TV News LIES

Large swaths of Central Oregon have become consumed by wildfire, with several blazes burning across the region simultaneously, forcing thousands to evacuate and further stretching the state’s limited firefighting resources.

Over the weekend, the Bench Fire just west of Madras quickly grew to more than 20,000 acres with 0% containment. That led to Level 3 “Go Now” evacuation orders for the entirety of Warm Springs and other areas of Jefferson County.

Officials said Monday at least six homes and five outbuildings had been destroyed.

The Beachcomb Fire, also located near the reservation, combined with the Bench Fire by Sunday. On Monday morning, officials announced the two fires were together being called the Bench Fire and had collectively burned more than 40,000 acres.

Highway 26 was temporarily closed at one point over the weekend between Warm Springs and Madras as firefighters worked to get the fire under control. The highway closed again Sunday between Prineville and John Day, except to local traffic and local deliveries, and had not reopened as of Monday morning.

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Diary entries released by a Republican senator in an attempt to damage Anthony Fauci also show the former top US government science adviser’s growing disillusionment with Donald Trump in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, branding the president “rambling”, “crazy”, “desperate”, “bumbling”, “incompetent”, “an idiot”, “a true embarrassment”, “totally nuts” and “truly an obnoxious adolescent”.

From the earliest days of the crisis six years ago, Fauci noted in his journal challenging interactions with the publicity-fixated Trump. On 27 February 2020, amid the first stirrings of public alarm, he wrote of a surprise late-night call, in which the US president “wanted to chat about the coronavirus situation in general”.

For “about 20-25 minutes”, Fauci wrote, he “encouraged [Trump] not to underplay the seriousness of the situation since if it turns out bad, it would look like he is covering up. I even spoke to him from a political standpoint that his chances for re-election might be more damaged if he downplayed the potential spread of virus in the USA than if he said we may face serious problems and even if the Stock Market goes down further, he was at least honest and the country would respect him for it.

“I thought that he heard what I said, but the next day, he again underplayed it.”

By 14 March, in the thick of the first Covid shutdowns, Fauci is bemoaning Trump’s fixation on “the fluff of ratings and publicity. And so he wants us to do 2 press conferences/day – one in AM and one in PM … We now will have no time to do work.”

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A tornado struck north-eastern Wisconsin on Monday, blackening the midday sky and sending workers sheltering in office basements as ferocious winds splintered homes, scattered twisted metal across a highway and knocked out power to more than 30,000 people.

The National Weather Service confirmed a tornado in Winnebago county, about 90 miles (145km) north-west of Milwaukee. Damage was reported in cities including Appleton and Menasha, where police chief Matt Albrecht said some homes and businesses were “severely impacted”.

The tornado ripped roofs off homes and flipped vehicles in Menasha, just blocks from the shores of Lake Winnebago. Video showed a trail of destruction, with some homes reduced to their outer walls.

Greg Van Driest was working in downtown Appleton when the sky got as dark as night.

“The word we all were using was ‘ominous’,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Whoa, look at that …’ You looked outside and you thought it was three in the morning, it was that dark.”

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A controversial move by the Pentagon to reclassify casualties in the Iran war is being taken by US military veterans as a sign of disrespect for the dead.

“It’s such a huge disrespect for the families,” said Michael E Smith, a retired US rear admiral and the founder of National Security Leaders for America. “To claim that they weren’t killed as a result of the war – oh, it was just overseas operations – is just ludicrous.”

In a quiet weekend update to the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS), a military database for displaying casualties, the US Department of Defense – renamed the Department of War under Donald Trump – added more than 140 wounded service members.

They also introduced a new casualty category labeled “Overseas Operations” for personnel killed and wounded “starting July 7” which splits the count from the beginning of the US-Israel war on Iran.

Four US service members killed in action by Iranian forces fall under that category: 1st Lt Tyler James Feehan, Pvt Isabella Gonzales, Sgt Angel S. Rampersad and Sgt Michael Emmanuel Swinton.

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The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has continued to spread, with the number of confirmed infections rising to 3,200.

The country's health authorities say that 1,405 people have died from the virus since the outbreak began in late April, with the current fatality rate standing at 43.9%.

Almost 90% of cases have been detected in the northeastern province of Ituri, near the borders with Uganda and South Sudan, according to the World Health Organization.

Experts believe that the actual number of cases may be much higher, with a large number of cases going undetected or unreported. However, authorities attributed part of the sharp increase to improved detection and expanded testing.

The outbreak, declared on May 15, has spread to five provinces in the country's conflict-scarred east.

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Israeli settlers on Sunday launched a series of widespread attacks across the West Bank, setting on fire two mosques in Nablus and Tulkarm and damaging heavy equipment at an industrial facility near Ramallah.

Eyewitnesses told Middle East Eye that settlers also raided several towns and villages, attacked homes, destroyed vehicles and fired live ammunition to terrorise residents.

The attacks targeted communities in the governorates of Nablus, Tulkarm, Ramallah, Hebron, Salfit, Qalqilya, Jericho and Jerusalem, according to Palestinian officials who said settlers were acting under the protection of Israeli forces.

In the village of Qusra, south of Nablus, Israeli settlers burned large parts of the al-Rahma mosque and spray-painted racist slogans in Hebrew on its walls.

Activist Abdul-Azim Wadi, from the village, told MEE that he received a call at 2:30 am informing him that settlers had burned the mosque, located in the southwestern part of the village.

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Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayor, is “fomenting hate” by calling the Israeli prime minister a war criminal who should be arrested over Israel’s war in Gaza if he visits the city for the United Nations general assembly.

Netanyahu said he intends to be in New York in September to address the annual UN gathering of world leaders, despite the mayor’s suggestion that he is not welcome. Mamdani said on Wednesday that while New York City does not have legal authority to execute an arrest warrant issued by the world’s top war crimes court, he encouraged the federal government to do so.

“He’s supposed to be the mayor of all New Yorkers – Jews, Christians, Muslims, everyone,” Netanyahu said on the Fox News channel’s Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo. “But he’s trying to turn one group against the other.”

The prime minister has become an increasingly polarizing figure over Israel’s war in Gaza, which was ignited by the 7 October 2023 deadly attack on southern Israel by Hamas militants. Israel also joined the US in starting the war against Iran on 28 February before launching a ground invasion in southern Lebanon in response to fire from the Iranian-backed Hezbollah group.

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At least 40 million people were under extreme heat warnings across central and southern parts of the United States on Sunday as high temperatures and severe humidity gripped large swaths of the country for a second straight day.

Heat indexes well above 100F (38C) stretched from Minnesota down to Mississippi, extending west into southern California and Nevada. Parts of the south-west were expected to see highs of 120F (49C), according to the National Weather Service.

Meteorologists said the sweltering weather was the result of another heat dome – a phenomenon in which atmospheric conditions trap heat, accentuating and prolonging already high temperatures.

“It’s extraordinarily hot,” said Pete Miller, an outreach manager for the homeless services network Threshold CoC, which was passing out water bottles to residents in Omaha, Nebraska, on Sunday.

“We’re seeing a lot of people who are exhausted, drained by the heat in a way that is really dangerous,” Miller added. “The humidity is insane. You stand outside for 30 seconds and you get drenched. And it’s going to be like that all night.”

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