TV News LIES

Mahmoud Khalil, the detained Columbia University graduate and Palestinian activist, was not allowed to hold his newborn son after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officials refused to allow a contact visit between him and his family, his lawyers said on Wednesday.

Instead, Khalil, 30, was forced to meet his month-old baby for the first time behind glass, after his wife, Noor Abdalla, traveled from New York to the Louisiana detention facility where he has been detained since March, his legal team said.

Ice officials and a private prison contractor denied the family’s request for a contact visit, citing the detention center’s no-contact visitation policy and unspecified “security concerns”, lawyers said.

A federal grand jury indicted Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan on May 13 on charges that she tried to assist an undocumented immigrant escape arrest from her courtroom last month, putting her at the center of the growing dispute between President Donald Trump and the judiciary.

The two-page indictment accuses Dugan, 66, of obstructing a U.S. agency and concealing an individual to prevent an arrest. The two charges carry a maximum penalty of six years in prison and a $350,000 fine, but sentences in cases involving nonviolent offenses typically are much shorter.

Dugan is expected to enter a plea at a May 15 hearing. But members of her defense team issued this statement: "As she said after her unnecessary arrest, Judge Dugan asserts her innocence and looks forward to being vindicated in court."

The indictment came after a string of witnesses entered the federal courthouse throughout the day on May 13 to testify before the grand jury.

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On the morning of 3 May, the Swarthmore borough police department disbanded a four-day pro-Palestinian encampment on Swarthmore College’s campus and arrested nine activists.

The demonstration calling on the college to divest from the tech company Cisco due to its ties to the Israeli government was a rare uprising in an academic year where higher-education institutions have been quick to quash them. One current and one former Swarthmore College student were among those arrested, while the rest were from outside the college community, the college’s president, Valerie Smith, said in a statement.

“With rising concerns about safety and security on campus, a continued and growing presence of individuals unaffiliated with the college, warnings from outside law enforcement agencies and no signs that protestors were willing to engage in conversation that would bring the encampment to an end,” Smith said, “I felt we had no choice but to seek outside assistance from local law enforcement.”

Around 7.30am on 3 May, Q, a Temple University student who is using a pseudonym out of fear of legal repercussions, was outside of his tent at a Swarthmore College pro-Palestinian encampment in Pennsylvania when he said that he received a call from Swarthmore College students.

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Thousands of employees at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) accepted the Trump administration’s voluntary resignation offer, leading to a significant reduction in force.

The decrease accounts for about 15 percent of the total workforce at the department which regulates food quality, agriculture development and nationwide nutrition efforts. A USDA spokesperson told The Hill that as of May 1, 15,182 employees elected to take a resignation offer.

In the past six months, two babies in Louisiana have died of pertussis, the disease commonly known as whooping cough.

Washington state recently announced its first confirmed death from pertussis in more than a decade.

Idaho and South Dakota each reported a death this year, and Oregon last year reported two as well as its highest number of cases since 1950.

While much of the country is focused on the spiraling measles outbreak concentrated in the small, dusty towns of West Texas, cases of pertussis have skyrocketed by more than 1,500% nationwide since hitting a recent low in 2021 amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Deaths tied to the disease are also up, hitting 10 last year, compared with about two to four in previous years. Cases are on track to exceed that total this year.

Doctors, researchers and public health experts warn that the measles outbreak, which has grown to more than 600 cases, may just be the beginning. They say outbreaks of preventable diseases could get much worse with falling vaccination rates and the Trump administration slashing spending on the country’s public health infrastructure.

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