TV News LIES

A suicide bombing by Islamic State (IS) targeting a church in Damascus has killed 22 people and wounded 63, Syrian state media have said.

The attack on Sunday night was the first major IS operation and the first suicide bombing in Syria since former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was toppled in December and replaced by an Islamist-led government.

A man affiliated with IS entered the Greek Orthodox Saint Elias church in the old Christian quarter of Damascus during prayers, opened fire and then detonated an explosive vest while inside the church, Syria’s interior ministry said. Eyewitnesses inside the church reported a second gunman who did not blow himself up, but also shot at the 150 or so worshippers present.

“People were praying safely under the eyes of God,” said Fadi Ghattas, who said he saw at least 20 people killed. “There were 350 people praying at the church.”

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U.S. officials say that strikes conducted on three key Iranian nuclear sites have devastated its nuclear program, but independent experts analyzing commercial satellite imagery say the nation's long-running nuclear enterprise is far from destroyed.

"At the end of the day there are some really important things that haven't been hit," says Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, who tracks Iran's nuclear facilities. "If this ends here, it's a really incomplete strike."

In particular Lewis says the strike doesn't seem to have touched Iran's stocks of highly enriched uranium.

"Today, it still has that material and we still don't know where it is," he says.

A 68-year-old Mexican-born man has become the first Ice detainee in at least a decade to die while being transported from a local jail to a federal detention center, and experts have warned there will likely be more such deaths amid the current administration’s “mass deportation” push across the US.

Abelardo Avellaneda Delgado’s exact cause of death remains under investigation, according to Ice, but the Guardian’s reporting reveals a confusing and at times contradictory series of events surrounding the incident.

The death occurred as private companies with little to no oversight are increasingly tasked with transporting more immigration detainees across the US, in pursuit of the Trump administration’s recently-announced target of arresting 3,000 people a day.

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The Iranian Parliament on Sunday approved a measure to close the Strait of Hormuz after the United States bombed three nuclear sites in Iran.

The strait, located between Iran and Oman, remains a critical oil choke point, and closing it could have serious implications for both the global and U.S. economy.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in several Sunday interviews, warned against shutting down the strait, calling the move “suicidal” for the regime. Rubio also called on China — Iran’s most crucial oil customer — to encourage the country against shutting it down.

“I encourage the Chinese government in Beijing to call them about that, because they heavily depend on the Straits of Hormuz for their oil,” Rubio said on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo.”

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The Senate parliamentarian has ruled against a controversial provision in the Senate Republicans’ megabill that would have made it significantly more difficult for courts to enforce contempt findings against the Trump administration.

The parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, ruled that limiting courts’ ability to hold Trump officials in contempt violated the Senate’s rules governing what can be passed with a simple-majority vote on the budget reconciliation fast track.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) hailed the parliamentarian’s decision as a major victory.

“Senate Republicans tried to write Donald Trump’s contempt for the courts into law — gutting judicial enforcement, defying the Constitution and bulldozing the very rule of law that forms our democracy,” Schumer said in a statement responding to the development.

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Israel hailed President Donald Trump's decision to bomb three Iranian nuclear sites as an action that would "deny the world's most dangerous regime the world's most dangerous weapons." But the United Nations and many countries around the world called for swift de-escalation while others criticized the attacks.

Trump said that the strikes June 22 "totally obliterated" Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities and that Iran had to "make peace" or face more, "far greater" attacks. In response, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi warned of "everlasting consequences."

A recorded statement from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu congratulated Trump for taking what he described as a "bold decision" that "will change history."

A federal judge in Tennessee has ruled that a Salvadoran migrant at the heart of the debate over President Donald Trump’s border security policies must be released from jail while he awaits trial on human smuggling charges.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes ruled in Nashville June 22 that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, 29, cannot remain in detention, denying the federal government's request. The judge set a June 25 hearing in Nashville to determine the conditions of Abrego Garcia's release.

Abrego Garcia was thrust into the national spotlight when the Trump administration mistakenly deported him to El Salvador in March in violation of a court order.

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At least eight Palestinians were killed and dozens more wounded on Sunday in a shooting near Israeli- and U.S.-supported food distribution points in the Gaza Strip, according to health officials. Witnesses blamed the Israeli military, which did not immediately comment.

Witnesses said Israeli forces opened fire around dawn toward crowds of desperate Palestinians heading to two aid sites in the southern city of Rafah.

Experts and aid workers say Israel’s monthslong blockade and military campaign have caused widespread hunger and raised the risk of famine in the population of over 2 million. The vast majority rely on international aid because the offensive has destroyed nearly all of Gaza’s capacity to produce food.

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