TV News LIES

Newly installed river barriers held back record levels of flooding and prevented widespread damage in Alaska’s capital city on Wednesday, after an ice dam at the nearby Mendenhall Glacier released a huge surge of rainwater and snowmelt, officials said.

Water pooled on several streets and in some yards in Juneau after the Mendenhall River crested earlier in the day, and high water was expected to persist for hours. But many residents in the flood zone had evacuated before peak water levels, and there were no damage reports similar to the past two summers, when about 300 homes were flooded.

The temporary barriers “really have protected our community”, Juneau city manager Katie Koester told a news conference. “If it weren’t for them, we would have hundreds and hundreds of flooded homes.”

On Tuesday morning, authorities confirmed that water had started escaping the ice dam, with flooding expected into Wednesday. Some Juneau residents in the flood zone had already evacuated as officials intensified their warnings on Tuesday, saying: “Don’t wait, Evacuate TONIGHT.”

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The US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is experiencing “severe” staff shortages at all its hospitals, with the number of shortages increasing by 50% this fiscal year, according to a new report from the agency’s independent watchdog.

The report, released on Tuesday, came a day after the Guardian revealed the department had lost thousands of healthcare professionals deemed “core” to the system under Donald Trump, without which, the agency said, “mission-critical work cannot be completed”.

The inspector general found 94% of VA facilities faced a “severe” shortage of doctors, while 79% faced a severe shortage of nurses. Psychology was “the most frequently reported clinical occupational staffing shortage”. A majority of VA facilities also reported severe shortages of police officers, who keep veteran patients and staff safe.

The VA operates the largest integrated healthcare system in the United States, serving 9 million veterans annually. The report is required under two laws, one signed by Trump in 2017, which require the agency’s inspector general annually to determine the extent of staffing shortages within each medical center.

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The White House confirmed to NBC News on Wednesday that EJ Antoni, the conservative economist Donald Trump has chosen to run the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was in the crowd of Trump supporters that surrounded the Capitol on January 6 2021.

A man of Antoni’s appearance, wearing a red varsity jacket, was caught on video posted on the conservative social network Parler walking through the crowd of Trump supporters massed outside the west side of the Capitol about 10 minutes before the mob broke through police lines and into the building.

That video, archived by ProPublica, shows the man in what appears to be a varsity jacket with the University of Pennsylvania crest on it walking away from that entrance to the Capitol at about 1.51 pm that day.

According to NBC News, the man also appears in other footage recorded on the east side of the Capitol building during the riot.

Approached for comment by NBC News, the White House confirmed that the man in the images was Antoni.

“These pictures show EJ Antoni, a bystander to the events of January 6th, observing and then leaving the Capitol area,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers wrote to NBC News. “EJ was in town for meetings, and it is wrong and defamatory to suggest EJ engaged in anything inappropriate or illegal.”

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Donald Trump has a simple solution when numbers are telling him something he does not want to hear: Make up new numbers.

The president’s strategy, if you want to call it one, was on vivid display this week on three fronts: His decision to appoint a conservative crony to an essential federal agency charged with compiling the monthly unemployment numbers, his decision to declare an emergency in Washington, D.C., while dismissing data showing crime in the city is in decline and at decades-long lows, and his demand for a new and likely unconstitutional census which would exclude undocumented immigrants.

In general, when Trump is in power, he likes to paint a rosy picture of an America where everything is going as right as it can be. When he’s out of office, Trump makes wildly false claims about the national unemployment rate and the crime rate to attack Democrats. During his 2016 presidential campaign, for example, Trump claimed the unemployment rate was as high as 42%, even though it was about 5% at the time.

But after a government report suggested the labor market is cooling off in his second term, Trump appears to be gearing up to muzzle or manipulate the Bureau of Labor Statistics, firing its respected leader and announcing plans to replace her with a partisan nominee who suggested getting rid of monthly jobs reports entirely. And that’s after the unemployment rate had only gone up a tenth of a percentage point.

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An Illinois judge on Wednesday declined Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s (R) request to hold Texas Democrats who fled there in contempt. 

Paxton reached across state lines to seek a ruling that would effectively force the blue state to comply with efforts to arrest the lawmakers and return them to Texas to end their quorum breaking that has blocked Republicans’ redistricting push.

“As the Petitioner has failed to present a legal basis for the court to obtain subject matter jurisdiction over this cause of action, this court is without jurisdiction to grant petitioner’s emergency motion to rule on pleadings,” Judge Scott Larson wrote in a brief order posted on the case docket. 

“This court does not find that it has subject matter jurisdiction, this court does not consider the issues of personal jurisdiction, venue or the merits of the underlying petition for rule to show cause or the request to issue a rule to show cause upon the respondents,” he continued.

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Since the war began in Gaza, 184 Palestinian journalists have been killed, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. They include men and women, freelancers and staffers, veterans with years in the field and young reporters on some of their first assignments. Some werekilled with their families at home, others were in vehicles marked “PRESS,” or in tents near hospitals, or out covering the violence. Many endured the same conditions as those they covered — hunger, displacement, and grief.

Israel has killed at least 184 Palestinian journalists since the war began
The war in Gaza has been the most dangerous conflict for journalists and media workers in recent history, observers say.

Among them:

—Ayat Khadoura, 27. The Al Quds University graduate shed light on the hardships families faced in the first weeks of the war. She became known for reporting on bombs striking her northern Gaza neighborhood, including one video in which she said Israeli forces had ordered residents to evacuate moments before a strike hit her home and killed her in November 2023.

— Hamza Dahdouh, 27. The son of Al Jazeera’s Gaza City bureau chief, he was killed in a January 2024 drone strike after leaving a reporting assignment at the site of an earlier strike in southern Gaza. He was the fifth member of his family to be killed.

TVNL Comment: Thank you, Associated Press editors, for paying tribute to some of the journalists killed in Gaza.  Wonder why no foreign jounalists are allowed to enter the region.  Also wonder why there is no outcry from other journalists throughout the world.

Read about more journalist killed by Israel here...

Danielle Spencer, who played the wisecracking and tattling little sister Dee Thomas on the 1970s sitcom What's Happening!! has died at 60.

Spencer, who became a veterinarian later in life, died Monday at a hospital in Richmond, Va., after a years-long battle with cancer, family spokesperson Sandra Jones said.

As Dee, Spencer was the smahttps://www.npr.org/2025/08/12/nx-s1-5500593/danielle-spencer-who-played-little-sister-dee-on-whats-happening-dies-at-60rter, more serious younger sister who offered a steady stream of deadpan roasts of big brother Roger "Raj" Thomas and his friends Dwayne Nelson and Freddie "Rerun" Stubbs.

"Ooh, I'm gonna tell mama," would become Dee's catchphrase.

The show, set in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts and among the first on television to focus on the lives of Black teenagers, was based on the movie Cooley High and ran on ABC from 1976 to 1979. It had a long legacy thanks to its memorable characters, including the geeky Raj, the catchphrase-spouting Dwayne, the red-bereted dancing phenom Rerun, and Dee with her eye-rolls and icy stare.

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The DC national guard will begin deploying on the city’s streets Tuesday night, the White House confirmed to the Guardian, a day after Donald Trump ordered their arrival and took control of the city’s police force, calling Washington DC a “lawless” city, despite official crime statistics saying otherwise. A White House official told the Washington Post that the national guard is expected to “begin being on the streets starting tonight”. Defense officials said a small number of the roughly 800 guard members planned for the mission had already been mobilized by Tuesday afternoon, with more expected to arrive in the coming days.
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About 850 officers and agents took part in a “massive law enforcement surge” across Washington DC on Monday night and made nearly two dozen arrests, the White House has said. The show of force came after Donald Trump announced he was sending the national guard into the capital and putting city police under federal control, even though the violent crime rate is at a 30-year low. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Tuesday: “As part of the president’s massive law enforcement surge, last night approximately 850 officers and agents were surged across the city. They made a total of 23 arrests, including multiple other contacts.”

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