idle social media post sent out late at night; there is no chance that the next person to speak to Trump might change his mind. It is now official US policy to destroy the ICC, and the administration is prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to do so.

Nations that do not fall into line will be punished. The state department has promised “increased scrutiny of nations that refuse to reject the ICC’s false authority while relying on US assistance”, particularly targeting those countries that “enjoy the benefits of the US security umbrella”. That will include the UK, a country that contributes just over £15m a year to the ICC, making it the fourth largest donor after Japan, Germany and France.

Travel and sanctions bans have already been imposed on judges and senior officials; now more will be targeted. As one of those previously threatened with sanctions told me, it can result in individuals being completely cut off from modern life. Personal bank accounts are shut down, while a whole host of US apps and websites, from Uber to booking.com, are off-limits. Email accounts can be blocked – Microsoft and Google are US companies. For the court itself, it means backing up evidence previously held on Microsoft systems.

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President Donald Trump attended his first-ever White House Correspondents Association Dinner, with this year's rescheduled gala held Friday evening in Washington, D.C., and delivered some pointed remarks to the assembled journalists in a rambling speech that stretched on for just over an hour — and during which he personally insulted several journalists, politicians and celebs that he's sparred with.

"I am delighted to be here at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Amazing people, a lot of people that I like," Trump said. "Some I don't like at all, but I respect most of them."

At first, Trump seemed unsure of the tone he wanted to impart, and suggested that — compared with barbs he was planning to deliver at the original WHCA dinner, which was disrupted by a gun-wielding attacker — he was pulling his punches. "I said, 'What do we do here? Is this supposed to be fun? Am I supposed to be serious? Am I supposed to be a comedian?' So I guess you said, maybe a little bit of everything."

But Trump quickly started bashing the press. "This evening it's really all about the fake news media and your handling of prizes — writing and producing and performing made-up stories like the Academy Awards," Trump said. The Academy Awards "used to be the the epitome of ratings outside of the Super Bowl… Now it's down in the dumps. Nobody wants to watch it anymore because they took on Trump. They hit me all night long."

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Israeli rights groups have called on the international community to intervene in order to prevent a "pogrom" in the occupied West Bank.

Organisations including B’Tselem, Rabbis for Human Rights and the Palestinian-run Adalah said action was needed to prevent further deaths after Israeli settlers killed four Palestinians on Friday.

A group of armed settlers killed the four Palestinians in the village of Tel, near Nablus, while a Palestinian seized a weapon from one of the settlers and opened fire, killing two of them.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israeli-rights-groups-call-international-community-stop-pogrom-against-palestinians-occupiedmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Though an Israeli army investigation found that the settlers had entered an off-limits area, the Israeli government ordered the army to demolish the home of the Palestinian accused of killing the two settlers.

The military said it was conducting an operation in Nablus to arrest dozens of Palestinians who "participated in the incident".

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Federal green grants canceled last year were selected “solely” based on a state’s political affiliation, the Trump administration said in a recent court filing.

In the filing, Department of Energy (DOE) lawyer Jeff Novak said the department came up with a list of 624 grants slated for potential termination.

Novak said the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) selected 284 of those grants to be included in a tranche of cancellations. 

He wrote that all except one of the 284 grants OMB selected had ties to states that voted for then-Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 and had two Democratic-caucusing senators. Novak noted that the other 340 grants have not been canceled.

“DOE accepts that the inclusion of grants in the October notice tranche was based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state,” he wrote.

He added that the grants’ inclusion in the October cancellations was not “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction, or performance-based factor.”

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President Trump on Friday issued an executive order directing disclaimers be installed outside the Smithsonian’s Museum of American history to warn passerby that some of the museum’s exhibits do not reflect his perspective on the nation’s past.

In an executive order entitled “Restoring trust in the Smithsonian Institution,” the president cited a recently-released report produced by the White House Domestic Policy Council after a months-long review of the NMAH’s exhibits.

“The Report demonstrates that the Smithsonian leadership does not present American history as a shared national inheritance to be taught and celebrated, but instead views American history as a ‘prime tool’ to advance ideas of social justice and the radical transformation of our society,” the president said in his executive order.

The Smithsonian Institute declined to comment. 

The president directed his administration to “take all available steps” to address the issues identified in this report. This includes encouraging corrections and installing temporary warning signs outside of the museum.

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Former “60 Minutes” correspondent Cecilia Vega is speaking out about the events that led up to her firing from the flagship news program earlier this year.

On Thursday, Status published a report on Vega’s appearance at the 2026 National Association of Hispanic Journalists Conference & Expo, which is taking place this week in New Orleans. According to the article, Vega spoke at length about her dismissal during an onstage interview with ABC News’ John Quiñones.

On Thursday, Status published a report on Vega’s appearance at the 2026 National Association of Hispanic Journalists Conference & Expo, which is taking place this week in New Orleans. According to the article, Vega spoke at length about her dismissal during an onstage interview with ABC News’ John Quiñones.

On Thursday, Status published a report on Vega’s appearance at the 2026 National Association of Hispanic Journalists Conference & Expo, which is taking place this week in New Orleans. According to the article, Vega spoke at length about her dismissal during an onstage interview with ABC News’ John Quiñones.

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Alexandra Bravo, the prosecutor assigned to investigate U.S. strikes on three Ecuadorian boats and the 36 survivors’ subsequent accounts of torture and kidnapping, was shot dead in the coastal city of Manta last month. According to police, on June 14 a hitman aboard a black motorcycle opened fire on Bravo as she and her sister were leaving a café at about 11 a.m. Bravo’s sister, who jumped to protect her, was also killed in the attack.

Upon arriving at the crime scene, officers say they found five 9mm shell casings and Bravo’s injured driver, but no sign of the police detail that had been assigned to protect her. The Police Directorate, which operates entirely under the executive branch, has launched a probe to determine if there’d been an internal security breach.

Bravo is the 26th member of Ecuador’s justice system to be assassinated since 2020 and the second individual investigating state crimes murdered that week. Besides her usual caseload of homicide and organized crime, Bravo had been working the Fiorella, Negra Francisca, and Don Maca cases—a series of drone attacks on civilian fishing ships exposed by Drop Site in April. Two of the boat’s crews returned home and reported being abducted, blindfolded, and starved for eight days by American gunmen in U.S. military uniforms aboard a U.S.-flagged patrol ship, before being abandoned in El Salvador.

The UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances endorsed the calls for an investigation, demanding that the U.S. provide information on the whereabouts of the eight still-missing men and any involvement in the matter by April 27. To date, the United States has not responded.

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An unprecedented investment in social media propaganda by Israel is failing to shift the cratering support for the country in the western world amid its ongoing genocide in Gaza, particularly among the younger generation, analysts have told Middle East Eye. 

A Pew Research Center survey conducted in March found that a majority, 60 percent of the American public, including 57 percent of Republican voters under the age of 50 and 84 percent of Democrats under 50, view Israel unfavourably.

Much of this is down to an increasing number of younger people using social media rather than mainstream outlets, which are overwhelmingly pro-Israel, for their news. 

To counter this shift, Israeli lawmakers approved a record budget of $730m for public diplomacy - known by its Hebrew name Hasbara - in March, amounting to almost five times its previous annual budget, which was already 20 times pre-2023 levels.

In September 2025, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with several American influencers in New York to enlist them to amplify pro-Israel messaging in the US.

During the meeting, Netanyahu stressed the importance of their role, saying: "We have to fight with weapons that apply to the battlefields in which we’re engaged in and the most important ones are on social media."

He added that the deal, which saw American billionaire Larry Ellison, alongside several other pro-Israel businessmen, acquire TikTok's US operations, was "the most important purchase going on right now".

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