TV News LIES

A Ukrainian MP and other officials have been arrested after the country's anti-corruption agencies uncovered what they call a large-scale bribery scheme in the purchase of drones and electronic warfare systems.

In a statement on X, President Volodymyr Zelensky said a Ukrainian MP, heads of district and city administrations and several National Guard service members had been exposed for their involvement, which involved state contracts with suppliers being signed at prices inflated by up to 30%.

Zelensky wrote that there can be "zero tolerance" for corruption in Ukraine, and thanked the agencies for their work.

Zelensky's government faced an extensive backlash after introducing a bill that would strip the National Anti-Corruption Bureau and Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, known as Nabu and Sap respectively, of their independence.

The president claimed the agencies needed to be "cleared of Russian influence", and sought to give the general prosecutor the authority to decide who should be prosecuted in high-level corruption cases.

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At least 325 people in Gaza were killed by Israeli forces while trying to reach food over the past week, according to Gaza's Health Ministry. That figure includes 24 people killed on Saturday in various parts of the territory, according to health officials and morgues reached by NPR.

The deadly search for food is happening despite Israeli assurances of a humanitarian pause in attacks to let more aid in as deaths from malnutrition soar in Gaza and starvation grips the territory.

Israel's military says its troops have only fired warning shots in some of these incidents when asked for comment, including on Wednesday when more than 90 people seeking aid were killed while trying to get sacks of flour off trucks as they rolled into Gaza near a border area where soldiers are.

Aid restrictions by Israel have drawn international condemnation. U.N.-backed experts on hunger say there's a famine unfolding now in Gaza.

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Tulsi Gabbard, the director of US national intelligence, hoped to uncover evidence that Barack Obama and his national security team conspired to undermine Donald Trump in a slow-motion coup.

But if her crusade was aimed at proving that Obama embarked on a “treasonous conspiracy” to falsely show that Russia intervened in the 2016 presidential election to help Trump, Gabbard made a mistake. A previously classified annexe to a report by another special counsel, John Durham – appointed towards the end of Trump’s first presidency – has further undermined Gabbard’s case.

It was a quixotic enterprise from the start.

After all, the 2019 report from Robert Mueller, the original special counsel appointed to investigate the Russia allegations, and a bipartisan five-volume report the following year from the Senate intelligence committee – then chaired by Marco Rubio, now Trump
’s secretary of state – both affirmed the offending January 2017 intelligence community assessment, which expressed “high confidence” in Russian interference.

Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, seemed to validate the intelligence’s premise in 2018 when, standing beside Trump at a news conference in Helsinki, he admitted wanting him to win.

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Senior Republican lawmakers are condemning the decision of their party leader, Donald Trump, to fire the leading US labor market statistician after a report that showed the national economy added just 73,000 jobs – far fewer than expected – in July.

The disappointing figures – coupled with a downward revision of the two previous months amounting to 258,000 fewer jobs and data showing that economic output and consumer spending slowed in the first half of the year – point to an overall economic deterioration in the US.

Trump defended his decision to fire US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner Erika McEntarfer. Without evidence to back his claims, the president wrote on social media that were numbers were “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad” and the US economy was, in fact, “BOOMING” on his watch.

But the firing of McEntarfer, who had been confirmed to her role in January 2024 during Joe Biden’s presidency, has alarmed members of Trump’s own party.

“If the president is firing the statistician because he doesn’t like the numbers but they are accurate, then that’s a problem,” said Wyoming Republican senator Cynthia Lummis. “It’s not the statistician’s fault if the numbers are accurate and that they’re not what the president had hoped for.”

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More than 50 signatures on New York mayor Eric Adams’ petition to run as an independent candidate in November’s election are fraudulent, according to a report published on Friday.

The Gothamist said it had found 52 signatures from people who said their names were forged, including signatures of three people who turned out to be dead. The publication cited others who said they were deceived into signing the petitions.

The discovery, if confirmed, is likely to be insignificant to Adams’ independent campaign, which is required to produce 7,500 signatures to qualify him as a candidate. The Adams campaign has turned in nearly 50,000 signatures.

Still, the finding adds complexity to a race to lead the nation’s largest city that pits the incumbent mayor against Democratic party nominee Zohran Mamdani, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa and ex-prosecutor Jim Walden.

Cuomo and Walden, like Adams, are running as independents.

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India has indicated that it would continue buying oil from Russia despite threats by U.S. President Donald Trump.

The Indian foreign ministry said its relationship with Russia was “steady and time-tested,” and should not be seen through the prism of a third country.

Addressing a weekly presser on Friday, spokesman Randhir Jaiswal said India’s broader stance on securing its energy needs was guided by the availability of oil in the markets and prevailing global circumstances.

The comments follow an announcement by President Donald Trump that he intends to impose a 25% tariff on goods from India plus an additional import tax because of New Delhi’s purchases of Russian oil.

The threat came as the U.S. president has increasingly soured on Russia for failing to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine and has threatened new economic sanctions if progress is not made.

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The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History said it is slated to restore the placard with information about President Trump’s two impeachments after removing it from the exhibit last month. 

The museum said in a Saturday statement that the section will be “updated in the coming weeks to reflect all impeachment proceedings in our nation’s history.”

The Washington Post reported on Thursday, citing an unnamed source familiar with the exhibit plans, that the removal of the placard occurred as part of an internal content review the institution agreed to after pressure from President Trump’s administration to get rid of the art museum director.

The Smithsonian said on Saturday that the placard, part of the exhibit “The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden,” did not meet the institution’s standards and argued no one within the administration asked the museum to remove the information.

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When Jerce Reyes Barrios first got to el Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), he tried to keep track of how much time had passed. He reminded himself that nothing was forever. Even trapped without charge inside a Salvadoran prison infamous for brutal conditions and indefinite detention, he believed he would, someday, somehow, go home.

But as days turned into weeks, and then months, the time passed more slowly. In between routine beatings from guards, he read the Bible, the only book permitted to detainees. He asked God to give him as much patience as Job, whose faith is tested through a series of horrible disasters. Eventually, Reyes Barrios stopped counting the days.

“The only thing I can say is human rights don’t exist there,” Reyes Barrios told HuffPost on Tuesday. There were “beatings all the time,” he said. “If you didn’t eat, they would hit you. If you took a shower when it wasn’t time, they would beat you. If you spoke roughly to them, they would beat you.”

Reyes Barrios is one of 252 Venezuelans who migrated to the U.S., wound up in immigration detention, and were flown by the Trump administration in March to CECOT for indefinite detention without charge, under a multimillion-dollar deal between the U.S. and Salvadoran governments. Most of the men had no criminal history, but U.S. officials claimed, with scant evidence, that they were linked to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

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