TV News LIES

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has warned President Barack Obama not to question him about extrajudicial killings, or “son of a bitch, I will swear at you” when they meet in Laos during a regional summit.

Duterte said Monday before flying to Laos that he is a leader of a sovereign country and is answerable only to the Filipino people.

Dozens of people have been killed in an apparently coordinated string of bombings across government-held cities in Syria, as battles that have drawn in regional and international powers rage throughout an embattled country carved into competing spheres of influence.

Syrian state media said at least 40 people had died in six suicide bombings in the city of Homs in central Syria, the suburbs of Damascus, the suburbs of the coastal city of Tartus, and the Kurdish-controlled Hasakah city. Dozens more have been wounded.

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A Jurassic sea monster in all its prehistoric glory has finally re-emerged into the light after 50 years cooped up in a museum storage room in Scotland.

Nicknamed the Storr Lochs Monster, the newly revealed creature is actually an ichthyosaur, a kind of extinct swimming reptile that ruled the waves while the dinosaurs reigned over the land. Over their long history, ichthyosaurs evolved into enormous beasts akin to the whales of their day.

This fossil, though not a giant, is a scientific prize, scientists say. At roughly 170 million years old, it lived during the Middle Jurassic, a somewhat mysterious period for paleontologists.

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Heroin, marijuana, LSD, and ... kratom? The latter is a plant native to southeast Asia, and it's about to join the others on the most restrictive drug classification list in the US. The DEA said this week that kratom—specifically its active ingredients, mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine — will become a Schedule 1 drug, reports STAT News.

The agency can take such action for two years if it deems a drug to be a public threat. At low dosages, kratom tends to behave like a stimulant, but at higher doses it is reported to behave much like opioids and dull pain, reports CNN. Because kratom has long been considered an herbal supplement — and it's a popular one at that — FDA efforts to curb its use and regulate its contents have been restricted.

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- The giant panda has been officially removed from the endangered species list, the international body for species protection said on Sunday.

The iconic conservation species native to China, has been taken off the list -- officially known as the Red List of Threatened Species -- after decades of work by the Chinese government and conservationists. The black and white bear will now move up to the "vulnerable" designation, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

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A multilevel parking garage under construction in the city of Tel Aviv collapsed on Monday, killing at least two people and injuring about 17 others, Israeli police and rescuers said, as rescue teams worked all day and into the night to locate several people believed trapped under the rubble.

The midday collapse sent a large plume of dust floating over the area. Those killed were not identified but they were likely workers at the construction zone. The cause of the collapse was under investigation.

A group of children and relatives of U.S. officers who were held in a Nazi German prisoner camp on Polish territory during World War II are on a visit that will take them to the camp's site.

The group includes George P. Waters, the grandson of Gen. George Smith Patton Jr. and son of Lt. Col. John K. Waters, and children of four other U.S. officers who were held at an officers' camp in central Poland, Oflag 64 in Szubin, from 1943 to 1945. They either managed to flee an evacuation march, survived the march and were freed, or were saved in a prisoner exchange.

Two Taliban suicide bombers blew themselves up close to the Afghan defence ministry in Kabul during late afternoon rush hour, killing at least 24 people and wounding 91 others, according to health ministry officials.

"It happened in the center of town, just about 4 pm, a very busy time" said Al Jazeera's Jennifer Glasse, reporting from Kabul.