TV News LIES

The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has moved to strip thousands of federal health agency employees of their collective bargaining rights, according to a union that called the effort illegal.

HHS officials confirmed Friday that the department is ending its recognition of unions for a number of employees and reclaiming office space and equipment that had been used for union activities.

It’s the latest move by the Trump administration to put an end to collective bargaining with unions that represent federal employees. Previously affected agencies include the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

In May, an appeals court said the administration could move forward with Donald Trump’s executive order that the president aimed at ending collective bargaining rights for hundreds of thousands of federal employees while a lawsuit plays out.

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Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp resigned on Friday after a cabinet meeting failed to agree to sanctions against Israel.

The centre-right New Social Contract Party, of which Veldkamp is a member, withdrew from the governing coalition after the resignation, adding to growing political chaos in the country.

Veldkamp had said on Thursday that he wanted new measures against Israel over its iron-fisted tactics in the Gaza war against Hamas.

Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp resigned on Friday after a cabinet meeting failed to agree to sanctions against Israel.

The centre-right New Social Contract Party, of which Veldkamp is a member, withdrew from the governing coalition after the resignation, adding to growing political chaos in the country.

Last month the Netherlands declared far-right Israeli ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich persona non grata. It was also among 21 countries that signed a joint declaration on Thursday condemning Israel's approval of a major West Bank settlement project as "unacceptable and contrary to international law".

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Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was wrongly deported in March before being brought back to the U.S., was released from criminal custody in Tennessee and on his way to Maryland, an attorney for Abrego Garcia told ABC News.

The Salvadoran native had been in criminal custody since the federal government brought him back to the U.S. in June to face human smuggling charges.

Once he is is released, immigration authorities will not be allowed to detain Abrego Garcia due to a ruling from a federal judge who last month ordered the government to return him to Maryland andblocked the administration from deporting him upon his release in Tennessee.

In a statement released by the immigrant advocacy organization CASA, Abrego Garcia said: "Today has been a very special day because I have seen my family for the first time in more than 160 days. I’d like to thank all the people who have supported me because after this long time I have witnessed that so many people have been by my side with such positivity." The statement went on to say: "Today I am grateful to God because He has heard me and today I am out. We are steps closer to justice, but justice has not been fully served.”

Abrego Garcia's lawyers said this week that they hired a private security company to bring him to Maryland.

An attorney representing Kilmar Abrego Garcia told ABC News Friday that while his client's release brings some relief, he is "far from safe."

"For the first time since March, our client Kilmar Abrego Garcia is reunited with his loving family," said Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg. "While his release brings some relief, we all know that he is far from safe. ICE detention or deportation to an unknown third country still threaten to tear his family apart. A measure of justice has been done, but the government must stop pursuing actions that would once again separate this family."

One source told ABC News that Abrego Garcia received a notice to report to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Baltimore on Monday.

Abrego Garcia must remain in the custody of his brother in Maryland, according to his release order.

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Court papers in a voting technology company’s $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News point to Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs and Jeanine Pirro as leaders in spreading false stories about election fraud in the weeks after Democrat Joe Biden’s victory over President Donald Trump in 2020.

Arguments for summary judgment by Smartmatic were filed in lightly redacted form this week at the New York Supreme Court. It’s like a bad rerun for Fox: Similar revelations about its conduct following the 2020 election came in a lawsuit by another company falsely accused of doctoring votes, Dominion Voting Systems. Fox agreed to pay Dominion $787 million in a 2023 settlement after the judge found it was “CRYSTAL CLEAR” that none of the claims against the voting system company were true.

In short: Fox let Trump aides spread conspiracy theories despite knowing they were false because it was what their viewers wanted to hear. Fox was trying to hold on to viewers who were angry at the network for saying Biden had won the election.

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The Trump administration has fired the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, in the latest in a series of moves to purge the U.S. intelligence community and install Trump loyalists in top positions, lawmakers said Aug. 22.

Kruse’s departure was first reported by The Washington Post, citing unnamed sources who didn’t immediately specify a reason for the dismissal other than “loss of confidence.” The Post later reported that two other military leaders were pushed out after Kruse: Vice Adm. Nancy Lacore, the chief of the Navy Reserve, and Rear Adm. Milton Sands, a Navy SEAL officer who oversaw the Naval Special Warfare Command.

Kruse’s firing follows a preliminary assessment from the DIA in June that concluded that U.S. military strikes against three of Iran’s main nuclear sites did not demolish them as President Trump had claimed, but only resulted in setting the Iranian nuclear program back by several months. That prompted a strong pushback from the Trump Administration and subsequent intelligence findings by the Defense Department and CIA that the damage was more significant.

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A federal judge has ruled that the State Department cannot use President Donald Trump’s latest travel ban to deny visas to foreigners who apply for them.

The decision issued Thursday by U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan applies only to 82 would-be immigrants and comes with a major caveat: It still allows immigration authorities to deny the foreign citizens entry to the U.S. by turning them away at a port of entry or instructing airline officials to refuse them boarding.

Sooknanan, a Biden appointee based in Washington, ruled that the federal law Trump invoked in June to limit entry to the U.S. by citizens of 19 countries does not give the State Department the power to deny visas.

Lawyers for the Trump administration asked Sooknanan to accept the “longstanding practice” of the State Department to refuse visas to people whose entry would be blocked by a presidential order.

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The FBI is searching the Maryland home and Washington office of John Bolton, who served in President Donald Trump’s first administration as national security adviser but later became critical of the president, as part of an investigation into the handling of classified information, a person familiar with the matter said Friday.

Bolton was not detained and has not been charged with any crimes, said the person, who was not authorized to discuss the investigation by name and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.

After the search at Bolton’s home started, he was spotted Friday morning standing in the lobby of the Washington building where he keeps an office and talking to two people with “FBI” visible on their vests. He left a few minutes later and appeared to have gone upstairs in the building.

Messages left with a spokesperson for Bolton and the White House were not immediately returned. A lawyer who has represented Bolton had no immediate comment.

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Figures from a classified Israeli military intelligence database indicate five out of six Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza have been civilians, an extreme rate of slaughter rarely matched in recent decades of warfare.

As of May, 19 months into the war, Israeli intelligence officials listed 8,900 named fighters from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad as dead or “probably dead”, a joint investigation by the Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call has found.

At that time 53,000 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli attacks, according to health authorities in Gaza, a toll that included combatants and civilians. Fighters named in the Israeli military intelligence database accounted for just 17% of the total, which indicates that 83% of the dead were civilians.

That apparent ratio of civilians to combatants among the dead is extremely high for modern warfare, even compared with conflicts notorious for indiscriminate killing, including the Syrian and Sudanese civil wars.

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