TV News LIES

The Supreme Court on Wednesday cleared the way for California to use its new congressional map that adds up to five Democratic-leaning seats for the midterms, rejecting Republicans’ emergency bid to block it. 

Supported by the Trump administration, the California GOP has challenged the map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. They point to the mapmaker’s comments boasting about strengthened Latino voting power under the new design.

In a one-sentence order without any noted dissents, the Supreme Court declined the emergency application to halt the design for the midterms. It is not a final ruling, and the case could return to the justices and impact future election cycles.

The decision was not entirely surprising, given the court signaled in a separate ruling related to the use of Texas’s new GOP-favored House map ahead of 2026 that both Texas and California had drawn their new set of congressional lines for partisan gainCalifornia Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) called for the map after Texas Republicans began a mid-decade redistricting war by passing a new map that nets up to five GOP-leaning seats.

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The Israel-Palestine director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), Omar Shakir, resigned effective on Monday after over almost a decade at the organization in protest of a top-level decision to shelve a report that characterized Israel’s decades-long campaign to deny Palestinians the right of return to their homes and land a “crime against humanity.”

The 43-page report formally underwent every step in Human Rights Watch’s internal review process, including evaluations by the divisions covering refugees, international justice, women and children’s rights, and the legal team over seven months. After that process was completed, incoming Executive Director Philippe Bolopion halted the report roughly two weeks before its scheduled publication on December 4. Shakir was informed of the decision by a phone call.

The report, which cites interviews with 53 Palestinian refugees and included fieldwork in refugee camps across Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, connected the expulsions of 1948 all the way to the present moment with the emptying of the camps in Gaza and the West Bank over the past two years. Shakir hoped that the report would open “a path to justice for Palestinian refugees.”

Bolopion’s decision came after a senior official at HRW raised concerns about the publication of the report. Shakir said in his resignation email that one senior leader told him it would be perceived as a call to “demographically extinguish the Jewishness of the Israeli state.”

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In Kyiv, hundreds of multi-story residential buildings remain without heating.

While Russian strikes on energy infrastructure and thermal generation have had virtually no effect on the front line, they have plunged civilians in the capital and other cities into darkness and cold during one of the harshest winters in memory.

The resulting mass shutdown of electricity and heating in Kyiv, with temperatures dropping to -20°C (-4° F), has put those who are least protected at risk – the elderly, people with disabilities, those with limited mobility, and those without relatives.

(Photo of Mrs. Bardash). She lives alone in a building that has had no heating for two weeks and practically no electricity after Russian strikes.

It’s only 11°C (52°F) inside, as we can see on the thermometer in her living room.

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French prosecutors raided the offices of social media platform X on Tuesday as part of a preliminary investigation into allegations including spreading child sexual abuse images and deepfakes. They have also summoned billionaire owner Elon Musk for questioning.

X and Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI also face intensifying scrutiny from Britain's data privacy regulator, which opened formal investigations into how they handled personal data when they developed and deployed Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot Grok.

Grok, which was built by xAI and is available through X, sparked global outrage last month after it pumped out a torrent of sexualized nonconsensual deepfake images in response to requests from X users.

The French investigation was opened in January last year by the prosecutors' cybercrime unit, the Paris prosecutors' office said in a statement. It's looking into alleged "complicity" in possessing and spreading pornographic images of minors, sexually explicit deepfakes, denial of crimes against humanity and manipulation of an automated data processing system as part of an organized group, among other charges.

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The extraordinary arrests of the journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort last week are a dangerous escalation in the Trump administration’s attacks on the press and pose a clear threat to first amendment freedoms.

Mere weeks after federal law enforcement executed a search warrant targeting a Washington Post reporter, the justice department is now pursuing criminal charges against two independent journalists for reporting from the scene of a protest in Minnesota citing – ironically – federal laws intended to protect the exercise of constitutional rights. These indictments are an affront to the first amendment of the US constitution.

On 18 January, protesters entered the Cities church in St Paul, where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official is a pastor, and interrupted a service with chants of “ICE out.” By all indications, Lemon, a former CNN host, and Fort, a local journalist, entered the church to cover the demonstration against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the Twin Cities.

Being at the scene of a breaking news event to report as it unfolds is the job of journalists, and is activity protected by the first amendment, which expressly protects “freedom ... of the press”. But according to the federal indictment unsealed on Friday, the justice department is accusing Lemon and Fort of conspiring to deprive others of their constitutional rights – a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison, a fine, or both – and with allegedly obstructing the free exercise of religion in a place of worship. These charges are an attempt to criminalize journalism.

It is unprecedented for the justice department to invoke these laws to punish journalistic activity, and there is no basis for doing so that would be consistent with the first amendment. Indeed, before the indictment, a federal magistrate judge in Minnesota had refused to sign an arrest warrant for Lemon. In a letter to a federal appeals court regarding the magistrate judge’s decision, chief judge Patrick Schiltz of the federal district court in Minneapolis, a George W Bush-appointee, noted that Lemon was a journalist and that “[t]here was no evidence” that he “engaged in any criminal behavior or conspired to do so”.

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A message from Donald Trump celebrating the 19th-century US invasion of its southern neighbour – and the subsequent loss of more than half its territory – has touched a historical nerve in Mexico, with some seeing it as a veiled threat for future incursions.

Reacting to the US president’s statement, which described the invasion as “a legendary victory”, Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s president, said during her morning news conference on Tuesday: “We must always defend our sovereignty.”

Others were less subtle in their criticism. “Never, in the recent annals of Mexico-US relations had we seen anything like this,” wrote the former Mexican ambassador to the US Arturo Sarukhan, on X. “This is not only spiking the ball in the end zone; it’s an in your face F… You.”

The message, posted by the White House on Monday, said the US-Mexico war “reasserted American sovereignty, and expanded the promise of American independence across our majestic continent”.

But the conflict has long been a historical sore spot for Mexico: Following the capture of Mexico City by US troops in 1847, Mexico gave away 55% of its pre-war territory, including the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, much of Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona.

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A leading historic preservation group has called on the Trump administration to halt the bulldozers tearing down the White House’s East Wing to make way for a massive ballroom.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a nonprofit created by Congress to help preserve historic buildings, said Tuesday that the 90,000-square-foot, $250 million event space would “overwhelm the White House itself,” which is about 55,000 square feet.

The intervention follows the furor sparked by images of a demolition crew tearing through the East Wing’s facade on Monday.

“Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough said Trump had taken a “wrecking ball” to the historic building and called the spectacle “just grotesque.”

But White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed back at the “fake outrage,” as officials argued the East Wing, which was added in 1902, has been altered many times before.

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Several more beach homes have crashed into the ocean along North Carolina’s Outer Banks, littering the shoreline with hazardous debris while raising the total number of felled homes along the barrier island to 31 since 2020.

Video posted on social media shows entire homes buckling and bobbing away in the powerful surf along the Cape Hatteras National Seashore in the wake of a historic winter storm that brought high wind gusts and several inches of snow to the Carolinas.

As of Sunday, four homes in Buxton have fallen into the Atlantic. This brings the total number of homes lost to the surrounding ocean to 20 since September, and 31 since May of 2020, the National Park Service said.

All four of the privately owned homes were unoccupied at the time of their destruction, officials said.

Officials are trying to work with the property owners to develop a cleanup strategy, which has not been easy, said David Hallac, superintendent of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, which is managed by the National Park Service.

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