TV News LIES

President Joe Biden sought to reassure his nervous campaign staff on Wednesday that he will be the 2024 Democratic nominee, telling his team during a conference call that he is not withdrawing from the race.

Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris joined an all-staff campaign call and pushed back at mounting pressure for the 81-year-old incumbent president to bow out following a disastrous debate performance last week that has thrust his campaign into chaos.

"The past few days have been tough. I’m sure you're getting a lot of calls, and I'm sure many of you have questions as well," Biden told the campaign, according to a source familiar with the conversation. "Let me say this as clearly as I possibly can and as simply and straightforward as I can: I am running.

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Students who enrolled at a fake Michigan university set up by immigration agents have the right to sue the U.S. government, a federal appellate court ruled.

A decision last week by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit means hundreds of students who paid tuition at the University of Farmington in Farmington Hills – created by undercover agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement – have a legal basis to continue pursuing their claims in court. Farmington Hills is about 20 miles northwest of Detroit.

In 2020, a lawsuit was filed against the U.S. government in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims by attorneys on behalf of Teja Ravi and other students enrolled at the University of Farmington, which was shut down by ICE after agents arrested about 250 of its students. The lawsuit said the government breached its contract with the students by stealing their tuition money, about $11,000 per year for each student. Students are asking for their money back and other punitive damages.

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Russia's economy is completely dominated by its war in Ukraine, so much that Moscow cannot afford either to win or lose the war, according to one European economist.

Renaud Foucart, a senior economics lecturer at Lancaster University, pointed to the dire economic situation facing Russia as the war in Ukraine wraps up its second year.

Russia's GDP grew 5.5% year-over-year over the third quarter of 2023, according to data from the Russian government. But most of that growth is being fueled by the nation's monster military spending, Foucart said, with plans for the Kremlin to spend a record 36.6 trillion rubles, or $386 billion on defense this year.

"Military pay, ammunition, tanks, planes, and compensation for dead and wounded soldiers, all contribute to the GDP figures. Put simply, the war against Ukraine is now the main driver of Russia's economic growth" Foucart said in an op-ed for The Conversation this week.

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The deputy leader of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah said Tuesday the only sure path to a cease-fire on the Lebanon-Israel border is a full cease-fire in Gaza.

“If there is a cease-fire in Gaza, we will stop without any discussion,” Hezbollah’s deputy leader, Sheikh Naim Kassem, said in an interview with The Associated Press at the group’s political office in Beirut’s southern suburbs.

Hezbollah's participation in the Israel-Hamas war has been as a “support front” for its ally, Hamas, Kassem said, and “if the war stops, this military support will no longer exist.”

But, he said, if Israel scales back its military operations without a formal cease-fire agreement and full withdrawal from Gaza, the implications for the Lebanon-Israel border conflict are less clear.

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Tulsa race massacre survivor Lessie Benningfield Randle, 109, made her first public appearance since the Oklahoma supreme court dismissed her historic lawsuit last month. Randle, along with fellow survivor Viola Fletcher, 110, had sought restitution for the survivors and descendants of the 1921 massacre, in which an estimated 300 Black Tulsans were killed, thousands were displaced, and Greenwood, the thriving district once known as “Black Wall Street”, was decimated in an act of racist violence.

A judgment in Randle and Fletcher’s favor would have been the first ruling to address the longstanding damage the massacre had on Tulsa’s Black community. But the court said that while the plaintiffs’ grievances were legitimate, the suit did not fall within the scope of the state’s public nuisance statute.

Seven years after deadly violence erupted during the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a federal appeals court has reinstated more than $2m in punitive damages for white nationalist leaders and organizations implicated in physical or emotional injuries suffered by people at the event.

The decision brought the total that a jury ordered to be paid to more than $26m. Most of that money, $24m, was for punitive damages, but a judge later slashed that amount to $350,000 – to be shared by eight plaintiffs.

On Monday, the Richmond-based fourth US circuit court of appeals restored more than $2m in punitive damages, finding that each of the plaintiffs should receive $350,000, instead of the $43,750 each would have received under the lower court’s ruling.

A three-judge panel at the fourth circuit affirmed the jury’s award of $2m in compensatory damages – but it found that a state law that imposes the $350,000 cap on punitive damages should be applied per person instead of for all eight plaintiffs, as a lower court judge had ruled.

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