Strong Men: Chatting with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the weekend, President Trump commiserated over problems he has with “fake news.” We’ll get to that. 

 Trump tweeted yesterday that his popularity is rising. “54% in Poll! I would be at 75% (with our great economy, maybe the best ever) if not for the Phony Witch Hunt and the Fake News Media!,” he wrote.

  Trump didn’t identify the poll in which he cracks 50 percent and we couldn’t find it. The Rasmussen poll, which always skews in favor of Republicans, has Trump at a 49 percent approval rating. The Real Clear Politicsaverage of polls has Trump at 44.5  approval and 51.9 disapproval. Nate Silver’s 538 blog has him at 42.3 approval and 52.7 disapproval.

   In an interview published just hours before the meeting,  Putin celebrated the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and the United States and declared that traditional Western-style liberalism “has become obsolete.”

  Trump didn’t argue the point. As reporters and photographers set up cameras and microphones, Trump shared his disdain for journalists with the Russian strongman.  

  “Get rid of them,” Trump said. “Fake news is a great term, isn’t it? You don’t have this problem in Russia, but we do.”

  “We also have,” Putin replied in English. “It’s the same.”

  Putin has taken over news outlets he finds troublesome and in some cases journalists have been mysteriously killed. 

  There may be a poll out there that has Trump at 54 percent approval, but for the time being it looks like the President is delivering his own fake news.

The News Roundup: A federal judge has permanently blocked the Trump administration from grabbing $2.5 billion from the Defense Department to build the President’s southern border wall. — In an agreement to re-start trade talks, President Trump on Saturday at the G-20 summit said he would scale back restrictions on Chinese technology giant Huawei and delay new tariffs from going into effect against Chinese goods. — The neo-Nazi who drove his car into a crowd of anti-racist protesters in Charlottesville, Va., killing a young woman, has been sentenced to life in prison. The judge told James Fields Jr., 22, of  Toledo, Ohio, that, “You could have done anything else but what you did. You deserve everything that you get.”

Missing:A Salt Lake man has been arrested and the burned remains of a woman found in his back yard in the case of a missing University of Utah student.

  Mackenzie Lueck, 23, went missing after taking a Lyft car from the Salt Lake airport. There’s still some mystery here. Phone records show that the last person Lueck communicated with was Ayoola Ajayi, 31, who has been charged with kidnapping and murder. Both cellphone and social media records show that she was in the park where she was last seen within a minute of Ajayi. Police found a cache of weapons in his home. They say neighbors had seen him burning something in his back yard.

From the Pitch: The US women are headed to the semi-finals of the World Cup after Megan Rapinoe scored two goals and the Americans beat France 2-1. Rapinoe is known for scoring goals and for saying she won’t go to the Trump White House if her team wins the cup.

Book Burning:Sometimes educators are the stupidest people in school. 

  The San Francisco School Board voted unanimously this past week to paint over a series of depression-era murals inside George Washington High School. The 13-panel mural “Life of Washington” painted in 1936  depicts George Washington’s slaves picking cotton in the fields of Mount Vernon and a group of colonizers walking past the corpse of a Native American.

  The school board has decided that the images are too disturbing for the kiddies, forgetting that about half of them go home at night to play war games and Grand Theft Auto on their computers. The board decided that covering the murals is not enough — they must be destroyed.

  The painter Victor Arnautoff, was a  Russian immigrant-communist and possibly the most important muralist in the Bay Area during the Depression. Arnautoff’s purpose was to provoke thought and make high school students question the whitewashed version of American history they were delivered in school.  Now the school board wants to whitewash Arnautoff.

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