TV News LIES

The heavy burden the US endured to defend Israel has caused the shortage of interceptors that Middle East Eye and other outlets reported on previously.

The US's Gulf allies were brushed off when they requested interceptor refills, MEE reported during the height of the war. Israel did send Iron Dome batteries and personnel to defend its close Arab partner, the UAE.

The US launched more than 200 Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (Thaad) interceptors in defence of Israel, roughly half of the Pentagon’s total inventory, the Washington Post reported.

The US also fired more than 100 Standard Missile-3 and Standard Missile-6 interceptors from vessels in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Israel fired fewer than 100 Arrow interceptors and around 90 David’s Sling interceptors. The latter were also used to shoot down projectiles fired from the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Both groups generally have fewer advanced missiles and drones than Iran.

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US intelligence assessed that Ukraine recaptured around 400 square kilometers of territory after Ukrainian officials disabled thousands of Starlink terminals used illegally by Russian forces. Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation, said the Starlink shutdown, together with middle-strike drones, helped shift battlefield momentum in Ukraine’s favor.

A newly declassified US defense intelligence assessment has revealed that Ukraine’s strategic disabling of thousands of illicit Russian Starlink terminals triggered a catastrophic command-and-control failure for Moscow, paving the way for Kyiv to liberate nearly 400 square kilometers of occupied territory earlier this year.

The advance was made possible, in part, by a significant weakening of Russia’s front-line capabilities, according to a US Defense Intelligence Agency report compiled for the Pentagon Inspector General.

The findings, first reported by Bloomberg, underscore how heavily Moscow’s forces had come to rely on smuggled commercial American technology to run their daily battlefield operations.

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Standing in his laboratory, Harvard professor Sean Eddy gazes at a row of vacant work stations. More than a year ago, this lab was filled with over a dozen researchers. On a given day they might be working independently on analyzing genomic sequencing or gathered around the group table, drinking coffee and helping each other troubleshoot questions about genomic data from different species.

Now, after his funding was terminated under the Trump administration, the computer screens are gone and the room is silent. He's one of the last people left.

" Seeing these labs empty — this is not the way it's supposed to be," he says. "This was a very vibrant lab."

Eddy is a computational biologist. He has devoted his career to one fundamental question. " I'm really interested in the origin of life," he says. "I want to know where it all came from."

He and his colleagues spent years developing software that could be used to seek out an answer. Scientists around the world now use the tools his team created to compare DNA and protein sequences, identify genes, and predict what they do. Their work underpins countless studies, including research related to cancer and neurodevelopmental disorders.

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When abortion restrictions are in the news, as they have been for several weeks, research shows that many Americans take that as a signal to stock up on abortion medications even if they're not pregnant.

Now, for the first time, a Planned Parenthood affiliate is offering what's called the "advance provision" of abortion medication. The initiative, shared exclusively with NPR, launched Thursday and is called "Just In Case Abortion Pills." It means people can have the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol on their shelf to be used in the future if they want to end an early pregnancy.

"As evidence supporting this model of care has continued to grow, and with supportive policy environments in Washington and in Hawai'i, this really is the right time for us to step into this space," says Rebecca Gibron, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, Hawai'i, Alaska, Indiana and Kentucky.

A range of telehealth organizations have offered prescriptions of abortion medication in advance for the past several years. Elisa Wells, co-founder of the website about medication abortion called Plan C, says this move by a Planned Parenthood affiliate is significant.

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Following pressure from the U.S., the Palestinian Ambassador to the United Nations is withdrawing his bid for a vice president role at the U.N. General Assembly, and Lebanon's ambassador is taking his place, the U.N. said Thursday.

The Palestinian U.N. delegation relayed, through an Arab country, that Ambassador Riyad Mansour would refrain from running for a vice president position for the coming two years, a person familiar with the matter told NPR on Thursday — a potential reference to the end of President Trump's term.

The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the two-year delay decision had not been announced publicly.

The spokesperson of the President of the U.N. General Assembly, La Neice Collins, confirmed the Palestinian delegation's withdrawal. The U.S. State Department did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

The State Department on Tuesday issued a cable, obtained by NPR, instructing the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem to pressure Palestinian officials to drop the leadership bid or face the potential revocation of their U.N. delegation's U.S. visas.

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Two-time Nascar Cup Series champion Kyle Busch has died at 41 after being hospitalized with a severe illness, Nascar said in a Thursday statement.

“We are saddened and heartbroken to share the news of the passing of Kyle Busch, a two-time Cup champion and one of our sport’s greatest and fiercest drivers. He was 41 years old,” the racing organization wrote on social media. “We extend our deepest condolences to the Busch family, Richard Childress Racing and the entire motorsports community.”

No cause of death was given.

Busch’s family had announced his hospitalization earlier on Thursday, saying he wouldn’t compete as planned at this weekend’s Nascar race in Charlotte, North Carolina.

During a Nascar Cup Series race on 10 May at Watkins Glen, Busch radioed in to his crew requesting medical aid from Dr Bill Heisel and a “shot” after the race. According to the TV broadcast, Busch had been struggling with a sinus cold that was exacerbated by the intense G-forces and elevation changes at the upstate New York road course.

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Early this month, a single pen stroke effectively ended representative Steve Cohen’s career in Congress. The man who has represented Memphis for 19 years will turn 77 later this month, but he wasn’t planning on retiring. He hadn’t lost any primary. The reason was that his district had been erased around him.

A new electoral map, passed by the Republican-led state legislature and signed by Bill Lee, the governor, divides the ninth district three ways. “Last week Tennessee Republicans silenced the Black vote here in Memphis to make Republican victories likely,” Cohen said in his statement. That’s succinct and accurate.

The new map folds a significant portion of Cohen’s Black constituents into Williamson county, which sits south of Nashville and was, until recently, the subject of a different fight.

To this day, the Williamson county seal depicts a Confederate battle flag draped over a cannon. It was adopted in 1968, at the height of the civil rights movement. A Tennessee court ruled in 2024 that the county could remove it. The state legislature responded the following year by passing a new law specifically designed to keep the flag on the seal. The vote was 70-24 in the House and 27-6 in the Senate, with no Democrats voting in favor. Lee, who is from Williamson county, signed it.

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Congressman Ro Khanna, a progressive Democrat from California thought to be considering a run for the presidency in 2028, joined the criticism of the Democratic National Committee’s reluctantly released, incomplete postmortem on the party’s disastrous 2024 election defeat.

In a social media video, Khanna said: “There’s not a single mention of Gaza in the 192-page DNC autopsy report that was just released today. As someone who campaigned in Michigan and Wisconsin, let me tell you: one of the reasons we lost is our blank check to Israel and Netanyahu while they committed genocide in Gaza. We must speak and confront hard truths if this party is to win in 2028.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic congresswoman from New York many progressives want to run for the presidency in 2028, told reporters she too was stunned by the omission of any mention of Gaza, Israel or the Uncommitted movement in the report.

“I think it’s pretty unbelievable that Gaza would not be mentioned once in the autopsy report,” the congresswoman said. “I think it was very clearly a major dynamic and a major thread that was happening in 2024. Regardless of how one feels about that issue, the fact that it’s not even addressed, I think, is a major oversight.”

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