TV News LIES

Graham Platner, the oyster farmer whose populist platform took Maine by storm, dropped his Senate bid Wednesday night as controversies over his past stacked up, leaving Democrats without a nominee to take on Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) this fall.

“We’re suspending campaign operations,” Platner told his supporters in a lengthy video posted on social media Wednesday evening, at times growing emotional.

“I intend to file my paperwork to withdraw,” he added. “The process needs to assure that what comes next is reflective of the Mainers, who on June 9 turned out and showed that they are desperate for a different kind of politics.”

Platner’s decision comes after he easily won the Democratic primary last month despite a growing list of scandals, including revelations around a sexting scandal, since-deleted social media posts downplaying sexual assault and criticizing law enforcement and reports of problematic behavior with former romantic partners.

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President Donald Trump mistakenly said the "Islamic Republic of Japan" fired 111 missiles at a U.S. aircraft carrier "a few months ago."

He made the comments July 8 while speaking to the press alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey.

"We have an aircraft carrier which is one of the most beautiful in the world, it's one of the biggest, the (USS) Abraham Lincoln," Trump said. "And a few months ago, we had, I told this story yesterday, we had 111 missiles shot by the Islamic Republic of Japan."

The president went on to say the missiles were shot at the aircraft carrier over the course of an hour and they were all intercepted.

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In the space of just a few weeks - the blink of an eye in the timeline of this Middle East conflict - US President Donald Trump has gone from being so popular in Israel he boasted he could be its next prime minister to a man so hated he could qualify for Israel’s next Amalek.

The pro-government commentariat was unsparing in their verdict. 

To give you just a taste of the bile aimed at Trump personally, Yinon Magal, host of a primetime show on Channel 14, called the US president "a loser" and branded his son-in law Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff as "little Jews".

Yaakov Bardugo, an Israeli political commentator, said that Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, were becoming the modern Chamberlain, the British prime minister associated with appeasing Hitler in 1938.

Amit Segal, chief political analyst for Channel 12 and Israel Hayom - which is owned by billionaire Miriam Adelson - said Trump had completely surrendered by allowing Iran to enrich uranium.

Shimon Riklin, an anchor on Israel's right-wing Channel 14, posted on X that the US was weaker than ever and that no-one will want to be its ally.

These commentators are close to the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Some are considered his mouthpiece. And they have collectively executed a textbook hand-brake turn.

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Egypt head coach Hossam Hassan sparked widespread praise on social media after delivering an emotional speech supporting Palestinians during a Fifa World Cup press conference on Monday, ahead of Egypt’s match against Argentina.

Speaking in Arabic, Hassan said: “If there is one person in the world who does not feel for the Palestinian people, then he is not a human being,” adding that this applied regardless of whether the person was “Arab, European, American or anything else”.

He criticised global indifference to the suffering of Palestinians, saying that while people often mobilise when an animal is harmed, “every day human beings are killed in their thousands, children and women”.

Hassan also appealed to athletes and media professionals to use football’s global platform to speak up, describing the sport as global “soft power".

“Please, please, all athletes and media professionals, regardless of their religions and countries, maybe through the World Cup, we can send a message: please let the Palestinian people live. They do not want anything, just to live.”

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Ukraine announced Tuesday it had signed “drone deals” with three more European countries, further capitalising on the expertise it has developed in drone warfare since Russia’s invasion.

The deals are custom to each country, but typically involve Kyiv providing blueprints for drone technology in exchange for royalties, investments and other military hardware.

In seperate statements on Facebook, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced he had signed agreements with Estonia, the Netherlands and Denmark at a NATO summit in the Turkish capital Ankara.

The drone deals create “new opportunities for joint production, the development of innovative defense technologies, systematic exchange of expertise, and the export of Ukrainian battlefield-proven solutions,” Zelensky said.

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A new lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C., alleges that the Trump administration is divulging details of Iranian asylum seekers to the government of Iran.

Lawyers with the left-leaning Public Citizen Litigation Group argue that the administration began sharing information about the applications with Iran in March 2025. Since then, U.S. government officials have "periodically mailed or hand delivered immigration files of Iranians" in immigration custody to the Iranian government, according to the complaint.

"The law is very clear that information within an asylum application or other applications for similar forms of protection cannot be shared, particularly with the government that the individual is fleeing," said Michael Kirkpatrick, an attorney with Public Citizen, told NPR. Public Citizen Litigation Group is representing the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund in the suit.

"That information could put them in grave risk upon return," Kirkpatrick said. "They could be detained. They could be interrogated. They could be sent to prison. They could be tortured. As well as the risk to their family and acquaintances who remain in Iran."

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A high-rise building in Manhattan was deemed unstable on Tuesday after authorities determined that support columns buckled, spurring evacuation of nearby buildings, according to officials and reports.

Officials said they also found “structural issues” on the 21st floor of the former Pfizer pharmaceutical building, which is being converted into residential apartments. “Two structural columns buckled, and there were multiple cracks and sagging floors,” the fire department said on X.

Workers were expected to begin stabilizing the building on Tuesday evening. According to New York mayor Zohran Mamdani’s office, a team went through each floor and did not detect any additional movement of the support columns, allowing the on-site contractors to begin the emergency repair work.

The temporary measures are meant to stabilize the building and are expected to stretch into the coming days, impacting a busy corridor of midtown near the famed Grand Central Terminal, which is a hub for metro area commuters and residents as well as tourists.

Officials said they received reports of a “structural issue at an active construction site” on East 42nd Street, between Second and Third avenues, before 8am.

The fire department also posted a photo of a dramatically bent beam on its X account.

“It’s a very serious situation because the box beams – the steel beams – have started to bend and deflect from the weight,” John Esposito, the fire department chief, said. “We evacuated the building and started evacuations of surrounding buildings.”

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Lake Powell, the US’s second-largest reservoir, threatens to plunge to unprecedentedly low levels this year after a historically bleak snowpack failed to raise its water level, scientists and water experts have said, adding renewed urgency to stalled talks over how to conserve a water source depended on by tens of millions of people in the US south-west.

The 185-mile Colorado River reservoir currently stands at about 22% of its capacity, or roughly 5.6m acre-feet. Lake Powell fell below that level for a few months three years ago. But those 2023 levels were recorded in the winter, when the reservoir, which straddles the Utah-Arizona border, hits its lowest ebb. Spring runoff carried the level back up to 9.6m acre-feet by June, according to data from the US Bureau of Reclamation.

Not this year. After a winter of historically low snowpack in the mountains and a heatwave that broke records across the south-west in March, water levels at Lake Powell barely rose this spring at all. Even after supplemental releases from Flaming Gorge Reservoir upstream, it ended the month of June below the annual low it hit the month before, and could keep dropping. Except for those few months in 2023, Lake Powell’s water level has not been this low since June of 1965 – two years after US authorities first started filling it.

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