TV News LIES

The Senate judiciary committee has postponed a vote, scheduled for Thursday, on the nomination of Todd Blanche, Donald Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer, to be attorney general.

Blanche, who holds the role on an acting basis, apparently lacks the votes of two Republican senators who want him to confirm in writing that the Department of Justice will not proceed with a $1.776bn fund to compensate Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6 2021, or a pledge to forever bar the IRS from investigating the tax returns of the president and his family.

The two senators, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas, both lost their re-election bids this year in Republican primaries in which Trump backed their opponents.

A spokesperson for the committee, which is chaired by Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley said in a statement:

“Chairman Grassley works to set President Trump’s nominees up for success in committee, not failure."

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Just one day before his funeral is set to take place in Washington, DC, video footage has emerged showing a gleeful Senator Lindsey Graham rejoicing at the launch of the US-Israeli war on Iran, and even single-handedly offering US military involvement to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his war on Lebanon.

The clips are from British filmmaker Alex Holder, who has been following Graham for the last three years for a documentary on his relationship with President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

Holder appears to have been granted access to staff meetings on Capitol Hill as well as discussions Graham had with national and foreign leaders, including the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. 

"I almost cried. How long have we been pushing this?" Graham is seen asking members of his office in one clip, as he watched Trump give remarks to the press five days into the launch of the war on Iran.

"[Trump] loves blowing stuff up," Graham said.

"There are a lot of people inside that didn't want to do it. So I've had my challenges. President Trump, when he gets into the zone, he listens, asks good questions. You know, no tweeting... He's been a great wartime president," he added.

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Washington has reimposed its naval blockade of Iranian ports after the collapse of a planned peace deal to end the US-Israeli war on Iran. 

For decades, the US has tried to isolate Iran, holder of the world’s third largest proven oil reserves, from the global shipping industry with a range of sanctions.

However, the Islamic Republic has been able to maintain some revenue through a network of rickety tankers often described as its “shadow fleet”, which occupy a legal grey zone and use subterfuge to skirt the US measures.

How do shadow fleets work?

Shadow tankers, also known as “dark fleets” or “ghost fleets”, are ships that operate on the fringes of the global shipping industry to transport oil and other commodities from countries facing western sanctions.

Many are ageing vessels that evade detection on marine traffic databases by turning off their mandatory tracking signals or broadcasting false locations. 

Iran is not the only country involved in such operations: Russia, which is also subject to oil sanctions, likewise operates a shadow fleet. Venezuela did so until the US attack on the country earlier this year and the seizure of many of its tankers.

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The sky outside is hazy orange, and my five-year-old son is screaming bloody murder. “Sorry, buddy, we have to stay inside,” I say. “It’s not safe to breathe out there.” I had told him we’d be going to the beach today. Something inside me tears a little as I wonder how many promises he’ll see similarly broken in the coming years.

Far too many parents were forced to have some version of this conversation with their children this month, as smoke from record-breaking wildfires poured across the midwest and north-east. Some of them already had to tell their kids that their Fourth of July festivities were canceled because of the lethal heatwave that caused numerous mass casualty events earlier this month.

According to scientists, these extreme weather events are not “natural” disasters. A team of researchers already published a study finding that the Fourth of July heat wave would have been “virtually impossible” but for the climate crisis. Other studies – using methods recently validated by the National Academy of Sciences, the country’s top scientific advisory body – found that the pollution from individual big oil companies such as ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP made some past climate-exacerbated heatwaves at least 10,000 times more likely compared with preindustrial levels.

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Within months of being soaked with a glyphosate herbicide while working on a cell tower maintenance crew, Tennessee teenager Arden Allison developed a tumor that grew into what he described as “this massive alien sucking the life off of me.”

Arden was 17 when he landed a job maintaining cell towers across the Midwest. According to his mother, Serene Allison, writing in RealClear Health, his duties included spraying weeds around tower sites with Roundup, a glyphosate-based herbicide first made by Monsanto, now owned by Bayer.

“I didn’t realize the danger,” Arden said in a recent interview on CHD.TV. During the two months he spent “mowing, weedeating and spraying around all the cell towers and access roads,” he said he experienced “several different big exposures of glyphosate.”

The worst came when a backpack sprayer malfunctioned. After Arden climbed over a fence, “the lid popped off” the sprayer. He was “completely doused … with glyphosate,” he said. The chemical soaked his neck, shoulders and upper body.

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Diary entries released by a Republican senator in an attempt to damage Anthony Fauci also show the former top US government science adviser’s growing disillusionment with Donald Trump in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, branding the president “rambling”, “crazy”, “desperate”, “bumbling”, “incompetent”, “an idiot”, “a true embarrassment”, “totally nuts” and “truly an obnoxious adolescent”.

From the earliest days of the crisis six years ago, Fauci noted in his journal challenging interactions with the publicity-fixated Trump. On 27 February 2020, amid the first stirrings of public alarm, he wrote of a surprise late-night call, in which the US president “wanted to chat about the coronavirus situation in general”.

For “about 20-25 minutes”, Fauci wrote, he “encouraged [Trump] not to underplay the seriousness of the situation since if it turns out bad, it would look like he is covering up. I even spoke to him from a political standpoint that his chances for re-election might be more damaged if he downplayed the potential spread of virus in the USA than if he said we may face serious problems and even if the Stock Market goes down further, he was at least honest and the country would respect him for it.

“I thought that he heard what I said, but the next day, he again underplayed it.”

By 14 March, in the thick of the first Covid shutdowns, Fauci is bemoaning Trump’s fixation on “the fluff of ratings and publicity. And so he wants us to do 2 press conferences/day – one in AM and one in PM … We now will have no time to do work.”

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A devastating tragedy has unfolded in Michigan after emergency crews responding to a house fire found eight members of the same family, including six children, dead. At least some of the dead inside the home had gunshot wounds.

Deputies with the Ottawa county sheriff’s office and firefighters from the Grand Haven fire department were dispatched at about 11.40am local time on Friday to a residence on Riverside Trail in Grand Haven Township.

Once crews entered the smoke-filled home to extinguish the fire, they made the grim discovery.

“Units made entry inside to battle the fire because there was smoke showing from the residence. When they got inside, they noticed that there were several people deceased inside the home,” Capt Jacob Sparks said at a press conference. “Some of the victims did have gunshot wounds to their bodies.”

Officials confirmed the victims were two adults and six children aged five to 15. Their identities have not yet been released.

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CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten said Friday that U.S. voters from both sides of the aisle have soured on Israel, referencing multiple recent polls confirming a “mammoth” shift in favorability — which Enten suggested could pose a serious problem for the Republican Party.

Enten made his case during an appearance on “News Central” after host John Berman noted Israel has been “one of the key issues” raised by Democrats in recent months, and that continued U.S. military aid to the country is not a partisan matter anymore.

“These are some absolutely huge, mammoth changes, generational changes that we’re talking about,” Enten said Friday. “I think there are a lot of Republicans [who think], ‘Oh, we’ll be able to run against these anti-Israeli Democrats once we hit the general election.’”

The data guru said Republicans can continue to believe that voters feel “very differently” about the matter than Democrats, as criticism of Israel has largely come from the party’s more progressive wing, but noted Israel’s net favorability has been “all negative” since the spring.

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