TV News LIES

The White House has lost confidence in a Pentagon leak investigation that Pete Hegseth used to justify firing three top aides last month, after advisers were told that the aides had supposedly been outed by an illegal warrantless National Security Agency (NSA) wiretap.

The extraordinary explanation alarmed the advisers, who also raised it with people close to JD Vance, because such a wiretap would almost certainly be unconstitutional and an even bigger scandal than a number of leaks.

But the advisers found the claim to be untrue and complained that they were being fed dubious information by Hegseth’s personal lawyer, Tim Parlatore, who had been tasked with overseeing the investigation.

The episode, as recounted by four people familiar with the matter, marked the most extraordinary twist in the investigation examining the leak of an allegedly top secret document that outlined options for the US military to reclaim the Panama canal to a reporter.

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Donald Trump’s campaign against the legal profession hit another setback Tuesday as a federal judge struck down yet another executive order that sought to place sanctions one of the country’s most prestigious law firms.

The order in favor of WilmerHale marks the third time this month that a federal judge in Washington has deemed Trump’s series of law firm executive orders to be unconstitutional and has permanently barred their enforcement.

“The cornerstone of the American system of justice is an independent judiciary and an independent bar willing to tackle unpopular cases, however daunting. The Founding Fathers knew this!” wrote US district judge Richard Leon.

To permit the order to stand, Leon wrote, “would be unfaithful to the judgment and vision of the Founding Fathers”.

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered U.S. embassies to stop scheduling new interviews for certain visas, including those used by international students, according to a cable obtained by Politico.

The outlet reported that the Trump administration is considering implementing new vetting guidelines for those applying for F, M and J visas that takes into consideration the applicant’s social media footprint. The cable does not explicitly say what the Trump administration would be looking for, Politico said.

The change comes amid the president’s war on elite educational institutions like Harvard, which he claims is not doing enough to stop on-campus antisemitism, a term he defines to include support for Palestinians in Gaza.

TVNL Comment:  It is an outrage and a disgrace to even suggest that supporting Palestine and opposing the genocide in Gaza are acts of antisemitism.  Americans can no longer be beholden to Israel.  And yet they are required to be.

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The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to take up a challenge to a land swap enabling mining at a sacred Indigenous site, garnering pushback from conservative Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas.

A 2014 law enabled a land transfer between mining company Resolution Copper and the federal government, allowing the miner to take control of a site called Oak Flat in Arizona, which is sacred to the Western Apache.

A group called Apache Stronghold, which says it represents Apaches, other Native peoples, and non-Native allies, appealed the case to the Supreme Court, asking it to reverse a 9th Circuit decision on religious freedom grounds.

The high court declined to take up the case Tuesday without explaining its decision. However, Gorsuch issued a dissent, joined by Thomas.

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Maryland Democrat Rep. Glenn Ivey said he was denied access to meet with Kilmar Abrego Garcia during a recent trip to El Salvador.

Abrego Garcia, a union sheet metal worker and father of three from Maryland, was wrongly deported to the Central American country in March. He was taken to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, before being transferred to a facility with better conditions in April.

Ivey, who flew to El Salvador on May 23, told WJZ-TV in an interview that the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador had informed the Salvadoran government of his visit, but he was denied access to see Abrego Garcia.

In April, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, also a Maryland Democrat, traveled to El Salvador and met with Abrego Garcia. And four House Democrats took a trip in April to El Salvador and were briefed by the U.S. embassy on his case.

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The UN’s Population Fund (UNFPA) said international law must be upheld to protect people who need medical treatment as the Israeli military’s restrictions on travel in the occupied West Bank have endangering pregnant women.

“These restrictions could threaten the lives of more than 50 women who give birth every day” in the West Bank, the UN agency said.

In a post on social media, the agency quoted a Palestinian mother who was forced to wait three weeks to have stitches removed after a caesarean section birth.

“Snipers were targeting anything that moved on the road,” the mother from West Bank’s Tulkarem City was quoted as saying.

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Johann Strauss II's popular orchestral piece "By the Beautiful Blue Danube" has been inextricably linked to space since it was used in the 1968 classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The waltz played as a fictional spaceship docks with a space station, with expansive views of the Earth and the distant stars.

This week, the piece will take a more literal place among the stars when the European Space Agency broadcasts it into space.