TV News LIES

For the last several months, the Trump administration’s reckless use of executive power, trade policy, gutting federal agencies and defying court orders has gone largely unchecked. National Democrats have limited means of opposition – so the best hope for accountability will be electoral accountability.

This may help explain why last Tuesday’s election results in America’s 41st biggest city generated such outsized excitement from progressives. John Ewing Jr, a longtime county treasurer, was elected the first Black mayor of Omaha, defeating the incumbent Jean Stothert, who was seeking a fourth term after holding that office since 2013. More than that, Ewing won big, by nearly 13 points, marking a huge shift after Stothert won her last race by 30.

Mahmoud Khalil, the detained Columbia University graduate and Palestinian activist, was not allowed to hold his newborn son after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officials refused to allow a contact visit between him and his family, his lawyers said on Wednesday.

Instead, Khalil, 30, was forced to meet his month-old baby for the first time behind glass, after his wife, Noor Abdalla, traveled from New York to the Louisiana detention facility where he has been detained since March, his legal team said.

Ice officials and a private prison contractor denied the family’s request for a contact visit, citing the detention center’s no-contact visitation policy and unspecified “security concerns”, lawyers said.

Two planes traveling between Honolulu and southern California were diverted due to safety concerns, one for a bomb threat, another for a “security concern” found written on a bathroom mirror.

United flight 1169 left Daniel K Inouye international airport at 9.40pm on Tuesday night, headed for Los Angeles international airport. Data from FlightAware shows the airplane reversing course east of Hawaii, and headed back to Honolulu.

United gave slim details in a written statement, and stated that all 339 passengers and 10 crew members made it back to Honolulu, and were rebooked on later flights.

A federal judge chided the Department of Justice (DOJ) during a Wednesday hearing where he agreed to dismiss a trespassing charge against Newark Mayor Ras Baraka (D) that stemmed from his visit to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility earlier this month alongside three Democratic members of Congress.

U.S. District Judge Andre Espinosa said the arrest suggested a “worrisome misstep” by the New Jersey’s U.S. attorney’s office, noting the “apparent rush” in bringing the case that culminated in the government’s “embarrassing” retraction of the charge.

He dismissed the complaint against Baraka with prejudice, meaning the charge cannot be brought again.

“Your role is not to secure convictions at all costs, nor to satisfy public clamor, nor to advance political agendas,” Espinosa said to the government’s lawyer. “Your allegiance is to the impartial application of the law, to the pursuit of truth and to the upholding of due process for all.”

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South African President Cyril Ramaphosa brought two championship golfers from his country and a 14-kilogram book showcasing South Africa's greatest golf courses.

But even his best attempts to appeal to President Donald Trump's golf fandom couldn't shield him from becoming the latest target of an Oval Office ambush.

In a wild one-hour May 21 meeting between Trump and Ramaphosa ‒ rivaled only by Trump's memorable clash with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February ‒ Trump accused the South African leader of overseeing "genocide" against White people, played a video to try to prove the false claim and lashed out at a reporter who asked about his administration accepting a $400 million jet from Qatar.

"I'm sorry I don't have a plane to give you," Ramaphosa quipped after things got heated, about 20 minutes into the meeting.

"I wish you did. I'd take it," Trump said. "If your country offered the U.S. Air Force a plane, I would take it."

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Huge expanses of ice are melting alarmingly fast, raising new concerns about "catastrophic consequences for humanity," a study published May 20 says.

The study focuses on two masses of ice currently sitting on land: The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. As temperatures rise, that ice is melting, flowing into the ocean and making sea levels rise.

While change in sea level rise is often measured in centimeters or inches, the ice melt potential of these sheets could raise sea levels dozens of feet.

It's happening even faster than expected, authors warn in the study published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment.

“Recent satellite-based observations of ice sheet mass loss have been a huge wake-up call for the whole scientific and policy community working on sea-level rise and its impacts," said study co-author Jonathan Bamber, of the University of Bristol in the UK.

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The Justice Department is dropping negotiations for court-approved settlements with Minneapolis and Louisville police agencies, despite having found that authorities routinely violated the civil rights of Black people.

The two cases sparked worldwide outrage over fatal police encounters in 2020, during President Donald Trump’s final year in office. Federal authorities also are closing investigations and retracting findings of wrongdoing against police departments in Phoenix; Memphis, Tennessee; Trenton, New Jersey; Mount Vernon, New York; Oklahoma City; and the Louisiana State Police.

“Overbroad police consent decrees divest local control of policing from communities where it belongs, turning that power over to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, often with an anti-police agenda,” Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general overseeing the department's Civil Rights Division, said in a statement May 21.

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