TV News LIES

On Tuesday, lists of names were nailed to wooden boards outside the gates of the Omid rehabilitation center, some typed on A4 sheets and others handwritten. Their edges curled quickly in the damp air, blurred by rain and a crowd of men running their fingers down the pages again and again, whispering names under their breath, as if repetition might produce a different outcome.

Behind the gates, officials in white medical gowns read names through a megaphone. In front of them, the crowd pushed forward waiting for confirmation of whether their family member was injured, dead, or missing.

"I came from Jalalabad to find my father,” said Shafiq, a teenager holding a crumpled piece of paper. “His name is Delaram.” He pointed to a number on a list. “It says he is alive. But…I don’t know where he is.”

On Monday, an airstrike by Pakistani jets hit the center at the precise moment when hundreds of patients gathered to break their fast. No official figure has captured the full scale of the attack. According to Hamdullah Fitrat, the Taliban’s deputy spokesperson, 400 patients were killed by the strike and 250 injured. But the medical staff and witnesses who handled the bodies insist the true toll is far higher than what has been publicly acknowledged. Pakistan has denied any wrongdoing, insisting that its operations targeted Taliban-affiliated sites.

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For over a year, Israel, Washington and even Lebanon’s government have been speaking as if Hezbollah has been broken for good.

Yet the Lebanese armed movement is once again at war with Israel, striking its enemy in response to the US-Israeli war on Iran.

Its performance on the battlefield and ability to strike deep into Israeli territory shows that Hezbollah treated its 15 months of ceasefire with Israel not as an end to war, but as a narrow and urgent window to rebuild, reorganise and prepare for what it believed would inevitably come next.

When a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel took effect on 27 November 2024, after more than a year of conflict sparked by the Gaza war, the public narrative was blunt.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the campaign had “set back” Hezbollah “decades”, destroyed most of its rockets and eliminated its top leadership.

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President Donald Trump joked about the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor during a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi.

The awkward moment came after a reporter asked Trump why he didn't inform U.S. allies before authorizing the Feb. 28 attack on Iran

"We didn't tell anyone about it, because we wanted surprise," Trump President Donald Trump was met with an awkward pause from Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi on Thursday, March 19, after he made a joke about her nation's 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor.. "Who knows better about surprise than Japan?"

As Trump, 79, continues to seek allies' support in the U.S. and Israel's war with Iran, he hosted Takaichi, 65, in the Oval Office. Trump has encouraged Japan to help defend the Strait of Hormuz, a critical shipping path for oil, from Iranian threats.

During the meeting, the two nations' leaders responded to reporters' questions together.

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Ongoing diplomatic efforts involving Ukraine, the US and Russia have been temporarily put on hold as Washington focuses its attention on escalating tensions in the Middle East, Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry said Wednesday.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Heorhii Tykhyi told reporters in Kyiv that several rounds of planned trilateral consultations have already been postponed, and further delays are now expected.

“Several upcoming rounds of trilateral consultations between Ukraine, Russia, and the United States have already been rescheduled multiple times. As of now, they have been pushed back again,” he said.

“They haven’t been canceled or abandoned, just delayed. There’s no need to read anything more into it,” Tykhyi continued.

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White House officials have grown increasingly frustrated with Republican congresswoman Nancy Mace, accusing her of complicating efforts to evacuate Americans stranded in the Middle East by attempting to conduct her own rescue missions, according to people familiar with the matter.

The irritation with Mace has been building for days after she traveled to the region to try to transport US citizens across international borders and engaged with foreign governments without informing the state department, which has been coordinating evacuation flights.

Trump administration officials have taken particular issue with Mace’s outreach to Saudi Arabia, where she unilaterally engaged with officials to facilitate departures for Americans – and then asked the state department to requisition a Saudi commercial plane to transport 300 people.

“Secretary Rubio, I am asking you directly: please authorize this Saudi aircraft mission without delay. I have done the diplomatic work and secured the commitment,” Mace wrote in a 16 March letter, addressed to Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, reviewed by the Guardian.

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German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has none of President Trump’s penchant for controversy or headline-grabbing language — but these days, he’s putting emphatic distance between Berlin and Washington all the same.

Merz is not only declining to answer Trump’s call for help in reopening the vital Strait of Hormuz. He is being scathing of the president’s decision to wage war on Iran in the first place.

“To this day, there is no convincing plan for how this operation could succeed,” Merz told German legislators on Wednesday, Reuters reported.

“Washington has not consulted us and did not say European assistance was necessary. … We would have advised against pursuing this course of action as it has been pursued.”

Trump’s call for help has found few takers elsewhere.

French President Emmanuel Macron said at a Tuesday Cabinet meeting that his nation would “never take part” in efforts to open the Strait of Hormuz while the current conflict rages.

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