TV News LIES

The House voted Tuesday to end a nearly four-day partial government shutdown, approving spending through September for previously shuttered departments and providing 10 more days of funding for the Department of Homeland Security.

The 217-214 final vote to send the funding package to President Trump’s desk was close — but bipartisan, with 21 Republicans voting against it and just 21 Democrats voting for it. Democratic leadership voted against the package.

Trump swiftly signed the legislation Tuesday afternoon, ending the partial government shutdown, but a fight is likely to continue over the issue that triggered it: what policy reforms should be implemented for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The bipartisan vote came only after a dramatic procedural vote earlier in the day in which House Republican leaders worked to wrangle a handful of holdouts making demands on separate legislation affecting voting in elections.

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The ex-husband of former first lady Jill Biden has been arrested in connection to the December killing of his wife, police in Delaware said.

William Stevenson, 77, was indicted on Feb. 2, on charges of first-degree murder of 64-year-old Linda Stevenson, the New Castle County Police Department said in a news release.

Police did not say how Stevenson's wife died, but according to the release, he was arrested following "an extensive weeks-long investigation" into the death of his wife after officers responded to a domestic dispute on Dec. 28 at a home in the Wilmington area.

After a grand jury indicted him on the felony, police said officers arrested Stevenson at his home without incident.

Online New Castle County Jail records show Stevenson remained in custody on $500,000 bond on Feb. 3 at the Howard R. Young Correctional Institution.

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The Timbisha Shoshone exhibit at the Furnace Creek Visitor Center in Death Valley is currently under review after the Trump administration advised National Park Service officials to remove certain language from a display.

The review came after the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe worked with the National Park Service to add language and materials to the exhibit to mark the 25th anniversary of the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act, which formally recognized the tribe’s ancestral connection to Death Valley, granted a permanent land base to the tribe, and established co-management of much of the park.

The phrases in question “We are still here” and “This is our Homeland” have been a part of the exhibit since it was created, but came under review after the Park Service submitted plans to add a medallion and earrings to the Timbisha exhibit as part of a public ceremony for the act’s anniversary.

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President Donald Trump said Republicans should "nationalize" the voting process as he continues to level unfounded claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, more than five years after losing to Joe Biden.

Trump called for Republicans at the federal level to seize control of elections from states during an appearance on the podcast of Dan Bongino, who returned to his show on Feb. 2 after resigning in January as FBI deputy director in the Trump administration.

"The Republicans should say, 'We want to take over. We should take over the voting in at least ‒ many, 15 places.'" Trump said. "The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. We have states that are so crooked."

The Constitution gives authority to states ‒ not the federal government ‒ to set "the times, places and manner" of holding federal elections, but it empowers Congress to "make or alter" rules.

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Israeli authorities have intensified their campaign of forced displacement across the occupied West Bank, issuing expulsion orders to an entire Bedouin community east of Ramallah and escalating demolition policies in occupied East Jerusalem.

The measures come amid a surge in settler violence targeting educational institutions in the Jordan Valley and residential homes in Qalqilya, further shrinking the living space for Palestinians under military occupation.

On Sunday morning, Israeli forces raided the Abu Najeh al-Kaabneh Bedouin community in al-Mughayyir village, east of Ramallah.

Local sources confirmed to the Wafa news agency that soldiers delivered a military order requiring the community’s 40 residents to dismantle their homes and leave the area within 48 hours. The army declared the site a “closed military zone”, a tactic frequently used to clear Palestinian land for settlement expansion.

During the raid, Israeli troops arrested three foreign solidarity activists attempting to document the eviction order.

The expulsion order is part of a widening campaign of ethnic cleansing in the region. It follows the complete displacement of the Shallal al-Auja community north of Jericho, which concluded on Saturday. After years of systematic harassment, the last three families of the community were forced to leave, marking the erasure of a presence that once included 120 families.

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In February 2024, just over three months into Israel’s war on Gaza, U.S. ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, and his deputy, Stephanie Hallett, blocked an internal cable intended for wider distribution among senior officials in the Biden administration that warned northern Gaza had turned into an “apocalyptic wasteland,” according to Reuters.

Lew and Hallett reportedly blocked the cable, which described the consequences of Israel’s assault in harrowing detail, because they believed it lacked balance.

The cable was drafted by U.S. Agency for International Development staffers and was based on a two-part humanitarian fact-finding mission by a small United Nations team that visited the area on January 31 and February 1, 2024.

I was part of that mission.

Northern Gaza had been under a total siege for over three months when we were eventually allowed to enter in January 2024. We moved through Gaza City, Beit Lahia, Jabaliya, and Beit Hanoun.

What we found was an endless horizon of destruction. People were living under plastic sheeting or in the rubble of buildings. Schools had been destroyed. In parts of Beit Hanoun, the entire area had been depopulated and decimated. There was a deadly shortage of clean drinking water, food and access to healthcare.

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Ukraine is enduring the most severe strain on its energy system since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, with freezing temperatures, sustained missile and drone strikes, and the loss of local generation in Kyiv creating what one energy analyst described as a uniquely dangerous phase for the country’s power and heating networks.

A cascading electrical disruption over the weekend – which energy officials said was triggered by load imbalances and weakened transmission links – forced emergency power cuts across parts of the capital, even as Moscow publicly floated what it called an “energy ceasefire.”

Speaking at a Media Center Ukraine briefing on Wednesday, Jan. 28, Oleksandr Kharchenko, director of the Energy Research Center, said the capital is now being supplied almost entirely from outside the city – a task he called “a complex technical challenge even in peacetime,” made far more difficult by ongoing damage to transmission networks.

“This is the hardest stretch of the war for Kyiv’s energy system,” Kharchenko said, warning that the next several weeks of winter cold would be critical.

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Immediately after a US border patrol agent shot two people in Oregon last month, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said the targets were “vicious” gang members connected to a prior shooting and alleged they had “attempted to run over” officers with their vehicle.

In the weeks since, key parts of the federal government’s narrative have fallen apart.

The events took place on the afternoon of 8 January, one day after a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer fatally shot Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis.

According to a DHS press release and social media posts issued the following day, border patrol agents were conducting a “targeted” stop of a vehicle in Portland occupied by two members of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang. Yorlenys Zambrano-Contreras, a woman in the passenger seat, had been “involved” in a Portland shooting last year, the agency wrote.

During the border patrol stop, the driver, Luis Niño-Moncada, “weaponized their vehicle against” officers, DHS said, prompting an agent “to defend himself and others” by shooting the occupants. Zambrano-Contreras was hit in the chest, Niño-Moncada was hit in the arm and both were hospitalized, then taken into federal custody, DHS noted. The agents were uninjured.

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