TV News LIES

The Pentagon has pulled key protections for its civilian personnel, directing managers to move with “speed and conviction” to fire underperforming workers, according to a memo issued one day before the U.S. government shut down.

“Supervisors and human resources (HR) professionals are directed to act with speed and conviction to facilitate the separation from Federal service of employees performing unsuccessfully,” states a Sept. 30 memo signed by the Pentagon’s top personnel policy officer, Under Secretary of Defense Anthony Tata.

It also warns that managers will be held accountable if they don’t address “poor employee performance.”

The new guidelines, which became public Tuesday, have sparked fears that they could be used to push out anyone at the Pentagon who doesn’t agree with or toe the line on the Trump administration’s programs.

It’s unclear how many employees may have been fired since the memo took effect. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Hill.

More...

Israeli planes launched strikes in Gaza on Tuesday after Israel accused the militant group Hamas of violating a ceasefire in the Palestinian territory, the latest test of a fragile deal brokered earlier this month by U.S. President Donald Trump.

At least nine people were killed in the strikes, including four in Gaza City's Sabra neighborhood and five in a car targeted in Khan Younis, according to local health authorities.

The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the strikes, the latest violence in a three-week-old ceasefire and which followed a statement by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office saying he had ordered immediate "powerful attacks."The statement did not give a specific reason for the attacks but an Israeli military official said Hamas had violated the ceasefire by carrying out an attack against Israeli forces in an area of the enclave that is under Israeli control.

"This is yet another blatant violation of the ceasefire," the official said.

More...

lsrael will not allow Turkish troops to take part in an international force the United States has proposed to oversee the ceasefire agreement in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, Israel’s top diplomat said Monday.

The 20-point deal brokered by U.S. President Donald Trump earlier this month calls for a force to monitor the ceasefire but does not mention which countries would provide troops.

It says the U.S. would “work with Arab and international partners to develop a temporary International Stabilization Force” to deploy in Gaza. The force would train and provide support to “vetted Palestinian police forces” and will “consult with Jordan and Egypt, who have extensive experience in this field.”

The first phase of the ceasefire agreement is still being carried out, and focuses on the release of the remaining dead hostages in Gaza, in exchange for Palestinian bodies held by Israel.

Late Monday, the Israeli military said the remains of another hostage had been returned to Israel.

Since the ceasefire began on Oct. 10, the remains of 16 hostages have been returned to Israel. Another 12 bodies still need to be recovered in Gaza and handed over.

More...

An overnight Russian drone attack on Kyiv killed three people and wounded dozens, including seven children, Ukrainian officials said on Sunday.

Moscow has intensified aerial attacks on Ukraine, including on its energy infrastructure as the war enters a fourth winter and as Kyiv's allies try to ratchet up pressure on Russian economy with new sanctions.

On Saturday night into Sunday, "three people were killed and 31 others were wounded in the Russian attack in Kyiv alone, including seven children," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his daily address.

More...

Donald Trump has declined to definitively say he will not seek an unconstitutional third term as US president. “I would love to do it: I have my best numbers ever,” the 79-year-old told reporters on Air Force One during a trip to Asia. Pressed on whether he was not ruling out a third term, he said: “Am I not ruling it out? I mean, you’ll have to tell me.”

Why all the talk of Trump 2028?

While this has been an ongoing theme with the president, the Trump Organization is now selling $50 red caps that read “Trump 2028”, appearing to promote the president as a candidate in the next election. Trump relishes showing the caps to foreign leaders and earlier this month placed them in front of Democratic leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer during budget talks in the Oval Office. Jeffries told CNN: “It was the strangest thing ever.”

Meanwhile a thinktank called Third Term Project is “devoted to getting President Donald J Trump his rightful third term in office”. And in an interview last week with the Economist magazine, Maga guru Steve Bannon said: “Trump is going to be president in ’28, and people ought to just get accommodated with that. At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is. But there is a plan.”

But what does the constitution say?

More...

The Trump administration’s military airstrikes against boats off Venezuela’s coast that the White House claims were being used for drug trafficking are “extrajudicial killings”, said Rand Paul, the president’s fellow Republican and US senator from Kentucky.

Paul’s strong comments on the topic came on Sunday during an interview on Republican-friendly Fox News, three days after Donald Trump publicly claimed he “can’t imagine” federal lawmakers would have “any problem” with the strikes when asked about seeking congressional approval for them.

US forces in recent weeks have carried out at least eight strikes against boats in the Caribbean off Venezuela’s coast, killing about 40 people that the Trump administration has insisted were involved in smuggling drugs.

Speaking with Fox News Sunday anchor Shannon Bream, Paul asserted that Congress has “gotten no information” on the campaign of strikes from Trump’s administration – despite the president claiming the White House would be open to briefing the federal lawmakers about the offensive.

More...

More than 40 million low-income food assistance beneficiaries are expected to receive less help with grocery bills — or no help at all — in the coming days.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is threatening to withhold billions of dollars in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) contingency funding, which Congress has already allocated for emergency scenarios, if the government shutdown stretches into November.

There is between $5 billion and $6 billion currently in that fund, experts say. That’s not enough to cover the estimated $8 billion in SNAP benefits due out next month, but it would allow for partial payments to help low-income Americans defray food costs. 

On Friday, however, the USDA released guidance saying it won’t use those funds to cover SNAP benefits if the government shutdown extends beyond Oct. 31 — a move that appears designed to maximize the pressure on Senate Democrats to support a GOP spending bill to reopen the government.

More...

In the fall of 1945, a bit more than six years after Nazi Germany invaded Poland and started the biggest and deadliest conflict in history, a largely self-taught lawyer from a tiny hamlet in the southwest corner of New York State set out to convict the surviving Nazi leadership of crimes “so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”

In his roughly four-hour opening statement at the first Nuremberg trial, Robert H. Jackson, chief prosecutor for the United States, offered the first full public picture of how the Nazis had planned and carried out the many horrors that shock the world to this day, including the systematic murder of an estimated six million Jews.

The war in Europe had ended just six months earlier. But, as Jackson made clear to the International Military Tribunal, assembled to decide the fate of these higher-level Nazis, the Allies’ great victory would be incomplete without a legal reckoning suited to the scale of the offenses.

“The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people,” he said, as 21 defendants, including Hermann Göring, commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, and Hans Frank, who had led the Nazi terror campaign in Poland, looked on from the dock.

“It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched.” The veteran litigator told the French, British, Soviet and American judges hearing the case—and the grieving world—what was to come: “We will give you undeniable proofs of incredible events.”

More...