TV News LIES

The immigration judge was looking out over her courtroom. Mahmoud Khalil was sitting at a table next to his lawyers as they tried to convince her not to order him deported to the Middle East.

"His life is at stake, your honor," one of them, Marc Van Der Hout, told the judge.

Khalil was focused and stern. But he kept getting distracted. His wife was sitting in the public gallery a few feet away, cradling their tiny newborn son, Deen. The baby was cooing. Everyone could hear. And each time, Khalil couldn't resist a smile.

It was a touch of levity in a courtroom otherwise heavy with the gravity of what was being discussed: Khalil's fear that if he's deported, the state of Israel might try to kill him.

It was a touch of levity in a courtroom otherwise heavy with the gravity of what was being discussed: Khalil's fear that if he's deported, the state of Israel might try to kill him.

Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate and detained Palestinian activist, was finally allowed to hold his infant son for the first time Thursday – one month after he was born – thanks to a federal judge who blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to keep the father and infant separated by a Plexiglass barrier.

The visit came before a scheduled immigration hearing for Khalil, a legal permanent resident who has been detained in a Louisiana jail since 8 March.

The question of whether Khalil would be permitted to hold his newborn child, Deen, or forced to meet him through a barrier had sparked days of legal fighting, triggering claims by Khalil’s attorneys that he is being subject to political retaliation by the government.

The Justice Department is dropping negotiations for court-approved settlements with Minneapolis and Louisville police agencies, despite having found that authorities routinely violated the civil rights of Black people.

The two cases sparked worldwide outrage over fatal police encounters in 2020, during President Donald Trump’s final year in office. Federal authorities also are closing investigations and retracting findings of wrongdoing against police departments in Phoenix; Memphis, Tennessee; Trenton, New Jersey; Mount Vernon, New York; Oklahoma City; and the Louisiana State Police.

“Overbroad police consent decrees divest local control of policing from communities where it belongs, turning that power over to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, often with an anti-police agenda,” Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general overseeing the department's Civil Rights Division, said in a statement May 21.

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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded with anger Tuesday after a former senior military official said Israel risked becoming “a pariah state” over the war in Gaza.

“A sane country does not wage war against civilians, does not kill babies as a pastime, and does not engage in mass population displacement,” Yair Golan, a left-wing opposition voice and the former deputy chief of staff of the Israeli army, said in a charged interview with local radio station Reshet Bet.

Comparing Israel's actions to those of South Africa during the decades of apartheid, Golan, the leader of the small Democrats party and a longtime critic of Netanyahu, added, “The Jewish people, who have endured persecution, pogroms, and genocides throughout our history ... are the ones now taking actions that are utterly unconscionable.”

Golan’s words drew swift condemnation, with Netanyahu calling them an “outrageous incitement against our heroic soldiers and against the State of Israel.”

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A federal judge in Massachusetts questioned the Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday about whether it had deported any migrants to South Sudan.

The judge, Brian Murphy, had in April barred any deportations of migrants from the U.S. to countries other than their own, unless they're given sufficient time to contest their deportations, and a notice in their native language.

But lawyers for at least one migrant, originally from Vietnam and known by the initials T.T.P in the court case, alleged he was on his way to South Sudan in Africa, the world's youngest country. The lawyers spoke during an emergency remote hearing Murphy called on Tuesday evening.

They argued that their Vietnamese client was given less than 24 hours' notice of his removal, and had no ability to contest it in his native language.

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Guy Joseph Guidry fondly remembers the moment he first encountered a bonsai tree, three decades ago.

Guidry spotted a cluster of the miniature trees in his neighbor's backyard in New Orleans. They were neglected, so Guidry adopted them. He became obsessed with figuring out how to care for bonsai.

"I would be late for work and didn't want to go inside," Guidry said. "I desperately wanted to learn."

He pored over books, picked up trimming tools and found mentors to help him get into the art of growing and shaping miniature trees in containers. The practice is derived from an ancient Chinese one known as penjing that was adopted by Japan.

Bonsai artists aim to realistically represent nature in the form of a miniature mature tree.

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