TV News LIES

Imagine this: Two countries are at war. Country X sends a drone into a major industrial city in Country Y, aiming to take out two propane tanks. A routine sequence. But this time, the drone never reaches its targets. Instead, Country X’s drone accidentally strikes a wall nearby, explodes, and kills three young civilians.

When Country Y eventually retrieves the drone’s remnants for intel, it finds an AI supercomputer inside that reveals something unsettling. Instead of a human deciding what to strike — the AI did.

The truth is, you don’t have to imagine this scene — it just happened. For the first time in the Russia-Ukraine war, as reported recently in the New York Times, three Ukrainian civilians were killed by a Russian drone, developed, designed and released by humans, that, in the end, selected its target autonomously. And this new reality is shaping up to be the future of warfare.

That’s because a number of countries, including those with the world’s most consequential militaries, are rejecting the idea that human beings need always be in control of weapons in war.

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A federal judge has ruled in favor of artificial intelligence company Anthropic in its legal battle against the Pentagon after the government labeled the company as a supply chain risk earlier this year.

U.S. District Judge Rita Lin issued a written order Thursday night that the Pentagon acted illegally by punishing the AI company for its criticism of the Department of Defense's views on AI use. The government is expected to fight the ruling.

The dispute between the AI company and the government broke out in February when President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth accused Anthropic of endangering national security and designated the company a supply chain risk. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei refused to back down over concerns the company's products could be used for mass surveillance or autonomous armed drones.

Lin wrote that the government's actions "were based on a desire to make a public example out of Anthropic for its 'arrogance' in criticizing the government, not based on any articulable basis to believe that Anthropic would actually sabotage its model."

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Tennessee national guard members assigned to a federal anti-crime taskforce in Memphis fatally shot an armed 20-year-old man in the back, according to an autopsy report obtained by the Associated Press, contradicting police accounts that said the man was facing the troops when they fired.

Authorities have said that Tyrin Johnson turned toward guard members with a gun while running from them in the early morning hours after the Fourth of July holiday in Memphis when he was fatally shot in the chest.

But according to an autopsy report shared by Johnson’s family, a single bullet went in the right side of his back and exited through his upper right chest. The autopsy findings, reported earlier by the Commercial Appeal, the Memphis news outlet, were prepared by the West Tennessee regional forensic center office of the medical examiner, which did not respond to a request for comment.

The guard members were assigned to the Memphis Safe Task Force, created by Donald Trump, as the US president last year sent troops and federal agents to Democratic-run cities that he described as overrun with crime. The taskforce was involved in four fatal shootings between May and July.

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blocked promotions of four Army officers picked for promotion to one-star rank, some of whom have ties to top Army generals the Pentagon chief ousted earlier this year, The Hill has learned.

Some of the officers pulled from the list have links to former Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Randy George, who Hegseth removed in April, and to Gen. Chris Donahue, the commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa who was ousted by the defense secretary in June, a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters, told The Hill on Friday.

“Military promotions are given to those who have earned them. This has always been the case under Secretary Hegseth and will not change.” Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell told The Hill in a statement on Friday.

Earlier this year, Hegseth intervened and removed four Army officers — two women and two Black men — from a one-star general promotion list to the dismay of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and other service branch officials, The Hill and other news outlets have reported.

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At a virtual town hall meeting, Navy families who abruptly evacuated from Bahrain six months ago had many questions. They said they still aren't getting enough answers.

NPR has reviewed a recording of the meeting, along with a full list of questions the families were asking Navy officials.

The families left Bahrain on short notice with few possessions shortly after the U.S.-Iran war began. Many are still living in temporary conditions, at hotels and short-term rentals, both inside the United States and in other parts of the world. About 580 people participated in the call last week, where Navy leaders tried to provide some answers but also left many unsure of what comes next.
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The head of the Navy's Fifth Fleet, Vice Adm. Curt Renshaw, acknowledged the hardships brought on by the rapid evacuations and that the Navy is "making it up as we go because nothing is conceived to go on this length of time." He also went on to say, "these are complex problems and the solutions have not been exactly obvious."

When the military and the State Department ordered the evacuation of dependents on March 2, Renshaw told families the Navy expected only a brief displacement, similar to when the U.S. and Israeli forces attacked Iran's nuclear facilities in June 2025. That war lasted 12 days.

"Unfortunately, this has just stretched on and on, and has evolved into something greater and a bigger challenge," Renshaw said during the conversation. "When we talk about that challenge, we've delayed making some hard decisions because we didn't want to close the door on getting people back into Bahrain."

As the sight of armed, uniformed National Guard troops became ubiquitous in Washington, D.C., over the past year, one voice has been notably absent from the public discourse around the deployment: the guard members themselves.

"I will say very frankly that the bad taste that this mission left in my mouth, it actually embarrasses me to be involved in any way," one guard member who was part of the deployment for several months recently told NPR.

Thousands of National Guard members have been patrolling the streets of Washington, D.C., for more than a year now, in what has become President Trump's largest and longest domestic military deployment. Their presence has become a common, and controversial, topic of conversation among D.C. residents and constitutional experts alike, raising concerns about the normalization of armed troops in a city for an extended period of time.

Members of the military are not allowed to speak to the press without authorization. Under this administration, those rules and the ramifications for breaking them have gotten even stricter.

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