TV News LIES

There's a conspiracy that Puerto Rican truck drivers are striking and delaying the delivery of crucial supplies — and Donald Trump may have bought into it.

Right-wing blogs The Conservative Treehouse and The Gateway Pundit recently published stories alleging that local unions were striking following the devastation of Hurricane Maria, preventing the delivery of food, water, and other crucial supplies.

The crux of the issue seems to be a quote from a Huffington Post interview with US Air Force Colonel Michael Valle, reports Snopes.

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The U.S. government has ordered 15 staff members from the Cuban Embassy in Washington to leave the country, a State Department official said Tuesday, a step intended to bring diplomatic operations between the two nations into parity after the U.S. cut its staff in Havana last week.

The official said the expulsion of Cuban diplomats should not be taken as an indication of a larger policy shift toward Havana, nor should it be read as the U.S. government blaming its Cuban counterparts for a series of sonic attacks against American diplomatic personnel. It was those attacks that prompted the State Department last week to order more than 60 percent of its embassy staff in Havana to leave the island.

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The detention of an unnamed U.S. citizen held by the military as an enemy combatant is increasingly a legal and human-rights emergency, national security lawyers and civil libertarian activists say—and a bellwether case for the unsettled question of what terrorism captures in Donald Trump’s administration will look like.

The executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Anthony Romero, wrote on Friday to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to urge the U.S. citizen’s  transfer to civilian custody, calling his military detention “unlawful as a matter of domestic law.”

Paul Weismann got the call for help Monday night at his home in Connecticut. By Tuesday afternoon, he was flying to Puerto Rico on his personal plane, with food, water, and power generators as his passengers.

“You fly over Puerto Rico on the way to the airport, and you see the place is wrecked,” Weismann told The Daily Beast. At night, “a few streets and highways are lit up, because of people and businesses with generators. But the rest of the island was just pitch black.”