TV News LIES

Daniel Biss, the mayor of Evanston, Ill., has won the Democratic primary for the state's 9th congressional district, according to a race call by The Associated Press, topping a crowded field in the race for a Chicago-area seat that has not been open for nearly three decades.

His victory in the safe blue district ends a highly contested primary of more than a dozen Democrats running to succeed retiring Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky, 81, who first took office in 1999.

With endorsements from Schakowsky and other national leaders such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Biss was seen as the frontrunner heading into the race. On the campaign trail, he sought to differentiate himself by emphasizing both his background in elected office and his willingness to push for progressive causes and against President Trump's agenda.

"I just don't think we can afford to compromise on either of those two things," he told NPR in an interview ahead of the primary.

Tuesday's results serve as an early indication of what Democratic voters are looking for from the next generation of party leaders, and how much change they feel is needed in this moment when the party is shut out of power in Washington, D.C.

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Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, has been formally subpoenaed to appear before a House panel to answer questions about the justice department’s handling of the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein and its release of the Epstein files.

The move came amid growing criticism from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle over the justice department’s compliance with a law passed last year requiring the full release of Epstein-related files.

Lawmakers have raised concerns that some disclosures exposed personal information about survivors, and have also accused the Department of Justice of improperly withholding and redacting material in violation of the law, including the names of people who may have committed crimes.

James Comer, chair of the House oversight and government reform committee, wrote in the subpoena letter that there were “questions regarding the Department of Justice’s handling of the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein and his associates and its compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act”.

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A judge ruled Monday to permanently bar several school districts from following Arkansas’s law to display the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks ruled the law violates the Establishment Clause and the free exercise rights of the plaintiffs.

“Act 573’s purpose is only to display a sacred, religious text in a prominent place in every public-school classroom. And the only reason to display a sacred, religious text in every classroom is to proselytize to children. The State has said the quiet part out loud,” the judge wrote.

The ruling affects several https://thehill.com/homenews/education/5787547-aransas-school-districts-ten-commandments/Arkansas school districts but is not a statewide ban.

“Today’s decision ensures that our clients’ classrooms will remain spaces where all students, regardless of their faith, feel welcomed and can learn without worrying that they do not live up to the state’s preferred religious beliefs,” said Heather Weaver, senior counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief.

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The head of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center resigned March 17, saying he “cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” the first top Trump administration official to quit over the conflict.

Joe Kent, a decorated former Army Ranger and CIA paramilitary officer, was a top aide to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who oversaw all U.S. counter-terrorism efforts in the U.S. and overseas.

In a March 17 post on social media platform X, Kent said that “after much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, effective today.”

“Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” Kent wrote in a letter to President Donald Trump, who nominated him for the top U.S. counterterrorism job on Feb. 3, 2025.

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There is an Israeli military strategy called the “fog procedure”. First used during the second intifada, it’s an unofficial rule that requires soldiers guarding military posts in conditions of low visibility to shoot bursts of gunfire into the darkness, on the theory that an invisible threat might be lurking.

It’s violence licensed by blindness. Shoot into the darkness and call it deterrence. With the dawn of AI warfare, that same logic of chosen blindness has been refined, systematized, and handed off to a machine.It may have been chosen blindness that led, at the start of the US-Israeli Iran war, to the strike at the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran. At least 168 people were killed, most of them children, girls aged seven to 12.

Israel’s recent war in Gaza has been described as the first major “AI war” – the first war in which AI systems have played a central role in generating Israel’s list of purported Hamas and Islamic jihad militants to target. Systems that processed billions of data points to rank the probability that any given person in the territory was a combatant.

The darkness in the watchtower was a condition of the terrain. The darkness inside the algorithm is a condition of the design. In both cases, the blindness was chosen. It was chosen because blindness is useful: it creates deniability, it makes the violence feel inevitable, it moves the question of who decided from a person to a procedure. The fog did not lift. It was given a probability score and called intelligence.

It may have been chosen blindness that led, at the start of the US-Israeli Iran war, to the strike at the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran. At least 168 people were killed, most of them children, girls aged seven to 12.

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As President Trump gives conflicting statements about the length and objectives of the war he launched with Israel against Iran, fears are growing that the conflict could continue to expand throughout the region and beyond. Lawrence Wilkerson, retired U.S. Army colonel and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, says the U.S. and Israel are committing wanton “war crimes” in Iran.

“We have bombed civilians relentlessly. We have bombed a school. We have bombed a hospital,” says Wilkerson, who also suggests Western media outlets are downplaying the extent of the damage in Israel and how successful Iran has been in defending itself.

“This is a war with long legs. Trump has completely misinterpreted it,” says Wilkerson. “The only one who’s interpreted it correctly is Bibi Netanyahu, and I think he’s ready to use a nuclear weapon, should it become as bad as it looks like it might right now, because Iran has not even began to shoot its most sophisticated missiles.”

Read transcript here...

A golf club company backed by the sons of Donald Trump is merging with drone manufacturer Powerus in a deal designed to take the drone technology company public.

The merger with Aureus Greenway Holdings is the latest in Eric and Donald Trump Jr’s growing investments in the drone sector, following last month’s $1.5bn tie-up between Israeli drone maker XTEND and Florida-based JFB Construction Holdings. Drones have become a major procurement priority for the Pentagon and are widely used in Ukraine, where dense air defense systems near the frontlines limit the deployment of conventional aircraft.

This growing reliance has also drawn significant Silicon Valley funding into drone and military artificial intelligence startups, boosting valuations of US companies such as Anduril Industries and Shield AI.

Powerus, which was formed in 2025 by Andrew Fox, makes heavy-lift drones that can carry industrial payloads up to 675kg. The company also offers services to transform existing staffed boats into remotely operated or fully autonomous vessels.

Fox is expected to serve as chief executive officer and chair of the combined company, Aureus said in an SEC filing.

In connection with the planned merger, Aureus has engaged Dominari Securities to help raise about $9m in financing.

Dominari counts both Trump brothers among its shareholders, with roughly 6% stake each.

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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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