TV News LIES

Protecting archaeological sites. Preventing water theft. The streamlining of land purchases. If anyone doubted the real purpose of the motley collection of new administrative and enforcement measures for the illegally occupied West Bank, Israel’s defence minister spelt it out: “We will continue to kill the idea of a Palestinian state,” Israel Katz said in a joint statement with the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich.

While the world’s attention was fixed upon the annihilation in Gaza, settlers in the West Bank intensified their campaign of ethnic cleansing. More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed there since October 2023; a fifth of them were children. Many more have been driven from their homes by relentless harassment and the destruction of infrastructure, with entire Palestinian communities erased across vast swathes of land.

The Israeli state is not merely complicit in these acts. In addition to the economic suffocation and increased military raids in the West Bank, the Guardian reported last month that settler-only units of the army are acting as “vigilante militias”. Haaretz newspaper reports that the military has ordered soldiers to prevent Palestinians from ploughing their land at the behest of settlers – not only threatening them with destitution, but paving the way for land seizure.

With Israel heading to elections in months, Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners are in a hurry. While they and their allies have changed the facts on the ground dramatically, and have steadily expanded Israel’s control, the bureaucratic measures adopted by the security cabinet last Sunday are “tectonic”, as one scholar notes. They ease land theft, stripping away the very limited constraints on purchase, and destroy the nominal authority of Palestinians in areas A and B.

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A federal judge on Thursday blocked the Pentagon’s efforts to censure Sen. Mark Kelly and lower his retirement rank in the wake of a video in which the Arizona senator and other Democrats called on service members to reject unlawful orders.    

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, noted the military principal that servicemembers enjoy weakened First Amendment protections to preserve discipline in the armed forces, but said that no court had ever extended that doctrine to retired service members.

He said he would not be the first to do so. 

“This Court has all it needs to conclude that Defendants have trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms and threatened the constitutional liberties of millions of military retirees,” the judge wrote.

Leon quoted singer-songwriter Bob Dylan to say, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

“To say the least, our retired veterans deserve more respect from their Government,” the judge added, “and our Constitution demands they receive it!”  

Hegseth wrote on X that the ruling will be “immediately appealed.”

“Sedition is sedition, ‘Captain,'” the Defense secretary said.

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Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are accusing the Department of Justice (DOJ) of spying on them as they reviewed the unredacted Epstein files on DOJ computers, tracking the documents they examined.

Attorney General Pam Bondi was photographed during a congressional appearance before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday flipping to a document titled “Jayapal Pramila Search History,” seemingly reviewing the activity of the Washington Democrat who tangled with Bondi during the hearing.

Bondi had a binder at the ready of stats and crime summaries to hurl at lawmakers during the contentious hearing, but members are unnerved that the DOJ apparently tracked their searches to have at the ready.

“It is totally inappropriate and against the separations of powers for the DOJ to surveil us as we search the Epstein files. Bondi showed up today with a burn book that held a printed search history of exactly what emails I searched. That is outrageous and I intend to pursue this and stop this spying on members,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) wrote on social platform X after seeing the photo.

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Former President Barack Obama slammed the Trump administration's repeal of a landmark climate finding from the Democrat's presidency, saying the United States is "less safe" after President Donald Trump eliminated the legal basis for federal regulations targeting greenhouse gases.

In a major blow to federal efforts to combat climate change, the Environmental Protection Agency, at Trump's direction, rescinded the EPA's "endangerment finding" on Feb. 12, which was signed during the Obama administration in 2019.

The finding stated that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere "threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations," providing the legal underpinning for EPA actions during the Obama and Biden administrations to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. But with its elimination, greenhouse gases emitted from tailpipes on vehicles and factories are no longer subject to regulations from the federal government.

"Today, the Trump administration repealed the endangerment finding: the ruling that served as the basis for limits on tailpipe emissions and power plant rules," Obama said in a statement on X. "Without it, we’ll be less safe, less healthy and less able to fight climate change — all so the fossil fuel industry can make even more money."

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Calls for President Donald Trump to be impeached are growing amid an all-time low presidential approval rating and growing uncertainty over the Republican Party's congressional fate in the upcoming 2026 Midterm Elections. Here's what the polls show today, Feb. 12.

Adding to the mounting calls for Trump's impeachment are more organized protest rallies for next Tuesday, Feb. 17, called "National Day of Lobbying: Impeach Trump and Abolish Ice". They are planned to take place outside congressional offices across the country on that day to influence their local legislatures and demand that Congress impeach Trump, convict him of violations against the U.S. Constitution and remove him from office.

Adding to the mounting calls for Trump's impeachment are more organized protest rallies for next Tuesday, Feb. 17, called "National Day of Lobbying: Impeach Trump and Abolish Ice". They are planned to take place outside congressional offices across the country on that day to influence their local legislatures and demand that Congress impeach Trump, convict him of violations against the U.S. Constitution and remove him from office.

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Pressure is mounting on Israel to scrap its plans to expand settlements in the West Bank ahead of a meeting between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House.

The Israeli prime minister has authorised steps that would make it easier for Israeli settlers to buy land in the occupied West Bank, while granting Israel broader powers in an area the Palestinians see as the heartland of a future state.

Eight U.S. Democratic senators on Tuesday urged Trump to oppose the settlements, which they said would go against the country’s longstanding policy on the issue, as well as the president’s own position.

The group’s statement reads: “We have long expressed our concern that these reckless moves make the possibility of a two-state solution, where Israelis and Palestinians can live side by side in peace and security, further out of reach.

“We urge Prime Minister Netanyahu to reverse course. When President Trump meets with Prime Minister Netanyahu this week, we also urge the president to clearly reinforce the opposition of the U.S. government to Israeli government actions that set the conditions for irreversible annexation.”

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The White House has deleted a social media post in which the vice-president, JD Vance, referred to the Armenian genocide, prompting anger from members of the Armenian diaspora as well as opposition politicians across the US.

The post was made during Vance’s two-day trip to Armenia to mark a visit by Vance and his wife, Usha Vance, to a memorial for the up to 1.5 million Armenians killed by Ottoman troops more than a century ago. The now-deleted post on Vance’s official X account said he was visiting the memorial to honour “the victims of the Armenian genocide”.

It marked the first time the Trump administration had used the word genocide to describe the massacres. An aide to Vance later told reporters that the message had been posted in error on social media by staff who were not travelling with Vance.

It was the second time in the past week that the administration cited staff error to explain its social media content; last week, after Donald Trump sought to dismiss the uproar over a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, the US president said it had been erroneously posted by a staffer.

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Newly released evidence has shown that Gregory Bovino, a border patrol chief who was the face of the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts until last month, praised a federal agent who shot a Chicago woman during an immigration crackdown last year.

Marimar Martinez, a US citizen, was shot five times by a border patrol agent in October while in her vehicle. She was charged with a felony after officials at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) accused her of trying to ram agents with her vehicle. But the case was abruptly dismissed after video evidence emerged showing that an agent had steered his vehicle into Martinez’s car.

Lawyers for Martinez have pushed to make evidence in the dismissed criminal case public, saying they were especially motivated to do so after a federal agent fatally shot Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis under similar circumstances.

The new evidence – which includes emails, text messages and videos – was released this week after a US district judge, Georgia Alexakis, lifted a protective order. Federal prosecutors had argued the documents could “further sully” reputation of the agent who shot Martinez.

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