TV News LIES

Former FBI Director James Comey, a longtime nemesis of President Donald Trump, pleaded not guilty Oct. 8 to charges that he lied to Congress and obstructed a congressional proceeding during testimony he gave more than five years ago.

Comey entered the plea through his lawyer and longtime friend, former senior Department of Justice prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, at an initial hearing in a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. Comey sat stone-faced, staring straight ahead, through most of the hearing. When asked to stand, he stood ramrod straight with his hands at his sides, looking directly at the judge. He didn't say a word.

"It is the honor of my life to represent Mr. Comey in this matter," Fitzgerald said.

The proceeding – which would for most other defendants be routine – took only minutes, but it jump-started a criminal process that could last months or years. The case has special significance because it has engendered widespread concern that Trump is politicizing the DOJ and using it to go after his enemies.

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The Trump administration can’t force organizations that receive federal teen pregnancy prevention grants to comply with an executive order against “indoctrinating” children about “radical gender ideology,” a federal judge ruled Tuesday. 

U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell in Washington, D.C., an appointee of former President Obama, ruled that a July directive from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) was arbitrary and capricious and contradicted the original congressional intent of the grants.

Howell said HHS imposed binding requirements on grant recipients but gave no indication that those requirements “were the product of reasoned decision-making and analysis of evidence.”

Instead, the agency “seemingly relied on irrelevant ideological factors, and did not justify its change in position,” Howell wrote.

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Louisiana public school librarian Amanda Jones loves helping kids find the right book. 

It’s her 25th year working in the Livingston Parish school district, the same one she attended as a kid. In 2022, she spoke at a local public library hearing about a challenge to remove a book about teen puberty, sexuality and consent from the shelves. She showed up with other community members to argue against banning any books from public libraries.

Soon, social media attacks started. She says commenters called her a "groomer" and a pedophile, publishing the name of her school and saying she was giving children pornography and erotica. Jones thought no one would believe them, but they did. She says she didn’t leave her room for four days, crying so hard her eyes swelled shut. She had debilitating panic attacks and was in and out of the hospital for two months. Jones brought a defamation lawsuit against a pair of conservative bloggers – seeking damages of $1 and an apology – that's still ongoing. Whatever happens, she says she’s committed to staying on the job.

Later, Jones would become one of the faces of the fight against book banning. She has since published a book about her experience called “That Librarian” and made it on TIME100 Next (with an appreciation written by actor and avid reader Sarah Jessica Parker).

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On a street named Gaza lives Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a top-floor apartment near a sushi restaurant.

Outside, one recent afternoon, a father stood holding a megaphone.

"Bibi and Sara," he calls out to the prime minister, using his nickname, and his wife. "It's Rom's dad."

Ofir Braslavsky's 21-year-old son Rom is still being held hostage in Gaza, two years after Hamas led an attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, sparking the devastating Gaza war.

As Netanyahu intensified the war this year, families of hostages have intensified their own war with Netanyahu — pressing him to strike a deal with Hamas to get their loved ones back before it's too late.

These families are among those in Israel who have paid the most agonizing personal cost of two years of prolonged war.

"I'm not going to let you kill my son and bring him back in a body bag," Braslavsky shouts.

The cost of unprecedented national division during wartime:re

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Numbers alone cannot capture the toll the Israel-Hamas war has taken on the Gaza Strip.

But they can help us understand how thoroughly the conflict has upended the lives of 2.1 million Palestinians living in the territory and decimated the territory's 365 square kilometers (140 square miles).

Out of every 10 people, one has been killed or injured in an Israeli strike. Nine are displaced. At least three have not eaten for days. Out of every 100 children, four have lost either one or both parents. Out of every 10 buildings that stood in Gaza prewar, eight are either damaged or flattened. Out of every 10 homes, nine are wrecked. Out of every 10 acres of cropland, eight are razed (more than three out of every four hectares).

The war began when Hamas militants launched a surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mainly civilians, and taking 251 hostages back to Gaza.

In response, Israeli leaders promised a punishing offensive on the strip to annihilate Hamas and free the hostages.

Here's a closer look at the devastation that followed, by the numbers.

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Before a federal judge blocked Donald Trump from putting members of California’s national guard on the streets of Portland, Oregon, late on Sunday, the state’s Republican party welcomed the planned deployment in celebratory posts on social media.

“President Trump on Sunday deployed 300 California National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon after a judge ruled that the Oregon National Guard could not be deployed to keep federal facilities and personnel in Portland safe,” Oregon Republicans wrote on their official Facebook, Instagram and X accounts.

On all three platforms, the statement was illustrated with an image that seemed designed to support Trump’s false claim that protests against immigration sweeps in Portland are so out of control that the city is “burning to the ground”. On one side of the image, a line of police officers held riot shields; on the other, a crowd of young men held up flares that lit up a night sky filled with red smoke.

On closer inspection, however, it turned out that the image was not a photograph of a real event in Portland, but instead a fabrication created by combining two photographs of scenes that unfolded in South America nearly a decade apart.

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The New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani drew ire from Israel over his statement on the two-year anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, in which he commemorated both the Israeli victims from that day and Palestinian victims from Israel’s ensuing war on Gaza.

“Two years ago today, Hamas carried out a horrific war crime, killing more than 1,100 Israelis and kidnapping 250 more. I mourn these lives and pray for the safe return of every hostage still held and for every family whose lives were torn apart by these atrocities,” Mamdani said in the statement on Tuesday.

He denounced Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his government for launching a “genocidal war” in Gaza as well. He also accused the US government of being “complicit”.

“A death toll that now far exceeds 67,000; with the Israeli military bombing homes, hospitals, and schools into rubble,” Mamdani wrote. “Every day in Gaza has become a place where grief itself has run out of language. I mourn these lives and pray for the families that have been shattered.”

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A deadly tornado that tore across North Dakota this summer has been upgraded to an EF-5, the strongest kind of tornado and the first one to attain that classification on US soil in 12 years.

The tornado on 20 June in Enderlin caused significant damage across the region and killed three people. The tornado touched down on the ground for just over 12 miles (19km), and at its largest, was 1.05 miles wide (1.69km).

Meteorologists from the National Weather Service (NWS) in Grand Forks estimated that the tornado had winds in excess of 210 miles per hour (338 kilometers per hour), according to an agency analysis released on Monday. An EF-5 tornado is one with winds greater than 200 miles per hour.

“In the last kind of 12 years, there’s been several strong tornadoes that have come close, but there haven’t been known damage indicators at that time to support the EF-5 rating,” said Melinda Beerends, meteorologist in charge at the NWS office in Grand Forks. “It’s hard sometimes to get tornadoes to hit something.”

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