TV News LIES

Veterans who helped the US’s Afghan allies find refuge in the US say they are outraged that a fellow veteran and advocate now faces federal conspiracy charges for his role in a protest against the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

Some call the arrest of former US army sergeant Bajun Mavalwalla II “shameful” and “un-American”. Mavalwalla is part of a community of American military veterans who, in the wake of Kabul’s fall to the Taliban in 2021, worked to rescue Afghans who supported the US military operations in their home country.

“He is one of us – and his arrest sends a message that peaceful dissent is being criminalized,” Shawn VanDiver, the founder and president of #AfghanEvac, an umbrella group bringing together military veterans, national security leaders, intelligence workers and refugee rights groups, wrote to his membership after the Guardian revealed Mavalwalla’s arrest on Tuesday.

“We want to say this loud and clear. We will not be intimidated,” VanDiver, a navy veteran, wrote.

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A federal judge on Friday ruled against the Trump administration from ending temporary legal protections that have granted more than 1 million people from Haiti and Venezuela the right to live and work in the United States.

The ruling by US district judge Edward Chen of San Francisco for the plaintiffs means that 600,000 Venezuelans whose temporary protections expired in April or whose protections were about to expire on 10 September have status to stay and work in the United States.

Chen said the actions of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary, Kristi Noem, in terminating and vacating three extensions granted by the previous administration exceeded her statutory authority and were arbitrary and capricious.

The DHS did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

Friday’s ruling came after an appeals court blocked Donald Trump’s plans to end protections for 600,000 people from Venezuela who have permission to live and work in the US, saying that plaintiffs were likely to win their claim that the Trump administration’s actions were unlawful.

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Donald Trump told reporters that he might send national guard troops into Portland, Oregon, apparently because he was misled about the scale of small protests there by a TV report that incorrectly presented video recorded in 2020 as having taken place this summer.

“I will say this, I watched today, I didn’t know that was continuing to go on, but Portland is unbelievable, what’s going on,” Trump said. He then claimed, incorrectly, that he had seen video evidence of “the destruction of the city”.

Trump, apparently misled by video of 2020 protests, threatens to send troops to Portland

Donald Trump told reporters that he might send national guard troops into Portland, Oregon, apparently because he was misled about the scale of small protests there by a TV report that incorrectly presented video recorded in 2020 as having taken place this summer.

“I will say this, I watched today, I didn’t know that was continuing to go on, but Portland is unbelievable, what’s going on,” Trump said. He then claimed, incorrectly, that he had seen video evidence of “the destruction of the city”.

In fact, a handful of protesters have demonstrated outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in a remote area of Portland along the south waterfront this year, but the scale of the protests, which attract dozens at most, is nothing like the 2020 protests following the police killing of George Floyd that regularly drew thousands to tens of thousands of demonstrators to a central part of the city for months.

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Immigration authorities said Friday they detained 475 people, most of them South Korean nationals, when hundreds of federal agents raided the sprawling manufacturing site in Georgia where Korean automaker Hyundai makes electric vehicles.

Steven Schrank, the lead Georgia agent of Homeland Security Investigations, said during a news conference Friday that the raid resulted from a monthslong investigation into allegations of illegal hiring at the site and was the “largest single site enforcement operation” in the agency’s two-decade history.

The Thursday raid targeted one of Georgia’s largest and most high-profile manufacturing sites, where Hyundai Motor Group a year ago began manufacturing electric vehicles at a $7.6 billion plant. The site employs about 1,200 people in an area about 25 miles (40 kilometers) west of Savannah where bedroom communities bleed into farms. Gov. Brian Kemp and other officials have touted it as the state’s largest economic development project.

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New York City’s Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani took on Donald Trump on Thursday as the president reportedly looks to “clear the field” and better former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s chances to win November’s election.

Mamdani, in response to Cuomo’s call for a series of borough-focused debates between the two, instead turned his attention to the president.

“Let’s cut out the middleman. Why should I debate Donald Trump’s puppet when I could debate Donald Trump himself?” the democratic socialist told CBS New York.

“If Donald Trump is serious about this, he should come to New York City. We can have as many debates as you want about why he is cutting SNAP benefits for hungry New Yorkers just to fund tax cuts for his billionaire donors.”

The challenge from Mamdani — who continues to lead in the polls over Cuomo, GOP nominee Curtis Sliwa and scandal-plagued New York Mayor Eric Adams (D), who is running as an independent — comes a day after The New York Times reported that Trump advisers discussed getting a job for Adams in the administration if he drops out.

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Another federal judge in the nation’s capital has blasted the Justice Department for filing federal felony charges it couldn't convince a grand jury to approve, this time in the case of a man accused of threatening to kill President Donald Trump.

The failure to secure an indictment is another setback for Trump’s handpicked U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, whose office has repeatedly disproved the axiom that a grand jury will indict even a ham sandwich.

“It's not fair to say they're losing credibility. We're past that now,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui said of Pirro's office and the broader Justice Department during a Sept. 4 hearing for the accused man, Edward Alexander Dana, a person in attendance confirmed to USA TODAY.

“There's no credibility left,” Faruqui later said, according to that person.

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The anguished final pleas of a 5-year-old Palestinian girl trapped in a car under Israeli fire are retold in “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” a searing new film that received a rapturous premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday.

“Hind’s story carries the weight of an entire people,” one of the actors, Saja Kilani, told reporters in a statement she read out on behalf of the whole cast and crew ahead of the screening.

The true-life drama focuses on telephone operators from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society who tried for hours to reassure the trapped Hind Rajab as she begged to be rescued from the car, where her aunt, uncle and three cousins already lay dead.

I’m so scared, please come,” the little girl says, with the original recordings of her increasingly desperate calls to the dispatchers used to powerful effect throughout the film.

The real question is, how have we let a child beg for life? No one can live in peace while even one child is forced to plead for survival. ... Let Hind Rajab’s voice echo around the world,” Kilani said.

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Twenty-six nations have pledged to provide postwar security guarantees to Ukraine, including an international force on land and sea and in the air, Emmanuel Macron said after a summit at which European leaders sought to pin down Donald Trump on the level of support he is willing to give Kyiv.

“The day the conflict stops, the security guarantees will be deployed,” the French president told a press conference at the Élysée Palace in Paris, standing alongside Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

After the summit, Macron told reporters: “We have today 26 countries who have formally committed – some others have not yet taken a position – to deploy a ‘reassurance force’ troops in Ukraine, or be present on the ground, in the sea or in the air.”

The troops would not be deployed “on the frontline” but aim to “prevent any new major aggression”, Macron said.Macron initially said the 26 nations – which he did not name – would deploy to Ukraine. But he later said some countries would provide guarantees while remaining outside Ukraine, for example by helping to train and equip Kyiv’s forces. He did not say how many troops would be involved in the guarantees.

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