TV News LIES

The White House budget director, Russell Vought, said on Friday that the Trump administration will freeze another $11bn worth of infrastructure projects in Democratic states due to the ongoing government shutdown.

Vought said on social media the US army corps of engineers would pause work on “low priority” projects in cities such as New York, San Francisco, Boston and Baltimore. He said the projects could eventually be canceled.

The White House office of management and budget (OMB) said Donald Trump “wants to reorient how the federal government prioritizes Army Corps projects”.

The Trump administration has already frozen at least $28bn meant for transportation and energy projects in Democratic-controlled cities and states, as the president pressures his opponents in Congress to end the shutdown, which began on 1 October.

Trump has also vowed to cut “Democrat agencies” and has sought to eliminate 4,100 federal jobs as he looks to inflict pain on his political opposition.

More...

In 2021, the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, finally removed the Confederate statues that had inspired a series of violent and eventually deadly white supremacist rallies in 2017.

The statue of Robert E Lee, which had been surrounded by white men with torches in a famous far-right propaganda image, was melted down. But the statue of Confederate general Stonewall Jackson, which stood at the heart of a 2017 Ku Klux Klan rally, was given to a California-based arts non-profit, which pledged to use it for “transformation, not further veneration”.

Today, that same Jackson equestrian statue, chopped apart and reconstructed by American artist Kara Walker, is in Los Angeles, the centerpiece of a new art exhibit reckoning with the US’s white supremacist monuments.

Walker is famous for making art that grapples with racist images and archetypes, from her cavorting mock-historical silhouettes of plantation scenes, to the shark-filled fountain she erected in the Tate Modern as a monument to the British slave trade. Her work made her the obvious choice for transforming a prominent Confederate statue weighted with many decades of violent history.

More...

Six months after approving the largest sexual abuse settlement in US history, officials in Los Angeles announced the county tentatively agreed to pay another huge sum, nearly $1bn, to settle more than 400 additional claims against county employees.

In April, Los Angeles county approved a historic $4bn settlement with about 11,000 claimants and allegations of sexual abuse in LA juvenile facilities that dated back decades. On Friday, the county said it had reached another major settlement for $828m, pending approval by the board of supervisors, the county governing body, and the county claims board.

“Our settlements balance our obligation to compensate victims and treat their experiences with compassion, with the need to put strong protections in place to protect taxpayers from fraud,” Kathryn Barger, the chair of the Los Angeles county board of supervisors, said in a statement.

More...

At least 15 people were taken into custody outside the Broadview Ice detention center in the Chicago area after heated confrontations between Illinois state police and protesters on Friday.

Authorities had instructed demonstrators to remain in designated “protest zones”

According to the Chicago Tribune, at about 8am, protesters advanced toward the building. Within minutes, dozens of troopers equipped with helmets and batons moved in to push the crowd back. Officers tackled and dragged several individuals. Much of the clash was captured on video and posted to social media.

At one point, protesters tried to intervene as a fellow demonstrator was detained. Later in the day, groups blew whistles at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents entering and leaving the facility.

More...

The 2025 Atlantic hurricane season might have at least one more trick up its sleeve.

A tropical wave in the central Atlantic Ocean shows signs of organizing as it makes its way west toward the Caribbean Sea, forecasters said Oct. 17.

"Interests in the Caribbean from Jamaica to Puerto Rico should monitor this tropical wave in the coming days," said meteorologist Ryan Maue in an Oct. 17 Substack post.

If it becomes a tropical storm, it would be the 13th named storm of the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season. It would likely get the name Melissa.

According to the National Hurricane Center, in a forecast released on the morning of Oct. 17, "A tropical wave located over the central tropical Atlantic more than 1,000 miles east of the Windward Islands continues to produce a large area of showers and thunderstorms. Gradual development of this system is possible over the next several days while it moves generally westward at 15 to 20 mph.

Late October hurricane outlook warns of tropical trouble
A tropical wave in the central Atlantic Ocean shows signs of organizing as it makes its way west toward the Caribbean Sea.

More...

President Donald Trump commuted U.S. Rep. George Santos’ seven-year prison sentence, releasing him from jail on Oct. 17.

Santos, a 37-year-old Republican from New York, reported to the Federal Correctional Institution Flatiron Satellite Camp in New Jersey on July 25 to begin a seven-year prison sentence for wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. As part of the plea, he admitted to filing false campaign finance reports, charging donors’ credit cards without authorization and fraudulently receiving unemployment benefits, among other acts that began years before he ran for Congress in 2022.

Santos represented parts of Queens and Long Island for 11 months. He recently published an open letter directly appealing to Trump in fawning language.

“George Santos was somewhat of a “rogue,” but there are many rogues throughout our Country that aren’t forced to serve seven years in prison,” wrote Trump in a Truth Social post. “At least Santos had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN! George has been in solitary confinement for long stretches of time and, by all accounts, has been horribly mistreated. Therefore, I just signed a Commutation, releasing George Santos from prison, IMMEDIATELY. Good luck George, have a great life!”

More...

The controversial US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has confirmed it suspended operations in Gaza after the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas came into effect on 10 October.

Despite being funded until  November, the organisation said its final delivery was on Friday.

The GHF has been heavily criticised after hundreds of Palestinians were killed while collecting food near its distribution sites. Witnesses say most were killed by Israeli forces.

Israel has regularly denied that its troops fired on civilians at or near the sites and the GHF has maintained that aid distribution at its sites has been carried out "without incident".

The group's northernmost aid distribution site, known as SDS4, was shut down because it was no longer in IDF-controlled territory, said a spokesman.

More...

"Of course, I was happy about being released, but not happy of being displaced with no safety in place, no life necessities," said 23-year-old Abdullah Wa'el Mohammed Farhan, one of the former Palestinian prisoners freed on Monday as part of a ceasefire deal that President Donald Trump helped broker.

Standing outside a tent in Khan Younis, where he and his family are living, Farhan told ABC News that he was imprisoned for 20 months as the war with Israel raged on. He said that while detained, he and the other Palestinian prisoners were "completely isolated from the world."

"When I was told about my release, I didn’t believe it because more than once [Israeli authorities] told us about our release and moved us from one prison to another while being tortured and beaten," Farhan said.

More...