TV News LIES

The cofounder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and six other people have been arrested after disrupting a United States Senate hearing to protest Washington’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza.

The arrests on Wednesday came as US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr was giving testimony to lawmakers on his shake-up of federal health agencies.

“Congress kills poor kids in Gaza by buying bombs and pays for it by kicking kids off Medicaid in the US,” Cohen said as he was escorted away by police.

A panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has struck down one of the key remaining ways of enforcing the federal Voting Rights Act in seven mainly Midwestern states.

For decades, private individuals and groups have brought the majority of lawsuits for enforcing the landmark law's Section 2 protections against racial discrimination in the election process.

But in a 2-1 ruling released Wednesday, the three-judge panel found that Section 2 cannot be enforced by lawsuits from private parties under a separate federal statute known as Section 1983.

That statute gives individuals the right to sue state and local government officials for violating their civil rights. Section 1983 stems from the Ku Klux Klan Act that Congress passed after the Civil War to protect Black people in the South from white supremacist violence, and voting rights advocates have considered it an antidote to a controversial 2023 decision by a different federal appeals panel that made it harder to enforce Section 2 in the 8th Circuit.

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President Trump campaigned on a pledge to fight antisemitism.

"Antisemitic bigotry has no place in a civilized society," Trump said at an event in 2024.

However, the president's critics question whether antisemitism may have found a place within his administration.

NPR has identified three Trump officials with close ties to antisemitic extremists, including a man described by federal prosecutors as a "Nazi sympathizer," and a prominent Holocaust denier.

The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The Trump administration has used the fight against antisemitism as justification for the deportation of pro-Palestinian student protesters and funding cuts to universities.

Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, argues that the administration is using antisemitism as a pretext.

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The Georgetown academic Badar Khan Suri was released from Ice detention hours after a Virginia federal judge’s order on Wednesday.

Khan Suri was among several individuals legally studying in the US who have been targeted by the Trump administration for their pro-Palestinian activism. He has spent two months in detention.

US district judge Patricia Giles in Alexandria, Virginia, said that the ruling was effective immediately with no conditions and no bond. She added that Khan Suri’s release was “in the public interest to disrupt the chilling effect on protected speech” during the hearing. The judge explained in her ruling how the government did not submit sufficient evidence on several of its claims.

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As many as 9,000 Afghan refugees are at risk of deportation, as the Trump administration has ended the temporary protected status (TPS) that allowed them to stay in the U.S. legally. The White House says their country is no longer dangerous for them, a contention that confounds Afghanistan watchers.

"It's a death penalty for them if they return," said Zia Ghafoori, who worked as an interpreter in combat with U.S. Army Special Forces from 2002 to 2014.

Ghafoori was received by President Trump at the White House in 2019 and became a U.S. citizen in 2020.

"He's a big supporter of our veterans and that's what we love about the president," Ghafoori said. "Maybe he's not aware how the policy is going to affect our Afghan allies. I don't know what's happening behind the scenes."

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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) warned Trump administration officials they would soon face a “problem” if they continued arresting her fellow Democratic colleagues.

Ocasio-Cortez specifically called out Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and border czar Tom Homan, and she accused the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) of using “public intimidation.”

“If anyone’s breaking the law in this situation, it’s not members of Congress, it’s the Department of Homeland Security,” she said during an Instagram video posted Sunday. “It’s people like Tom Homan and Secretary Kristi Noem.”

“You lay a finger on someone, on Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman … or any of the representatives that were there, you lay a finger on them, we are going to have a problem,” Ocasio-Cortez added. “Because the people who are breaking the law are the people not abiding by it.”

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