TV News LIES

At least eight people died in the United States over two days when tornadoes struck Oklahoma and southern Michigan on March 5 - 6, and the National Weather Service warns more severe weather is possible on Saturday, March 7.

A weather service team is expected to head out on the morning of March 7 to survey damage from a tornado-producing storm that ripped across a 50 mile stretch of southern Michigan on March 6, leaving four dead.

A swath of damage was reported across parts of Cass, Branch and St. Joseph counties, from Edwardsburg through Three Rivers and into Union City, the weather service reported. At least one large, “extremely dangerous” tornado was confirmed in Three Rivers, Michigan, based on preliminary reports from trained storm spotters,

A swath of damage was reported across parts of Cass, Branch and St. Joseph counties, from Edwardsburg through Three Rivers and into Union City, the weather service reported. At least one large, “extremely dangerous” tornado was confirmed in Three Rivers, Michigan, based on preliminary reports from trained storm spotters, emergency officials and public videos, according to the weather

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In an exclusive interview with Drop Site News, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Esmail Baghaei rejected President Donald Trump’s claim that he launched the war because Iran was “going to attack first,” calling it a “big lie.”

“There was no intention on the part of Iran to attack the United States,” he said. “They claim that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States,” Baghaei added. “Did we come to the Gulf of Mexico to target Los Angeles and other U.S. cities? Or did they come 6,500 miles away to Iranian shores?”

On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that the U.S. decided to preemptively attack Iran because the White House knew Israel was going to begin bombing Iran and that Iran would strike back. “We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

On Tuesday, Trump sought to recast the U.S. rationale and said that he believed Iran was going to launch an attack first. “They were going to attack if we didn’t do it. They were going to attack first—I felt strongly about that,” Trump said, charging that the Iranians “were getting ready to attack Israel. They were gonna attack others.”

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Just months after President Trump's mass pardons for Jan. 6 rioters freed him from prison, a Florida man repeatedly sexually abused two middle-school aged children.

On Thursday, the man, Andrew Paul Johnson, was sentenced to life in prison, after a Florida jury found him guilty of five criminal charges, including molestation, lewd and lascivious exhibition and transmission of material harmful to a minor.

Police reported that Johnson, 45, tried to keep the children quiet by telling them he would share millions of dollars in restitution money he expected to receive from the Trump administration in connection with his Jan. 6 case.

"He said not to tell anybody," one of Johnson's victims testified.

Both children later testified that they were too afraid to tell any adults about what they had endured, according to trial records obtained by NPR.

"We were scared," Johnson's other victim testified. "Like, we didn't realize that this stuff was not okay because we were 12 years old."

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Bernard LaFayette, the advance man who did the risky groundwork for the voter registration campaign in Selma, Alabama, that culminated in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, has died.

Bernard LaFayette III said his father died Thursday morning of a heart attack. He was 85.

On 7 March 1965, the beating of future congressman John Lewis and voting rights marchers on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge led the evening news, shocking the nation’s conscience and pushing Congress to act. But two years before “Bloody Sunday”, it was LaFayette who quietly set the stage for Selma and the advances in voting rights that would follow.

LaFayette was one of a delegation of Nashville students who in 1960 helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which organized desegregation and voting rights campaigns across the south. SNCC crossed Selma off its map after some initial scouting determined “the white folks were too mean and the Black folks were too scared”, LaFayette said.

But he insisted on trying anyway. Named director of the Alabama voter registration campaign in 1963, LaFayette moved to the town and, with his former wife, Colia Liddell, gradually built the leadership capacity of the local people, convincing them change was possible and creating momentum that could not be stopped. He described this work in a 2013 memoir, In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma.

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President Donald Trump announced March 5 he was replacing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem after lawmakers grilled her this week about a $220 million ad campaign that featured her prominently.

Trump announced on social media that Noem would be succeeded by Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Oklahoma, effective March 31.

Trump said Noem would become special envoy for the Shield of the Americas, his initiative for security against narcotics trafficking in the western hemisphere.

The shift came after Noem was grilled by Republicans and Democrats at the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 3 and the House Judiciary Committee on March 4 about her ad campaign. She testified that she had discussed the campaign with Trump and he approved it.

"I never knew anything about it," Trump told Reuters in a phone interview.

The ads prominently featured Noem, including in a scene filmed on horseback at Mount Rushmore in the former South Dakota governor's home state.

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“On the US calendar it’s still March 4,” Jabbarli said, “but so much happens in a single day that sometimes it would normally take months or years.”

Ramin Jabbarli is a sociologist and the director of the Seattle-based Foundation for Inclusive Society, an NGO that regularly monitors the human rights situation in Iran. He told Kyiv Post that since airstrikes began last Saturday, it has not only been the internet – but even phone lines have been cut off.

“It’s not only about protests,” Jabbarli said. “They don’t want information to spread quickly… They want to limit communications.”

Monitoring group NetBlocks reported Iran’s connectivity falling to around 1% of ordinary levels during the blackout. Jabbarli said some footage escapes via satellite links like Starlink or through devices brought out of the country, but described those routes as limited and risky.

The most urgent political question, Jabbarli said, is what comes after Khamenei – and whether the succession stabilizes the system or becomes another trigger for conflict.

“There are different alternatives being discussed,” he said. “One is Khamenei’s son. Another is [Iran’s first supreme leader Ruhollah] Khomeini’s grandson. Hassan Rouhani is also mentioned.”

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Israel’s military issued warnings to residents of dozens of border villages in southern Lebanon to evacuate “immediately” Wednesday as airstrikes on suburbs of Beirut intensified and Hezbollah claimed more attacks.

Lebanon was dragged into the broader war in the Middle East early Monday when Hezbollah fired rockets and drones into northern Israel, triggering Israeli retaliatory airstrikes that killed more than 70 people, wounded more than 400 and displaced tens of thousands of people from southern Lebanon, the eastern Bekaa Valley and Beirut’s southern suburbs.

The ongoing conflict is not the first between Hezbollah and Israel. Hezbollah began firing into Israel a day after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on southern Israel triggered the war in Gaza. After months of low-level fighting, a full-scale war erupted in September 2024 and Israel later launched a ground invasion of Lebanon.

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Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said Dunkin’ and other companies will need to prove that their ingredients are safe, prompting Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey (D) on Wednesday to reply back, “Come and take it.”

Kennedy, while at a rally at Brazos Hall last week in Austin, Texas, said, “We’re going to ask Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks, ‘Show us the safety data that show that it’s OK for a teenage girl to drink an iced coffee with 115 grams of sugar in it.'”

He added, as the audience applauded, “I don’t think they’re going to be able to do it.

“The reforms aim to ensure American foods follow the highest safety and nutritional standards globally,” MAHA Action, Kennedy’s nonprofit health advocacy group, said in a statement explaining Kennedy’s announcement.

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