TV News LIES

The Microsoft founder Bill Gates told US members of Congress that the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein had sought to “blackmail” him over his extramarital affairs, according to a transcript of the testimony.

The tech pioneer testified behind closed doors before the House oversight committee on 10 June regarding his friendship with Epstein, who died in prison in 2019 as he awaited trial for sex crimes.

According to the transcript released by the committee on Tuesday, Gates spoke of “veiled” threats and said Epstein had considered exploiting his own knowledge of Gates’s extramarital affairs to force him to remain in Epstein’s orbit, even as Gates was distancing himself from Epstein.

“I was not blackmailed, but you know, as you look at these emails, you know, it looks like Mr Epstein’s brainstorming was going in that direction,” Gates added, referring to documents from the Epstein case released in January by the US Department of Justice.

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France recorded its hottest day ever Tuesday as an early heat wave gripped Europe, prompting the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre museum to restrict visiting hours and disrupting school and transportation schedules in multiple countries.

Punishing temperatures extended to the United Kingdom and Spain, where weather agencies issued red alerts — like France — about the risks of extreme heat for tens of millions of people.

The record of 29.8 C (85.6 F) for France's national thermal indicator — an average of temperatures measured at 30 weather stations — was only the latest in a series of never-before-registered highs heaped on Europe's largest country. The conditions were likely to persist at least until the weekend.

"Further record-breaking temperatures are expected, including some that could surpass all previous records, regardless of the time of year," the Meteo France weather service said.

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Michigan is not obligated to hand over sensitive voter data to the Trump administration, a federal appeals court decided on Wednesday.

A divided three-judge panel for the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Title III of the 1960 Civil Rights Act does not authorize the Justice Department to compel the state to provide its unredacted voter roll, which contains the dates of birth, partial social security numbers and driver’s license numbers of every registered voter in the state.

Judge Andre Mathis, a Biden appointee, authored the majority opinion. He was joined by Senior Judge R. Guy Cole Jr., a Clinton appointee.

Judge John Nalbandian, who was nominated by President Trump in his first term, dissented.

The Justice Department has filed lawsuits against 30 states and the District of Columbia in an attempt to force compliance with its demand, but those efforts have been repeatedly rejected at the district court level. Its cases against California, Oregon, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Arizona, Wisconsin, Maine and Maryland have also been dismissed.

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A federal judge on Wednesday permanently barred President Donald Trump's administration from implementing most of his first executive order on elections, part of which sought to require people to show documentary proof of citizenship when they register to vote.

The ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper in Boston effectively converts a preliminary injunction she issued a year ago, in which she temporarily blocked many of Trump's efforts to overhaul elections, into a permanent ban.

Casper rejected the administration's argument that the lawsuit to block the changes brought by Democratic state attorneys general was premature because the rules had yet to be implemented. Instead, she agreed that the Constitution gives states and Congress the authority to regulate elections, and that Trump's requirements violated the separation of powers.

The Constitution "does not grant the President any specific powers over elections," she wrote.

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President Donald Trump abruptly canceled a signing ceremony for landmark housing affordability legislation Wednesday, saying he wanted Republicans in Congress to pass a major election reform bill first.

A couple hours later, Trump arrived at Capital Hill for a previously scheduled lunch with Republican senators.

Addressing whether the SAVE America Act, a bill that affects voter registration laws, is more important than the housing bill, he said: “Every election is important. They want a lot of communists to come in.”

The housing bill, which passed the Senate and House of Representatives by large, bipartisan margins this week, was a significant – and rare – victory on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers and experts called it a sweeping "first step" in tackling the nation's housing crunch.

If Congress remains in session, the housing bill can become law without the president's signature 10 days after it was presented to him.

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Soon after President Donald Trump’s self-congratulatory tour for “ending” the Gaza war last October, replete with ceremonies in which various kings, emirs, and presidents praised him, Israel made clear it had no intention of respecting the terms of the deal. It continued to kill Palestinians on a near daily basis and began limiting the entry of the agreed upon life essentials to the Strip stipulated in the ceasefire agreement.

Nonetheless, Trump pulled off a coup the following month when he got the UN Security Council to endorse his Gaza plan. In an unprecedented move, the council endorsed the deployment of an international force that would not operate under the banner of the UN, but would instead be commanded and controlled by Trump and his private “Board of Peace”—to which states could buy in for $1 billion and receive permanent membership. In the big picture, Trump could wrap the future edicts of his board in the veneer of UN legitimacy.

As Israel steadily expanded its military attacks on Gaza and pushed its occupation forces deeper into the enclave instead of withdrawing and repositioning them as agreed, Hamas officials told Drop Site that they heard nothing from the Board of Peace until March.

Since then, the negotiations over Gaza’s future have been stuck in a diplomatic netherworld. Despite the pomp and circumstance manufactured by the White House after the signing of the deal and Trump’s promise to guarantee it, the U.S. has refused to hold Israel to any of its obligations. While Hamas fulfilled its part of the deal and handed over all of its captives to Israel, both alive and dead, Israel has repeatedly violated nearly every term of the agreement and has killed more than 1,000 Palestinians since the signing of the deal in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.

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A Palestinian citizen of Israel held by the internal security agency, Shin Bet, has died in hospital after being found unconscious in his cell, with his family and lawyers saying they found severe bruising on his body. 

According to a Haaretz report, Saber Amitel, 21, was arrested earlier this month and taken to Shikma prison in Ashkelon, where he was denied access to a lawyer. He was suspected of arms smuggling

Police told his attorneys and family that he had attempted to take his own life.

His family and legal team were only permitted to visit him after Haaretz enquired about the case.

When his lawyers visited him at Barzilai Hospital on 8 June, they found severe bruising on his body, according to Haaretz.

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Palestinian children are "increasingly unprotected", as Israel forces human rights organisations to cease or curtail work across the occupied Palestinian territories, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child warned on Monday. 

The committee condemned Israel's designation of civil society groups as "terrorists". Labelling NGOs as terrorist entities gives Israel legal cover to obstruct humanitarian work, including military raids, travel bans, personal financial sanctions, threats of arrest, destruction of records and, in some cases, "threats of secondary sanctions against partners".

he committee is made up of a body of 18 independent experts that work within the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (UN OHCHR).

The warning doesn't name any of the organisations they are alluding to, but in 2021 Israel outlawed six major Palestinian NGOs, including Adameer, Al-Haq, Bisan Center for Research and Development, Defense for Children International - Palestine, Union of Agricultural Work Committees and the Union of Palestinian Women's Committees. 

In January of this year, more than 50 international NGOs operating in occupied Palestine warned that recent registration measures imposed by Israel threatened to halt operations at a time of acute humanitarian need in Gaza.

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