TV News LIES

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a new proposed rule for H-1B visas on Monday that would charge a $103,265 fee for all workers seeking to gain employment in the U.S. who are subject to the annual statutory cap.

Notice of the proposed rule says the fee would be used for the federal government’s costs of administering the lawful immigration system, including activities carried out by the DHS and the departments of Justice, State and Labor.

“The proposed H‑1B fee is intended to recover the costs incurred across the federal government to adjudicate, vet, and support lawful immigration programs that otherwise must be funded by taxpayers,” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesperson Zach Kahler said in a release. 

The move follows a federal judge’s decision in June to strike down the Trump administration’s previously proposed $100,000 fee for H-1B visa applications.

U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin ruled that it was unlawful to implement a tax on visa applications, as Congress is the only legislative body with the authority to set immigration policy and taxes.

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It was a routine online meeting with my academic supervisors during the summer. One of them, who had just returned from visiting her home country, spoke about the joy of being surrounded by family, the comfort of familiar places, and the quiet sense of belonging that comes from returning home. 

Then she used a phrase that has stayed with me ever since: “The privilege of home.”

Until that moment, I had never considered home a privilege. I had always thought of it as something ordinary, something everyone simply had. https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/after-israels-annihilation-gaza-can-i-ever-return-home

But since leaving Gaza almost a year ago, those three words have echoed in my mind, forcing me to ask questions I had never needed to confront before: what is home? When does it become part of our identity?

Can it be destroyed not only physically, but psychologically? And what happens when there is nowhere left to return to?

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Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said Saturday morning that the country will enact retaliatory tariffs on the U.S. beginning on Sept. 8 in response to the Trump administration’s new 50 percent tariffs.

The prime minister said during a press conference that the country will “match Washington’s new tariffs dollar for dollar in order to protect Canadian workers, farmers, families and businesses.”

Carney said his government will release more details about these retaliatory policies in the “coming days” and that the tariffs would apply to goods like steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper and electronics. 

He stressed during his morning remarks that the Canadian government “take[s] this step reluctantly.”

“Reluctantly because we recognize that some of these measures will raise costs and reduce choice for Canadians,” Carney said. “Reluctantly because we recognize that some U.S. companies and some U.S. states are innocent bystanders in a dispute that they did not want. Reluctantly because this trade dispute is preventing Canada and America from doing so much good that we could do together.

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Force must be used to liberate South Lebanon because Israel will never be convinced to withdraw through negotiations alone, senior Hezbollah official Nawaf Moussawi told Middle East Eye.

Speaking to MEE in a wide-ranging interview at his Beirut office, Moussawi insisted that Lebanese-Israeli negotiations would remain fruitless as long as President Joseph Aoun comes to the table lacking any sort of leverage over the Israelis.

Moussawi, who, as head of Hezbollah’s border and resources department, is responsible for many Israeli affairs, said the Lebanese armed movement will continue to fight the occupying troops until they completely depart from his country.

“Is there international pressure that would compel the Israelis to withdraw? So far, there is not, just as there was not in Palestine,” he said.

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An Israeli drone attack on a cafe in the port area west of Gaza City on Tuesday killed at least seven Palestinians, including a child, and left one body so mutilated that health workers could not identify the victim, according to Gaza health officials. 

Most of the injured, including those in critical condition, were transferred to al-Shifa Hospital, which reported that it had received six bodies and 13 wounded, one of whom succumbed to their injuries later in the evening.

The hospital said one victim appeared to have taken a direct missile hit, with the body shredded beyond recognition.

Al Jazeera Arabic said the intensity of the strike pushed a number of the injured and dead into the sea, meaning the real number of casualties may be higher. 

Recovery efforts are currently underway.

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For the 12th consecutive day, three Palestinian families, comprising 10 people, including two young children, have been trapped inside their homes in the occupied West Bank, besieged and terrorized by dozens of armed Israelis—both settlers and soldiers. The family members have been stuck in separate homes, unable to shelter together or attend to their basic needs, with food supplies running dangerously low and without access to cooking gas or a fridge.

While the siege on the three families has garnered international media attention and statements of condemnation, the attack is not the first of its kind, but rather a more prominent example of a growing tactic by Israeli settlers and soldiers working in tandem to dispossess Palestinians from their homes in the West Bank. The attacks are increasingly focused on Palestinian communities in Area B, a designation under the Oslo Accords where the Palestinian Authority is nominally in charge of civil administration while Israel retains security control.

The latest Israeli siege targeted a small cluster of Palestinian homes that sit atop a hill on the edge of the village of Qusra, in the southern part of the Nablus governorate in the northern West Bank.

On the morning of August 9, armed settlers blocked off the only road leading to the homes and erected a colonial outpost directly in front of the door of one of the houses. They began pelting the homes with rocks and trying to break inside on a regular basis.

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