TV News LIES

Every day for two months, Michael Ofer Ziv spent hours watching grainy, black-and-white footage of the Gaza Strip from a tiny room across the border.

As an operations commander, he was tracking Israeli forces inside Gaza and approving airstrikes.

Every day, he said, his unit had a certain quota to fill.

“They will tell us, today you have seven, today you have nine… you sometimes argue for more, but you will never fire less than you’re given,” he told CNN in an interview. CNN has reached out to the Israeli military for comment on his claims.

One by one, buildings blew up on his screen like a hypnotic reel of destruction.

At first, it was easy to forget that those images were real, and not just a video game playing on a screen. But the more he stepped out of that war room, the more he was exposed to the reality of those strikes.

A Chinese American scholar was convicted on Tuesday in the US on charges of using his reputation as a pro-democracy activist to gather information on dissidents and feed it to his homeland’s government.

A federal jury in New York delivered the verdict in the case of Shujun Wang, who helped found a pro-democracy group in the city.

Prosecutors said that at the behest of China’s main intelligence agency, the ministry of state security, Wang lived a double life for more than a decade.

“The defendant pretended to be opposed to the Chinese government so that he could get close to people who were actually opposed to the Chinese government,” assistant US attorney Ellen Sise said in an opening statement last month. “And then, the defendant betrayed those people, people who trusted him, by reporting information on them to China.”

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Several packages of cocaine with a street value exceeding $1m have washed up on a Florida beach after Hurricane Debby crashed ashore in the state on Monday and progressed up the eastern seaboard.

The acting chief patrol agent of the US border patrol’s division in Miami, Samuel Briggs, shared a picture of the confiscated drugs on X, showing the 25 packages – or 70lb – of cocaine washed up on a Florida Keys beach.

Briggs said a passerby “discovered the drugs [and] contacted authorities”.

“US border patrol seized the drugs, which have a street value of over $1m dollars,” he added.

The unusual confiscation provided a humorous postscript to Florida’s encounter with Debby after the storm made landfall north of Steinhatchee, about 80 miles west of Gainesville. The storm has since been downgraded to a tropical storm. But, still packing heavy rainfall and gusty winds of 40 to 50mph, Debby on Tuesday remained a threat to neighboring states and even those farther north.

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Customers lined up at dispensaries across Ohio on Tuesday for the first day of recreational marijuana sales in the state.

Nearly 100 medical marijuana dispensaries were authorized to begin selling recreational marijuana to adults after receiving operating certificates this week from the state’s division of cannabis control.

Jeffrey Reide camped out in his car so he could make the first purchase at a Cincinnati dispensary just after sunrise.

“I’m pumped, I’m excited, finally it’s legal for recreational. I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time,” he said shortly after making the first purchase, which drew applause from store employees.

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Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York City mayor, announced on Tuesday that his charitable organization is donating $600m million to four historically Black medical schools.

The landmark gifts, made by his Bloomberg Philanthropies group, will give $175m each to Howard University College of Medicine in Washington DC, Meharry Medical College in Tennessee and Morehouse School of Medicine in Georgia. Another $75m is headed to Charles R Drew University of Medicine & Science in California, according to a news release from Bloomberg.

Class sizes and anticipated growth determined the funding levels, the organization said, adding that an extra $5m will be given to support a new medical school in New Orleans being created by Xavier University of Louisiana – another historically Black institution – and Ochsner Health, a prominent hospital network in that region.

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Kamala Harris picked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her vice presidential running mate on Tuesday, according to a source familiar with the decision, thrusting the outspoken Midwestern statesman into the national spotlight while adding a key ally to her fast-moving campaign for the presidency.

Walz, 60, brings political acuity, suburban-and-rural appeal and progressive patriotism to a competition where all three criteria are seen as helpful for Democrats to clinch a 2024 win against the Republican ticket of former President Donald Trump and and Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio.