TV News LIES

The FBI on Wednesday searched the election office of a Georgia county that has been central to right-wing conspiracy theories over President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss, acting just one week after the Republican leader predicted prosecutions over a contest he has baselessly insisted was tainted by widespread fraud.

The search at Fulton County’s main election facility in Union City sought records related to the 2020 election, county spokesperson Jessica Corbitt-Dominguez said. It appeared to be the most public step by law enforcement to pursue Trump’s claims of a stolen election, grievances rejected time and again by courts and state and federal officials, who found no evidence of fraud that would have altered the outcome.

It also unfolds against the backdrop of FBI and Justice Department efforts to investigate perceived political enemies of Trump, including former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Trump has for years focused on Fulton, Georgia’s most populous county and a Democratic stronghold, as a key example of what he claims went wrong in the 2020 election. His pressure campaign there culminated in a sweeping state indictment accusing him and 18 others of illegally trying to overturn the vote.

An FBI spokesperson said agents were “executing a court authorized law enforcement action” at the county’s main election office in Union City, just south of Atlanta. The spokesperson declined to provide any further information, citing an ongoing matter.

More...

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico fiercely denied a Politico report that said he was “shocked” by President Trump’s state of mind during his visit to Mar-a-Lago in Florida this month.

Politico, citing five unnamed European diplomats, reported that Fico told European Union leaders at a summit in Brussels last week that his meeting with the U.S. president left him concerned about Trump’s “psychological state.

Two of the diplomats said Fico used the word “dangerous” to describe the way Trump came across during the Jan. 17 meeting at Trump’s estate in Florida, according to Politico.

“I must emphatically reject the lies of the POLITICO portal about how I assessed my meeting with US President D. Trump at an informal summit in Brussels,” Fico wrote in a post on the social platform X.

“No one heard anything, no one saw anything, there are no witnesses, but nothing prevented the POLITICO portal from coming up with lies,” he continued.

More...

Last Tuesday, during the morning rush hour, 15 individuals from a group called Eject Elbit staked positions in the four-lane access road to the headquarters of banking giant Capital One Financial Corporation in McLean, Virginia. They mounted ladders in the road and climbed atop them, unfurling a banner from their perches that read “CAPITAL ONE FUNDS GENOCIDE.” They stretched across the road a second banner, fifty feet wide, that said “DIVEST FROM DEATH.” Another protestor, a disabled woman, blockaded the road while locked to her wheelchair.

Max, a former employee of the company who only used his first name for security reasons, said they flooded the streets to “shake people awake,” regarding Capital One’s $90 million loan to Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems, the largest supplier of the Israeli Defense forces. Elbit produces everything from precision-guided rockets and bombs to state-of-the-art artillery ammunition, guidance systems for aircraft and helicopters, and killer drones that have been deployed in the genocide of Gaza.

Eject Elbit launched its new campaign against Capital One earlier this month across northern Virginia, Boston, Philadelphia, DC, Seattle, and New York City. A thirty-year-old queer activist named Cassian, who was posted atop one of the ladders that blockaded the McLean site last week, helped launch the Eject Elbit campaign in Washington, DC, after years of participating in protests with pro-Palestinian groups. “If the US government was not going to stop sending weapons for the genocide, then the people were going to have to stop it,” Cassian said.

For an hour and a half, the bank’s opulent campus—with its mini-golf course, sculpture garden, baseball field, and concert hall—was inaccessible as traffic backed up and irate motorists leaned on their horns and shouted.

Last September, in a special report titled “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide,” UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese investigated the “corporate machinery sustaining Israel’s settler-colonial project of displacement and replacement of the Palestinians in the occupied territory,” in which Elbit Systems featured as a primary contractor to the Israeli state. Detailing how “the military-industrial complex has become the economic backbone” of Israel, the UN report says that Elbit Systems provides “a critical domestic supply of weaponry, and reinforce[s] Israel’s military alliances through arms exports and joint development of military technology.”

More...

Israel said Monday that the remains of the last hostage in Gaza had been recovered, clearing the way for the next phase of the ceasefire that stopped the Israel-Hamas war. The announcement came a day after Israel's government said the military was conducting a "large-scale operation" in a cemetery in northern Gaza to locate the remains of Ran Gvili.

The return of all remaining hostages, living or dead, has been a key part of the Gaza ceasefire's first phase, and Gvili's family had urged Israel's government not to enter the second phase until his remains were recovered and returned.

In a statement, the Israel Defense Forces said representatives had informed Gvili's family "that their loved one has been identified and is being buried."

"With this, all of the abductees have been returned from the Gaza Strip," the IDF said.

Israel and Hamas have been under pressure from ceasefire mediators, including the Trump administration, to move into the second phase of the U.S.-brokered truce, which took effect on Oct. 10.

More...

A new study from a US think tank has found that military casualties from the Kremlin’s nearly four-year unprovoked invasion have approached two million, with the invaders suffering the lion’s share of those dead and injured. The number represents soldiers either killed in action, wounded, or missing.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies announced on Tuesday that its analysts have found that Moscow’s troops have suffered 1.2 million casualties, with about 325,000 dead. 

This roughly coincides with Kyiv’s official estimate of 1.24 Russian casualties, a figure that its updated daily at the top of Kyiv Post’s homepage.

“Combined Russian and Ukrainian casualties may be as high as 1.8 million and could reach two million total casualties by the spring of 2026,” the think tank wrote in its report.

“No major power has suffered anywhere near these numbers of casualties or fatalities in any war since World War II,” CSIS analysts wrote.

The study’s stated goal was to measure the success of Moscow’s campaign in Ukraine. The introduction reads:

“A close look at the data suggests that Russia is hardly winning and, even more interestingly, that Russia is increasingly a declining power. To better understand the state of the war and Russia’s battlefield performance, this analysis asks: How successful has the Russian military been in achieving the Kremlin’s main objectives?

More...

Former FIFA president Sepp Blatter on Monday backed a proposed fan boycott of World Cup matches in the United States because of the conduct of President Donald Trump and his administration at home and abroad.

Blatter was the latest international soccer figure to call into question the suitability of the United States as a host country. He called for the boycott in a post on X that supported Mark Pieth's comments in an interview last week with the Swiss newspaper Der Bund.

Pieth, a Swiss attorney specializing in white-collar crime and an anti-corruption expert, chaired the Independent Governance Committee's oversight of FIFA reform a decade ago. Blatter was president of the world's governing body for soccer from 1998-2015; he resigned amid an investigation into corruption.

In his interview with Der Bund, Pieth said, "If we consider everything we've discussed, there's only one piece of advice for fans: Stay away from the USA! You'll see it better on TV anyway. And upon arrival, fans should expect that if they don't please the officials, they'll be put straight on the next flight home. If they're lucky."

More...

A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that a five-year-old Minnesota boy and his father cannot be immediately deported, one week after their arrest sparked international outrage.

A Texas-based judge issued an order saying Liam Ramos, the preschooler, and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, cannot be removed or transferred out of the judicial district where they are being held while the litigation challenging their detention proceeds.

A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that a five-year-old Minnesota boy and his father cannot be immediately deported, one week after their arrest sparked international outrage.

A Texas-based judge issued an order saying Liam Ramos, the preschooler, and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, cannot be removed or transferred out of the judicial district where they are being held while the litigation challenging their detention proceeds.

Liam’s arrest seven days prior went viral and became a symbol of the Trump administration’s relentless crackdown on immigrant communities in the Minneapolis region. Attorneys for the family have said the father and son have an active asylum case and had entered the US at an authorized port of entry.

Officials at Liam’s school district spoke out about his arrest last week, saying the boy and his father were detained as they returned home from school. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) defended the arrest, arguing that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was conducting a “targeted operation” to detain the boy’s father.

More...

Civil rights attorneys filed a federal lawsuit against the United States government on Tuesday on behalf of the families of two men from a small fishing village in Trinidad who were killed in a US military airstrike on a small boat in the Caribbean Sea on 14 October.

The lawsuit, shared in advance with the Guardian, says that Chad Joseph, 26, and Rishi Samaroo, 41, both of Las Cuevas, Trinidad, were returning to Trinidad from Venezuela when they and four other people were killed in the strike. It was the fifth attack announced by the White House under Donald Trump’s campaign against the small go-fast boats the administration claims are connected to cartels and gangs.

The suit was filed four days after the administration announced the 36th such boat attack on Friday, this one in the eastern Pacific. The death toll of the boat strikes stands around at least 117 people dead so far.

The lawsuit said the strikes were illegal. “These premeditated and intentional killings lack any plausible legal justification,” the lawsuit said. “Thus, they were simply murder, ordered at the highest levels of government and obeyed by military officers in the chain of command.”

Legal scholars have said the strikes, launched against civilians in boats far from the US, are violations of domestic and international law. The Trump administration maintains they are legal, under a secret opinion written by the justice department that argues the US is in an armed conflict with cartels and that the laws of war apply to the strikes.

More...