TV News LIES

The Justice Department released a memo this week that quietly calls into question decades of civil rights protections for Americans with disabilities and stirred fear and anger among advocates and families.

The memo, an opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel, argues that states do not have to provide in-home or community-based care to people with disabilities who need support. These services allow many disabled Americans to continue to live, learn and work at home or in their own communities, among family and friends.

"It is now the position of the United States government that people with disabilities don't have a right to be part of their communities," says Alison Barkoff, a health law and policy professor at George Washington University who led disability law and policy efforts during both the Obama and Biden administrations. "I can't overstate how significant this change in position is."

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Israeli strikes in Gaza on Saturday killed at least six people, including two children and a cameraman with broadcaster Al Jazeera, according to Palestinian health officials.

Despite an October ceasefire between Israel and the militant group Hamas, the enclave has seen near-daily Israeli attacks that have killed over 1,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

The first strike on Saturday hit an apartment in Gaza City around 2 a.m., according to the ministry. At the site, an Associated Press reporter saw rubble and chunks of concrete stained with blood.

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Weeks after the Civil War's guns fell silent and barely two months after President Abraham Lincoln's assassination, Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas. They had come to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation, an order freeing enslaved people in seceded Confederate states. And the date they arrived — June 19, 1865 — is now remembered as the first "Juneteenth."

The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued years earlier during the war, on Jan. 1, 1863. It's the version most commonly emphasized in history books: the executive order that Lincoln himself reportedly said was "the great event of the nineteenth century" and his lasting legacy.

But word of such an order had already been circulating throughout the South for months. A preliminary proclamation, which contained much the same wording as the historic order, was issued on Sept. 22, 1862, days after the Battle of Antietam — the single bloodiest day in American military history. The purpose of it was to "warn that if the Confederate states don't return to the Union by January 1st, [Lincoln] will in fact issue a final proclamation," according to Harold Holzer, a Lincoln historian.

Not all enslaved people immediately knew about Lincoln's orders, but many learned of it while the fighting was still raging. Rumors spread through informal networks, sometimes inadvertently from slaveholders themselves, says Holzer, who directs the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College in New York.

Slaveholders would often discuss the proclamation right in front of the people they enslaved, he says. They wrongly assumed that since enslaved people were prohibited from reading and writing, they would be oblivious to discussion of events around them.

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The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem has denounced the “unlawful and illegitimate” Israeli seizure of its property in occupied East Jerusalem.

In a statement on Wednesday, the Patriarchate said that it "expressed grave concern over the Israeli raid and land grab targeting its Church property in Silwan".

During the operation, which took place on Monday, “the Patriarchate’s representative was forcibly removed, his equipment was confiscated, trees were uprooted, and the property was enclosed with fencing and gates”.

It said that the disputed land, which is adjacent to the Monastery of St Onuphrius, is registered under its ownership, and warned that this seizure “sets a dangerous precedent for Church rights in Jerusalem”.

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Republican governor Mike DeWine, the who co-wrote the bill to reinstate Ohio’s death penalty more than 45 years ago, has called for the state to abolish capital punishment, saying it did not improve public safety and could no longer be morally justified.

“I no longer believe the death penalty is a deterrent to murder,” DeWine said on Tuesday. “The moral justification I had for voting for the death penalty simply no longer exists.”

Tuesday’s announcement represents a change of heart for the 79-year-old governor. After Ohio’s reinstated death penalty law was stuck down in 1978, DeWine, then a newly minted state senator, was instrumental in crafting the 1981 law that survived court challenges and remains in effect. But DeWine has softened his stance in recent years, and repeatedly delayed executions throughout his nearly eight-year tenure as Ohio’s governor.

His call for abolition is consistent with the moderate approach to capital punishment that has defined his time as governor, and it puts him at odds with national Republican leaders like Donald Trump, who has sought to expand the death penalty in his second term.

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On Sunday, Israeli settlers torched vehicles and attempted to set fire to a mosque in the West Bank, prompting The Israeli military to deploy troops to quell riots described as violent acts by "Israeli civilians."

In the village of Burqa, settlers set fire to a car and broke down a mosque door, setting its entrance alight before fleeing, according to Wafa. In nearby Deir Dibwan, settlers torched two vehicles, the Palestinian news agency reported.

Security forces were dispatched to the Binyamin Brigade area to disperse riots and extinguish fires, the military said. The military stated forces "strongly condemn all acts of violence."

Days before these attacks, the United Nations warned settler violence in the West Bank had reached record levels, averaging six attacks daily. More than 2,200 Palestinians have been displaced this year due to such violence.

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