TV News LIES

When Leen Ezzeddine stood before her classmates at Harvard Medical School, the moment could have been framed as a familiar story of immigrant success: a Lebanese woman graduating as a doctor from one of the world’s most prestigious institutions.

But Ezzeddine chose to tell a different story.

In her graduation speech last week, she spoke of circumstance, borders, luck and the thin line separating her life from the lives of medical students in Lebanon and Palestine who share the same ambition but are made to study under drones, bombardment and displacement.

That line, for her, was not abstract. While she was pursuing her studies at Harvard, a US missile launched by Israel levelled her family home in Arab Salim, her mother’s village in southern Lebanon, in October 2024.

It was the village where she used to spend her summers, surrounded by cousins, relatives, and her grandparents, Hayat Chamseddine and Ali Zayour, who were later forced to leave and relocate to Beirut after their house was destroyed.

The contrast was stark: she was standing in Harvard as a new doctor, while the village that helped shape her childhood and family memories was being attacked.

That contradiction became the emotional and political centre of her intervention.

Her speech was not only about Gaza, or Lebanon, or the violence of war. It was about what it means to become a doctor inside an elite institution while entire communities are being denied the basic conditions of life.

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Journalists may no longer enter the Pentagon’s press office, which has been designated as a classified space amid growing moves to restrict press access to the defense department.

"This is the most transparent war department in history. No amount of spin from the Fake News media will change that,” Jose Valdez, the acting defense department press secretary, said in a social media post. “The Pentagon Press Office has been redesignated as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility due to speechwriters from the Office of the Secretary of War sharing the facility.”

Valdez added that, because speechwriters handle classified material, “journalists will no longer be permitted to enter the office space”.

The move was first reported by the Washington Post, and later confirmed by Valdez on social media.

The defense department, which the Trump administration prefers to call the war department, began rolling out new restrictions to press access in September, when the military demanded journalists pledge not to gather any information – including unclassified documents – that had not been authorized for release or else risk revocation of their press passes.

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The latest wave of anxiety followed a statement by Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz, who warned that there would be “no calm in Beirut” if Hezbollah’s attacks on Israeli forces and northern Israel continued.

“The Dahieh in Beirut is no different from the communities in northern Israel – if there is no calm in the north, there will be no calm in Beirut,” Katz said, referring to the densely residential area in Beirut's southern suburb.

The warning came as Israel intensified its ground and air offensive in Lebanon in recent days.

Hezbollah said its fighters were still confronting Israeli troops near the ancient Beaufort Castle, the strategic hilltop fortress in southern Lebanon, a day after Israel said it had seized it and raised the Israeli flag there.

Hezbollah said in a statement on Monday that its fighters were engaged in a “battle of attrition” against Israeli troops in the area.

Israel has framed its expanded campaign as an effort to push Hezbollah away from Israeli forces and residents in the north. Katz said the Israeli army was working to turn the area around the Litani River into a zone under its security control, “free of weapons and terrorists”.

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A team of UN experts has issued a “stark warning about surging Israeli settler terror” in the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem and “the existential risk it poses to Palestinian communities’ presence on the land”.

The group of 14, including the UN’s special rapporteur for Palestine, Francesca Albanese, cited a sharp increase in the number of Palestinian casualties in settler attacks this year, saying at least 13 had been killed and close to 500 injured in five months amid the “settler brutality”.

The experts said in a statement:

Relentless attacks by the settler-colonial movement, carried out with the support and acquiescence of the Israeli State, have become a daily terror in Palestinian lives, sowing fear, uncertainty and profound insecurity that inevitably compels the forcible displacement of the indigenous population..

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A smart drug that stops cancer cells “hiding” from treatment can shrink tumours by at least 30% in six of the world’s most common forms of the disease, early trial results show.

While immunotherapy treatments have improved survival rates for many patients, their effectiveness can stall or fail when tumour cells hide and then spread.

Researchers in Oxford have developed a drug designed to stop cancer cells concealing themselves from the immune system, allowing immunotherapy treatments to identify and destroy them.

In a trial spanning the UK, France, Spain and Australia, 83 patients with cervical, bladder, liver, bowel, lung or head and neck cancers were given the experimental drug, GRWD5769, alongside the immunotherapy treatment cemiplimab.

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Iran says it's suspending talks with U.S. if Israel does not halt its expanding offensive in Lebanon

Iran on Monday announced it was halting all communications with the U-S unless Israel stops its expanding military offensive in southern Lebanon, the semi-official Iranian news agency Tasnim said.

Referring to Israel, the news agency said that "given the continuation of the Zionist regime's crimes in Lebanon and considering t

It demanded an end to the "aggressive and brutal army operations in Gaza and Lebanon" and called for Israel's "complete withdrawal from the occupied areas in Lebanon."

There was no immediate confirmation from senior Iranian officials that diplomatic messages – mostly relayed via Pakistan between the warring parties – were being suspended.

hat Lebanon was one of the preconditions for the ceasefire and that this ceasefire has now been violated on all fronts, including Lebanon, the Iranian negotiating team is stopping 'talks and exchange of texts through a mediator.'"

It demanded an end to the "aggressive and brutal army operations in Gaza and Lebanon" and called for Israel's "complete withdrawal from the occupied areas in Lebanon."

There was no immediate confirmation from senior Iranian officials that diplomatic messages – mostly relayed via Pakistan between the warring parties – were being suspended.

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CBS News staffers sent a letter to Trump-aligned boss David Ellison to demand he uphold journalistic values, Ben Mullins, The New York Times’ media editor, shared Monday on X.

“Modernizing the show for new audiences and new delivery approaches is important – but not at the cost of editorial integrity,” part of the letter reads. “The wholesale dismissal of editorial management, without a public pledge to maintain the values, standards, and traditions of this program, puts the legacy of ’60 Minutes’ in jeopardy.”

The letter is signed by current and former “60 Minutes” staffers, as well as other prominent journalists and actors, including Dan Rather, Glenn Close, Alex Gibney and Lowell Bergman.

The letter follows a massive shakeup at “60 Minutes” and festering questions about the future of the venerable news program. HuffPost reached out to CBS News for comment.

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A federal judge has ordered the National Park Service not to interfere with a liberal organization’s display of an “86-47” flag at its ongoing demonstration near the National Mall, rejecting the contention that the phrase was meant as a coded call for violence against President Donald Trump.

U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss issued a two-week restraining order Monday at the request of Accountability Now USA, which has been protesting Trump for months at a site in front of the federal courthouse on Constitution Avenue.

Moss concluded that the group intended to advocate for Trump’s removal from office via impeachment, and that “86” is not an unambiguous call to political violence — and certainly not the kind of “imminent” violence that would be necessary to justify restrictions on speech.

“The Court does not doubt that political violence is on the rise and that it poses a grave threat not just to the targets of the threats but to the country as a whole.re But the enormity of that problem does not change the meaning of Plaintiff’s speech, which by any reasonable measure merely advocated for the President’s impeachment and removal from office — that is, ‘to throw [him] out,’” Moss wrote.

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