TV News LIES

The US Department of State has released a long-delayed, legally required report on human trafficking after an investigation by the Guardian and bipartisan pressure from Congress.

The 2025 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report, which details conditions in the United States and more than 185 countries, was initially scheduled for release at an event in June featuring the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, the Guardian has reported, but the event was scrapped and staff at the state department office charged with leading the federal government’s fight against human trafficking were cut by more [than] 70%.

The US Trafficking Victims Protection Act requires that the state department provide the report to Congress each year no later than 30 June. The delay in the release of the report this year raised fears among some anti-trafficking advocates that the 2025 document had been permanently shelved.

The report was published quietly on the agency’s website on Monday without a customary introduction from the secretary of state or the ambassador tasked with monitoring and combating human trafficking, a position Donald Trump has not filled.

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The Trump administration has filed a first-of-its-kind civil rights lawsuit against pro-Palestinian groups and activists, accusing the advocates of violating a law that has traditionally been used to protect reproductive health clinics from anti-abortion harassment and violence.

The lawsuit, filed on Monday by the justice department’s civil rights division, alleges that two advocacy groups and six people broke the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (Face) Act when they protested against an event at a West Orange, New Jersey, synagogue in November 2024. The event at the Ohr Torah synagogue promoted the sale of property in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, which are widely considered illegal under international law. Similar events have sparked protests in the years since the outbreak of the war in Gaza, but this event escalated into violence.

One man, a pro-Israel counterprotester, pepper-sprayed a pro-Palestinian demonstrator, while another counterprotester bashed the same demonstrator in the head with a flashlight, according to a local news outlet. Local New Jersey prosecutors ultimately filed charges against the two counterprotestors on multiple counts, including aggravated assault. (The pair have denied the accusations against them.)

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A woman who was knocked unconscious and arrested by two sheriff’s deputies in northern California after stopping to change drivers during a family trip in 2020 has reached a $17m settlement with the county, her lawyer said on Monday.https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/30/nakia-porter-police-settlement-solano-county-california

Nakia Porter had filed a federal lawsuit accusing the Solano county sheriff’s office deputies violating state and federal civil rights statutes by engaging in “unlawful seizure, assault and excessive force”.

Porter, her father and her three young children were driving home at night on 6 August 2020, when they pulled off the road. Porter, who is Black, was already out of the car when the deputies pulled up with lights flashing and she explained that they were just switching drivers and would be on their way, according to the lawsuit.

Body cameras worn by the deputies recorded them pulling guns on Porter before slamming her to the pavement while handcuffing her along a rural road in the town of Dixon. Her father, Joe Powell, was also placed in handcuffs and briefly detained.

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Zohran Mamdani on Monday hit back at Donald Trump’s vow to withhold federal funds to New York City if he becomes mayor.

Trump on Monday raged on his Truth Social platform that democratic socialist Mamdani “needs the money” from him to “fulfill all of his FAKE Communist promises” but “won’t be getting any of it, so what’s the point of voting for him?”

CNN’s Erin Burnett asked Mamdani if he was “OK if New York City loses” the $7.4 billion it receives in federal funding each year.

“No,” Mamdani replied, then he defiantly promised: “We will fight for every single dollar that the city currently receives from the federal government.”

“I look for examples across this country that showcase the best way to respond to Donald Trump’s... threats rather is responding with strength,” he continued. “And what we see in California is an attorney general of the state has estimated that for every dollar they spent on lawsuits against the federal government’s threats to withhold funding, they won more than $30,000 in what would otherwise have been lost.”

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A federal judge has blocked Voice of America CEO Kari Lake from firing 500 employees and warned in a blistering decision that her agency’s “disrespect” toward the court merited a trial for civil contempt.

Judge Royce Lamberth, a Ronald Reagan appointee, wrote that the only reason he was not initiating contempt proceedings was that the plaintiffs in the case hadn’t asked for them.

The court’s decision not to pursue contempt of its own accord “should not be mistaken for lenience toward the defendants’ egregious erstwhile conduct,” he wrote.

In March, the congressionally established U.S. Agency for Global Media—overseen by Lake, a former anchor for a Fox affiliate in Arizona—moved to fire about 600 of its 1,040 full-time employees and place another 400 on administrative leave.

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Rebecca Shouhed watched the surveillance video in horror, as one immigration agent knocked her 79-year-old, U.S. citizen father to the ground inside his car wash business. When he got back up and went outside, two others tackled him to the pavement.

An agent can be seen barreling into her father, Rafie Ollah Shouhed, she said, "bulldozing down the hallways like a linebacker."

Under President Donald Trump's nationwide immigration crackdown federal agents are on orders to aggressively go after people they believe are in the country illegally.

The increasingly violent arrest encounters have resulted in multiple, multi-million-dollar tort claims by people – including American citizens – who say they were severely harmed or wrongfully detained during ICE operations.

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President Donald Trump is often at his most frank when he plays pundit, and so it went with his recent musings about Israel’s war with Hamas and the political fallout.

“They had total control over Congress, and now they don’t,” Trump told the Daily Caller in an interview published earlier this month, referring to Israel. “They’re gonna have to get that war over with. … They may be winning the war, but they’re not winning the world of public relations, you know, and it is hurting them.”

Trump’s not wrong about Israel’s increasingly tattered international reputation. In just the last few days, Canada, the U.K. and Australia became the newest countries to recognize the state of Palestine. The U.S.-Israel relationship is also facing more scrutiny than ever before, with a rising number of lawmakers who once jostled to portray themselves as staunchly pro-Israel growing deeply critical. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest moves to launch a ground offensive in Gaza City, target Hamas leaders in Doha and deny evidence of widespread famine in the besieged strip are only further fueling the uproar.

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A federal judge ruled Tuesday that the Trump administration’s effort to deport pro-Palestinian academics is a deliberate attack on free speech meant to “strike fear” into non-citizen students and chill campus protests.

“The effect of these targeted deportation proceedings continues unconstitutionally to chill freedom of speech to this day,” U.S. District Judge William Young concluded, in a scathing, 161-page opinion that he described as tYoung, a Reagan appointee based in Boston, did not immediately order changes to administration policies, but said he will hold further proceedings on how to rein in the practices he found to violate First Amendment free-speech rights.

The ruling is the long-awaited result of a lawsuit brought by university professors who say the Trump administration is illegally chilling free speech by targeting prominent pro-Palestinian campus activists — like Mahmoud Khalil — and others who have expressed pro-Palestinian views. It followed a two week trial that featured testimony from top Trump administration officials, who described orchestrating the arrests of these activists and taking cues from an anonymously run website.

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