TV News LIES

An explosion at a nursing home just outside Philadelphia collapsed part of the building and has left at least two people dead, and five others unaccounted for. The exact number of those injured and trapped inside has yet to be announced, authorities said.

The electric company Peco said in a statement that crews responded to reports of a gas odor at the site around 2pm. “While crews were on site, an explosion occurred at the facility,” the statement said. “PECO crews shut off natural gas and electric service to the facility to ensure the safety of first responders and local residents.”

A plume of black smoke rose from Silver Lake healthcare center in Bristol Township as emergency responders across the region gathered there.

Police for Upper Makefield Township posted on social media that it was a “mass casualty incident” and warned people to avoid the area in Bristol, about 25 miles (40km) north-east of Philadelphia.

County officials said they received the report of an explosion at approximately 2.17pm and said a portion of the building was reported to have collapsed. Ruth Miller, a Pennsylvania emergency management agency spokesperson, said her agency had been informed that people were trapped inside.

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Former Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) announced Tuesday he has been diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer.

The former two-term senator, 53, wrote in a lengthy social media post that he received the diagnosis last week.

“This is a tough note to write, but since a bunch of you have started to suspect something, I’ll cut to the chase: Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die,” Sasse continued. “Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it’s a death sentence. But I already had a death sentence before last week too — we all do.”

“I’m blessed with amazing siblings and half-a-dozen buddies that are genuinely brothers. As one of them put it, ‘Sure, you’re on the clock, but we’re all on the clock.’ Death is a wicked thief, and the bastard pursues us all,” he added.

The Nebraska Republican added, “I’ll have more to say. I’m not going down without a fight.”

“One sub-part of God’s grace is found in the jawdropping advances science has made the past few years in immunotherapy and more,” he wrote near the end of the post. “Death and dying aren’t the same — the process of dying is still something to be lived. We’re zealously embracing a lot of gallows humor in our house, and I’ve pledged to do my part to run through the irreverent tape.”

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The Supreme Court won’t let President Donald Trump deploy National Guard troops in Chicago for now, the first time the high court has weighed in on the president’s efforts to use the military to enforce immigration laws and fight crime in cities led by Democrats.

In a rare loss for Trump at the high court, the justices on Dec. 23 kept in place a hold that a lower court placed on the use of troops while litigation over the administration’s actions continues.

In an unsigned opinion, the court’s majority said the Trump administration “failed to identify a source of authority that would allow the military to execute the laws in Illinois.”

And the president can’t rely on “inherent constitutional authority,” the majority said. Three of the court’s six conservatives – Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch – dissented.

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This week, the New York Times awoke from its slumber to publish an extensive investigation on Jeffrey Epstein that purported to put to rest the question of how the man made his money early in his career. In it, the Times dismisses the possibility that Epstein could have worked for or adjacent to intelligence agencies. “Abundant conspiracy theories hold that Epstein worked for spy services or ran a lucrative blackmail operation, but we found a more prosaic explanation for how he built a fortune,” the paper wrote.

To the paper’s credit, their journalists have put into the record some details that took an impressive effort to track down. For instance, the paper reported about Epstein’s business associates in the early 1980s:

Epstein had been spending extravagantly, and despite his lofty compensation at Bear Stearns and his work for [Douglas] Leese, he found himself strapped, even occasionally bouncing rent checks. Back in New York, he joined forces with John Stanley Pottinger, a lawyer who had recently left a senior post in the Justice Department. Epstein, Pottinger and Pottinger’s brother rented a penthouse office in the Hotel St. Moritz on Central Park South. (The broker, Joanna Cutler, told us that Epstein initially stiffed her on the commission.)

The Times deserves credit, we suppose, for digging up that nugget from his one-time broker—but had the paper decided to look up rather than look down, they may have noticed something a bit more revelatory in their own reporting.

Stanley Pottinger, as it happens, was a notable figure in the scandal that became known as Iran-Contra, in which the CIA used Israel as a middleman to move off-the-books weapons to Iran. In the early 1980s, under the CIA’s supervision, Pottinger advised an Iranian banker on shipping embargoed arms to Iran using fraudulent paperwork and overseas “dummy companies”—in the very same period that Pottinger and Epstein worked together selling “tax-avoidance” strategies from a penthouse by Central Park. Pottinger’s system eventually gave rise to a network of covert intermediaries shipping arms around the world; the CIA’s profits became a slush fund used to illegally bankroll the insurgent Contra army, who waged a war against Nicaragua’s leftist government while simultaneously trafficking cocaine to the United States.

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Ukraine has received €2.3 billion ($2.7 billion) from the European Union under the Ukraine Facility program, the Finance Ministry said on Monday. 

The funds, transferred to the state budget on Dec. 22, include €2.1 billion ($2.5 billion) in concessional loans and €200 million ($235 million) in grants.

The payment marks the sixth regular tranche under Pillar I of the Ukraine Facility, which focuses on direct budget support. It is the tranche approved by the EU Council and previously announced by Ukraine’s Ministry of Finance on Dec. 12.

Ukraine’s Finance Ministry wrote in its press release the money will be used to finance essential state expenditures, including social payments and humanitarian needs.

Launched in 2024 for a four-year period, the Ukraine Facility is the EU’s flagship financial assistance instrument for Ukraine. Since the program began, Kyiv has already received more than €26.7 billion ($31.3 billion), including over €10.6 billion ($12.4 billion) in 2025 alone.

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More than 100 organizations that support victims of human trafficking have lost funding since October, leaving thousands of survivors at risk, a Guardian investigation has found.

Anti-trafficking advocates say the US Department of Justice’s failure to spend nearly $90m appropriated by Congress is impeding law-enforcement investigations and exposing survivors to homelessness and the risk of deportation, jail time or re-exploitation.

This is the latest in a series of Guardian investigative reports, which in September revealed that the Trump administration had rolled back efforts to combat human trafficking across the federal government. That retreat has far-reaching implications beyond those related to the release of the investigative files related to the late Jeffrey Epstein.

“It’s extremely irresponsible, and maybe even immoral,” said Kristina Rose, who ran the justice department’s office for victims of crime under Joe Biden and served as its deputy director during the first Trump administration.

A justice department spokesperson told the Guardian: “The justice department can remain focused on two critical priorities at the same time: support victims of human trafficking and prosecute criminals who exploit children, and ensure the efficient use of taxpayer dollars.”

The Guardian’s report struck a chord on Capitol Hill, where three US senators expressed outrage. Richard Durbin of Illinois said it fit a pattern by the Trump administration of “disregarding congressionally appropriated funds intended to target the most heinous crimes and national security threats – including human trafficking”.

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The Trump administration has said it is immediately pausing all leases for offshore wind farms already under construction, in the heaviest blow yet to an industry that the administration has relentlessly targeted throughout the year.

Trump’s Department of the Interior said that it was halting the building of five wind projects due to “national security risks”. The department said it would work with the US Department of Defense to mitigate the risk of the wind turbine towers creating radar interference called “clutter” that could in some way hamper the US military.

“The prime duty of the United States government is to protect the American people,” said Doug Burgum, secretary of the interior. “Today’s action addresses emerging national security risks, including the rapid evolution of the relevant adversary technologies, and the vulnerabilities created by large-scale offshore wind projects with proximity near our east coast population centers.”

The halt will affect the Vineyard Wind 1 project off the coast of Massachusetts, Sunrise Wind and Empire Wind in New York, Revolution Wind off Rhode Island and Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind in Virginia.

All of the projects were reviewed and approved under Joe Biden’s administration, which found there were no undue national security concerns raised by the developments. Democrats have pointed to two assessments by the Pentagon of Revolution Wind that found the project “would not have adverse impacts to DoD missions in the area”.

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A school district board in upstate New York is investigating school officials amid accusations that the district may have confined elementary school students inside wooden “timeout” boxes.

Images of the boxes, which resemble tiny padded cells, first spread on social media last week, after a former member of the Salmon River school district school board accused officials of building them to seclude children with disabilities. The images unleashed an immediate uproar in the small district, which teaches about 1,300 children and lies on the border between New York state and Canada.

In addition to investigating the officials, the Salmon River central school district board of education announced last Thursday it had placed three officials, including an elementary school teacher, on leave. It also reassigned the district’s superintendent to “home duties” and is cooperating with a New York state department of education investigation.

While the district superintendent acknowledged that the district had set up three of the wooden crates at two elementary schools, he also said that the district had removed the boxes and that no student had ever been confined inside them. However, at an emotional and tense community meeting last week, multiple parents said they suspected their children had been inside the boxes, the Albany-based Times Union reported.

One parent of a minimally verbal child said his son told him: “If you are happy or if you are sad, this is the place you have to go to calm down.”

More than 60% of Salmon River students are Native American. For several community members, the controversy over the boxes evoked memories of abusive residential schools, the US government’s boarding school system that sought to force Native American students to assimilate to white society. Nearly 1,000 students died at those schools, which operated as recently as the 1960s.

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