TV News LIES

The US military will no longer allow transgender individuals to join the armed forces and will stop performing or facilitating procedures associated with gender transition for service members, according to a memo from defense secretary Pete Hegseth filed in court Monday.

Hegseth’s memo comes after Donald Trump signed an executive order in January that took aim at transgender troops in a personal way. The president’s order had said that a man identifying as a woman was “not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member”.

To that end, the memo from Hegseth on Monday – filed with the US district court in Washington DC – said: “Effective immediately, all new accessions for individuals with a history of gender dysphoria are paused.

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President Trump has spoken to Russian leader Vladimir Putin on the phone to try to negotiate an end to the Ukraine war, he told The Post in an exclusive interview aboard Air Force One Friday.

“I’d better not say,” said Trump when asked how many times the two leaders have spoken.

But he believes Putin “does care” about the killing on the battlefield.“He wants to see people stop dying,” said Trump.

“All those dead people. Young, young, beautiful people. They’re like your kids, two million of them – and for no reason.”

The three-year-old war “never would have happened” if he had been president in 2022, Trump asserted.

“I always had a good relationship with Putin,” he said, unlike his predecessor.

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The National Institutes of Health (NIH) on Friday made a significant reduction in grants reserved for research institutions, a decision that may significantly impact American higher education.

The NIH said it provided over $35 billion in grants to more than 2,500 institutions in 2023, announcing that it will now limit the amount granted for “indirect funding” to 15 percent. This funding helps cover universities’ overhead and administrative expenses and previously averaged nearly 30 percent, with some universities charging over 60 percent.

The change will take effect on Monday, and will save roughly $4 billion annually, per the NIH.

Ukraine wants to collaborate with partner countries on postwar projects worth billions of dollars not just in mining rare earth elements, but also in energy and construction sectors to help rebuild the country, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said Wednesday.

Sybiha responded to comments by President Donald Trump who said Monday that he wanted to gain access to Ukraine’s valuable rare earth materials as a condition for continuing support for its war against Russia.

Ukrainian officials have said Russia wants to get its hands on Ukraine’s vast natural resources.

Kyiv intends to offer “guarantees of the presence of major businesses in Ukraine and the vested interests of our closest allies — the United States — in developing these (rare earth) deposits and ensuring their protection,” the foreign minister said.

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Andrew McCabe, the former acting director of the FBI, said the agency is in “utter disarray” amid an apparent purge of law enforcement agents, officials and other employees who worked on probes into President Trump.

McCabe joined CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Monday to discuss the state of play at the FBI, which has seen dozens of officials removed, including those who worked on Jan. 6 Capitol riot cases.

“I’ve talked to more FBI people in the last four days than I did in the prior four years,” said McCabe, who served as acting director in 2017, until Trump appointed Christopher Wray to the post.

“It is a place in utter disarray right now.”

In just a few weeks, the Trump administration has removed dozens of Department of Justice and FBI officials and thousands more are feared on the chopping block, given the sprawling nature of the investigations into Jan. 6 in particular.

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Employees at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) are being placed on administrative leave with pay “until further notice,” according to letters reviewed by The Hill.

Employees must be available by phone and email during business hours, according to the notice, which provides an email for them to contact “to end that.”

The letters come after most USAID employees lost access to internal systems over the weekend as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency put the agency through a “woodchipper.”

On Thursday, the Trump administration ordered the US agriculture department to unpublish its websites documenting or referencing the climate crisis.

By Friday, the landing pages on the United States Forest Service website for key resources, research and adaptation tools – including those that provide vital context and vulnerability assessments for wildfires – had gone dark, leaving behind an error message or just a single line: “You are not authorized to access this page.”

The government website was one of many that were affected on Friday by new directives from the Trump administration on what information federal agencies can publish.