TV News LIES

The U.S. House Oversight Committee voted March 4 to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi to testify about the Department of Justice's handling of its release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Some members of Congress have expressed frustration and outrage that the Department only released a little more 3 million pages of the 6 million it possesses related to investigations of the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender who died by suicide while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges. Congress voted in December to force the Department to release all of the Epstein files with limited redactions to protect victims and their identities.

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Israel closed all crossings into Gaza indefinitely when it attacked Iran, imposing a siege that has already pushed up food prices and threatens to plunge 2 million people into a new hunger crisis.

After more than two years of war, and with Israeli forces in control of about 60% of the territory, almost all of Gaza’s food must be brought in.

Humanitarian groups feeding much of the population say the supplies they had on Saturday, when the war began, will only last a few more days.

“If [the borders] stay closed, World Central Kitchen will run out of food this week,” said the organisation’s founder and chief, José Andrés, in a post on social media.

“We are cooking 1m hot meals every day. We need food deliveries every single day.”

One international food security expert said there was just a week’s supply of fresh food in Gaza.

Community bakeries that supply some of the most vulnerable people have only enough flour for about 10 days of bread, and there are about two weeks’ supply of aid parcels.

Israel imposed a total siege on Gaza last spring followed by extreme restrictions on food shipments. Together they caused a famine last summer.

Hundreds of people were also killed trying to reach the food distribution points of a new logistics organisation, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which only operated in Israeli-controlled areas.

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US President Donald Trump said his “biggest surprise” since unleashing a war in the Middle East has been Iran’s attacks on the Arab Gulf states, which the US counts as some of its closest and richest partners.

“Unbelievable,” a former US intelligence official told Middle East Eye in response to Trump’s comment.

“It’s as if the US was operating and planning in a bubble for the last year. This is what Trump was warned of in conversations with Gulf rulers, and presumably his own intelligence briefings,” the person added.

Not even a year has passed since Trump gave a speech in Riyadh praising the “gleaming marvels” of the oil and gas-rich region’s cities, and now Iranian drones and ballistic missiles are slamming into those very towers and the energy infrastructure that made them possible.

In his May speech, Trump also trashed “interventionists”. His remarks were welcomed not only by ordinary people in the Gulf but also by its wealthy rulers, who are increasingly seeking to manage the region on their own - sometimes through violent means, as in Sudan, and at other times through negotiation.

Now, the US’s willingness to engage in an all-out war on the Islamic Republic as its Gulf allies take the retaliatory blows is shaking the foundations of their security partnership in the first place, analysts and officials in the Gulf say.

“To my knowledge, the US has not spelt out to leadership what our gain is if we join a full-scale war on Iran,” a Gulf official told MEE. “But the cost is obvious.”

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Jeremy Scahill, Murtaza Hussain, and Sharif Abdel Kouddous discuss the latest developments in the U.S.-Israel war on Iran with Karim Makdisi, an associate professor at the American University of Beirut and a co-host, with his brothers, of the Makdisi Street podcast. With Hezbollah entering the war and Israel slowly moving troops into Lebanon, they discuss the spreading conflict in the context of Israel’s broader agenda in the region.

“If you go back to the question of resistance, if you go to the question of Hezbollah, I think their calculation now is to say, look, if Iran falls, we’re doomed, Hezbollah’s doomed, Lebanon is doomed,” Makdisi said. “So this is a situation where we need to enter in whatever capacity possible and support this particular attack or do whatever they can do in order to support this larger regional war, because otherwise the Israelis with the Americas are going to just pick off each of these entities one at a time in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Iran, etc.... This is for them an existential situation, as it is in Iran.”

Attempting to weaken or overthrow Iran, they note, is a means to support Israel’s campaign of annihilation in Palestine and beyond.

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US political commentator and journalist Tucker Carlson claimed on Monday that Saudi Arabia and Qatar had caught and “arrested Israeli Mossad agents planning bombings in those countries”.

“Why would the Israelis be committing bombings in Gulf countries, which are also being attacked by Iran?” Carlson said on his show. “Aren’t they on the same side?”

“Israel wants to hurt Iran - and Qatar, and the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, and Oman and Kuwait,” he added.

Carlson also alleged that Israel deliberately sows chaos among America’s Arab allies.

The American journalist did not cite a source for the claim, which Middle East Eye could not independently verify.

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US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he’s “not happy” with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer for not joining the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, though he allowed US forces to use UK bases.

“I’m not happy with the UK,” Trump said during a White House meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. “It’s taken three, four days for us to work out where we can land. This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with.”

Trump also singled out Spain, whose left-wing government refused to let US planes use its bases for attacks and resisted NATO defense spending increases.

“Spain has been terrible,” Trump told reporters. “We’re going to cut off all trade with Spain. We don’t want anything to do with Spain.”

The comments came as US and Israeli strikes hit targets across Tehran, marking the fourth day of the conflict.

Drones and missiles targeted Iranian oil facilities and US embassies in the Gulf, while Israel intensified operations in Lebanon against Tehran-backed Hezbollah after the militia entered the fight.

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U.S. first lady Melania Trump presided over a U.N. Security Council meeting on Monday focusing on children in conflict, one of her signature issues, and acknowledged she was doing so in "challenging times" as the United States has joined Israel in attacking Iran.

"The U.S. stands with all of the children throughout the world," she said, speaking generally and not specifically about the new war in the Middle East. "I hope soon peace will be yours."

Hanging over Monday's meeting was what Iranian state media says was an airstrike that hit a girls' school in southern Iran, killing at least 165 people and wounding dozens more. The Israeli military said it was not aware of strikes in the area. The U.S. military said it was looking into the reports.

Shortly before Monday's session began, Iran's ambassador to the U.N., Amir Saeid Iravani, said it was "deeply shameful and hypocritical" for the U.S. to convene a meeting on protecting children during conflict while launching airstrikes on Iranian cities.

"For the United States, 'protecting children' and 'maintaining international peace and security' clearly mean something very different from what the U.N. Charter provides," he told reporters.

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The US justice department abruptly reversed course on Tuesday and decided it would defend executive orders made by Donald Trump to try to penalize law firms that represented clients or causes the president did not like.

On Monday, the department announced in a court filing that it was dropping its appeal against a ruling by a district court judge that blocked Trump’s retaliatory executive actions against four companies that refused to make a deal with him.

Trump’s “capitulation” was celebrated by at least two of the the companies that welcomed the DoJ’s voluntary withdrawal from the legal proceedings.

On Tuesday, however, the government filed a new, single-paragraph request to the US court of appeals for the Columbia circuit, announcing it had changed its mind, and wished “to pursue this appeal”.

It gave no reason for its sudden about-face, and quoted attorneys for the four companies who unanimously opposed “the government’s unexplained request to withdraw yesterday’s voluntary dismissal, to which all parties had agreed”.

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