TV News LIES

The mayor of Chicago has signed an executive order outlining how the city will attempt to resist Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Brandon Johnson pushed back on Saturday against what he called the “out-of-control” Trump administration’s plan to deploy large numbers of federal officers into the country’s third-largest city, which could take place within days.

The Chicago police department will be barred from helping federal authorities with civil immigration enforcement or any related patrols, traffic stops and checkpoints during the surge, according to the executive order Johnson signed.

The mayor directed all city departments to guard the constitutional rights of Chicago residents “amidst the possibility of imminent militarized immigration or national guard deployment by the federal government”.

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A conservative justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court said Friday that she will not seek reelection, creating an open race for a seat on the court that’s controlled 4-3 by liberals.

Justice Rebecca Bradley's decision not to run for a second full term comes after conservative candidates for the highest court in the battleground state have lost each of the past two elections by double-digit margins. Both of those races broke national spending records and the liberal won in April despite heavy spending by billionaire Elon Musk.

Liberal state Supreme Court candidates have won four of the past five races, resulting in them taking over the majority in 2023, breaking a 15-year run of conservative control. Regardless of who wins the April election, liberals will maintain their 4-3 court majority until at least 2028. If they can win next year, their majority would increase to 5-2.

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The U.S. is seeing a late summer surge in COVID-19 cases, tracking from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows.

The spike is particularly pronounced in one region of the country, which includes Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, where about 15% of COVID tests reported to the CDC are turning up positive.

But practically the entire Western country isn’t far behind. A dozen more states west of the Mississippi reported test positivity rates about 10% last week.

In reality, the number of cases across the country is likely underreported as more people opt to test for the virus with at-home kits over lab tests.

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Early humans who made some of the oldest known stone tools might have traveled miles to secure the best materials for their construction, new research suggests.

Archaeologists traced the origins of rocks used to make some of the earliest known Oldowan tools, the oldest widespread form of stone technology. To their surprise, they found that the toolmakers at the Nyayanga archaeological site in Kenya transported stones up to eight miles more than 2.6 million years ago—though the exact early human species that created these aMore...rtifacts remains a mystery. The findings were published this month in the journal Science Advances.

“Prior to our study, we did not know that even the oldest known toolmakers had the mental prowess to know and remember the locations of the highest-quality rocks,” says Rick Potts, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and senior author of the study, in an email to Smithsonian magazine.

“People often focus on the tools themselves, but the real innovation of the Oldowan may actually be the transport of resources from one place to another,” Potts adds in a statement.

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Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has been blocked from attending the UN General Assembly session in New York next month, after he and 80 other Palestinian officials had their visas revoked, the US State Department has said.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio blamed them for undermining peace efforts and for seeking "the unilateral recognition of a conjectural Palestinian state".

The decision, welcomed by Israel, is unusual as the US is expected to facilitate travel for officials of all countries wishing to visit the UN headquarters.

The ban comes as France leads international efforts to recognise a state of Palestine at the session - a move Donald Trump's administration has opposed.

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The prime minister of Yemen's Houthi government and several other ministers were killed in an Israeli strike on the capital Sanaa, the news agency run by the group said on Saturday, citing a statement by the head of the Houthi Supreme Political Council, Mahdi al-Mashat.

A number of others were wounded in Thursday's strike, it said, without providing details.

Israel said on Friday that the airstrike had targeted the Iran-aligned group's chief of staff, defense minister and other senior officials and that it was verifying the outcome.

Mashat's statement did not make clear whether the Houthi defense minister was among the casualties.

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The Israeli military struck Nasser Hospital at least four times during its morning attack on southern Gaza that killed 22 people earlier this week, according to an NBC News analysis of newly obtained video.

The findings come as Reuters — whose cameraman Hussam al-Masri was among five journalists killed Monday in the Israeli strikes — said the Israeli military was “fully aware” that its team and other journalists were operating from the hospital in southern Gaza.

The agency told NBC News on Wednesday that it had offered daily live feeds to its news clients from that location in recent weeks, but earlier in the war had stopped sharing its teams' exact locations “after so many journalists were killed in IDF strikes.”

What initially appeared to be a “double tap” strike — a tactic in which a target is hit, then struck again often after first responders have rushed in — was in fact more extensive.

Al-Masri’s live feed freezes at 10:08 a.m. local time but there’s no video of the first strikes. Video of the aftermath of these hits shows smoke billowing from two separate staircases: the one where journalists were working and a second, around the corner next to the intensive care unit.

Al-Masri was killed in the first strike.
Two projectiles are seen near and hitting Nasser Hospital on Monday.

Minutes later, at 10:17 a.m., after journalists and first responders arrived on the staircase used by journalists — including men carrying a gurney seen on video wearing clearly identifiable high visibility vests — a second strike hits.

Video obtained and verified by NBC News shows two additional projectiles striking the fourth-floor staircase within milliseconds of each other. Plumes of smoke can be seen rising from all affected areas.

N.R. Jenzen-Jones, director of the arms intelligence firm Armament Research Services, said video of the incident after the first strike pointed to a direct-fire weapon, with damage “consistent with that expected from a multi-purpose tank gun projectile.”

Video of the second strike also appeared to show two projectiles, he said. Their flight pattern and “bright emission… more likely to be from a tracer” suggested they came from tank rounds, Jenzen-Jones said. The timing, he added, implies “two tanks may have fired on the target simultaneously.”

The Israel Defense Forces did not respond to a request for comment on the newest revelations. The IDF has not provided NBC News with any additional information since it released preliminary findings on Tuesday.

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Hexavalent chromium nanoparticles were found in air samples gathered by researchers over the course of several days in the spring as they drove through and around the Eaton and Palisades fire burn areas.

The heavy metal — also known as chromium-6 and brought to public consciousness by environmentalist Erin Brockovich in the 1990s — is a known carcinogen. But researchers aren’t yet sure what the public health implications are.

“ We think that there's hotspots in the cities, but we don't have a way to quantify that yet with what we've measured so far,” said Michael Kleeman, professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Davis.

Kleeman was the lead author of a paper that’s been submitted to the journal Nature’s Communications Earth and Environment for peer review and published online as a preprint. The researchers are part of the L.A. Fire Health Study, a group of universities working together to investigate the health effects of the January fires.

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