TV News LIES

One day during his first term, Donald Trump summoned a top aide to discuss a new idea. “Trump called me down to the Oval Office,” John Bolton, national security adviser in 2018, told the Guardian. “He said a prominent businessman had just suggested the US buy Greenland.”

It was an extraordinary proposal. And it originated from a longtime friend of the president who would go on to acquire business interests in the Danish territory.

The businessman, Bolton learned, was Ronald Lauder. Heir to a makeup fortune – the global cosmetics brand Estée Lauder – he had known Trump, a fellow wealthy New Yorker, for more than 60 years.

Bolton said he discussed the Greenland proposition with Lauder. After the billionaire’s intervention, a White House team began to explore ways to increase US sway in the vast Arctic territory controlled by Denmark.

Trump’s renewed pursuit of Lauder’s idea during his second term is typical of how the president operates, Bolton said. “Bits of information that he hears from friends, he takes them as truth and you can’t shake his opinion.”

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Discussions are reportedly under way within Donald Trump’s administration about the US possibly granting asylum to Jewish people from the UK, according to the Telegraph, citing the US president’s personal lawyer.

Trump lawyer Robert Garson told the newspaper that he has held conversations with the US state department about offering refuge to British Jews who are leaving the UK citing rising antisemitism.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Guardian.

Garson, 49, said he felt the UK was “no longer a safe place for Jews”. He added that recent events – namely an Islamist attack on a synagogue in Manchester and what he described as widespread antisemitism following the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 – had led him to believe that British Jews should be given the option of sanctuary in the US.

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Wildfires raging across central and southern Chile on Sunday left at least 15 people dead, scorched thousands of acres of forest and destroyed scores of homes, authorities said, as the South American country swelters under a heat wave.

Chilean President Gabriel Boric declared a state of catastrophe in the country’s central Biobio region and the neighboring Ñuble region, around 500 kilometers (300 miles) south of Santiago, the capital.

The emergency designation allows greater coordination with the military to rein in two dozen wildfires that have so far blazed through 8,500 hectares (21,000 acres) and prompted 50,000 people to evacuate, according to Chilean Security Minister Luis Cordero.

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While President Donald Trump might have the medal in hand, the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado cannot be redistributed to him, the Nobel Foundation said in a statement following Machado's move to present the president with the award at their Jan. 15 meeting at the White House.

Machado's decision to give Trump the award does not change the recipient of the prize, the Nobel Foundation said in a statement on Jan. 16. The Nobel Foundation aims to "safeguard the dignity of the Nobel Prizes and their administration" and uphold "Alfred Nobel’s will and its stipulations," the statement said.

"...the prizes shall be awarded to those who 'have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind,' and it specifies who has the right to award each respective prize," the statement reads. "A prize can therefore not, even symbolically, be passed on or further distributed."

While President Donald Trump might have the medal in hand, the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado cannot be redistributed to him, the Nobel Foundation said in a statement following Machado's move to present the president with the award at their Jan. 15 meeting at the White House.

Machado was granted the award in October 2025. Trump openly lobbied to be awarded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, but the honor was instead given to Machado for her "efforts to advance democracy in Venezuela,” the Nobel Committee said when she won, including in "the face of ever-expanding authoritarianism in Venezuela," the Nobel Prize outreach website states.

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An explosion of unknown origin in a high-rise residential building in Kharkiv early Saturday left at least two people dead and others injured, city officials said.

Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said in a Telegram post that the blast occurred at about 1:30 a.m. in an apartment on the fifth floor of a 16-story building.

Rescue workers were searching through the rubble, and Yevhen Vasylenko, a spokesperson for the Kharkiv regional office of Ukraine’s State Emergency Service told Suspilne that the two confirmed fatalities include a man and a woman. Their bodies were being recovered, and additional casualties were being treated.

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IIn a rare rebuke of his most important ally, President Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said the so-called Board of Peace ‘was not coordinated with Israel and is contrary to its policy’.

The statement adds that Netanyahu has instructed his foreign ministry to contact US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

No Israeli officials have been named to the committee, although an Israeli businessman has been.

Former UK prime minister Sir Tony Blair and high-profile Trump administration officials were named as part of the ‘founding executive board’ to lead long-term peace efforts in the Middle East.

This will be the operational arm of the Board of Peace, which will be chaired by Mr Trump and other serving world leaders who have not yet been named.

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