TV News LIES

New Jersey progressive candidate is the projected winner of the Democratic nomination in the race for Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s (D) former House seat, Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ) announced Friday.

Her closest rival, former Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), conceded the race on Tuesday.

Mejia declared victory hours later, thanking supporters and pledging to represent her district’s interests in Congress if she sails through the general election in April.

“People will say that this district is not the kind of district in which a progressive or a lefty could win. But it’s not about left-right. It’s about right and wrong,” she told supporters. The director of the New Jersey Working Families Alliance, Mejia was the most high-profile progressive candidate in the race, having scored endorsements from Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), as well as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

Her apparent victory in the primary sets her up as the favored candidate in the April general election in a district that voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris by 9 points in 2024. It’s the latest boost for the party’s left flank and represents a stunning upset against Malinowski, who outraised her and had a higher name ID in the state by virtue of his previous two terms in Congress, ending in 2023.

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President Donald Trump met for more than two hours behind closed doors with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday and said he'd insisted that negotiations with Iran continue as the U.S. pushes for a nuclear deal with Tehran

Netanyahu entered the White House out of the view of reporters and left without issuing a statement on what was said. But Trump, in a subsequent post on his social media site, called it "a very good meeting" but said "there was nothing definitive reached, other than I insisted that negotiations with Iran continue to see whether or not a Deal can be consummated."

"If it can, I let the Prime Minister know that will be a preference," Trump wrote. "If it cannot, we will just have to see what the outcome will be."

He added, "Last time Iran decided that they were better off not making a Deal" and were hit by U.S. strikes.

"Hopefully this time they will be more reasonable and responsible," Trump wrote.

The visit from Netanyahu — their seventh meeting in Trump's second term — comes as both Tehran and Washington are projecting cautious optimism after holding indirect talks in Oman on Friday about how, once again, to approach negotiations over Iran's nuclear program.

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Russian infantry assaults against Ukrainian positions fell off moderately following loss of access to the tactically critical Starlink satellite communications system by Kremlin forces and the widely-used Telegram messaging app – but they have not stopped, news and field reports, and official statements over the past week have shown.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX company on Feb. 4 shut down gray and black market Starlink terminals operating in Russia and Ukraine, following a Ukrainian government request.

The switch-off did not significantly damage the ability of the Ukrainian military, widely using white market Starlink terminals, to digitally share battle intelligence and targeting information instantaneously, and in some sectors it gave piloted strike drones immune to jamming.

The access denial at the same time turned hundreds of gray and black market Starlink terminals used by Russian combat units for their own enciphered information-sharing and drone operations in Ukraine, into useless junk.

On Tuesday, Russian users of the Telegram messaging app reported critical slowdowns in access and data transfer speed, following a reported Russian state move to pressure Russian Telegram-users to shift to the state-developed app Messenger Max.

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A new report from Congress has raised the alarm about children with mental health conditions being held in juvenile detention, rather than getting treatment.

"Prolonged Incarceration of Children Due to Mental Health Care Shortages," released Thursday by the staff of Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff and Republican Rep. Jen Kiggans, is based on a survey sent to administrators of public juvenile detention facilities around the country. About half of those who responded to the survey reported they had, at some point, kept children incarcerated when they could have been released into offsite mental health care.

"This should shock America's conscience," Ossoff says. "Children with special needs, locked up for extended time instead of getting the mental health care that they need."

According to the survey, 75 juvenile detention centers in 25 states reported holding youths for days or even months until space became available at a long-term psychiatric residential treatment facility.

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Israeli authorities have arrested several people and charged two on suspicion of using classified information to place bets about military operations on the popular prediction market platform Polymarket.

Prosecutors say a civilian and a military reservist have been indicted for bribery and obstruction of justice, with an undisclosed number of others also arrested for placing Polymarket wagers based on classified information, according to a statement released Thursday by officials in Tel Aviv.

While the names of those charged and the specific bets they made were not disclosed, the announcement comes weeks after Israeli media reported that security agencies were probing whether military officials were turning secret intelligence about military strikes into Polymarket bets.

Kan News, Israel's public broadcaster, reported last month that government investigators were examining Polymarket bets on an Israeli strike on Iran in June 2025, when the countries fought a 12-day war.

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Protecting archaeological sites. Preventing water theft. The streamlining of land purchases. If anyone doubted the real purpose of the motley collection of new administrative and enforcement measures for the illegally occupied West Bank, Israel’s defence minister spelt it out: “We will continue to kill the idea of a Palestinian state,” Israel Katz said in a joint statement with the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich.

While the world’s attention was fixed upon the annihilation in Gaza, settlers in the West Bank intensified their campaign of ethnic cleansing. More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed there since October 2023; a fifth of them were children. Many more have been driven from their homes by relentless harassment and the destruction of infrastructure, with entire Palestinian communities erased across vast swathes of land.

The Israeli state is not merely complicit in these acts. In addition to the economic suffocation and increased military raids in the West Bank, the Guardian reported last month that settler-only units of the army are acting as “vigilante militias”. Haaretz newspaper reports that the military has ordered soldiers to prevent Palestinians from ploughing their land at the behest of settlers – not only threatening them with destitution, but paving the way for land seizure.

With Israel heading to elections in months, Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners are in a hurry. While they and their allies have changed the facts on the ground dramatically, and have steadily expanded Israel’s control, the bureaucratic measures adopted by the security cabinet last Sunday are “tectonic”, as one scholar notes. They ease land theft, stripping away the very limited constraints on purchase, and destroy the nominal authority of Palestinians in areas A and B.

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A federal judge on Thursday blocked the Pentagon’s efforts to censure Sen. Mark Kelly and lower his retirement rank in the wake of a video in which the Arizona senator and other Democrats called on service members to reject unlawful orders.    

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, noted the military principal that servicemembers enjoy weakened First Amendment protections to preserve discipline in the armed forces, but said that no court had ever extended that doctrine to retired service members.

He said he would not be the first to do so. 

“This Court has all it needs to conclude that Defendants have trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms and threatened the constitutional liberties of millions of military retirees,” the judge wrote.

Leon quoted singer-songwriter Bob Dylan to say, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

“To say the least, our retired veterans deserve more respect from their Government,” the judge added, “and our Constitution demands they receive it!”  

Hegseth wrote on X that the ruling will be “immediately appealed.”

“Sedition is sedition, ‘Captain,'” the Defense secretary said.

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Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are accusing the Department of Justice (DOJ) of spying on them as they reviewed the unredacted Epstein files on DOJ computers, tracking the documents they examined.

Attorney General Pam Bondi was photographed during a congressional appearance before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday flipping to a document titled “Jayapal Pramila Search History,” seemingly reviewing the activity of the Washington Democrat who tangled with Bondi during the hearing.

Bondi had a binder at the ready of stats and crime summaries to hurl at lawmakers during the contentious hearing, but members are unnerved that the DOJ apparently tracked their searches to have at the ready.

“It is totally inappropriate and against the separations of powers for the DOJ to surveil us as we search the Epstein files. Bondi showed up today with a burn book that held a printed search history of exactly what emails I searched. That is outrageous and I intend to pursue this and stop this spying on members,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) wrote on social platform X after seeing the photo.

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