TV News LIES

Pressure is mounting on Israel to scrap its plans to expand settlements in the West Bank ahead of a meeting between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House.

The Israeli prime minister has authorised steps that would make it easier for Israeli settlers to buy land in the occupied West Bank, while granting Israel broader powers in an area the Palestinians see as the heartland of a future state.

Eight U.S. Democratic senators on Tuesday urged Trump to oppose the settlements, which they said would go against the country’s longstanding policy on the issue, as well as the president’s own position.

The group’s statement reads: “We have long expressed our concern that these reckless moves make the possibility of a two-state solution, where Israelis and Palestinians can live side by side in peace and security, further out of reach.

“We urge Prime Minister Netanyahu to reverse course. When President Trump meets with Prime Minister Netanyahu this week, we also urge the president to clearly reinforce the opposition of the U.S. government to Israeli government actions that set the conditions for irreversible annexation.”

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The White House has deleted a social media post in which the vice-president, JD Vance, referred to the Armenian genocide, prompting anger from members of the Armenian diaspora as well as opposition politicians across the US.

The post was made during Vance’s two-day trip to Armenia to mark a visit by Vance and his wife, Usha Vance, to a memorial for the up to 1.5 million Armenians killed by Ottoman troops more than a century ago. The now-deleted post on Vance’s official X account said he was visiting the memorial to honour “the victims of the Armenian genocide”.

It marked the first time the Trump administration had used the word genocide to describe the massacres. An aide to Vance later told reporters that the message had been posted in error on social media by staff who were not travelling with Vance.

It was the second time in the past week that the administration cited staff error to explain its social media content; last week, after Donald Trump sought to dismiss the uproar over a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, the US president said it had been erroneously posted by a staffer.

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Newly released evidence has shown that Gregory Bovino, a border patrol chief who was the face of the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts until last month, praised a federal agent who shot a Chicago woman during an immigration crackdown last year.

Marimar Martinez, a US citizen, was shot five times by a border patrol agent in October while in her vehicle. She was charged with a felony after officials at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) accused her of trying to ram agents with her vehicle. But the case was abruptly dismissed after video evidence emerged showing that an agent had steered his vehicle into Martinez’s car.

Lawyers for Martinez have pushed to make evidence in the dismissed criminal case public, saying they were especially motivated to do so after a federal agent fatally shot Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis under similar circumstances.

The new evidence – which includes emails, text messages and videos – was released this week after a US district judge, Georgia Alexakis, lifted a protective order. Federal prosecutors had argued the documents could “further sully” reputation of the agent who shot Martinez.

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Ukrainian forces repelled major Russian assaults in a single day in the Pokrovsk direction (Donetsk region), killing around 90 Russian soldiers.

In a Jan. 31 Telegram report, the Spartan National Guard brigade said it had jointly repelled a Russian assault alongside the “Ptakhy Madyara” unit and adjacent forces, as Moscow committed up to 90 assault troops to the attack.

“The enemy attempted an offensive in the Pokrovsk direction. Under the cover of fog, the enemy tried to advance using cars, motorcycles, and ATVs,” the report said.

Ukrainian units stopped the assault completely, destroying Russian manpower and equipment.

“Spartan, together with adjacent units, repelled the enemy assault - almost four platoons of Russians were destroyed in a single day,” the brigade said.

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For 200 days, Abu Ismail Hammad has been digging beneath his home in Gaza City, painstakingly collecting the remains of his wife and unborn child. He has been using a flour sifter to find their bone fragments hidden in the sand.

His entire family was killed just under two months into Israel’s genocidal assault, when an airstrike hit their home in the Sabra neighborhood on December 6, 2023. His five children—Ismail, Mohammed, Ghaith, Jana, and Joudi—aged between eight to 16 years old, were all killed, along with his wife, Naama Alaa Al-Din Hammad. Naama was nine months pregnant with their sixth child, a girl they were planning to name Haifa, after her martyred aunt. His brother, sister-in-law and all of their children were also killed.

Hammad had left the apartment to go upstairs to another floor just 15 minutes before the strike. He was badly injured in the attack. Hammad was the sole survivor.

Wounded and displaced, and with the war raging, it took him a year before he was able to return, at the end of 2024, to begin trying to recover their bodies. After a few weeks, he was forced to stop again as Israel’s assault in the area intensified again. In November, soon after the so-called ceasefire went into effect, Hammad returned once more to find them.

He showed Drop Site pictures of them all together, smiling before the war, their faces slightly distorted by his heavily cracked phone screen.

Hammad spent weeks clearing away tons of rubble and then began to dig. “I was able to recover my brother, his wife, and their children. When I reached the living room in my home, it became clear that it was completely burned. I realized that the fate of my children was unknown—that they were burned and their bones had melted away. I then went to the room where my wife had been and I found her bones,” Hammad told Drop Site News. “How did I know it was my wife? First, the location of the room. Second, the bones of the unborn child were found in the same place, because the pregnancy was complete.”

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The unexpected shutdown of the entire airspace over El Paso, Texas, was reportedly related to federal officials disagreeing about the safety of anti-drone tests near the El Paso International Airport after the U.S. military shot down a party balloon earlier this week that it mistook for a drone.

The Federal Aviation Administration abruptly ordered the airspace’s closure Tuesday night after the Defense Department started testing new counter-drone technology involving a high-energy laser near the Fort Bliss Army base, ahead of planned meetings with the FAA to discuss its safety, CBS News and The New York Times reported, citing multiple sources.

FAA officials had warned the Pentagon that it could close the airspace if it was not given proper time to carry out a safety review. After the testing commenced anyway, resulting in the balloon’s destruction, the FAA ordered the airspace’s closure without alerting the White House, Pentagon or Homeland Security officials, sources told The Times.

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Attorney General Pam Bondi went toe-to-toe with lawmakers in a heated hearing on Wednesday as the country’s top lawyer appeared before the House Judiciary Committee for the first time since taking office.

Bondi fielded questions on issues ranging from pending investigations into adversaries of President Trump to immigration, but the most tense exchanges came amid questions about the Epstein files.

The attorney general was seated with a large binder that she referenced repeatedly as she lobbed insults at lawmakers, citing specific crimes in their districts or boasting about the performance of the stock market.The repetition began to prompt groans from Democrats, and Bondi so frequently referenced the guide that at one point Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) quipped he would “like to see you flip to the Jared Moskowitz section of the binder. I’m interested to see what staff provided on the oppo on me.”

Here are four takeaways from a combative hearing.:

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Gallup will no longer track presidential approval ratings after more than eight decades doing so, the public opinion polling agency confirmed to The Hill on Wednesday.

The company said starting this year it would stop publishing approval and favorability ratings of individual political figures, saying in a statement it “reflects an evolution in how Gallup focuses its public research and thought leadership.”

“Our commitment is to long-term, methodologically sound research on issues and conditions that shape people’s lives,” a spokesperson for the agency said. “That work will continue through the Gallup Poll Social Series, the Gallup Quarterly Business Review, the World Poll, and our portfolio of U.S. and global research.”

The Gallup Presidential Approval Rating has for decades been the among the top barometers cited by media outlets measuring public opinion of the president’s performance.

President Trump has seen his rating by the agency slip in recent months, peaking at 47 percent last February and dipping to less than 37 percent in its last poll taken in December.

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