TV News LIES

D.C. National Guard members patrolling Washington as part of the Trump administration's plan to ramp up policing may soon be carrying weapons, a Guard spokesperson said Sunday.

The Army had said last week that Guard members would not be carrying weapons and would not be making arrests.

But on Sunday, Army Senior Master Sgt. Craig Clapper told NPR in a statement that "Guard members may be armed consistent with their mission and training."

"Their presence is focused on supporting civil authorities and ensuring the safety of the community they serve," Clapper added. "The DC National Guard remains committed to assisting the District of Columbia and serving its residents and visitors whenever called upon."

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Marius Borg Høiby, the son of the Norwegian crown princess, has been charged with 32 offences including four counts of rape, a prosecutor has said.

Høiby, whose mother is the crown princess, Mette-Marit, and whose stepfather is the crown prince, Haakon, Norway’s future king, is expected to stand trial early next year and could face up to 10 years in prison if found guilty of the most serious charges.

The charges, made public on Monday, include the rape of four different women, domestic abuse of a former partner, and illegally filming a number of women, including their genitals, without their knowledge or consent.

He is also charged with harassment of police and traffic violations.

Høiby’s lawyer, Petar Sekulic, who is representing him together with Ellen Holager Andaenæs, said: “Our client denies all charges of sexual abuse, as well as the majority of the charges regarding violence. He will present a detailed account of his version of events before the court.”

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The Irish novelist Sally Rooney could be arrested under the Terrorism Act after saying she intends to use proceeds from her work to support Palestine Action, which was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in the UK last month, a legal expert has warned.

Meanwhile, No 10 said that supporting the group was an offence under the act, after Rooney had made her pledge.

Royalties from Rooney’s books, including Normal People and Conversations with Friends, along with BBC adaptations of them, would be used to support Palestine Action, she wrote in the Irish Times over the weekend.

The legal expert also said that the bestselling writer could face prosecution if she were to express her views at, for example, a UK book festival, underscoring the proscription’s “gross disproportionality”.

While the prime minister’s spokesperson would not respond to the author’s comments specifically, they said that there was “a difference between showing support for a proscribed organisation, which is an offence under the Terrorism Act, and legitimate protest in support of a cause”, according to the Press Association.

The conservative outlet Newsmax has agreed to pay $67m to Dominion Voting Systems to settle a defamation lawsuit over lies about voting in the 2020 election.

The settlement came as the case was headed to trial. Earlier this year, Delaware superior court judge Eric Davis ruled that Newsmax had defamed the voting technology company by broadcasting false claims about its equipment afthttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/18/newsmax-election-lies-dominion-settlementer the 2020 election. A jury would have considered whether Newsmax was liable for damages. Dominion had sued the outlet for $1.6bn.

After the 2020 election, lies about the security of Dominion voting machines, which are widely used in the US, became central to Donald Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen from him. Allies and other rightwing personalities made baseless claims that votes had been flipped and that the equipment was not secure.

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The first time I met Al Jazeera’s Gaza team lead, Tamer Almisshal, was in July last year. His team had already buried two journalists, Hamza al-Dahdouh and Samer Abu Daqqa. The rest, he told me, were hungry. They were also dealing with trying to get hold of protective gear, threats from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the killing of family members.

Ismail al-Ghoul hadn’t seen his wife and child in months and was missing them intensely. Hossam Shabat, Mohammed Qraiqea and Anas al-Sharif were asking for time to secure food in the morning before they could start reporting. Today, they are all dead.

The first time I met Al Jazeera’s Gaza team lead, Tamer Almisshal, was in July last year. His team had already buried two journalists, Hamza al-Dahdouh and Samer Abu Daqqa. The rest, he told me, were hungry. They were also dealing with trying to get hold of protective gear, threats from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the killing of family members. Ismail al-Ghoul hadn’t seen his wife and child in months and was missing them intensely. Hossam Shabat, Mohammed Qraiqea and Anas al-Sharif were asking for time to secure food in the morning before they could start reporting. Today, they are all dead.

I spoke with various members of the Gaza team while writing a profile of Gaza’s veteran reporter Wael al-Dahdouh, who lost his wife, three of his children and grandson. All spoke of their work as a duty that needed to be carried out despite the risks. Three members of that team have since been killed in a chain of assassinations.

Each time I sent condolences, the response was always that the coverage would not cease. “We are continuing,” the Gaza editor told me last week, after he lost his entire Gaza City team in the targeted strike that claimed the lives of Sharif, Mohammed Nofal, Ibrahim Thaher and Qraiqea. “We will not betray their message, or their last wishes.”

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The Trump administration restored a public database that showed how funding is apportioned to federal agencies following a recent order by a federal appeals court. 

Public access to the data was restored over the weekend, not long after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ordered the website be restored in a unanimous ruling.

“To hear the Government tell it, the separation of powers hangs in the balance and only this Court can set things right. But when it comes to appropriations, our Constitution has made plain that congressional power is at its zenith,” U.S. Circuit Judge Karen Henderson wrote last wee

Under the apportionments process, agencies are given limited authority to spend funding allocated by Congress in installments.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy came dressed for diplomacy.

The last time Zelenskyy met with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office in February - an acrimonious meeting that ended abruptly - he said he’d wear a suit after the Russian war on his country had ended.

The declaration came after a reporter asked Zelenskyy, who was wearing a black sweatshirt, black slacks and boots, why he was not wearing a suit while visiting the “highest level” office in the country.

I’ll “wear the costume after the war is finished," he replied. Kostium is the Ukrainian word for suit.

This time, his sartorial choice as well as his choice of words seemed carefully designed to insulate him from another unceremonious exit from the Oval Office. But perhaps his willingness to don a suit to the meeting, three days after Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, also revealed that peace could possibly be within reach.

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President Donald Trump said he would sign an executive order to abolish mail-in voting, a move he said Russia’s President Vladimir Putin supported.

Mailing ballots is a popular option for voters to avoid waiting in line at polling places on Election Day. Election-security officials say voting has never been more secure and that the president has no role overseeing elections. But Trump has long railed against mail-in voting as vulnerable to fraud – despite election experts, including those in his first administration, who said mail-in voting is secure.

“We’re going to end mail-in voting," Trump told reporters Aug. 18 in the Oval Office. "It’s a fraud."

He reiterated arguments he made earlier in a social-media post. He argued elections would be more reliable if everyone voted in person with paper ballots rather than through machines.

“It’s very hard to cheat," Trump said of in-person voting.

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