TV News LIES

A Tennessee school district has banned Roots, the author Alex Haley’s groundbreaking novel and one of the most renowned and influential works about the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade.

Knox county schools (KCS) took that step under a state law that has disappeared hundreds of titles from school libraries and alarmed advocates of free expression.

First published in 1976, Roots: The Saga of an American Family tells the story of Kunta Kinte, who was brutally stolen from his home in the Gambia and taken to North America to be sold into the nightmare of slavery.

The novel chronicles six generations of Kinte’s descendants in the US to Haley himself; won the Pulitzer prize; and was later adapted into a mini-series.

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The Pentagon has quietly dismantled a program it is legally required to operate to prevent and respond to civilian deaths in US military operations, according to its internal watchdog.

A report released by the department’s inspector general concluded the US military no longer has the people, tools or infrastructure needed to comply with two federal statutes requiring it to maintain a functioning civilian casualty policy, and operate a Civilian Protection Center of Excellence (CP CoE).

Donald Trump’s administration has been accused of making deep cuts to the Pentagon’s civilian harm mitigation and response (CHMR) program, designed to handle training and procedures critical in limiting civilian harm in theaters of war.

While the program has not been officially canceled, the inspector general’s report said that funding had ended for a data management platform; committee meetings had halted; and many dedicated personnelhad been lost or reassigned.

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The Texas Supreme Court on Friday shut down Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) effort to penalize the dozens of Democratic legislators who fled the state last summer in an attempt to block a rare mid-decade redistricting effort.

Abbott asked the all-Republican court in an emergency petition last August to find that the Texas House’s Democratic leader, Houston Rep. Gene Wu, had vacated his office when he and more than 50 other Democrats refused to return to Texas to pass a new GOP-drawn congressional map.

In a Friday opinion, authored by Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock, the Lone Star State‘s high court rejected the request.

“Whatever wrong may have been committed by the absent House members, the Texas Constitution’s internal political remedies, none of which involve the judicial branch, were sufficient to the task of restoring the House’s ability to do business,” wrote Blacklock, who was first appointed to the bench by Abbott in 2018.

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Tina Peters, a former elections clerk who was the first local official convicted over efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election, will go free from prison after Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) commuted her sentence Friday.

Polis told Colorado Public Radio earlier in the day from the governor’s office that he would cut her almost nine-year prison sentence to 4 1/2 years. By June 1, she will have been in prison for more than 600 days.

The governor added that Peters “did not interfere with any election, did not have to do with ballot counting, but it was illegal access to the computer room.”

“She thought she was trying to back up the software before it was updated,” Polis said. “She did it illegally. There’s no question about it. And she deserves to go to prison. And I think this is a more appropriate, even harsh, frankly, sentence for that crime.”

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The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday rejected a bid by Virginia Democrats to revive a voting map designed to help their party wrest control of the U.S. House of Representatives from President Donald Trump’s fellow Republicans in November’s midterm elections.

The justices declined to halt a ruling by Virginia’s top court that blocked a voter-approved pro-Democratic map for the midterms, denying a request by Democrats in the state. The court’s action came in a brief and unsigned order that provided no rationale. No justice publicly dissented.

Democrats pursued the revised electoral map - crafted to flip four Republican-held U.S. House of Representatives seats to Democrats - as part of a nationwide political battle initiated last year by Trump to redraw the boundaries of U.S. electoral districts for partisan benefit.

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It's a date inked in infamy for generations of Palestinians.

Each year, on 15 May, millions mark the Nakba, or catastrophe, which refers to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist militias to make way for the creation of Israel in 1948.

In a premeditated military campaign, Zionist forces killed thousands of Palestinians, destroyed hundreds of villages and forcibly expelled 80 percent of the Palestinian population from their homeland.

After more than a year of relentless violence, the newly created State of Israel captured 78 percent of historic Palestine.

The remaining 22 percent, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, were occupied by Israel 19 years later and remain under Israeli military rule.

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Right now in the West Bank, Palestinians live under Israeli military law. They can be detained without charge, tried in military courts with conviction rates above 96 per cent, and subjected to emergency regulations that put the occupying power beyond any real legal challenge.

Their Israeli neighbours live under civil law. Two populations, two legal systems, one territory. It’s an arrangement most people would call unjust. What most people don’t know is that Britain designed it.

During 30 years of British rule over Palestine, we created the legal architecture that still operates today – the emergency powers, the military courts, the collective punishment, the dual legal system. We built it. And when we left in 1948, we didn’t dismantle it. It was picked up and carried on.

This is all laid out, in painstaking detail, in a 400-page legal petition put together by leading KCs and historians. The evidence is taken overwhelmingly from Britain’s own archives. It is our records that tell the story – and the story is damning.

The petition was submitted to the government by the Britain Owes Palestine campaign more than six months ago. There has yet to be a government response.

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Today marks Nakba Day, an annual day of remembrance to commemorate the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians between 1947 and 1949 during the creation of the State of Israel and the year that followed.

Inea is a New Yorker and a Nakba survivor. She shared her story with us — one of home, tradition and memory over generations.

View video here: