TV News LIES

In this rural town just across the Massachusetts line, the Leavitt family runs a used-car dealership, with hulking work trucks lined up in the front lot. Inside the lobby, a giant TV blares Fox News, and a framed photo features President Donald Trump, posing with owners Bob and Erin Leavitt.

A New Hampshire family once best known for selling cars and ice cream, the Leavitts were thrust into the national spotlight this year when their 27-year-old daughter, Karoline, was named White House press secretary. Ten months later, the administration’s war on illegal immigration landed in the Leavitts’ backyard.

Bruna Ferreira — a Brazilian immigrant who shares an 11-year-old child with Karoline’s brother Michael Leavitt — was arrested by ICE in mid-November. Ferreira, 33, remains in custody in Louisiana. The boy lives with his father in New Hampshire.

Ferreira’s sister and lawyer had claimed there was no animosity between Ferreira and the Leavitts. But court records, police reports and family text chains reviewed by WBUR tell a vastly different story — one of a bitter custody battle, years-old allegations of a threat to call immigration authorities, and concerns for the well-being of the child when his mother was staying in a vacant mansion in Cohasset.

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The Biden administration withheld data from the public on the risks of myocarditis from the Covid vaccine, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary claimed Thursday — a bold accusation that clashes with years of public statements from federal health officials.

“We have done more to study myocarditis and to go back and look at deaths of people, of children from the Covid vaccine,” Makary told NBC News in an interview. “Internal data submitted on myocarditis, we found that the Biden administration was sitting on data on myocarditis in young people, and it was not made public.”

Makary’s claim comes less than a week after Vinay Prasad, the FDA’s top vaccine regulator, told agency staff in a memo that an internal review found that at least 10 children died “after and because of receiving” the Covid shot. Prasad suggested — without evidence to support his claim — that the child deaths were tied to myocarditis.

Myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle, is a known — but small — risk of the mRNA Covid vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, information that federal agencies have discussed openly since 2021.

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Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk has some thoughts on New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the type of people who voted for him.

“You know, it’s so interesting, because I lived in Manhattan for a while, and I loved this city,” Kirk told The New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin at the Dealbook Summit on Wednesday.

Sorkin had pointed out that Mamdani, a democratic socialist and the city’s first Muslim mayor, was someone who had “captured younger voters” but was on the “complete opposite end” of where Kirk’s late husband, right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, would have stood politically. He then asked Kirk for her take on the new mayor.

Kirk answered that she wanted to approach the question “as a female voter,” due to the large number of women who voted for Mamdani.

“I think there’s a tendency, especially when you live in a city like Manhattan, where, again, you are so career-driven, and you almost look to the government as a form of replacement for certain things, relationship-wise, even,” she said. “You see things a little bit differently.”

“What I don’t want to have happen is women, young women, in the city look to the government as a solution,” she said. “To put off having a family or a marriage, because you’re relying on the government to support you, instead of being united with a husband, where you can support yourself and your husband can support [you], and you guys can all combine together.”

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The Supreme Court on Thursday came to the rescue of Texas Republicans, allowing next year’s elections to be held under the state’s congressional redistricting plan favorable to the GOP and pushed by President Donald Trump despite a lower-court ruling that the map likely discriminates on the basis of race.

The justices acted on an emergency request from Texas for quick action because qualifying in the new districts already has begun, with primary elections in March.

The Supreme Court’s order puts the 2-1 ruling blocking the map on hold at least until after the high court issues a final decision in the case. Justice Samuel Alito had previously temporarily blocked the order while the full court considered the Texas appeal.

The justices have blocked past lower-court rulings in congressional redistricting cases, most recently in Alabama and Louisiana, that came several months before elections.

The Texas congressional map enacted last summer at Trump’s urging was engineered to give Republicans five additional House seats.

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A federal judge late on Tuesday blocked the Trump administration from making widespread immigration arrests in the nation’s capital without warrants or probable cause that the person would be an imminent flight risk.

The US district judge Beryl Howell in Washington granted a preliminary injunction sought by civil liberties and immigrants’ rights groups in a lawsuit against the US Department of Homeland Security.

The lawsuit alleged that since Donald Trump declared an emergency in Washington in August, there has been a pattern of widespread, unlawful immigration arrests. Community members have reported living in fear of being stopped while driving or walking through their neighborhoods and many have avoided going to work, walking children to school or other daily activities in an attempt to avoid checkpoints and immigration enforcement agents.

Officers making civil immigration arrests generally have to have an administrative warrant. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, they may make arrests without a warrant only if they have probable cause to believe the person is in the US illegally and is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained, according to Howell’s ruling.

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The Trump administration is framing its boat strikes against drug cartels in the Caribbean in part as a collective self-defense effort on behalf of US allies in the region, according to three people directly familiar with the administration’s internal legal argument.

The legal analysis rests on a premise – for which there is no immediate public evidence – that the cartels are waging armed violence against the security forces of allies like Mexico, and that the violence is financed by cocaine shipments.

As a result, according to the legal analysis, the strikes are targeting the cocaine, and the deaths of anyone on board should be treated as an enemy casualty or collateral damage if any civilians are killed, rather than murder.

That line of reasoning, which forms the backbone of a classified justice department office of legal counsel (OLC) opinion, provides the clearest explanation to date how the US satisfied the conditions to use lethal force.

But it marks a sharp departure from Donald Trump’s narrative to the public every time he has discussed the 21 strikes that have killed more than 80 people, which he has portrayed as an effort to stop overdose deaths.

A White House official responded that Trump has not been making a legal argument. Still, Trump’s remarks remain the only public reason for why the US is firing missiles – when the legal justification is in fact very different.

And it would also be the first time the US has claimed – dubiously, and contrary to the widely held understanding – that the cartels are using cocaine proceeds to wage wars, rather than to make money.

In a statement, a justice department spokesperson said: “These operations were ordered consistent with the law of armed conflict.” The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.

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