The News You Need, Tuesday, July 7th, 2026
Putin's Information Bubble, EV sales surpass gasoline-powered cars in Europe, London Mayor condemns transphobes at London Pride, GOP Congressman improperly dispensed amphetamines to White House staff
Vladimir Putin, or the loneliness of ‘Homo Sovieticus’
Le Monde
Scott: A sense of “last days” is settling in surrounding Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin, a taste of desperation. And nothing describes it better than the bizarre relationship that has emerged between Putin and Russia’s First Channel, reports Le Monde.
Between denial of reality, a desire for revenge and carefully crafted messaging, the Russian president has tried to position himself as the master of the game. But after more than four years of war in Ukraine, these old tricks inherited from the Soviet past are showing their limitations, and he is losing credibility.
Like other dictators before him, Vladimir Putin has his own television news programs. Every evening, after the 8 pm broadcast, teams from the official channel Rossiya 1 stay at their workplace and re-edit the news segments to deliver a carefully filtered version, stripped of any news likely to displease the Russian president.
This system was described by Dmitri Skorobutov, former editor-in-chief of the channel’s nightly news broadcast who has been living in exile in Europe since 2020, in an interview in June to The Moscow Times, an opposition media outlet in exile. Introduced in 2011, at the time of the major Russian protests against electoral fraud, the practice intensified after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, to the point that Putin is now said to be “completely cut off from the reality on the front lines,” according to Skorobutov.
Isolated in this curated information bubble, the Russian president continually claims that his army is advancing “every day in all directions” in Ukraine. On June 4, he boasted about the capture of “around 2,440 square kilometers” – a figure clearly disconnected from reality. Russian forces lost ground in May, for the second month in a row, according to analysis by the Institute for the Study of War, an American think tank. Even the regime’s most zealous supporters acknowledge that it is unlikely Moscow will manage to break through the lines. “An indefinite war of attrition is not in Russia’s interest,” wrote Dmitri Trenin
London Mayor Condemns Transphobic Activisits at London Pride
Pink News
Charles: London Mayor Sadiq Khan condemned radical feminist transphobic activists who forced their way into the front of the march for London Pride last weekend. Carrying signs reading “Transactivism Erases Lesbians” and “Lesbian Not Queer,” the protesters enraged thousands behind them by distributing anti-trans leaflets.
A spokesman for Mayor Khan wisely condemned the transphobes in a statement to Pink News:
Pride is about celebrating difference and London’s amazing LGBT+ community.
It’s about showing those around the world that in our great city you can be free to be whatever you want to be and love whoever you want to love.
The vast majority of those present at today’s march respected and embraced that and the Mayor condemns the tiny minority who did not.
Transphobia is never acceptable.
Amen.
Electric and plug-in hybrid car sales overtake petrol-only motors
The Times
Workers at the production base complex of BYD, the Chinese carmaker, in Camacari, Brazil. Xinhua News Service.
Scott: In the UK and across Europe, the sales of EV and plug-in hybrid vehicles have surpassed sales of internal combustion engines, as the United States, under the control of the fossil fuels industry, remains the last redoubt of gasoline-powered cars. The arrival of a new generation of technologically sophisticated EVs out of China, selling at roughly half the cost of comparable Teslas, is expected to further eclipse gasoline car sales in the next decade.
Sales of electric and plug-in hybrid cars have overtaken registrations of petrol-only motors as more motorists embrace the decarbonisation agenda.
In the other major car-buying trend of the year, the big three Chinese exporters selling vehicles across all fuel types are now accounting for one in seven of all new cars sold.
After a spring and early summer of record-high petrol pump prices, and in an emerging era of falling electric car prices in an ever-more competitive marketplace, sales of zero-emission electric vehicles rose 35% to nearly 63,950, accounting for 30% of the market.
In addition, June’s sales of plug-in hybrids, which can primarily run in battery electric mode but with a back-up petrol engine, were up 25% year-on-year at 26,702, a market share of 12.5%.
Meanwhile, petrol car sales fell to 84,541, dropping below a 40%t market share to a low of 39.7%.
Irish Resort Leaves Peter Thiel Homeless
Irish Times
Charles: Just five weeks before Peter Thiel’s Dialog was scheduled to bring together a motley crew of tech bros, NATO officers, Trump officials and at least one New York Times Columnist at a posh Irish Resort, the Powerscourt Hotel and Spa cancelled its contract and declared the would-be celebrants personas non grata.
Last week I wrote about Thiel’s odd confabs and his new obsession with antichrists, which is the term he favors for anyone interested in any guardrails for AI. The Irish Times neatly summarized the reasons his latest meeting had aroused the opposition of sensible Irish activists:
Thiel was a cofounder of payments group PayPal and Palantir, a defence contractor known for mass surveillance and criticised heavily for its “strategic partnership” with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in its assault on Gaza.
A leaked schedule for the “retreat” hosted by Dialog, an invitation-only group cofounded 20 years ago by Thiel and entrepreneur Auren Hoffman, featured discussions on topics including preparations for a third world war, battlefield technologies, nuclear energy and cult-building.
Europeans are so much more sensible about oligarchical risks to society than Americans.
Powerscourt Hotel Resort and Spa is owned by MHL Hotel Collection, a tenant of the Powerscourt Estate, which said it was delighted by news of the cancellation.
“Following a period of great concern for Powerscourt Estate…we are relieved and pleased to announce the Dialog event planned for August at the Powerscourt Hotel has been cancelled,” the estate said.
Peter Thiel
Pro-Palestine groups had mounted a “Drop Dialogue” campaign to get the conference cancelled because of Palantir’s links to the Israeli Defense Forces. A spokeswoman for the protesters called the cancellation “a victory for all people of conscience who mobilised against it, and shows that direct action works”.
Today’s climate extremes shock even scientists
Bloomberg
Scott: Much of the US just sweltered through the July 4 holiday weekend as an intense heat dome bore down, putting strain on power grids and prompting the cancellation of many events. In Europe, punishing temperatures are set to return days after a deadly heat wave pushed thermometers as high as 43.8ºC (111ºF) in France.
A troubling pattern has emerged in this summer’s heat: Not only has it broken records, it’s done so often by margins far above the previous all-time highs. Yet all this accords perfectly with the projections of climate scientists who warn about life-altering and lethal changes in temperature and weather patterns.
These heat jumps are part of a larger shift. Sea levels are rising and polar ice is melting faster than before, while new records for daily rainfall are being set at a rapid clip. The pace of global warming itself has quickened in recent years. Today’s climate can “seem like an unexpected step change” from that of a few years ago, said atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University. El Niño weather systems exacerbate the heating brought about by greenhouse gas pollution. Some models suggest the current El Niño could push warming briefly as high as 2ºC. And “it is possible for a single month to surpass this threshold,” said Sarah Kapnick, global head of climate advisory at JPMorgan Chase & Co. The world is currently at 1.4ªC above pre-industrial levels.
Knowledge is Power
Scott: I believe passionately that one of the really poor items in media coverage in the United States is science reporting.
I am routinely pulling things out from major science journals that are significant news in themselves but haven’t really been covered as news.
Try getting the news you need from Charles and me for two weeks.
The Candyman comes
WWJ950 News
Scott: In the Trump One White House, amphetamines were handed out like candy. It was necessary to keep people happy and alert, apparently. This flows from the recently released Inspector General’s report. The doctor responsible, a Naval officer, got demoted and booted from the service as a result; he was nicknamed “the Candyman.” But not to worry, he was elected to Congress for the GOP from a district in north Texas, and Trump, upon returning to office, restored his rank and benefits, and thanked him for his dispensary services, claiming he was the victim of “woke” medical personnel.
“White House Medical Unit medical providers offered prescription and over‑the‑counter medications to all White House staff members,” the report stated. “Additionally, the White House Medical Unit provided pharmaceutical support for travelers on White House official travel. This includes the dispensing of controlled substances, such as Ambien and Provigil, without verifying the patient’s identity.”
One witness explained to investigators that the drugs were often divided up and packed into plastic baggies, especially before any big overseas trip.
“So we would normally make these packets of Ambien and Provigil, and a lot of times they’d be in like five tablets in a zip‑lock bag. And so traditionally, too, we would hand these out,” the witness said, per the report. “But a lot of times the senior staff would come by or their staff representatives... would come by the residence clinic to pick it up. And it was very much a, ‘Hey, I’m here to pick this up for Ms. X.’ And the expectation was we just go ahead and pass it out.”
Another witness said drugs were given to at least one White House official as a “parting gift.”
“Dr. [X] asked if I could hook up this person with some Provigil as a parting gift for leaving the White House. And at the time, the corpsmen and the medics... it was okay for us to dispense Provigil and Ambien without having a provider present,” the witness said. “I’m not sure if it was okay as far as, like, what’s medically allowed. But in the unit, it was authorized for us to do that kind of stuff.”
Additionally, the report found the White House Medical Unit:
• Provided a wide range of health care and pharmaceutical services to ineligible White House staff in violation of federal law and regulation
• Dispensed prescription medications, including controlled substances, to ineligible White House staff
• Did not follow guidelines for verifying patient eligibility
• Ineffectively used taxpayer funds by obtaining brand‑name medications instead of generic equivalents; this increased the risk for the diversion of controlled substances by not accounting for them appropriately
• Improperly disposed of controlled and non-controlled medications
Dueling Bands over the Atacama Desert
Image Credit & Copyright: Julien Looten
Explanation: What are these two bands in the sky? The more commonly seen band is on the left and is the central band of our Milky Way galaxy. Our Sun orbits in the disk of this spiral galaxy so that from inside, it appears as a band of comparable brightness all the way around the sky. The less commonly seen band, on the right, is zodiacal light -- sunlight reflected from dust orbiting the Sun in our Solar System. Zodiacal light is brightest near the Sun and so is best seen just before sunrise or just after sunset. On some evenings, this ribbon of zodiacal light can appear quite prominent. It was discovered only in this century that zodiacal dust was mostly expelled by comets that have passed near Jupiter. The featured image was captured about a year ago from the Atacama Desert in Chile.
Your Online Moment of Zen
Watching The Wheels
Written by John Lennon
Performed By Willie Nelson and his sons Lucas and Micha
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