TV News LIES

In the space of just a few weeks - the blink of an eye in the timeline of this Middle East conflict - US President Donald Trump has gone from being so popular in Israel he boasted he could be its next prime minister to a man so hated he could qualify for Israel’s next Amalek.

The pro-government commentariat was unsparing in their verdict. 

To give you just a taste of the bile aimed at Trump personally, Yinon Magal, host of a primetime show on Channel 14, called the US president "a loser" and branded his son-in law Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff as "little Jews".

Yaakov Bardugo, an Israeli political commentator, said that Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, were becoming the modern Chamberlain, the British prime minister associated with appeasing Hitler in 1938.

Amit Segal, chief political analyst for Channel 12 and Israel Hayom - which is owned by billionaire Miriam Adelson - said Trump had completely surrendered by allowing Iran to enrich uranium.

Shimon Riklin, an anchor on Israel's right-wing Channel 14, posted on X that the US was weaker than ever and that no-one will want to be its ally.

These commentators are close to the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Some are considered his mouthpiece. And they have collectively executed a textbook hand-brake turn.

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Egypt head coach Hossam Hassan sparked widespread praise on social media after delivering an emotional speech supporting Palestinians during a Fifa World Cup press conference on Monday, ahead of Egypt’s match against Argentina.

Speaking in Arabic, Hassan said: “If there is one person in the world who does not feel for the Palestinian people, then he is not a human being,” adding that this applied regardless of whether the person was “Arab, European, American or anything else”.

He criticised global indifference to the suffering of Palestinians, saying that while people often mobilise when an animal is harmed, “every day human beings are killed in their thousands, children and women”.

Hassan also appealed to athletes and media professionals to use football’s global platform to speak up, describing the sport as global “soft power".

“Please, please, all athletes and media professionals, regardless of their religions and countries, maybe through the World Cup, we can send a message: please let the Palestinian people live. They do not want anything, just to live.”

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Ukraine announced Tuesday it had signed “drone deals” with three more European countries, further capitalising on the expertise it has developed in drone warfare since Russia’s invasion.

The deals are custom to each country, but typically involve Kyiv providing blueprints for drone technology in exchange for royalties, investments and other military hardware.

In seperate statements on Facebook, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced he had signed agreements with Estonia, the Netherlands and Denmark at a NATO summit in the Turkish capital Ankara.

The drone deals create “new opportunities for joint production, the development of innovative defense technologies, systematic exchange of expertise, and the export of Ukrainian battlefield-proven solutions,” Zelensky said.

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A new lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C., alleges that the Trump administration is divulging details of Iranian asylum seekers to the government of Iran.

Lawyers with the left-leaning Public Citizen Litigation Group argue that the administration began sharing information about the applications with Iran in March 2025. Since then, U.S. government officials have "periodically mailed or hand delivered immigration files of Iranians" in immigration custody to the Iranian government, according to the complaint.

"The law is very clear that information within an asylum application or other applications for similar forms of protection cannot be shared, particularly with the government that the individual is fleeing," said Michael Kirkpatrick, an attorney with Public Citizen, told NPR. Public Citizen Litigation Group is representing the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund in the suit.

"That information could put them in grave risk upon return," Kirkpatrick said. "They could be detained. They could be interrogated. They could be sent to prison. They could be tortured. As well as the risk to their family and acquaintances who remain in Iran."

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A high-rise building in Manhattan was deemed unstable on Tuesday after authorities determined that support columns buckled, spurring evacuation of nearby buildings, according to officials and reports.

Officials said they also found “structural issues” on the 21st floor of the former Pfizer pharmaceutical building, which is being converted into residential apartments. “Two structural columns buckled, and there were multiple cracks and sagging floors,” the fire department said on X.

Workers were expected to begin stabilizing the building on Tuesday evening. According to New York mayor Zohran Mamdani’s office, a team went through each floor and did not detect any additional movement of the support columns, allowing the on-site contractors to begin the emergency repair work.

The temporary measures are meant to stabilize the building and are expected to stretch into the coming days, impacting a busy corridor of midtown near the famed Grand Central Terminal, which is a hub for metro area commuters and residents as well as tourists.

Officials said they received reports of a “structural issue at an active construction site” on East 42nd Street, between Second and Third avenues, before 8am.

The fire department also posted a photo of a dramatically bent beam on its X account.

“It’s a very serious situation because the box beams – the steel beams – have started to bend and deflect from the weight,” John Esposito, the fire department chief, said. “We evacuated the building and started evacuations of surrounding buildings.”

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Lake Powell, the US’s second-largest reservoir, threatens to plunge to unprecedentedly low levels this year after a historically bleak snowpack failed to raise its water level, scientists and water experts have said, adding renewed urgency to stalled talks over how to conserve a water source depended on by tens of millions of people in the US south-west.

The 185-mile Colorado River reservoir currently stands at about 22% of its capacity, or roughly 5.6m acre-feet. Lake Powell fell below that level for a few months three years ago. But those 2023 levels were recorded in the winter, when the reservoir, which straddles the Utah-Arizona border, hits its lowest ebb. Spring runoff carried the level back up to 9.6m acre-feet by June, according to data from the US Bureau of Reclamation.

Not this year. After a winter of historically low snowpack in the mountains and a heatwave that broke records across the south-west in March, water levels at Lake Powell barely rose this spring at all. Even after supplemental releases from Flaming Gorge Reservoir upstream, it ended the month of June below the annual low it hit the month before, and could keep dropping. Except for those few months in 2023, Lake Powell’s water level has not been this low since June of 1965 – two years after US authorities first started filling it.

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Just a few weeks after President Donald Trump’s December promise that prescription drug prices would plummet "fast and furious," Patricia Brown checked into a California clinic for an infusion of Merck & Co.'s blockbuster cancer drug, Keytruda. 

When the bill arrived, the clinic's charge for a 400 milligram dose dominated the page: $162,567.74.  

Brown, an accomplished cook battling lung cancer, owed about $2,000.

But the six-figure charges to Brown and her insurance company show how quickly prices for cutting-edge medical treatments can balloon in the U.S. health care system. Someone has to pay: An employer, taxpayers, or regular people whose insurance premiums go up and up.

The price of Keytruda for Americans starts high and often heads higher. Merck lists Brown’s dose at an already steep $24,000. Then, depending on the insurer, the health care provider and any number of middlemen, prices can rise.

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President Trump renewed his call for the United States to have control of Greenland soon after arriving in Turkey for the NATO summit, reopening a fight that badly frayed relations with allies earlier this year.

“Greenland doesn’t help Denmark, Denmark doesn’t spend money to really help Greenland, but it’s an important part for the United States,” Trump said during a bilateral meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Greenland is a self-governing, semiautonomous territory owned by Denmark. Trump has repeatedly argued that U.S. control over Greenland is necessary for global security and countering Russian and Chinese threats in the Arctic.

“That should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark,” he said. “And when they wouldn’t go along with it, and with all the money we spend to help them with Russia — we don’t have to spend any money.”

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