TV News LIES

When Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, announced that the US and Iran, along with their allies, had agreed to an immediate ceasefire on Tuesday night, he made clear that the truce applied “everywhere including Lebanon”. But hours later, the Israeli government insisted that the deal did not include halting its attacks on Lebanon, which had become one of the deadliest fronts of the regional war instigated by the joint US-Israeli attack on Iran.

By Wednesday afternoon, Israel had launched its largest and most destructive attack on Lebanon in years, killing at least 300 people and wounding more than 1,100. Dozens of Israeli warplanes dropped bombs on 100 targets across Lebanon within 10 minutes, with the Israeli military claiming it was targeting Hezbollah “command centers” in an operation it called “Eternal Darkness”. But Israeli warplanes leveled several buildings in crowded residential neighborhoods of Beirut, spreading panic in the Lebanese capital and overwhelming hospitals with hundreds of casualties. Israel also continued bombing Lebanon’s infrastructure, destroying the last remaining bridge that linked southern Lebanon to the rest of the country.

Israel’s escalating attacks on Lebanon could unravel the two-week ceasefire even before negotiations between the US and Iran, which are expected to start on Saturday in Islamabad. Iranian leaders are accusing the US of failing to uphold the truce and threatening to back out of it unless Washington restrains its ally. “The U.S. must choose – ceasefire or continued war via Israel. It cannot have both,” Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, wrote on Twitter/X on Wednesday. “The world sees the massacres in Lebanon. The ball is in the U.S. court, and the world is watching whether it will act on its commitments.”

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The U.S. military has launched operations to begin de-mining the Strait of Hormuz, U.S. Central Command (Centcom) said on Saturday.

Centcom said in a social media post highlighted by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that two Navy guided-missile destroyers began “setting conditions” for this mission on Saturday morning.

The USS Frank E. Peterson and USS Michael Murphy have previously operated in the Arabian Gulf to help clear the strait of sea mines set by Tehran, according to Centcom.

“Today, we began the process of establishing a new passage and we will share this safe pathway with the maritime industry soon to encourage the free flow of commerce,” Centcom Commander Adm. Brad Cooper said in the post.

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A U.S. Court of Appeals on Saturday said that construction of the White House ballroom can carry on temporarily after a judge halted construction late last month.

A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled 2-1 that the preliminary injunction be put on pause until April 17, allowing for construction to continue. The panel asked U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, appointed by former President George W. Bush, to clarify the order in an appeal.

The panel addressed the Trump administration’s appeal arguing that leaving the ballroom unfinished would “imperil” Trump and others who live and work in the White House.

“We cannot fairly determine, on this hurried record, whether and to what extent the district court’s ‘necessary for safety and security’ exception addresses Defendants’ claims of irreparable harm, insofar as it may accommodate the Defendants’ asserted safety and security need for the ballroom itself or other temporary measures to secure the safety and security of the White House, the President, staff, and visitors while this appeal proceeds,” the panel wrote in its ruling.

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A man wielding a machete stabbed three people on two New York City subway platforms before police fatally shot him on Saturday, April 11, city officials said.

At around 9:40 a.m., a bystander flagged two New York City police detectives, saying a man stabbed multiple people at Grand Central Terminal, in Midtown Manhattan, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch told reporters.

At around 9:40 a.m., a bystander flagged two New York City police detectives, saying a man stabbed multiple people at Grand Central Terminal, in Midtown Manhattan, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch told reporters.

Prior to NYPD’s arrival, the man is accused of stabbing an 84-year-old man on the 7 train subway platform, as well as a 70-year-old woman and a 65-year-old man on the 4, 5, 6 trains subway platform, police said.

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Twenty-three years ago, I sat beside Hamid Karzai in his presidential office in Kabul, watching US bombers pound Saddam Hussein’s Iraq live on Al Jazeera. 

It was clear the Afghan leader hated what he saw, concluding that the American-led war was mad and bad.

We both grimaced – and we were right. By invading Iraq, former US President George W Bush and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair incited a catastrophe. It led to civil war, hundreds of thousands of deaths, the trashing of international law, and trillions of dollars down the drain.

Today marks the 23rd anniversary of the fall of Baghdad, and the world is witnessing the same madness, bloodshed and horror – this time courtesy of another US president, Donald Trump.

In his Iran adventure, Trump naturally enjoys the support of Blair, who has criticised Prime Minister Keir Starmer for not showing stronger support for Britain’s allies in Washington.

But warmonger Blair has now retired from active politics. Trump’s primary ally in the Iran debacle is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Twenty-three years ago, Netanyahu (then an opposition politician) was one of the strongest advocates for the assault on Iraq.

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Former Columbia University student and Palestinian rights activist Mahmoud Khalil is now a step closer to being deported from the US after the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) issued a final removal order in his case on Thursday. 

The judges who make up the BIA do not operate as an independent judiciary. The BIA falls under the control of the executive branch of government - in this case, the Trump administration.

The same applies to all immigration courts, which operate under the purview of the Department of Justice. 

Khalil's lawyers maintain that the decision to remove him from the country is in direct retaliation for his pro-Palestine speech. They are going to appeal, they said in a statement.

Khalil has a separate, ongoing federal case regarding what his team said were violations of his constitutional rights, which means he cannot be rearrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or deported until that case is closed.

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The president of the United States threatened this week to commit genocide against Iran. As Israel engages in continued bombing in Lebanon, killing more than 200 people in a single day, that fact must never be scrubbed away, not least because there is no guarantee the threat will not be revived. But as we descend towards the abyss, we need to understand where our fall began.

“A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Donald Trump wrote on Tuesday. Just over a year ago, he announced: “A civilisation has been wiped out in Gaza.” The connection is not hard to trace. Trump knew Gaza had been razed by Israel, insisting it was “not a place for people to be living”. When he joined forces with the perpetrator of that genocide in an illegal war on Iran, the apocalyptic rubble of Gaza became a template.

For two and a half years, western politicians and media outlets normalised Israel’s wholesale shredding of international law. Opponents of the genocide in Gaza warned this would unleash a boundless violence. They were right.

The US-Israeli war on Iran began with the mass killing of 175 people, most of them schoolgirls, in the city of Minab. When it happened, there were hardly any outraged front pages, nor nearly enough strong denunciations of the US from western leaders. But what did we expect? The west had already normalised the killing of more than 20,000 Palestinian children. Many were incinerated in their beds; others deliberately shot in the head, chest and genitals, according to western doctors who served in Gaza. Now 763 Iranian schools are reportedly damaged or destroyed – but did the west not facilitate the same fate for almost every single school in Gaza?

According to the Iranian Red Crescent, 316 medical centres have also been severely damaged or destroyed, but did the west not normalise the Israeli attack on every hospital in Gaza and the killing of at least 1,722 health workers?

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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is making some of its staffers relocate and reassigning an even larger share of employees as part of its efforts to reorganize its scientific research.

The agency is reassigning a total of 124 staffers, 35 of whom are being asked to relocate.

The move comes as the Trump administration seeks to eliminate its Office of Research and Development and instead conduct scientific research in a new office housed within the office of the administrator.

An EPA spokesperson said via email Thursday that as part of the restructure, the agency “has issued reassignment notices to those employees who remain in the Office of Research and Development.”

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