TV News LIES

Russian infantry assaults against Ukrainian positions fell off moderately following loss of access to the tactically critical Starlink satellite communications system by Kremlin forces and the widely-used Telegram messaging app – but they have not stopped, news and field reports, and official statements over the past week have shown.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX company on Feb. 4 shut down gray and black market Starlink terminals operating in Russia and Ukraine, following a Ukrainian government request.

The switch-off did not significantly damage the ability of the Ukrainian military, widely using white market Starlink terminals, to digitally share battle intelligence and targeting information instantaneously, and in some sectors it gave piloted strike drones immune to jamming.

The access denial at the same time turned hundreds of gray and black market Starlink terminals used by Russian combat units for their own enciphered information-sharing and drone operations in Ukraine, into useless junk.

On Tuesday, Russian users of the Telegram messaging app reported critical slowdowns in access and data transfer speed, following a reported Russian state move to pressure Russian Telegram-users to shift to the state-developed app Messenger Max.

More...

A new report from Congress has raised the alarm about children with mental health conditions being held in juvenile detention, rather than getting treatment.

"Prolonged Incarceration of Children Due to Mental Health Care Shortages," released Thursday by the staff of Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff and Republican Rep. Jen Kiggans, is based on a survey sent to administrators of public juvenile detention facilities around the country. About half of those who responded to the survey reported they had, at some point, kept children incarcerated when they could have been released into offsite mental health care.

"This should shock America's conscience," Ossoff says. "Children with special needs, locked up for extended time instead of getting the mental health care that they need."

According to the survey, 75 juvenile detention centers in 25 states reported holding youths for days or even months until space became available at a long-term psychiatric residential treatment facility.

More...

Israeli authorities have arrested several people and charged two on suspicion of using classified information to place bets about military operations on the popular prediction market platform Polymarket.

Prosecutors say a civilian and a military reservist have been indicted for bribery and obstruction of justice, with an undisclosed number of others also arrested for placing Polymarket wagers based on classified information, according to a statement released Thursday by officials in Tel Aviv.

While the names of those charged and the specific bets they made were not disclosed, the announcement comes weeks after Israeli media reported that security agencies were probing whether military officials were turning secret intelligence about military strikes into Polymarket bets.

Kan News, Israel's public broadcaster, reported last month that government investigators were examining Polymarket bets on an Israeli strike on Iran in June 2025, when the countries fought a 12-day war.

More...

Protecting archaeological sites. Preventing water theft. The streamlining of land purchases. If anyone doubted the real purpose of the motley collection of new administrative and enforcement measures for the illegally occupied West Bank, Israel’s defence minister spelt it out: “We will continue to kill the idea of a Palestinian state,” Israel Katz said in a joint statement with the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich.

While the world’s attention was fixed upon the annihilation in Gaza, settlers in the West Bank intensified their campaign of ethnic cleansing. More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed there since October 2023; a fifth of them were children. Many more have been driven from their homes by relentless harassment and the destruction of infrastructure, with entire Palestinian communities erased across vast swathes of land.

The Israeli state is not merely complicit in these acts. In addition to the economic suffocation and increased military raids in the West Bank, the Guardian reported last month that settler-only units of the army are acting as “vigilante militias”. Haaretz newspaper reports that the military has ordered soldiers to prevent Palestinians from ploughing their land at the behest of settlers – not only threatening them with destitution, but paving the way for land seizure.

With Israel heading to elections in months, Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners are in a hurry. While they and their allies have changed the facts on the ground dramatically, and have steadily expanded Israel’s control, the bureaucratic measures adopted by the security cabinet last Sunday are “tectonic”, as one scholar notes. They ease land theft, stripping away the very limited constraints on purchase, and destroy the nominal authority of Palestinians in areas A and B.

More...

A federal judge on Thursday blocked the Pentagon’s efforts to censure Sen. Mark Kelly and lower his retirement rank in the wake of a video in which the Arizona senator and other Democrats called on service members to reject unlawful orders.    

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, noted the military principal that servicemembers enjoy weakened First Amendment protections to preserve discipline in the armed forces, but said that no court had ever extended that doctrine to retired service members.

He said he would not be the first to do so. 

“This Court has all it needs to conclude that Defendants have trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms and threatened the constitutional liberties of millions of military retirees,” the judge wrote.

Leon quoted singer-songwriter Bob Dylan to say, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

“To say the least, our retired veterans deserve more respect from their Government,” the judge added, “and our Constitution demands they receive it!”  

Hegseth wrote on X that the ruling will be “immediately appealed.”

“Sedition is sedition, ‘Captain,'” the Defense secretary said.

More...

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are accusing the Department of Justice (DOJ) of spying on them as they reviewed the unredacted Epstein files on DOJ computers, tracking the documents they examined.

Attorney General Pam Bondi was photographed during a congressional appearance before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday flipping to a document titled “Jayapal Pramila Search History,” seemingly reviewing the activity of the Washington Democrat who tangled with Bondi during the hearing.

Bondi had a binder at the ready of stats and crime summaries to hurl at lawmakers during the contentious hearing, but members are unnerved that the DOJ apparently tracked their searches to have at the ready.

“It is totally inappropriate and against the separations of powers for the DOJ to surveil us as we search the Epstein files. Bondi showed up today with a burn book that held a printed search history of exactly what emails I searched. That is outrageous and I intend to pursue this and stop this spying on members,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) wrote on social platform X after seeing the photo.

More...

Former President Barack Obama slammed the Trump administration's repeal of a landmark climate finding from the Democrat's presidency, saying the United States is "less safe" after President Donald Trump eliminated the legal basis for federal regulations targeting greenhouse gases.

In a major blow to federal efforts to combat climate change, the Environmental Protection Agency, at Trump's direction, rescinded the EPA's "endangerment finding" on Feb. 12, which was signed during the Obama administration in 2019.

The finding stated that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere "threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations," providing the legal underpinning for EPA actions during the Obama and Biden administrations to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. But with its elimination, greenhouse gases emitted from tailpipes on vehicles and factories are no longer subject to regulations from the federal government.

"Today, the Trump administration repealed the endangerment finding: the ruling that served as the basis for limits on tailpipe emissions and power plant rules," Obama said in a statement on X. "Without it, we’ll be less safe, less healthy and less able to fight climate change — all so the fossil fuel industry can make even more money."

More...

Calls for President Donald Trump to be impeached are growing amid an all-time low presidential approval rating and growing uncertainty over the Republican Party's congressional fate in the upcoming 2026 Midterm Elections. Here's what the polls show today, Feb. 12.

Adding to the mounting calls for Trump's impeachment are more organized protest rallies for next Tuesday, Feb. 17, called "National Day of Lobbying: Impeach Trump and Abolish Ice". They are planned to take place outside congressional offices across the country on that day to influence their local legislatures and demand that Congress impeach Trump, convict him of violations against the U.S. Constitution and remove him from office.

Adding to the mounting calls for Trump's impeachment are more organized protest rallies for next Tuesday, Feb. 17, called "National Day of Lobbying: Impeach Trump and Abolish Ice". They are planned to take place outside congressional offices across the country on that day to influence their local legislatures and demand that Congress impeach Trump, convict him of violations against the U.S. Constitution and remove him from office.

More...