TV News LIES

Tens of thousands of Palestinians gathered under heavy Israeli restrictions at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque compound for the first Friday prayers of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, including some who were allowed to enter from the occupied West Bank.

The Ramadan prayers at Al-Aqsa took place for the first time since a shaky ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas went into effect in October. It was the first opportunity many had to leave the West Bank and pray at the site in Jerusalem’s Old City since Ramadan last year.

Israel restricted the number of Palestinians allowed to enter from the West Bank to 10,000 on Friday, and only allowed men over 55 and women over 50 as well as children up to 12. It has imposed similar restrictions in the past, citing security concerns.

The hilltop, which Jews refer to as the Temple Mount, is the holiest site in Judaism and was home to the ancient biblical temples. Muslims call the site the Noble Sanctuary. Today it is home to Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam.

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A 23-year-old police officer was killed and 25 people were injured in what authorities described as a terrorist attack in Lviv overnight on Feb. 22, as officials confirmed the detention of a suspected perpetrator.

The blasts damaged a patrol vehicle and a civilian car, and prompted a large-scale response from law enforcement and emergency services.

According to Astra, citing regional authorities and police, the first explosion occurred after patrol officers arrived at a store on Danylyshyna Street following a report of unlawful entry. A second explosion followed when another patrol unit reached the scene.

Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovy described the incident as a terrorist act in a statement issued shortly after midnight.

“Lviv. This was a terrorist attack. At present, 14 injured have been hospitalized. Doctors are providing all necessary assistance. Law enforcement and all relevant services are working,” Sadovyi wrote.

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As marijuana use among teens has grown in the past decade, researchers have been trying to better understand the health risks of the drug. Now, a new longitudinal study finds that cannabis use among adolescents increases risks of being diagnosed with bipolar and psychotic disorders, as well as anxiety and depression, years later.

"This is very, very, very worrying," says psychiatrist Dr. Ryan Sultan at Columbia University, a cannabis researcher who wasn't involved in the new study published in the latest JAMA Health Forum.

Researchers analyzed health data on 460,000 teenagers in the Kaiser Permanente Health System in Northern California. The teens were followed until they were 25 years old. The data included annual screenings for substance use and any mental health diagnoses from the health records. Researchers excluded the adolescents who had symptoms of mental illnesses before using cannabis.

"We looked at kids using cannabis before they had any evidence of these psychiatric conditions and then followed them to understand if they were more likely or less likely to develop them," says Dr. Lynn Silver, a pediatrician and researcher at the Public Health Institute, and an author of the new study.

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A newly discovered species of large dinosaur lived in marshy areas, hunted for fish and had an impressive horn protruding from its skull. It is the first time in over 100 years that scientists have discovered a new species of Spinosaurus dinosaurs, which are large fish-eating predators that first emerged during the Jurassic period more than 140 million years ago.

The new species, called Spinosaurus mirabilis, was the length of a school bus and was unearthed in Niger by an international team of scientists led by paleontologists from the University of Chicago. Details of the discovery were published in the journal Science last week.

The authors estimate that Spinosaurus mirabilis lived about 95 million years ago during the Cretaceous period, in a marshy inland area in what is now the central Sahara.

Lead author Paul Sereno compared them to herons, which also hunt for fish in shallow water and have bodies that are well-suited to semi-aquatic living. "I suspect that this animal was fishing largely in about 3 feet of water," he explained in an email to NPR, although it was large enough.

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A Guardian analysis of government records has found that the vast majority – 77% – of people who entered deportation proceedings for the first time in 2025 had no criminal conviction, exposing a stark gap between the Trump administration’s rhetoric and reality.

Within days of Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) trotted out a phrase that his surrogates would come to use over and over again: “the worst of the worst.”

The term has become a shorthand justification for the administration’s unprecedented overhaul of immigration enforcement – a relentless campaign the administration claims is focused on arresting and deporting violent criminals.

However, a review of records obtained by the Guardian and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed against DHS, raises questions about those claims.

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Anderson Cooper decides to walk away from broadcast TV’s most prestigious news show, 60 Minutes. Stephen Colbert takes his interview with a rising Democratic politician to YouTube instead of his own late-night show. The CBS Evening News anchor presents a misleading version of the network’s own exclusive reporting on Ice arrests. And a news producer writes a farewell note to her CBS News colleagues blaming the loss of editorial independence.

If you connect the dots, the picture of what’s happening at CBS becomes all too clear. That picture comes into even sharper focus once you recall an underlying factor: the network’s parent company is trying to get a big commercial deal done and needs the help of the Trump administration to bring it over the finish line.

“Media capture” is the name that University of Pennsylvania scholar Victor Pickard gives to what we’re seeing unfold before our eyes.

What’s happening at CBS and elsewhere “isn’t a singular breakdown”, Pickard writes in a new analysis.

It’s a whole cascade of layers – media ownership, control and market structure – that “endanger our information and communication systems, our First Amendment freedoms, and our democracy”.

In the CBS situation, the immediate motivation is easy to understand. The network’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, wants to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, which also owns CNN – one of Donald Trump’s favorite punching bags and a news organization he would love to see take the same rightward turn as CBS.

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Top US trade negotiator Jamieson Greer insisted on Sunday that the Trump administration was set to persist with its tariffs policy, two days after the supreme court declared many of Donald Trump’s tariffs illegal.

The ruling issued on Friday by the highest US court was a sharp rebuke to the Republican president that toppled a key pillar of his aggressive economic agenda – even as it prompted Trump to announce a new global tariff using different statutes, albeit temporary.

“The reality is, we want to maintain the policy we have, have as much continuity as possible, make sure that business understands this is the direction we’ve been going. We’re going to continue going this way,” Greer told the ABC News Sunday politics show This Week.

ABC host Martha Raddatz asked Greer about the government’s persistence despite the unpopularity of the policy with the public, citing an ABC/Washington Post/Ipsos poll that showed 64% of those surveyed in the US disapproved of tariffs as an economic strategy.

“The policy hasn’t changed. The legal tools that implement that may change but the policy hasn’t changed,” he said, arguing that it gives US business “a lot of leverage” in world trade.

Greer also said in a separate interview with CBS that the US will not back out of tariff deals it has already sealed with a number of countries around the world including the UK, the EU, Japan, Switzerland and others, even though the supreme court ruled that tariffs imposed in those deals were illegal.

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In 1850, Andrew Benjamin Tarbutton enslaved 25 people in central Georgia. A year later, he purchased more than a dozen additional people off the docks in Savannah and marched them toward his home, setting the foundation for his family’s generational wealth.

Four generations later, a railroad company owned by one of his descendants is using eminent domain to seize land of poor farmers, including descendants of enslaved people, not too far from where his family’s fortunes started.

In 2024, the Georgia Public Service Commission granted the Tarbutton-owned Sandersville Railroad Co. eminent domain authority, allowing it to seize private property for what they claim is a public use: to build a rail spur to haul gravel from a local quarry. 

The landowners filed a petition for judicial review of the PSC’s decision in Fulton County Superior Court. That appeal has been moving through the courts for the past two years. In February 2025, the Fulton County Superior Court affirmed the PSC’s decision but kept a pause on construction in place while the case proceeded toward further review in the Georgia Court of Appeals.

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