TV News LIES

President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte on Wednesday to press for urgently needed air defense interceptors after a devastating Russian missile and drone attack killed 17 people and wounded more than 40 in Kyiv and the surrounding region.

The high-level call came just hours after Ukrainian air defenses failed to intercept any of the missiles Russia launched overnight – exposing one of the most dangerous gaps in the country’s defenses as Moscow intensifies ballistic attacks against Ukrainian cities.

“Today, I spoke with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte about the overall situation,” Zelensky wrote on social media.

“Mark is well-informed about the threats, and we coordinated our efforts regarding countries that have the necessary missiles and the capacity to help.”

“It is important to cut through all red tape and make the necessary political decisions,” he wrote.

More...

New Mexico filed a lawsuit against the US Department of Justice and the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, on Wednesday for “stonewalling” its criminal investigation into the activities of the late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein at a remote ranch in the state.

Raúl Torrez, the New Mexico attorney general, had said he was mulling the possibility of legal action if the justice department did not share with him by 31 July information about the alleged historical abuse of girls and young women at Epstein’s Zorro ranch about 30 miles south of Santa Fe.https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/05/new-mexico-sues-doj-epstein-investigation

Wednesday’s filing, seen by the Guardian, delivers on that threat after the justice department appeared to ignore last Friday’s deadline.

The lawsuit, filed in the US district court for the district of Columbia, alleges that Blanche and his department had “stonewalled” the state investigation Torrez reopened in February after the 10,000-acre Zorro property was mentioned thousands of times in recent releases of the so-called Epstein files.

More...

Donald Trump’s legal team is making an 11th-hour attempt to block a court order that would grant the BBC access to the president’s financial records, as part of his multibillion-dollar lawsuit against the British broadcaster.

Trump claims that the BBC’s 2024 documentary on the January 6 attacks have damaged the president’s business interests. In July, a Miami-based judge ruled that the president would have to start handing over detailed financial records to the BBC by 6 August. The records would reveal details into the hundreds of businesses owned by the US president’s family trust.

Trump’s attorneys asked the court on Wednesday to temporarily pause the enforcement of the court order, arguing the BBC had demanded a “shockingly broad amount of information based on clearly political motivations”.

Trump’s lawyers also asked the court to amend their initial lawsuit to instead focus on the “reputation harm” that was caused by the documentary, which would keep necessary disclosures “proportional to the needs of the case”, the lawyers said.

More...

Dozens of young children, including one who wore a pink shirt and spoke in a sing-song voice, appeared virtually in a Downtown Manhattan immigration court on Wednesday morning. Most lacked attorneys and were facing government lawyers alone as their ability to remain in the United States hung in the balance.

Immigration Judge Lisa Ling admonished one girl for failing to provide a completed asylum application, which the judge said was the third time that important task had been left undone. Without a completed asylum appliImmigration Judge Lisa Ling admonished one girl for failing to provide a completed asylum application, which the judge said was the third time that important task had been left undone. Without a completed asylum application or another form of immigration relief, Ling explained, she could order the child to be deported.

"> The day before yesterday I was going to get in touch with an attorney, but they didn’t call me,” the girl said in Spanish through an interpreter.

Ling replied, “I understand it’s difficult. But with or without an attorney, you need to fill out that application in English.”

The Trump administration allowed a $200 million federal contract providing lawyers for over 24,000 unaccompanied minors across the country to expire on Friday. On Tuesday, the officials announced that a new $150 million contract had been reached — but it won’t start until Aug. 15, leaving untold numbers of children across the country to potentially fend for themselves before immigration judges — as was the case during the virtual proceedings in Manhattan.

More...

Respiratory therapist Marcy Freeman doesn't need a research study to confirm for her a return to the dark days of coal mining. She finds evidence in a stack of more than 150 funeral programs, all for former patients at her pulmonary rehabilitation clinic in Norton, Virginia.

"Each one of these represents a life that's gone because of black lung," Freeman explained as she flipped through the programs, recognizing names and images.

"These are husbands. These are brothers. … These men were just hardworking men, and the only thing they did was go to work and provide for their families. And it cost them everything. … This is the aftermath of black lung."

This aftermath is more dire than even black lung clinicians and researchers expected, according to new data published Wednesday in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

More...

The White House and Pentagon have pushed back on a slate of recent reports indicating that supplies of both offensive and defensive weapons have dropped dangerously low after five months of war on Iran.

Experts have said that low supplies of air defence interceptors, particularly those used in Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) air defence systems, may pose a particular threat to US forces, with knock-on effects for allies in the region and beyond.

But in a statement provided to Al Jazeera on Tuesday by the White House, President Donald Trump pushed back on claims the US faced deficiencies in its current supply.

“We have far more munitions than anyone in the world, and far more than we need, despite the fact that an unprecedented amount was given away by Crooked Joe Biden and the Biden Administration to Ukraine and Europe at no cost, in one of many of their extremely dumb moves,” Trump said. He was referencing the Patriot interceptor transfers to Ukraine under former President Joe Biden following Russia’s invasion.

More...

Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic party upstart who just won a contentious primary in Michigan, says that if not for an "accident of history," he would have become a cab driver in Egypt like others in his family.

Instead, the 41-year-old Michigander is a Senate nominee after winning an Aug. 4 primary race against U.S. Rep Haley Stevens, an establishment Democrat pick who was backed by tens of millions of dollars from pro-Israel lobbyists. The race was closely watched around the nation as it is seen as a bellwether for where the Democratic Party is headed.

El-Sayed, a former public health official turned politician, offered up a vision of that direction in an Aug. 5 victory speech, where he reflected on the luck of his upbringing in suburban Detroit and what it means for his goals.

"But for an accident of history that allows my dad to immigrate to Detroit to go to Wayne State University, I would have been a cab driver in Egypt like my cousins," El-Sayed said in Detroit shortly after the primary race was called in his favor. "Except for I got to be born in America."

More...

Palestinians on Tuesday buried 112 members of a single clan killed in Israeli air strikes in November 2023, after their remains were recovered from beneath the rubble last month.

Relatives of the Abu Shari'a and al-Hasayna family gathered in Gaza City to bid a final farewell to their loved ones, whose bodies lay in rows draped in Palestinian flags.

For many, it was a moment of both relief and renewed grief after nearly 1,000 days of waiting to recover the bodies of their relatives.

"There is a feeling of both pain and joy," Amer Abu Shari'a, who lost relatives in the attack, told Middle East Eye.

"Joy because we will bury and honour these martyrs after three years. But the sorrow has returned, as if the massacre happened today."

The strike on the Sabra neighbourhood was one of the deadliest single-strike casualty events of the two-year genocide.

Israeli warplanes flattened an entire residential block where hundreds of members of the Abu Shari'a and al-Hasayna clan had been living and sheltering.

More...