TV News LIES

A German court this month decided that comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is protected legal speech, highlighting a growing conflict between constitutional protections and Berlin’s political commitment to Tel Aviv. 

The regional court acquitted a woman convicted in a lower court over social media posts comparing Israel’s conduct in Gaza with the methods of the Nazi regime.

In recent years, Germany’s support for Israel has increasingly shaped policing, administrative decisions and criminal prosecutions.

After 7 October 2023, Germany banned Hamas and Samidoun, a Palestinian advocacy group, while increasingly using laws originally aimed at preventing a Nazi revival to crack down on criticism of Israel.

The recent court ruling, which found that the woman’s use of Nazi imagery in the context of Israel’s conduct in Gaza constituted protected political expression, rejected the prominent notion within German circles that such analogies are inherently criminal in nature.

More...

Haitham Rashaidh was among the last to leave his home near Ein al-Auja, a natural spring and waterfall north of Jericho in the occupied West Bank. 

His family packed up their tents and heaped all their belongings onto a tractor, and then began the two-hour journey across difficult terrain towards al-Balqa, a sparsely populated area of the Jordan Valley, where they set up camp alongside their displaced neighbours.

Leaving Ein al-Auja felt like losing a part of themselves, Rashaidh explained mournfully. Water once flowed here in a torrent, estimated at thousands of cubic metres daily - yet today, the ground is parched, the spring that once supported a Bedouin community of more than 100 families reduced to a trickle.

Palestinians used to treasure Ein al-Auja as an oasis of calm in a region under siege. But Israel’s diversion of water, alongside continuing settler attacks, ultimately made life in the community untenable.

“We did not leave the first time they tried to push us out,” Rashaidh told Middle East Eye. “We came back, rebuilt what we could, and tried to continue our lives.

More...

A federal judge says Idaho can’t prosecute doctors who perform abortions to protect a pregnant person’s health or prevent self-harm.

U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill made the ruling Thursday, writing that Idaho’s “Defense of Life Act” and “Fetal Heartbeat Act” — which together create a near-total ban on abortion — violate the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment. Physicians who violate the laws can lose their license and face up to five years in prison.

Both laws include narrow exceptions, including abortions done to prevent the death of a pregnant woman or in some cases of rape or incest where the pregnant person has filed a police report.

The case isn’t about bodily autonomy or reproductive choice, Winmill wrote in the 81-page decision, but rather the “limit of the state’s power to make a woman suffer for the sake of an unborn child.”

Both laws include narrow exceptions, including abortions done to prevent the death of a pregnant woman or in some cases of rape or incest where the pregnant person has filed a police report.

The case isn’t about bodily autonomy or reproductive choice, Winmill wrote in the 81-page decision, but rather the “limit of the state’s power to make a woman suffer for the sake of an unborn child.”

More...

Hantavirus. Ebola. West Nile. Measles. And, of course, cyclospora — that stomach parasite making people miserable across the country. Americans have plenty to worry about this summer.

But remember COVID-19? It may not be surprising that many people may have almost forgotten about COVID. Unfortunately, COVID hasn't forgotten about us.

"We're now in the midst of a growing summer surge of COVID here in the United States," says Dr. John Brooks, an infectious disease doctor at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga., who used to work at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "I think most of us kind of feel like it's fading away and are certainly very grateful for that. But nationally we're seeing it ticking up pretty much everywhere."

The virus is spreading the most again in the South and West, but is also on the rise in the Northeast and Midwest. The good news is the virus is still at very low levels. And so far this summer's wave seems to be continuing the trend of getting milder each year, sending fewer people to the hospital and causing fewer deaths.

More...

A mass shooting on Friday has left six people dead, including the suspected gunman, in Missaukee county, a rural area of northern Michigan, according to state police. Another person is in critical condition at a local hospital.

Michigan state police identified the suspected gunman as 39-year-old Chad Hickman in a statement posted on social media.

Hickman fled the scene, prompting a manhunt, the police said. The Missaukee county sheriff’s office had appealed to the public for help in locating the “armed and dangerous” Hickman, before he was located by state police.

Investigators tracked Hickman’s vehicle to a wooded area, where he and another individual were found deceased. It is unclear what circumstances led up to the shooting.

More...

President Donald Trump‘s administration lost its second top official in just as many days on Friday, with White House deputy national security adviser Andy Baker confirming his departure some 48 hours after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced hers.

“This has been an amazing journey,” Baker told Axios in a statement Friday. “I’m proud of everything we’ve achieved and, of course, am incredibly grateful to the President, Vice President [JD Vance], and Secretary [of State Marco] Rubio.”

The news comes on the heels of Leavitt confirming her own exit Wednesday on social media, similarly stating how “incredibly grateful” she was to the president and describing her tenure in the administration as “the adventure of a lifetime.”

Leavitt gave birth to her second child in May and explained in her announcement Wednesday that she is leaving to be with her family. A source close to Baker told Axios Friday that he similarly plans to spend more time with his family.

More...

President Donald Trump denied that family members of sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln ‒ now being replaced in the Middle East ‒ have concerns about the ship after reports of suicide attempts and declining moral amid extended deployment.

"Well, no, that ship is moving. No, they're not," Trump said on Aug. 14 in a response to a reporter who began a question by stating families are concerned about the conditions on the USS Lincoln.

Asked whether the deployment of the ship's sailors has gone too long amid the war in Iran, Trump responded: "No, not nearly long enough."

Trump's remarks came after two military-focused outlets, the Navy Times and Stars and Stripes, this week reported on suicide attempts aboard the ship, exhaustion among the crew of 5,000 sailors and sharply declining morale.

More...

Home demolitions by Israeli forces; attacks on healthcare infrastructure, homes, and schools; mass displacement of Palestinians; and the expansion of illegal settlements across the West Bank have brought the occupied Palestinian territory to “the breaking point,” said a top humanitarian official at the United Nations Security Council Tuesday, calling for a “coordinated international effort” to end the violent Israeli occupation.

At a meeting on the situation in the territory, Ramiz Alakbarov, the UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, addressed the council as families in the town of Qusra, northern Nablus, were facing days of attacks by Israeli settlers.

That violence exemplified what the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem called an escalating “ethnic cleansing” operation that Israel’s military allows.

As B’Tselem said Wednesday, settlers had established an illegal outpost in the yards of two Palestinian families’ homes, “forcing the families out and taking over their homes,” and the US-backed Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had done nothing to protect the Palestinian residents.

“Israeli ethnic cleansing in the West Bank is accelerating and expanding in full view of everyone,” Yuli Novak, president of B’Tselem, told Anadolu Agency, adding that the settlers’ seizure of the Palestinian homes was “not an isolated incident.”

More...