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The White House is launching its own news channel days after banning three outlets from the building. JD Vance held a rally in North Carolina where the crowd was so small and so bored that people fell asleep in the front row. ICE quietly erased thousands of detainees from its public tracking system so families and lawyers can no longer find them. And the administration told developers and loggers they are free to kill endangered animals as long as that wasn’t their stated goal.
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White House Launches “Trump TV” Days After Banning News Outlets
Even Vladimir Putin called his channel Russia Today and not “Vlad TV.”
The White House has announced it is starting its own news channel, a 24/7 YouTube feed of presidential speeches and highlights called Trump TV: The Essentials Station. The channel is launching Monday evening, though the administration has revealed nothing else.
The channel arrives just days after Trump banned reporters from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House for publishing what he called “fiction and lies”. Reporters arrived at work Saturday morning only to find their press badges no longer worked.
The three banned outlets filed a federal lawsuit against the administration Monday seeking to reinstate their credentials. They’re asking the court to block Trump from revoking access to any news organization based on the content of its coverage.
All major television networks, including ABC, CBS, NBC, and even Fox, announced shortly after that they would stop pooled coverage of the White House in solidarity. The administration immediately launching its own YouTube channel in response suggests the backup plan was already waiting.
Vance Holds Rally in Must-Win State and 300 People Show Up
The Koury Convention Center has hosted regional accounting conferences that drew more excitement than JD Vance did.
Photographs from Monday’s rally in Greensboro, North Carolina captured attendees falling asleep in the front row and scrolling through their phones while the vice president campaigned for Republican Senate candidate Michael Whatley. A local NPR affiliate estimated the crowd at about 300 in a venue that holds 3,000.
Some of the audience had been specifically selected to sit on stage behind Vance and wave flags and banners, but even they seemed disinterested. Vance spent most of the speech calling Democrats “radicals” hellbent on destroying the country, which didn’t seem to wake anybody up.
Trump promised earlier this month that he would aggressively campaign for Republicans in the midterms. He has barely shown up on the trail since then, instead sending Vance out to do the work.
At one of the few rallies he has attended, Trump told a crowd in Gastonia he would withhold FEMA disaster relief from western North Carolina if Whatley lost in November, then told the groaning crowd he was joking. Earlier this year he blocked hundreds of millions of dollars in disaster aid to four Democratic-led states.
ICE Quietly Removes Thousands of Detainees From Public Database
You can track your package across states, but as of last week you can no longer track a person in government custody.
ICE removed detainees with final deportation orders from its public online locator system last week without announcing the change, according to three current and former officials who spoke to the Associated Press. The move has made it nearly impossible for lawyers and family members to find out where those detainees are.
The online locator, created in 2010, allows families and lawyers to find people in ICE custody. About 30 percent of the more than 65,000 people currently held in detention are believed to have final removal orders, meaning about 20,000 detainees may have gone missing from the system overnight.
The American Immigration Lawyers Association warned its members Friday, and several lawyers confirmed their clients had disappeared from the system. Greg Chen, senior director of government relations at the association, said that families are now desperately trying to locate their loved ones with little success.
The change does not affect facilities in Minneapolis, New York City, Chicago, or Adelanto, California, where judges have ordered ICE to add detainees to the locator promptly as part of ongoing litigation. No court has yet intervened for the rest of us.
Trump Says Developers and Loggers Can Kill Endangered Species
If you accidentally hit a bald eagle with your car, that’s a federal crime. But if you bulldoze its nest for a strip mall, Brian Nesvik says you’re good.
In a memo to staff last week, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director said that developers, loggers, and other industries can kill endangered animals in the course of doing their work as long as killing wasn’t their primary objective. The new standard is effective immediately and applies to all enforcement of the Endangered Species Act.
Earlier this year, the Fish and Wildlife Service said it was legal to cut trees or drain a wetland even if it destroyed a species, as long as the animals weren’t killed directly. Now Nesvik is saying it’s okay to kill them outright, meaning logging companies could knowingly chop down a forest full of endangered owls with no consequences.
A coalition of attorneys general, tribes, and environmental groups have already filed lawsuits challenging the administration’s previous rollbacks. Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, New Mexico, North Dakota, New Jersey, Vermont, and Wyoming wildlife officials all submitted public comments expressing concern about the policy.
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POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Trump’s Press Ban Backfires as Networks Boycott White House Coverage. After Trump banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico on Friday, all the major TV networks including ABC, CBS, NBC, and even Fox said they would stop pooled coverage of the administration in solidarity. Without the pool, no network has the cameras or microphones that allow the public to hear what the president is saying at official events. The fallout was immediate at a ribbon-cutting for a new helipad on the South Lawn, where the White House’s own feed couldn’t pick up Trump’s audio over the sound of Marine One parked nearby. Even Newsmax acknowledged it was an example of the press ban backfiring.
Judge Blocks Warrantless ICE Construction Site Raids After Agents Arrest a U.S. Citizen. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Beaverstock on Monday issued a temporary stay blocking ICE from conducting warrantless raids at private construction sites in southern Alabama. The ruling is the result of a class-action lawsuit filed by Leo Garcia Venegas, a U.S. citizen who has been handcuffed by ICE officers three times despite carrying a valid REAL ID on every occasion. In two of the cases, masked agents entered private construction sites without warrants and detained workers based on their perceived ethnicity. During the first raid, Venegas was filming his brother’s arrest and was thrown to the ground by agents, cuffed and told his government-issued license was a fake.
Local Opposition Blocked $68 Billion in Data Center Projects in Second Quarter of 2026. Data Center Watch, a research group, found that 45 data center projects worth $68 billion were blocked or delayed between April and June of this year due to community opposition. Thirty state legislatures have now passed regulations on data center siting and resource use and there are an estimated 843 opposition groups at work in every state but Hawaii. In just a single weekend in July, there were 142 data center protests in 42 states. Residents worry about energy and water use, noise and the environmental impact of gas-fired power plants on the site, including a project in Virginia that boosted local electricity bills 76 percent.
Alzheimer’s Disease Is Starting to Be Considered a Treatable Condition. Clinical trials are on the verge of breakthroughs in diagnosis and treatment after years of slow progress, says the World Alzheimer Report 2026, published by Alzheimer’s Disease International. There are already drugs on the market that target the amyloid plaques in the brain to slow the disease and researchers are now testing whether treating people before symptoms appear can prevent cognitive decline altogether. There are 158 drugs in 192 clinical trials at the moment. New blood tests being developed in the UK and Australia could in future replace the invasive brain imaging and spinal taps that patients currently undergo to get a diagnosis.
