TV News LIES

President Donald Trump said Friday he's "thinking about" merging the U.S. Postal Service with the Commerce Department, ending the agency’s independent status and putting it under the authority of his administration.

Trump's statement in the Oval Office, after Howard Lutnick was sworn in as his new Commerce secretary, came after two news reports published earlier.

Trump is preparing to issue an executive order to fire the postal service’s governing board, The Washington Post reported Thursday, citing six anonymous officials. Trump confirmed the merger plan on Friday, the Post reported.

"We want to have a post office that works well and doesn't lose massive amounts of money. And we're thinking about doing that," Trump said, according to USA TODAY.

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President Donald Trump’s administration on Sunday said it was placing all but a handful of U.S. Agency for International Development personnel around the world on paid administrative leave and eliminating some 2,000 of those positions in the U.S., according to a notice sent to agency workers reviewed by Reuters.

Just before midnight on Sunday, all United States Agency for International Development direct hire personnel with the exception of workers essential for critical functions, will be placed on leave. At the same time the agency is "beginning to implement a Reduction-in-Force" affecting about 2,000 USAID personnel in the U.S., the notice said.

The White House did not immediately respond to request for comment.

Billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has led an effort to gut USAID, the main delivery mechanism for American foreign assistance, a critical tool of U.S. "soft power" for winning influence abroad.

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The federal office that funds housing and other support for homeless people across the country is slated to shrink dramatically, a prospect that advocates warn would make record-high homelessness even worse.

The Office of Community Planning and Development, within the Department of Housing and Urban Development, is slated to lose 84% of its staff, according to a document seen by NPR. That target is the deepest of any office in the agency.

"That proposed cut is massive. And the potential for adverse impact at the community level and at the national level is also massive," said Ann Oliva, who spent a decade at HUD and is now CEO at the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

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Hamas released six Israeli hostages early Saturday in three different locations throughout Gaza, in exchange for more than 600 Palestinian prisoners and detainees freed from Israeli jails. This is the largest number of Palestinian prisoners to be released at once since the beginning of the ceasefire which began in January.

This comes two days after Hamas returned the bodies of four Israeli hostages, one of which was supposed to be Shiri Bibas, a mother who was 32 years old at the time of her kidnapping. Israeli forensic testing showed that those remains were in fact that of an unidentified woman. On Friday, Hamas returned a second body, which Israeli authorities confirmed was that of Bibas.

A newer variant of H5N1 bird flu has spilled over into dairy cows separately in Nevada and Arizona, prompting new theories about how the virus is spread and leading to questions about containing the ongoing outbreaks.

The news comes amid a purge of experts at federal agencies, including employees who were responding to the highly pathogenic avian influenza outbreak at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the US Department of Agriculture.

The additional spillovers are changing experts’ view of how rare introductions to herds may be – with implications for how to prevent such spread.

“It’s endemic in cows now. There is no way this is going to get contained” on its own, said Seema Lakdawala, an influenza virologist and co-director of the Center for Transmission of Airborne Pathogens at Emory School of Medicine.

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The measles outbreak in Texas has grown to at least 90 cases, reaching historic levels, according to officials.

Since late January, 90 cases of measles have been identified in the South Plains region, the state’s department of state health services (DSHS) reported Friday. At least 16 patients have been hospitalized as a result.

The majority of reported measles cases were in children and teenagers; minors between the ages of five and 17 accounted for 51 cases. Children under four made up 26 cases. Most patients’ parents either had chosen to not immunize them against the highly contagious illness through vaccines meant to prevent the potentially deadly illness and its spread, or their vaccination status was unknown.

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God save the king. Drunk on power, Donald Trump spent Saturday afternoon before adoring fans, boasting of his victories, taunting his enemies and casting himself as America’s absolute monarch, supreme leader and divine emperor rolled into one.

Trump’s appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the National Harbor in Maryland began with country singer Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA and raucous cheers in a crowded ballroom that included January 6 insurrectionists.

Seventy-five minutes later, it concluded with the US president standing between two stars-and-stripes flags, pumping his fists and swaying to the Village People’s anthem YMCA.

What emerged in between was a man who has never felt so sure of himself, so contemptuous of his foes and so convinced of his righteous mission to make America great again, even if it means breaking china, cracking skulls and leaving global destruction in his wake.

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