TV News LIES

The American Library Association (ALA) has reported a record high in the number of books banned in US libraries.

In 2025, 5,668 books were banned – representing 66% of the total number challenged – with an additional 920 censored through access restriction, such as relocation on the library shelves.

The most-banned book in 2025 was Sold, a 2006 novel by Patricia McCormick about sex trafficking in India. Other frequently challenged titles include The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe and Empire of Storms by Sarah J Maas.

According to the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF), challenges were recorded against 4,235 unique titles in 2025. That figure is the second highest since the organisation began tracking censorship data more than 30 years ago, topped only by 4,240 titles in 2023.

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A day after Virginia voters passed a redistricting referendum expected to net Democrats more House seats, a Republican-appointed judge blocked its implementation.

Judge Jack Hurley ruled that the redistricting was unconstitutional and issued an injunction preventing certification of the election. Hurley previously ruled that the referendum should not go to voters, but the state Supreme Court overruled him.

Virginians for Fair Elections, a group that backed the referendum, also slammed the decision.

“Republicans lost,” the group said. “Now they’re trying to overturn the will of the voters in court and trying to relitigate an election they couldn’t win.”

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Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) is holding up hundreds of Coast Guard promotions over an issue with Eastern Shipbuilding Group, a Florida shipbuilder.

In a statement to The Hill on Wednesday, Scott said he has questions about what happened with contracts with the company since President Trump took office and “they haven’t been answered yet.”

Eastern Shipbuilding Group, based in Panama City, in 2016 won a multibillion-dollar deal with the Coast Guard to deliver four new Offshore Patrol Cutters (OPC).

But the company, which was supposed to deliver the first such ship in June 2023, hit several snags in production. Then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem last year decided to cut the order from four down to two vessels, citing “failing to meet delivery agreements.”

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President Donald Trump’s pick to run the Navy is exiting "effective immediately" as the U.S. naval blockade has become a key issue in the war and as Iran grows more aggressive on the waters, seizing two ships on Wednesday.

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell announced Secretary John C. Phelan’s exit Wednesday afternoon without elaborating on what prompted the move. The former Trump campaign donor’s departure comes as Iran tightens its grip over the Strait of Hormuz and as Trump says he will not call off his blockade of Iranian ports.

A ceasefire between the United States and Iran remains in effect after Trump extended the break in hostilities. But tensions on the water remain high. Iran views the naval blockade as an act of war and has signaled it is holding up further peace negotiations. The president says he’s waiting on the Islamic republic to deliver a "unified proposal" for peace.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps seized two vessels for alleged maritime violations and escorted them to Iran's shores, according to the semi-official Tasnim news agency. The ships were the first seized since the beginning of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran began Feb. 28.

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Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei on Wednesday said his country has not decided whether to join another round of negotiations with the U.S., after President Donald Trump extended the ceasefire between the two countries indefinitely.

Baghaei blamed the Trump administration, saying "Washington keeps changing its stance hour by hour and lacks consistency and a unified approach in its decisions," according to Iranian state television.

Iranian and U.S. officials were expected to begin a second round of peace talks on Wednesday, but the trip was delayed as Iran had not agreed to participate. Trump then announced that he was extending the ceasefire until Iran's leaders can "come up with a unified proposal."

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Israeli forces dispersed a student protest in the village of Umm al-Khair on Sunday, after barring Palestinian residents from accessing schools for over a week.

Khalil Hathaleen, a local education official and a parent of two students, told Middle East Eye that his children were among 55 students barred from schools for the second week.

Israeli troops, armed and accompanied by security dogs, were stationed alongside their vehicles at the protests, which were mostly attended by schoolchildren.

The demonstration was sparked after residents were prevented from accessing a vital road between Khirbet Umm al-Khair and the nearby village of Umm al-Khair, south of Hebron in the occupied West Bank. Dozens of students were left unable to attend school.

“Our message is clear, it is that today, they are attempting to take away our rights to education,” Hathaleen said.

“Our goal is clear in our demands to the right to education through safe routes to our children, a safe education and the end to demolitions in Khirbet Umm al-Khair.”

The main route connecting the village to external resources was first blocked over 10 days ago by settler leader Nivo, who holds a security role in the neighbouring Carmel settlement.

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Former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, when asked to explain the apparent about-face that led him to advocate the unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, quoted a beloved Israeli pop ballad. “What you can see from there, you can’t see from here,” he said, referring to the shift in perspective he had supposedly undergone since coming to power.

Although the 2005 Gaza disengagement was perhaps less a change of heart than one of strategy, as his senior adviser later admitted, the lyric became a byword of Israeli politics, an oft-cited reminder that perspective is everything.

Israeli-born Holocaust historian Omer Bartov invoked the same line when he was asked how he had come to view Israel’s ferocious assault on Gaza as a genocide. Living in the US, where he has spent more than three decades, he said, had given him the necessary distance to see the annihilation of Gaza for what it was. “I think it’s very hard to be dispassionate when you’re there,” he said.

Bartov did more than simply apply the word genocide to Israel’s actions: he shouted it from the establishment-media rooftops, making the case in a lengthy July 2025 essay in the New York Times titled: I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It. (He had addressed some of the arguments in a Guardian essay the year prior.) Bartov’s declaration cost him several close relationships, he told me, even though subsequent events have not only validated his analysis but further demonstrated the lack of concern for Palestinian suffering that has become prevalent in Israeli society.

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Texas can require the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms, a US appeals court ruled Tuesday in a victory for conservatives who have long sought to incorporate more religion into schools.

It sets up a potential clash at the US supreme court over the issue in the future.

The fifth circuit court of appeals said in the decision that the law did not violate either the establishment clause or the free exercise clause of the first amendment.

The law is among the pushes by Republicans, including Donald Trump, to incorporate religion into public schools. Critics say it violates the separation of church and state while backers argue that the Ten Commandments are historical and part of the foundation of US law.

The ruling comes after the full court heard arguments in January in the Texas case and a similar case in Louisiana. The appeals court in February cleared the way for Louisiana’s law, requiring displays of the commandments in public school classrooms. The fifth circuit court of appeals voted 12-6 to lift a block that a lower court had first placed on the law in 2024.

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