TV News LIES

Two men that the Trump administration expelled to Equatorial Guinea were bound, fitted with bags over their heads, beaten and pushed down a flight of stairs, all in plain view of other US deportees, according to witnesses and human rights lawyers.

The men – one from Egypt and one from Eritrea – were then taken to a prison. About 30 detainees from the US remain trapped at a hotel in the outskirts of the coastal city of Malabo after being deported from the US. Detainees have said they believe the men were beaten for telling the press and human rights advocates about the poor conditions and violence inside the hotel, and that they are haunted by flashbacks and terrified they will be retaliated against next.

Human rights advocates and experts have warned for months that conditions at the Hotel Bamy – a run-down establishment that has served as a detention center for US deportees – are dangerous.

The US has sent at least 66 people from different African countries, Cuba and Brazil to Equatorial Guinea, which has received $7.5m as part of a deal to cooperate with the US deportation program. The Trump administration has pursued dozens of similar deals with countries to take in immigrants that the US cannot deport directly to their home countries, where judges have deemed they would face torture or persecution. In the past, the US government allowed those people to live and work in the US indefinitely.

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Paul López, Denver's clerk and recorder overseeing elections, has noticed voters have a new concern this year.

"Every single meeting I have, there's somebody that asks the question, 'What can we do if federal agents are at the polls?'" López said.

Federal interference at the polls is against the law. But it is increasingly a scenario López and other voting officials and civil rights groups are planning for and trying to prevent, since Trump administration officials have repeatedly floated the possibility of federal officers at polling locations.

López is part of a coalition that filed a lawsuit last week. Another coalition filed one Friday. Each is aimed at blocking federal officers from the polls under different aspects of federal law. NPR is the first to report on the latest lawsuit, which was brought by civil rights groups and unions.

President Trump, when asked in May about the idea that federal agents could be deployed to polling places, said he would do "anything necessary" to make sure the U.S. has "honest" elections. Earlier this month, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents could serve warrants at polling places. And border czar Tom Homan told Fox News last week that agents would not be "sweeping polling places," but earlier in the year also questioned why anyone would be concerned by such activity.

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The Pentagon’s public database left out two deaths of U.S. service members deployed in the Middle East during the war against Iran, who took part in missions unrelated to the conflict in the Middle East.\

Maj. Sorffly Davius, who served in the 42nd Infantry Division at Camp Buehring, Kuwait, died of “undetermined causes” on March 6 this year. The release announcing his death said he deployed to Kuwait in the summer of 2025 in support of Operation Spartan Shield.

Sgt. Devin Seibel, who was assigned to the Air Ambulance Company, 2nd Battalion, 4th Combat Aviation Brigade, Fort Carson, Colo., died on May 31 in Erbil Airbase, Iraq, during a “training-related incident,” the Pentagon said in a June press release. Seibel, whose death is under investigation, deployed in support of Operation Inherent Resolve.

Their deaths are not included in the Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS), which came under fire earlier this year for briefly excluding names of several U.S. service members who were killed because of Iranian military attacks.

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If recent history is the judge, President Donald Trump faces an uncertain legal landscape after his latest attempt to ban certain media outlets from covering him at the White House.

Trump announced in a Sept. 18 social media post that he is banning reporters from three major media outlets – CNN, MS NOW, and Politico – from the White House because he views their coverage as "FAKE NEWS."

Trump later said there wasn't a specific incident or story that prompted him to initiate the ban, which would not preclue the outlets from reporting on the president.

"It's really just cumulative stories over the last few years. You get sick of it," he said.

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When Israel deployed its Iron Beam laser weapon for the first time last December, the announcement by leading Israeli defense firms Rafael and Elbit Systems was met with fawning coverage worldwide. The futuristic laser system, designed to shoot drones and rockets out of the sky, was celebrated as a demonstration of the Israeli weapons industry’s technological sophistication.

The Israeli Ministry of Defense described Iron Beam as “Israel’s first domestically developed laser interception system,” while touting the country as a pioneer in missile defense. The Arrow anti-ballistic missile system, another key example of Israel’s purportedly homegrown ingenuity, was heavily employed to defend from Iranian missile attacks during two recent wars.

That alleged ingenuity is at the center of a debate roiling Washington this month as Congress returns to debates about whether to create a new office in the Pentagon to coordinate U.S. and Israeli military research, testing, and industrial production, giving institutional architecture to a relationship that is already deeply intertwined on a de facto basis. The legislation, known as Section 219, was included in the House-passed National Defense Authorization Act, but remains contested in the Senate. Backers of the bill argue that tighter coordination with Israel should not be seen as a giveaway or cost to the United States, but rather is a boon to U.S. military capacity because the U.S. benefits more from the partnership than Israel. Arrow and Iron Beam are routinely held up as case studies of such innovation.

But the real story of how these weapons were developed is quite different. In fact, both weapons systems were developed and financed by the United States before being handed off to Israel by acts of Congress, according to government documents and interviews with key personnel involved in their development—despite warnings from U.S. intelligence agencies that transferring the tech to Israel effectively hands it over to U.S. adversaries such as China and Russia.

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The United Nations has “reasonable grounds” to believe the US committed a war crime with its strikes on the Minab elementary school and a sports centre in the opening days of the US-Israeli war on Iran.

The US attack on the Minab school killed at least 150 people, including approximately 120 children. Another strike hit a “clearly identifiable sports complex and residential area” in the southern Iranian city of Lamerd.

“The Mission found reasonable grounds to believe the United States committed the war crime of launching indiscriminate attacks resulting in the loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects,” a UN fact-finding mission wrote in a report released on Thursday.

The report is not a judicial ruling, but has been submitted to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

The UN investigators noted that the Minab school was struck by a Tomahawk missile as part of ongoing strikes on an adjacent Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps base. The researchers noted that the strike was not due to an errant missile

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Dozens of far-right Israelis gathered outside NAZA filmmaker Rachel Szor's family home on Wednesday, demanding she be hanged over her documentary on war crimes Israel committed during its genocidal war on Gaza.

Szor and her co-director, Yuval Abraham, have faced a growing backlash in Israel since their film won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival on Saturday.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that several of the protesters demanded the "death penalty for traitors".

One demonstrator said that when Szor and Abraham return to Israel, "they should be tried and go to the gallows, and the family should be expelled and the house sealed".

A far-right activist with connections to National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir also urged protesters to identify the filmmakers if they saw them in public.

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More than 1,600 critically imperiled species protected under the US Endangered Species Act (ESA) face losing further federal protections following a new reinterpretation of the 1973 law by the Donald Trump administration.

A September 14 memo distributed to Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) field offices by FWS director Brian Nesvik calls for a reinterpretation of what it means to “take” an endangered species. Under the ESA, “take” is defined as “to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect, or to attempt to engage in any such conduct”.

The memo, obtained and shared by the Center for Biological Diversity, reinterprets the law to mean that harming or killing an endangered animal would no longer be considered illegal unless the action was specifically intended to cause harm or death.

“A vessel that inadvertently strikes a whale has not taken it, because the vessel’s course was not set against the whale,” the memo said, adding: “Felling a tree is not a take of the bats roosting in it unless the tree is felled for the purpose of killing or capturing them.”

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