TV News LIES

The Trump administration has suspended federal funding to Los Angeles’s beleaguered homelessness agency.

The announcement is the administration’s latest move rescinding funding to California, where Donald Trump has feuded with the state’s Democratic leaders.

In a letter to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the largest continuum of care (CoC) homeless services agency in the nation, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (Hud) immediately suspended funds to the agency, pending an investigation citing allegations of fraud.

“Hud will fund results, not corrupt failure or the homeless industrial complex,” secretary Scott Turner said in a statement. “Taxpayers will no longer bankroll an organization that puts its own self-interests ahead of the Americans it was created to serve.”

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The truth slowly comes to light: Israel's genocide in Gaza was planned decades ago.

Listen to the testimonies of four Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza. 

Soldier 1: “Human lives didn’t matter. You could kill, there was no law. No one would say a word to you. But it’s not a good feeling. It mainly kills your humanity.”

Soldier 2: “At first I wasn’t willing to execute Arabs who weren’t resisting [that is, civilians]. Then we came to the conclusion that we had to kill. We went through the process of ceasing to see them as human beings.”

Soldier 3: “We caught guys, lined them up and eliminated them. In retrospect, it looks like murder.”

Soldier 4: “We would roam through refugee camps in Gaza and carry out purges... Every soldier who was there created a ‘concentration camp’, and they didn’t hesitate to kill people who caused a slight disturbance.”

No, these testimonies are not new. The whistleblowers did not serve in Gaza during the current, ongoing genocide there. These accounts are nearly 60 years old, published last week by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz under the headline "We were ordered to kill”.

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Down here in the tombs, there aren’t any windows,” writes Tremane Wood from inside his cell, in a modern-day American “dungeon” that few people have ever heard of.

“It’s really like living in cave,” he writes in another letter. “It’s dark and damp. Sometimes this place drives people mad. The hardest part is the isolation.”

Or in another: “You end up loosing [sic] track of days and nights and what day it is … It’s a real form of psychological torture that some people never come back from.”

Wood, 46, spent 17 years incarcerated in H Unit – the underground cells at the state prison in the rural town of McAlester, Oklahoma, where no natural light ever reaches.

According to prisoner letters seen by the Guardian and published here for the first time, H Unit – also known by the prisoners as the “tombs” – features a series of windowless cells that are built banked into the earth. The letters also tell of infestations of vermin, unsanitary conditions, and frequent instances of physical and sexual violence.

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A campaign of ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Bedouins in the occupied West Bank is being driven not by rogue extremists, but by the Israeli state, according to a major new report. 

Amnesty International published the new 150-page report on Wednesday. 

It found that Israeli authorities were committing the crime against humanity of forcible transfer, through a “state-driven campaign of ethnic cleansing targeting Palestinian Bedouin and herding communities in Area C of the occupied West Bank”. 

Area C makes up around 60 percent of the total area of the West Bank, and is under military and civil control of Israeli authorities - in contravention of international law. 

According to Amnesty’s report, the Israeli government has expanded gun licences and the number of armed settlers in the area, increased funding for illegal settlements, and accelerated the construction of settlements and the legalisation of outposts.

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Israel has emptied four facilities within the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex that served as offices for the Islamic Waqf, in what a monitoring group has described as an escalating campaign against the Jordanian-backed body.

The Al-Quds International Institution, a Palestinian organisation that monitors developments in Jerusalem, said on Tuesday that Israeli authorities have used "manufactured security pretexts" to target the facilities.

According to the group, Israeli forces raided the sites in recent months, broke their locks and prevented the installation of replacements.

The facilities were then left open, while anyone attempting to enter them was expelled because they had been used for "activities that threaten security".

The four sites are the Dome of Imam al-Ghazali, located above the Bab al-Rahma prayer hall along the eastern wall of the complex; Dar al-Hadith al-Sharif in the northeastern section of Al-Aqsa; Qubbat Sulayman, an open-air domed shrine opposite King Faisal Gate; and Qubbat Musa, located near Bab al-Silsila (Chain Gate).

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A federal judge on Tuesday permanently blocked Alabama from executing a man with nitrogen gas after declaring the method violates the ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Alabama became the first state in the nation to use the execution method in January 2024, but has faced repeated legal challenges to its use.

Emily C Marks, a US district judge, permanently enjoined the state from executing Jeffery Lee by nitrogen gas. Lee was scheduled to be executed Thursday at an Alabama prison.

A spokesman for Alabama attorney general Steve Marshall said the state is appealing the decision. The case will likely end up before the US supreme court, which has previously let nitrogen executions proceed.

In 2000, a jury sentenced Lee to life without parole for the 1998 murders of Jimmy Ellis and Elaine Thompson. A judge later declined to follow the jury’s recommendation and sentenced Lee to death. In 2017, Kay Ivey, an Alabama governor, signed a bill to ban such cases of judicial override, but the law only applied to future – and not past – cases. Lee’s attorneys have since asked Ivey to grant him clemency and end judicial override retroactively.

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