TV News LIES

A joint intervention between Japan and the Trump administration has caused the U.S. dollar to sink against the yen. 

Markets show the U.S. dollar sits at 156.80 yen as of Monday morning after reaching a 40-year high of 164 yen in July.

The drop follows the Treasury Department’s decision to sell off euros for yen on Friday in an effort to intervene on behalf of Tokyo’s deflating currency. 

The amount of euros used to purchase yen was not made clear by the Financial Times, which reported the move launched by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Sales were conducted through Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, two people familiar with the matter told the outlet.

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Federal prosecutors dropped the last of their cases against people charged with vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in DC had filed charges of vandalism in connection with damage to the iconic DC pond against David Hearn, Justin Carreno, Sophie Dennison-Gibby and Cameron Thiers. President Donald Trump had previously described the supposed pool-damaging culprits as "SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE."

The office for U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, however, decided to drop the cases against all four people after concluding that contractors, not vandals, were to blame for the pool’s deteriorated state. Court records obtained by USA TODAY show that prosecutors filed paperwork to drop all of the cases on Friday, July 31.

USA TODAY has reached out to Pirro for comment. The move to drop the last of the Reflecting Pool cases comes after Trump has repeatedly alleged the pool was vandalized.

"To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM," the president said as late as Saturday, Aug. 1, in a statement on an official Trump social media account. "There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS!"

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Israeli ministers and lawmakers led a march towards the Gaza Strip on Sunday, calling for the re-establishment of settlements in the Palestinian enclave.

Thousands joined the demonstratiohttps://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israeli-ministers-lead-march-calling-settlements-gazan, organised by the Nachala settler movement under the slogan, "Returning home after 21 years", referring to Israel's 2005 withdrawal from Gaza.

Nachala said at least 28 ministers and lawmakers took part, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party.

Addressing the crowd, Nachala leader Daniella Weiss said she is often asked: "What will happen to the Arabs in Gaza?"

"There will be no more Arabs in Gaza," she declared.

Smotrich told supporters: "We erased the disgrace of the expulsion in northern Samaria, and with God's help, we will do the same here in the Gaza Strip," referring to the re-establishment of settlements in parts of the northern occupied West Bank evacuated in 2005.

Ben Gvir said, "There will be Jewish settlements in all of Gaza."

"Encourage voluntary immigration [of Palestinians to other countries], send those who need it to their countries. And we return home. Gaza is ours," he added.

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Dr Mazen Rantisi, a 71-year-old Palestinian physician popularly described as the “doctor of the poor”, says he has suffered physical abuse and medical neglect since Israeli authorities detained him more than a month ago, Haaretz reported on Sunday.

The doctor, known for often waiving fees, supplying medicines and operating a clinic that serves as a refuge for low-income Palestinians, was detained in a pre-dawn raid on his home in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank on 21 June. Prosecutors later indicted him for serving as chairman of the board of the Union of Health Work Committees, a Palestinian non-profit that provides medical care to thousands of Palestinians each year.

According to the report, Rantisi told a lawyer from the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel that prison authorities withheld his regular medication for the first 10 days in Ofer prison and are still denying him one of his medicines.

His requests to see a doctor went unanswered, and a medic checked his pulse only once through a small opening in the cell door.

Rantisi also reported physical violence, saying that said the prison units raided his cell several times a week and beat detainees.

“The younger prisoners surround me to protect me, taking the beatings themselves,” Rantisi said, adding that the guards sprayed tear gas into the cell during one raid, leaving him struggling to breathe.

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An estimated 26,000 children who entered the U.S. without parents or guardians are expected to be left without independent legal representation as soon as Monday, according to lawyers who help represent them.

For more than two decades, the U.S. has been required by law to protect children who cross the border alone, because of fears that they could be easily exploited, abused or trafficked. After children cross the border unaccompanied, they are typically transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). A network of nearly 100 legal groups helps provide children who arrive in ORR custody with legal services, funded by Congress.

But in November, ORR stopped paying for those legal services, after lawyers declined to provide the agency with confidential information it had requested about the children. The attorneys say that information is covered by attorney-client privilege.

"The government is withholding payment for work that has already been performed in order to extract confidential information about kids, information the government has no right to," Acacia Center for Justice, the nonprofit that manages the legal services contract with ORR, said in a statement on Thursday.

ORR did not renew the contract with the network of legal providers, which expired Friday.

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Russian missiles tore into the Ukrainian capital before dawn on Saturday, killing nine people and injuring more than 30 others as part of an intensive, ongoing Russian air campaign.

"This was a horrific night for Kyiv," Vitali Klitschko, the city's mayor, said in a social media post.

The Russian attack included 35 missiles and 185 attack drones, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Only one of 27 ballistic missiles were shot down due to the country's dwindling supply of Patriot air defense missiles, the one weapon the country has to guard against such Russian attacks, Zelenskyy also said.

The bombardment hit five areas of Kyiv, setting off fires that sent rescue crews scrambling throughout the night to pull residents from damaged and burning apartment blocks.

Firefighters doused gutted buildings with hoses. Their beams cut through smoke and darkness, while charred cars were parked in the street and in apartment courtyards. One image taken by the Associated Press showed a covered body near a cluster of burned-out vehicles. In another, blood pooled across a crosswalk littered with broken glass and debris from the blasts.

A piece of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is expected to slam into the moon on Wednesday, according to scientists.

The piece is expected to hit the moon around 2:35 a.m. ET at more than 5,000 miles per hour, according to analysis by Bill Gray, who develops software that tracks objects in space. It is part of the rocket's upper portion and about the size of a five-story building.

It was part of the Falcon 9 rocket that carried two lunar landers and scientific instruments to the moon in January 2025.

The piece is expected to hit a sunlit side of the moon facing Earth, which will be partially illuminated, in the northwestern portion near the Einstein Crater, according to Gray. The impact could leave a crater at least 17 meters in diameter, he said.

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It’s five years this month since the chaotic retreat of US forces from Kabul. The Nato-backed invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, launched after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington DC, is now widely regarded as a failure.

It cost the lives of more than 2,400 US and 450 British troops, and tens of thousands of civilians (the exact number is unknown). Although al-Qaida terrorists were routed, their Taliban hosts reimposed repressive, misogynistic Islamist rule after regaining power in 2021. Afghanistan became a byword for ill-considered western interventionism and nation-building. It was the archetypal “forever war”, a phrase first coined during Vietnam.

If this cautionary tale had any lasting value, it was as a deterrent to politicians and generals tempted to rashly embark on open-ended conflicts without just cause, defined, achievable aims, and an exit strategy. Dismayingly, the forever war lesson had to be learned all over again in Iraq, which the US and UK invaded in 2003 and departed, having caused huge harm for scant benefit, in 2011. “Never again!” was the passionate cry at the time and since. And yet, it seems, the same disastrous pattern is now repeating after Donald Trump’s incomprehensibly foolish decision to attack Iran. A war he termed a “little excursion” is entering its sixth month and has been escalating rapidly. It, too, has a forever feel.

That this nightmare is happening again defies all reason. How can it be? Immediate causes of the war aside, answers may be found in persistent US exaggerations and misconceptions about the level and extent of external threats, mixed up with political dishonesty, national hubris, naivety and misplaced idealism.

Recalling the harrowing US experience in Afghanistan, Carter Malkasian, a National War College professor who served as a civilian adviser to US forces in Helmand and Kabul, suggests the basic premise for keeping troops in Afghanistan for 20 years – a belief the country would otherwise revert to being a safe haven for international terrorism – was fatally flawed.

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