TV News LIES

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered that the near shutdown of Voice of America was illegal and has ordered the government to reinstate more than 1,000 people who were placed on leave from the media organization.

The order by District Judge Royce Lamberth amounted to a sharp rebuke to the administration, which has aggressively sought to shrink and remake VOA through Kari Lake, the ally of President Donald Trump who has served as CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media.

Lamberth said in a pair of rulings that Lake’s moves to close the agency violated federal administrative law and directed that the employees return to work by March 23. He also ordered a resumption of international broadcasting, which the U.S. has used for decades to promote press freedom around the world.

Beginning in early 2025, hundreds of journalists were placed on administrative leave and then targeted for layoffs, with more than 600 cuts announced by summer and ultimately roughly 85 percent of staff eliminated across the agency. The reductions were so deep that VOA, which once broadcast in nearly 50 languages to hundreds of millions of people, was pared down to a skeleton operation with only a handful of language services still running.

Lamberth issued a scathing review of the government’s “flagrant and nearly year-long refusal” to uphold statutory requirements set by Congress, adding that Lake “thumbed her nose” at the requirements.

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In early October 2025, Lebanese paramedic Haj Qassem Sultan stood outside Marjayoun Government Hospital in southern Lebanon and addressed Lebanese TV.

“Our message is clear. Even if we are killed one by one, we will not abandon our duty,” he said. “We will continue to serve Khiam and Marjayoun and Al-Taybeh and Debbine and all of our sacred land.”

He was attending a memorial for seven of his colleagues who were killed exactly one year earlier in an Israeli airstrike on ambulances parked outside the hospital. Five other paramedics, including Sultan, were wounded in the attack, in what human rights groups said was an apparent war crime.

On Friday, Sultan was killed in another Israeli strike on an Islamic Health Authority (IHA) medical center in Burj Qalaouiyah in southern Lebanon’s Bint Jbeil District. The bombing destroyed the facility, killing 12 people, including on-duty doctors, paramedics, nurses, and three patients.

The majority of the victims worked with the IHA, a healthcare and emergency service provider affiliated with Hezbollah that operates rescue and medical services in Beirut’s southern suburbs and across much of southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley.

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Britain was an active participant in some Israeli war crimes in Gaza, a tribunal chaired by Your Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and two international law specialists has found.

The highly publicised Gaza Tribunal was held last September and its findings were published in a report on Monday.

It was held after the Labour government blocked a bill put forward by former Labour leader Corbyn for a public Chilcot-style inquiry into Britain's military cooperation with Ihttps://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uk-was-active-participant-israeli-war-crimes-corbyn-tribunal-findssrael.

The Gaza Tribunal took evidence from eyewitnesses, UN rapporteurs, journalists, medics and academics.

Monday's report concludes that Britain has "failed in its fundamental obligation to prevent genocide, has been complicit in atrocity crimes, and in some instances has even been an active participant in these crimes".

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Israel is set to keep Al-Aqsa Mosque closed through the upcoming Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr and beyond, Middle East Eye has learnt.

Sources familiar with the occupied East Jerusalem mosque’s affairs said Israeli authorities informed the Islamic Waqf, the body responsible for administering the site, of the decision in recent days.

Al-Aqsa Mosque, one of the holiest sites in Islam, was closed by Israeli authorities earlier this month, citing the “security situation” amid the US-Israeli war on Iran.

The unprecedented closure, particularly during the month of Ramadan, has been condemned by Palestinians as the latest attempt by Israel to exploit security tensions to impose further restrictions and consolidate control over Al-Aqsa.

This has been the first Ramadan since Israel seized East Jerusalem in 1967 that Palestinians have been unable to perform Friday prayers at the mosque.

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Ukrainian forces struck a major Russian microelectronics factory in Bryansk with Storm Shadow cruise missile air-launched missiles, damaging a facility that produces critical components for Russia’s missile systems, Ukraine’s military said.

Ukraine’s General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine confirmed the strike on the Kremniy El Group plant, describing it as part of a broader campaign to reduce Russia’s military-industrial capacity.

“Kremniy El is a critically important link in the chain of production of Russian ‘high-precision’ weapons,” the General Staff said in a statement.

“The plant specializes in discrete semiconductor devices and integrated microchips that serve as the ‘brains’ and ‘nervous system’ of modern weapons.”

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Officials in Cuba reported an island-wide blackout Monday in the country of some 11 million people as its energy and economic crises deepen and its power grid continues to crumble.

The Ministry of Energy and Mines on X noted a "complete disconnection" of the country's electrical system and said it was investigating, noting there were no failures in the units that were operating when the grid collapsed.

It was the third major blackout in Cuba over the past four months.

Tomás David Velázquez Felipe, a 61-year-old resident of Havana, said the relentless outages make him think that Cubans who can should just pack up and leave the island. "What little we have to eat spoils," he said. "Our people are too old to keep suffering."

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Three Tennessee teenagers have filed a class action lawsuit against Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, alleging its large language model powered an app that was used to make nonconsensual nude and sexually explicit images and videos of them when they were girls.

"Like a rag doll brought to life through the dark arts, this [AI-generated] child can be manipulated into any pose, however sick, however fetishized, however unlawful. To the viewer, the resulting video appears entirely real," reads the complaint. "For the child, her identifying features will now forever be attached to a video depicting her own child sexual abuse."

While the perpetrator didn't use xAI's chatbot, Grok or the social media platform X (also owned by xAI), the lawsuit claims that the perpetrator relied on an unnamed app that used xAI's algorithm, citing law enforcement.

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Israel’s announcement on Monday of a ground campaign in new areas of southern Lebanon is fuelling fears of a prolonged occupation among hundreds of thousands of displaced Lebanese.

Concerns intensified after Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, drawing comparisons with Gaza, warned displaced Lebanese forced from their homes would not be allowed to return until the safety of Israelis near the border was guaranteed, remarks that appeared to suggest the presence of Israeli troops could become prolonged.

Israel’s announcement on Monday of a ground campaign in new areas of southern Lebanon is fuelling fears of a prolonged occupation among hundreds of thousands of displaced Lebanese.

Concerns intensified after Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, drawing comparisons with Gaza, warned displaced Lebanese forced from their homes would not be allowed to return until the safety of Israelis near the border was guaranteed, remarks that appeared to suggest the presence of Israeli troops could become prolonged.

“Hundreds of thousands of Shi’ite residents of southern Lebanon who have evacuated or are evacuating their homes in southern Lebanon and Beirut will not return to areas south of the Litani line until the safety of northern residents is ensured,” Katz said in a statement. ‘‘Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and I have instructed the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] to destroy the terror infrastructure in the contact villages near the border in Lebanon,” he added, “just as was done against Hamas in Rafah, Beit Hanoun and the terror tunnels in Gaza”.

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