TV News LIES

Kashyap Patel looked forward to his team’s Friday lunches. All the doctors from his oncology practice would gather in the open-air courtyard under the shadow of a tall magnolia tree and catch up. The atmosphere tended to the lighthearted and optimistic. But that week, he was distressed.

Websites that appear to covertly target mostly younger, progressive Americans with a pro-Israeli spin on the war in Gaza are linked to a company that’s being paid by the Israeli government to sway lawmakers and public opinion in the U.S., according to Israeli researchers and The New York Times.

A new report published Wednesday by FakeReporter, an Israeli watchdog group that tracks misinformation, identified five specific websites tied to an Israeli political consulting form called STOIC. The Times reported Wednesday that STOIC is being paid $2 million by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs to influence Democratic members of the U.S. Congress to maintain support for Israel, at a time when many Democrats are questioning continued U.S. military support to Israel amid rising civilian casualties and suffering in Gaza.

With the official start of summer still weeks away, a record-setting heatwave is cooking the south-western US, causing dangerous conditions far earlier than normal.

More than 34 million people were under heat alerts on Thursday afternoon, as warnings were issued from the southern tip of Texas across Arizona and Nevada, and up through the center of California to the northern part of the state.

The brutal conditions are expected to linger through Friday, according to the National Weather Service, as communities across the region brace for days of potentially life-threatening temperatures. Parts of California, the Great Basin and the south-west are forecast to break daily-high temperature records on Thursday and Friday, as Las Vegas, Nevada, and Phoenix, Arizona, hit 110F for the first time this year.

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Divers in Key West, Florida, have discovered more than a dozen packages of suspected cocaine in the Atlantic Ocean.

On Wednesday, the sheriff’s office in Monroe county announced the discovery, saying that divers found 25kg of individually wrapped packages of suspected cocaine that were located approximately 100ft underwater.

“The sheriffs responded to the Rainbow Reef Dive Center in Key Largo at approximately 12.25pm where divers stated they were removing what they thought was trash when the discovery was made,” the sheriff’s office said.

A photo posted on Facebook showed a ripped black garbage bag next to the gray packages of suspected cocaine. Each of the packages was wrapped in clear plastic and marked with a blue “Nike SB” sign and the Nike swoosh logo.

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Supreme Court justices have received nearly $5 million in gifts since the early 2000s, and one justice in particular, Justice Clarence Thomas, accounts for nearly all of it.

Data released Thursday by watchdog group Fix the Court unveils a list of gifts justices have received since January 2004. The dataset was released ahead of an expected release of the justices’ financial disclosure reports Friday.

Thomas, nominated to the high court by former President George H.W. Bush, made headlines last year after an investigation found he had taken dozens of trips paid for by separate billionaire friends.

According to the data compiled by Fix the Court, since 2004, Thomas has accepted $4,042,286, or 193 gifts. The group reported that, for Thomas, there’s an additional 126 “likely but not confirmed gifts.”

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A federal judge revoked the bail for Steve Bannon, the political strategist and former White House aide to former President Donald Trump, and ordered him to report to federal prison for his contempt of Congress conviction by July 1.

Bannon was convicted in July 2022 for defying a subpoena during the House investigation of the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021. He was sentenced to four months in jail and fined $6,500.

He remained free while he appealed the conviction to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. A three-judge panel upheld the conviction unanimously May 10.

U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves urged U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols to jail Bannon because he is unlikely to reverse the verdict or win a new trial.

Bannon’s lawyer, David Schoen, argued Nichols had no authority to jail Bannon and doing so would be “gravely unjust and unfair.”

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The Israeli military made improper use of a U.S.-made bomb in a deadly airstrike Thursday on a United Nations school compound in Gaza, according to current and former U.S. defense officials who analyzed an image of the bomb remnants documented by NPR at the site.

The munition used was a GBU-39 small-diameter bomb, according to a Pentagon official and a former U.S. Air Force official. It is the same kind of bomb, according to The New York Times, that Israel used in an airstrike last month that killed dozens of displaced civilians at a tent camp in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, an incident Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a “tragic mishap.”

Israel’s army said it was targeting a group of militants inside two classrooms at a U.N. school in Nuseirat, a central Gaza refugee camp. But the 2 a.m. strike killed at least 32 people, including seven children, according to Dr. Khalil Doqran, director of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in central Gaza.

Families displaced in the war are sheltering in the school. At the hospital morgue, NPR documented one body bag labeled as containing the body parts of five children.

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