TV News LIES

US President Donald Trump and his top aides expressed concern over several Israeli policies in the West Bank during their meetings Monday with visiting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in West Palm Beach, a US official told The Times of Israel.

Trump and his senior advisers took particular issue with unchecked settler violence, settlement expansion and Israel’s withholding of several billion dollars in Palestinian Authority tax revenues, which has brought the Ramallah-based government to the brink of collapse, the US official said, confirming a report on the Axios news site.

The official clarified that the conversations on those issues were cordial, even as Washington expressed fear that instability in the West Bank could harm efforts to stabilize the Gaza Strip and expand the Abraham Accords.

Asked whether he raised concern about Israeli settler violence during his meeting with Netanyahu, Trump acknowledged some disagreement, saying: “We have had a big discussion for a long time on the West Bank, and I wouldn’t say we agree on the West Bank 100 percent. But we’ll come to a conclusion on the West Bank.”

The US is said to also be pushing Israel to release several billion dollars in clearance revenues that Jerusalem is withholding from Ramallah, bringing the Palestinian Authority to the brink of collapse.

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A turbulent New Year’s  Eve unfolded across Russia as multiple regions reported drone attacks in the early hours of Jan. 1, triggering fires at oil facilities in Kaluga Oblast and Krasnodar Krai, according to Russian Telegram channels and monitoring groups.

Local residents shared videos showing a glow in the sky and large fires in industrial areas where energy facilities are located. In the city of Liudinovo in Kaluga Oblast, reports indicated that a local oil storage facility was hit.

The Kyiv Independent can't immediately verify the claims.

Footage circulating online showed a tall column of fire and smoke above the site. Regional authorities have not commented on the extent of the damage, though local channels said the fire was preceded by the sound of explosions.

Residents of Krasnodar Krai also reported a turbulent New Year’s night, as the Ilsky oil refinery came under attack. The facility has previously been targeted by drones on multiple occasions, according to open-source reports and local media.

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The U.S. Department of Energy issued an emergency order late Tuesday to keep an aging Colorado coal plant open, just one day before it was slated to close. 

The plant — Unit 1, part of Craig Station, in Moffat County — is now required to keep running until March 30, 2026. The order can also be extended. 

The move drew a furious response from the governor’s office and environmental groups, who contest whether an emergency even exists that would require the plant to stay open.

Governor Polis said the order would lead to a huge spike in costs to repair the plant, which may be borne by customers of Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, a cooperative operating the plant to deliver electricity to rural communities in Nebraska, New Mexico, Wyoming and Colorado.

“This order will pass tens of millions in costs to Colorado ratepayers, in order to keep a coal plant open that is broken and not needed,” Polis said in a statement. 

“Ludicrously, the coal plant isn’t even operational right now, meaning repairs — to the tune of millions of dollars — just to get it running, all on the backs of rural Colorado ratepayers!”

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First, New Yorkers saw the elimination of subway token, which lasted for half a century. Now, its successor – the swipeable MetroCard, which lasted barely more than three decades – has seen its demise.

At midnight on 1 January, the flexible credit card-sized pass used by millions of New Yorkers to get through subway turnstiles is being terminated from sale just as a new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, takes office.

The transit system will fully transition to Omny, a contactless payment system that allows riders to tap their credit card, phone or other smart device to pay fares, much as they do for other purchases.

But the end of the MetroCard has brought mixed feelings. The unlimited ride, 30-day option made More....travelers feel like kings or queens of the city, swiping around at will, seemingly free to travel the length and breadth of the metro system, surfacing on a whim.

There were drawbacks – the MetroCard’s notoriously sensitive magnetic strip could fail to read, abruptly halting the progress of the rider into the turnstile gate, forcing them to reverse to try again.

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The Department of Health and Human Services is freezing all childcare payments to all states, an official for Donald Trump’s administration told ABC News in a report published Wednesday. States’ funds will be released “only when states prove they are being spent legitimately”.

The report came a day after Jim O’Neill, the HHS deputy secretary, and Alex Adams, an HHS assistant secretary who oversees the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), appeared in a Tuesday evening video message. O’Neill declared that the department had “activated our defend-the-spend system for all ACF childcare payments across America” and would now require “justification, receipt or photo evidence before we make a payment”.

Originally, O’Neill and Adams’s message was interpreted as an announcement that HHS would stop childcare funding in Minnesota, not all 50 states. However, the Associated Press reported late Wednesday that the freeze would apply to every state and that all states would need to provide more documentation about their childcare programs before receiving federal money

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Nineteen states will raise their minimum wages to ring in the new year for 2026, with most of them reaching a rate of $15 per hour or higher.

Another 49 cities and counties across the country will also be hiking their wage floors on Jan. 1, according to a breakdown by the National Employment Law Project.

Even though the federal minimum wage remains just $7.25 per hour, a majority of states now require employers to pay a higher rate. New Year’s Day is the most common time for states to implement scheduled increases to their minimum wages, thanks to cost-of-living adjustments written into state laws.

The highest state minimums will come to Washington State, at $17.13 per hour; New York, which will mandate $17 in the New York City metro area; and New Jersey, which will require $18.92 for long-term care workers.

Alaska and Florida are scheduled to raise their wage floors later in 2026, to $14 and $15, respectively. Oregon will also hike its minimum wage next summer to a rate still to be determined.

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The U.S. military said Wednesday it struck three more boats that were allegedly smuggling drugs, killing three people while others jumped overboard and may have survived.

The statement by U.S. Southern Command, which oversees South America, did not reveal where the attacks occurred. Previous attacks have been in the Caribbean Sea and in the eastern Pacific Ocean.

A video posted by Southern Command on social media shows the boats traveling in a close formation, which is unusual, and the military said they were in a convoy along known narco-trafficking routes and “had transferred narcotics between the three vessels prior to the strikes.” The military did not provide evidence to back up the claim.

The military said three people were killed when the first boat was struck, while people in the other two boats jumped overboard and distanced themselves from the vessels before they were attacked. Southern Command said it immediately notified the U.S. Coast Guard to activate search and rescue efforts.

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Former special counsel Jack Smith was still contemplating whether to charge President Trump’s co-conspirators in the Jan. 6, 2021, case when the president won the election, he revealed to the House in a closed-door deposition released Wednesday.

Smith also told investigators he was preparing to rely on a number of Trump allies who agreed to testify against the president that “what they were trying to do was an attempt to overthrow the government and illegal.” He also said the violence of Jan. 6 was “foreseeable” to Trump.More...

“Our case was built on, frankly, Republicans who put their allegiance to the country before the party,” Smith told the panel’s team over the course of a more than seven-hour interview on Dec. 17.

The Justice Department prohibited Smith from talking about not-yet-public information related to his investigation into Trump’s retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. He was also more broadly prohibited from speaking about aspects of either case against Trump still covered by grand jury secrecy rules.

But the 255-page transcript offers new insights into Smith’s approach to the case, a rare window into the mind of a prosecutor prohibited from making bombshell statements about the case and who has been little heard from since a brief press conference in 2022 announcing he would oversee the investigations.

Smith told investigators that he met with many of Trump’s allies in the case — saying he found a level of cooperation with some of the six co-conspirators they accused of working alongside the president to block the peaceful transfer of power.

“Some of the co-conspirators met with us in proffers and did interviews with us,” Smith said.

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