TV News LIES

The Supreme Court on Tuesday cleared the way for Alabama Republicans to remove the state’s second majority-Black congressional district for the midterms, handing the party a pickup opportunity in an apparent 6-3 vote.

Alabama chastised a lower court for keeping its map blocked, insisting it should move ahead in the wake of the Supreme Court narrowing the Voting Rights Act.

The justices’ emergency order allows Republicans to do so over the objections of Black voters and other challengers, who contended the design should be halted for an independent reason and it was too late for the Supreme Court to intervene, anyways.“While federal courts should not impose changes close to an election,” the justices wrote in their unsigned ruling, “States are free to decide for themselves whether last-minute changes to an election are in their best interests.”

“Now the Court is squarely faced with a record of the turmoil it has caused and the harm it has wrought,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

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President Donald Trump has signed an executive order directing the Treasury Department to shut down bank accounts used to support illegal immigration.

Trump announced the order in a June 2 Truth Social post, saying it targets the banks, credit card companies, and other financial institutions that criminals use to move money tied to human smuggling, drug trafficking, illegal immigration, and cartels.

"Illegal Immigrants and Foreign Fraudsters steal BILLIONS every year from the American Taxpayer." posted President Donald Trump, Truth Social, June 2.

Under the order, Trump said, accounts used to support illegal immigration or to hold government benefits paid to undocumented immigrants could be closed, seized, or forfeited.

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Increasingly outspoken "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley apparently has harsh words for his new CBS bosses.

The anchor, during a reported staff meeting, accused network Editor in Chief Bari Weiss of "murdering" the news institution, according to a recording obtained by The New York Times and reported Monday,

USA TODAY has reached out to CBS for comment.

The outlets report that the meeting was to serve as an introduction to Bilton, a former Times technology columnist and investigative journalist, who was selected to lead "60 Minutes" in late May.

In a tense reported exchange during the meeting, in which The New York Times reports Pelley called Bilton's qualifications "slender," the broadcast journalist questioned Weiss' commitment to the prosperity of the news program.

Bilton's career, which includes investigative work at Vanity Fair as well as writing and producing documentaries, has largely existed in print. He has not worked in broadcast journalism, nor led a newsroom.

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When Leen Ezzeddine stood before her classmates at Harvard Medical School, the moment could have been framed as a familiar story of immigrant success: a Lebanese woman graduating as a doctor from one of the world’s most prestigious institutions.

But Ezzeddine chose to tell a different story.

In her graduation speech last week, she spoke of circumstance, borders, luck and the thin line separating her life from the lives of medical students in Lebanon and Palestine who share the same ambition but are made to study under drones, bombardment and displacement.

That line, for her, was not abstract. While she was pursuing her studies at Harvard, a US missile launched by Israel levelled her family home in Arab Salim, her mother’s village in southern Lebanon, in October 2024.

It was the village where she used to spend her summers, surrounded by cousins, relatives, and her grandparents, Hayat Chamseddine and Ali Zayour, who were later forced to leave and relocate to Beirut after their house was destroyed.

The contrast was stark: she was standing in Harvard as a new doctor, while the village that helped shape her childhood and family memories was being attacked.

That contradiction became the emotional and political centre of her intervention.

Her speech was not only about Gaza, or Lebanon, or the violence of war. It was about what it means to become a doctor inside an elite institution while entire communities are being denied the basic conditions of life.

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Journalists may no longer enter the Pentagon’s press office, which has been designated as a classified space amid growing moves to restrict press access to the defense department.

"This is the most transparent war department in history. No amount of spin from the Fake News media will change that,” Jose Valdez, the acting defense department press secretary, said in a social media post. “The Pentagon Press Office has been redesignated as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility due to speechwriters from the Office of the Secretary of War sharing the facility.”

Valdez added that, because speechwriters handle classified material, “journalists will no longer be permitted to enter the office space”.

The move was first reported by the Washington Post, and later confirmed by Valdez on social media.

The defense department, which the Trump administration prefers to call the war department, began rolling out new restrictions to press access in September, when the military demanded journalists pledge not to gather any information – including unclassified documents – that had not been authorized for release or else risk revocation of their press passes.

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The latest wave of anxiety followed a statement by Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz, who warned that there would be “no calm in Beirut” if Hezbollah’s attacks on Israeli forces and northern Israel continued.

“The Dahieh in Beirut is no different from the communities in northern Israel – if there is no calm in the north, there will be no calm in Beirut,” Katz said, referring to the densely residential area in Beirut's southern suburb.

The warning came as Israel intensified its ground and air offensive in Lebanon in recent days.

Hezbollah said its fighters were still confronting Israeli troops near the ancient Beaufort Castle, the strategic hilltop fortress in southern Lebanon, a day after Israel said it had seized it and raised the Israeli flag there.

Hezbollah said in a statement on Monday that its fighters were engaged in a “battle of attrition” against Israeli troops in the area.

Israel has framed its expanded campaign as an effort to push Hezbollah away from Israeli forces and residents in the north. Katz said the Israeli army was working to turn the area around the Litani River into a zone under its security control, “free of weapons and terrorists”.

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A team of UN experts has issued a “stark warning about surging Israeli settler terror” in the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem and “the existential risk it poses to Palestinian communities’ presence on the land”.

The group of 14, including the UN’s special rapporteur for Palestine, Francesca Albanese, cited a sharp increase in the number of Palestinian casualties in settler attacks this year, saying at least 13 had been killed and close to 500 injured in five months amid the “settler brutality”.

The experts said in a statement:

Relentless attacks by the settler-colonial movement, carried out with the support and acquiescence of the Israeli State, have become a daily terror in Palestinian lives, sowing fear, uncertainty and profound insecurity that inevitably compels the forcible displacement of the indigenous population..

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A smart drug that stops cancer cells “hiding” from treatment can shrink tumours by at least 30% in six of the world’s most common forms of the disease, early trial results show.

While immunotherapy treatments have improved survival rates for many patients, their effectiveness can stall or fail when tumour cells hide and then spread.

Researchers in Oxford have developed a drug designed to stop cancer cells concealing themselves from the immune system, allowing immunotherapy treatments to identify and destroy them.

In a trial spanning the UK, France, Spain and Australia, 83 patients with cervical, bladder, liver, bowel, lung or head and neck cancers were given the experimental drug, GRWD5769, alongside the immunotherapy treatment cemiplimab.

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