TV News LIES

New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani will be sworn in, not inside City Hall on New Year's Day, but dozens of feet below it.

The incoming Democratic mayor will be sworn in at the Old City Hall subway station during a private midnight ceremony, according to a Dec. 29 news release. New York Attorney General Letitia James will administer the oath of office, and the underground ceremony will be attended by Mamdani's family.

In a statement, Mamdani said the station is a "physical monument" to the city and called its subway system a lifeblood of New York.

“When I take my oath from the station at the dawn of the New Year, I will do so humbled by the opportunity to lead millions of New Yorkers into a new era of opportunity, and honored to carry forward our city’s legacy of greatness," Mamdani said in the news release.

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Babies are still being buried in Gaza.

A five-month-old infant was wrapped in a small shroud of white cloth after an Israeli strike on a school shelter in a so-called safe zone beyond IDF control.

A 29-day-old baby was declared dead on the cold stainless steel of a table in a morgue after suffering hypothermia in his family's tent.

Children as young as 8 years old are called "suspects" by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) and killed for venturing close to the shifting yellow line demarcating their control.

These are the scenes of devastation and despair during what is called a ceasefire in Gaza.

International journalists have been barred from independently reporting from the strip for more than two years. The drone footage of vast areas of ashen rubble is still shocking through a screen.

"It is one of the most devastated places on earth to date," says Alessandro Mrakic, the head of the United Nations Development Programme's Gaza office.

"85% of the buildings have been, either partially or totally damaged, with almost 2 million people being currently displaced."

Israel does not permit the entry of reconstruction material and heavy machinery required to rebuild homes in the current phase of the US-led peace plan.

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Iran is at war with the United States, Israel and Europe, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said Saturday, months after President Donald Trump ordered strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities.

“In my opinion, we are in a full-fledged war with America, Israel, and Europe; they do not want our country to stand on its feet,” he said Saturday in an interview on the website of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader.

Pezeshkian’s statement came with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu readying a visit to the United States this weekend for a confab with Trump on Iran.

Trump’s strikes in June marked an inflection point in a nearly two-week-long armed conflict between Iran and Israel, now dubbed the 12 Day War, which the president helped end with a ceasefire in late June.

But with the White House resuming its policy of crippling sanctions against Tehran upon Trump’s return to the Oval Office in January, the strife is far from over, Pezeshkian said.

“Here, they are besieging us from every aspect, they are putting us in difficulty and constraint, creating problems — in terms of livelihood, culturally, politically, and security-wise — while raising society’s expectations,” he said. “On one side, they block our sales, our exchanges, our trade, and on the other side, expectations in society have risen. Consequently, we must all help with all our might to fix the country.”

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Authorities in Azerbaijan say they have been left “bewildered” after Russian officials told them that a criminal probe into the crash of an Azerbaijan Airlines passenger jet has been terminated.

Speaking at a press conference on Friday, Azeri Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov said the head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, had sent a letter stating that the investigation into the incident, as well as criminal cases, had been closed.

Initial investigations suggested the aircraft was struck by Russian air defense systems amid a Ukrainian drone attack in Russ

“The letter claimed that the criminal case had been closed, which naturally raised serious questions,” Bayramov said, adding that Azerbaijan had sent an official response making clear the matter was far from resolved.

“Our expectation is that the process will be completed in accordance with the statements and apology of the Russian President in Dushanbe,” Bayramov said, referring to a meeting between Vladimir Putin and his Azeri counterpart Ilham Aliyev in October 2025.

ia’s skies.

“The letter claimed that the criminal case had been closed, which naturally raised serious questions,” Bayramov said, adding that Azerbaijan had sent an official response making clear the matter was far from resolved. 

“Our expectation is that the process will be completed in accordance with the statements and apology of the Russian President in Dushanbe,” Bayramov said, referring to a meeting between Vladimir Putin and his Azeri counterpart Ilham Aliyev in October 2025.

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This is a story about a missing painting, from an artist you may never have heard of. Though she helped shape European modern art, German artist Gabriele Münter's work was quickly overshadowed in the public's mind by her 12-year relationship with noted abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky.

She met Kandinsky in Munich in 1902, and with his tutoring, she "mastered color as well as the line," she told a German public broadcaster in 1957. Together with other artists, they founded an avant-garde arts collective called Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in 1911.

At the time, most modern artists, like Kandinsky, were moving toward more and more abstract work. Not Münter. In her paintings, people look like people and flowers look like flowers. But her dazzling colors, simplified forms and dramatic scenes are startlingly fresh; her domestic scenes are so immediate that they feel like you've interrupted a crucial, private moment.

"Gabriele Münter was so pioneering, so adventurous in her adherence to life," said Megan Fontanella, curator of modern art and provenance at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. "She is revitalizing the still life, the landscape, the portrait genres, and presenting them in these really fresh and dynamic ways."

Yet, perhaps due to her relationship with Kandinsky, her work was rarely collected by important museums after her death in 1962 (she herself said she was seen as "an unnecessary side dish" to him), and so her paintings largely disappeared from the public eye.

Now Münter is having a moment, with exhibitions this year in Madrid and Paris, as well as one currently at the Guggenheim in New York. The New York show is an expansive one and includes American street photography in the late 1890s, alongside over 50 paintings, from her dazzlingly colored European landscapes to portraits capturing the expressive faces of people she knew.

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US senator Bernie Sanders amplified his recent criticism of artificial intelligence on Sunday, explicitly linking the financial ambition of “the richest people in the world” to economic insecurity for millions of Americans – and calling for a potential moratorium on new datacenters.

Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with the Democratic party, said on CNN’s State of the Union that he was “fearful of a lot” when it came to AI. And the senator called it “the most consequential technology in the history of humanity” that will “transform” the US and the world in ways that had not been fully discussed.

“If there are no jobs and humans won’t be needed for most things, how do people get an income to feed their families, to get healthcare or to pay the rent?” Sanders said. “There’s not been one serious word of discussion in the Congress about that reality.”

Days from being scheduled to help swear New York mayor-elect and democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani into office, Sanders said “the richest people in the world” were pushing the technology. He singled out tech moguls Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel while questioning their motives.

“You think they’re staying up nights worrying about working people and how this technology will impact those people?” Sanders said. “They are not. They are doing it to get richer and even more powerful.”

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The FBI has deployed additional personnel and investigative resources to Minnesota to “dismantle large-scale fraud schemes exploiting federal programs”, director Kash Patel said on social media on Sunday.

The FBI director said the agency had already dismantled a $250m fraud scheme that stole federal food aid meant for vulnerable children during the Covid pandemic in a case that led to 78 indictments and 57 convictions.

Patel said the FBI believes “this is just the tip of a very large iceberg”. Some of those involved in the alleged scheme are being “referred to immigrations officials for possible further denaturalization and deportation proceedings where eligible”.

Patel’s comments comes after federal prosecutors estimate as much as $9bn has been stolen across schemes linked to the state’s Somalia population, a figure nearly equivalent to Somalia’s entire GDP.

The FBI director also said he was aware of recent social media reports in Minnesota, which appears to refer to an online report by independent journalist Nick Shirley about a daycare center in Minneapolis that received $4m despite reportedly having no enrolled kids. The 42-minute video has been viewed 84m times since it was posted on 26 December.

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Two helicopters crashed midair in New Jersey on Sunday, killing one person and critically injuring another, authorities say.

Hammonton Police Chief Kevin Friel said rescuers responded to a report of an aviation crash at about 11:25 a.m. Video from the scene shows a helicopter spinning rapidly to the ground. Police and fire crews subsequently extinguished flames that engulfed one of the helicopters.

The Federal Aviation Administration described the crash as a midair collision between an Enstrom F-28A helicopter and Enstrom 280C helicopter over Hammonton Municipal Airport. Only the pilots were on board each aircraft. One was killed, and the other was transported to a hospital with life-threatening injuries.

Sal Silipino, owner of a cafe near the crash site, said the pilots were regulars at the restaurant and would often have breakfast together. He said he and other customers watched the helicopters take off before one began spiraling downward, followed by the other.

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