TV News LIES

A hostage video released Wednesday by the military wing of Hamas appears to show a statement by an American-Israeli man who was kidnapped on Oct. 7, marking the first time the militant group has released a video showing one of the five Americans it is holding captive.

The video is also the first time that Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 24, has been seen alive since the day of the Hamas-led attack on Israel, during which some 1,200 people were killed.

• Ukraine has taken American Abrams M1A1 battle tanks off the frontline, partly because of Russian drone tactics, Pentagon officials have said. The US agreed to send 31 Abrams to Ukraine in January 2023. Five have been lost to Russian attacks.

• The proliferation of drones means “there isn’t open ground that you can just drive across without fear of detection”, a senior defence official said on Thursday. “Now, there is a way to do it,” he said. “We’ll work with our Ukrainian partners, and other partners on the ground, to help them think through how they might use that, in that kind of changed environment now, where everything is seen immediately.”

• The Ukrainians have not adopted tactics that could have made the tanks more effective, one of the US defence officials said, such as in combined-arms warfare, training for which was provided by the US in Germany. Russian forces have sustained heavy losses of their own tanks and armoured equipment due to highly effective surveillance and attacks by Ukrainian drone warfare units.

Louisiana state police went into the office of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of New Orleans on Thursday to begin the process of collecting records from the organization spanning the history of its decades-old clerical abuse scandal, as troopers investigate whether the local church hierarchy illegally covered up systemic child molestation.

Troopers arrived at the archdiocese’s headquarters at about 9.45am local time three days after a state court judge signed a search warrant authorizing them to take the entirety of the documents in question.

The troopers left after meeting with church officials and their lawyers for about 45 minutes. An archdiocesan spokesperson said the church did not immediately turn over any documents, with troopers treating the warrant in a manner more like a subpoena, which gives the targets of investigation a chance to gather and return targeted material.

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The White House punted on Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) demand for President Biden to call in the National Guard to college campuses amid mass protests over the Israel-Hamas war on Thursday.

White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said Thursday that the issue is not up to the president.

“That is something for the governors to decide,” she told reporters, noting that Biden has previously criticized the protests as antisemitic.

Johnson went a step further Wednesday, calling the protests “dangerous.”

Lawmakers in Alabama passed legislation that could lead to the prosecution of librarians under the state’s obscenity law for providing minors with “harmful” materials.

The bill, approved 72-28 by the Alabama House of Representatives, will now move to the state Senate. It removes existing exemptions for public libraries in the state’s obscenity law and is part of a larger nationwide effort to ban books.

The bill will also expand the definition of sexual conduct prohibited at public K-12 schools or public libraries to include any “sexual or gender oriented conduct” that may expose minors to people who are dressed in “sexually revealing, exaggerated, or provocative clothing or costumers, or are stripping, or engaged in lewd or lascivious dancing, presentations, or activities.”

If signed into law, any librarian who violates the law could face a misdemeanor.

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Student demonstrations against the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza are erupting at colleges across the country, with more than 30 schools in 16 states from California to Massachusetts reporting on-campus protests as of April 25.

More than 500 people have been arrested in confrontations with police, according to a USA TODAY review of news reports.

The movement, which calls for an end to civilian casualties in Gaza, started at Columbia University on April 17. About 100 Columbia students have been arrested, and the protests have been spreading to other colleges in the U.S. and overseas.

Pecker testified that he used National Enquirer to promote Trump's 2016 campaign interests, including stifling a story about an alleged love-child of Trump's. Pecker's actions were part of a "catch-and-kill" conspiracy with Trump to quash stories that could hurt Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, according to prosecutors.

The New York appeals court said in a written opinion Thursday that the judge in Weinstein's 2020 case, James Burke, admitted testimony from women with allegations that were not a part of the case − known as Molineux witnesses − but rather "irrelevant, prejudicial, and untested allegations of prior bad acts."

This "error" was exacerbated when the judge ruled that the former Hollywood producer could be cross-examined regarding these allegations and others, which depicted Weinstein in a "prejudicial light."

"Under our system of justice, the accused has a right to be held to account only for the crime charged and, thus, allegations of prior bad acts may not be admitted against them for the sole purpose of establishing" a tendency for criminal acts, the court's majority opinion states.

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