TV News LIES

The White House has deleted a social media post in which the vice-president, JD Vance, referred to the Armenian genocide, prompting anger from members of the Armenian diaspora as well as opposition politicians across the US.

The post was made during Vance’s two-day trip to Armenia to mark a visit by Vance and his wife, Usha Vance, to a memorial for the up to 1.5 million Armenians killed by Ottoman troops more than a century ago. The now-deleted post on Vance’s official X account said he was visiting the memorial to honour “the victims of the Armenian genocide”.

It marked the first time the Trump administration had used the word genocide to describe the massacres. An aide to Vance later told reporters that the message had been posted in error on social media by staff who were not travelling with Vance.

It was the second time in the past week that the administration cited staff error to explain its social media content; last week, after Donald Trump sought to dismiss the uproar over a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, the US president said it had been erroneously posted by a staffer.

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Newly released evidence has shown that Gregory Bovino, a border patrol chief who was the face of the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts until last month, praised a federal agent who shot a Chicago woman during an immigration crackdown last year.

Marimar Martinez, a US citizen, was shot five times by a border patrol agent in October while in her vehicle. She was charged with a felony after officials at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) accused her of trying to ram agents with her vehicle. But the case was abruptly dismissed after video evidence emerged showing that an agent had steered his vehicle into Martinez’s car.

Lawyers for Martinez have pushed to make evidence in the dismissed criminal case public, saying they were especially motivated to do so after a federal agent fatally shot Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis under similar circumstances.

The new evidence – which includes emails, text messages and videos – was released this week after a US district judge, Georgia Alexakis, lifted a protective order. Federal prosecutors had argued the documents could “further sully” reputation of the agent who shot Martinez.

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The unexpected shutdown of the entire airspace over El Paso, Texas, was reportedly related to federal officials disagreeing about the safety of anti-drone tests near the El Paso International Airport after the U.S. military shot down a party balloon earlier this week that it mistook for a drone.

The Federal Aviation Administration abruptly ordered the airspace’s closure Tuesday night after the Defense Department started testing new counter-drone technology involving a high-energy laser near the Fort Bliss Army base, ahead of planned meetings with the FAA to discuss its safety, CBS News and The New York Times reported, citing multiple sources.

FAA officials had warned the Pentagon that it could close the airspace if it was not given proper time to carry out a safety review. After the testing commenced anyway, resulting in the balloon’s destruction, the FAA ordered the airspace’s closure without alerting the White House, Pentagon or Homeland Security officials, sources told The Times.

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Gallup will no longer track presidential approval ratings after more than eight decades doing so, the public opinion polling agency confirmed to The Hill on Wednesday.

The company said starting this year it would stop publishing approval and favorability ratings of individual political figures, saying in a statement it “reflects an evolution in how Gallup focuses its public research and thought leadership.”

“Our commitment is to long-term, methodologically sound research on issues and conditions that shape people’s lives,” a spokesperson for the agency said. “That work will continue through the Gallup Poll Social Series, the Gallup Quarterly Business Review, the World Poll, and our portfolio of U.S. and global research.”

The Gallup Presidential Approval Rating has for decades been the among the top barometers cited by media outlets measuring public opinion of the president’s performance.

President Trump has seen his rating by the agency slip in recent months, peaking at 47 percent last February and dipping to less than 37 percent in its last poll taken in December.

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The Republican-led House of Representatives on Feb. 11 passed a bill favored by President Donald Trump to mandate proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.

The bill, called the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE America, Act, would require voters show a government-issued photo ID to cast their ballots. Polling shows support for photo ID requirements in elections is widespread in both political parties.

Yet the measure would potentially prevent millions of Americans from voting, according to independent experts and voting rights groups. And it would create broadly defined criminal penalties for election officials who register voters that haven't adequately provided evidence of their citizenship.

The legislation faces an uncertain future in the GOP-controlled Senate, where 60 votes are needed for passage and other versions of the same legislation have already stalled.

If the bill, which Trump has indicated he would sign, fully passes, millions of women whose married names aren’t on their birth certificates or passports could face extra hurdles to register to vote and cast their ballots, according to the Brennan Center.

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Ro Khanna, the US congressman, publicly revealed the names of six men whose identities were redacted from the Jeffrey Epstein files, including Leslie Wexner, a billionaire retail magnate, whom the FBI appeared to have labeled as a co-conspirator.

The Democratic representative of California disclosed the names during a floor speech on Tuesday, following a visit to the Department of Justice, where he and Thomas Massie, a Republican congressman from Kentucky, spent two hours reviewing unredacted documents.

The six men named by Khanna are Wexner, the Victoria’s Secret founder; Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, CEO of DP World and an Emirati billionaire businessman; and four others identified as Nicola Caputo, Salvatore Nuara, Zurab Mikeladze and Leonic Leonov.

Khanna did not provide evidence of wrongdoing against any of them nor have they been charged with a crime in connection with Epstein.

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The National Governors Association (NGA) has canceled its annual White House meeting after President Trump only invited Republican governors to the gathering. 

The yearly meeting is traditionally bipartisan and offers a chance for state leaders to convene with one another and the president.

“Because NGA’s mission is to represent all 55 governors, the Association is no longer serving as the facilitator for that event, and it is no longer included in our official program,” Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) wrote in a Monday letter announcing plans to forgo the meeting, according to The Associated Press.

Stitt said the Trump administration’s decision to exclude Democratic governors would not divide the association. 

“We cannot allow one divisive action to achieve its goal of dividing us,” he wrote. “The solution is not to respond in kind, but to rise above and to remain focused on our shared duty to the people we serve. America’s governors have always been models of pragmatic leadership, and that example is most important when Washington grows distracted by politics.”

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An immigration judge has rejected the Trump administration’s efforts to deport Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University PhD student, who was arrested last year as part of its targeting of pro-Palestinian campus activists, her lawyers said on Monday.

Lawyers for the Turkish student detailed the immigration judge’s decision in a filing with the New York-based second US circuit court of appeals, which had been reviewing a ruling that led to her release from immigration custody in May.

An immigration judge on 29 January concluded the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had not met its burden of proving she was removable and terminated the proceedings against her, her lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union wrote.

Her immigration lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai, said the decision was issued by immigration judge Roopal Patel in Boston.

That ended, for now, proceedings that began with Öztürk’s arrest by immigration authorities in March on a street in Massachusetts after DHS revoked her student visa.

The sole basis authorities provided for revoking her visa was an editorial she co-authored in Tufts’s student newspaper a year earlier criticizing her school’s response to Israel’s war on Gaza.

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