TV News LIES

For more than four centuries, people believed it had vanished.

But after being discovered in a Paris townhouse, a painting from the 17th century Baroque master Peter Paul Rubens sold Sunday at the Osenat auction house in Versailles for 2.3 million euros ($2.7 million).

The painting, titled Christ on the Cross, was completed in 1613 but soon vanished from public view. For centuries, its existence was known only through engravings, printed reproductions made by other artists. Its whereabouts remained a mystery until the auctioneer Jean-Pierre Osenat uncovered it in September 2024 during a routine inspection of a Paris home he was preparing to sell.

"It is a masterpiece," Osenat told the French wire agency AFP shortly after making the discovery, adding the artwork was in "very good condition."

Still, Osenat had doubts that what he stumbled upon was so uniquely valuable. It was initially believed the piece was produced from one of the many Rubens workshops. The painter had set up a large studio where he collaborated on pieces with a team of assistants.

Yet Osenat says he had a hunch that maybe this piece was not like all other pieces.

"I did everything I could to try and have it authenticated," Osenat told the Associated Press.

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Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz condemned President Donald Trump for his use of a slur in a social media post on Thanksgiving, Nov. 27, and for his characterization of the state's Somali immigrant and diaspora community.

Appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Nov. 30, Walz said Trump's use of the r-word, which the president used to insult to the Democratic governor and 2024 vice presidential hopeful, was "damaging."

"This is what Donald Trump has done. He has normalized this type of hateful behavior and this type of language," Walz said of Trump's social media post. "At first, I think it’s just because he’s not a good human being. But secondly, (it’s) to distract from his incompetency."

While the word was introduced as a medical term in 1961, it has evolved over the decades to become a slur used to demean people with and without disabilities. Disability advocates seek to end its use, and the president's post has ignited backlash.

Walz told NBC that "kids know better" than to use the word, and criticized attempts to brush off outrage as "woke" language policing.

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At least four people were killed and 10 others were wounded in a shooting at a family party in Stockton, California, on Nov. 29, according to local police.  

Gunfire erupted inside a banquet hall in California’s Central Valley, where a family had gathered to celebrate a child’s birthday party, the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office said.

Several of the 14 victims, including children and adults, were taken to local hospitals. Four have been confirmed dead. Heather Brent, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office, said early indications suggest the shooting may have been a “targeted incident.” Police are still searching for the shooting suspect.

Here’s what we know so far.  
What happened?  

As of 9 a.m. ET Nov. 30, Brent told USA TODAY, the sheriff’s office had limited information about the shooting.

Police received reports of gunfire at the banquet hall shortly before 6 p.m. Nov. 29. The shooting broke out during a child’s birthday party, Brent said. It occurred at a shopping mall complex that includes a Dairy Queen, a donut shop and an Asian restaurant.

San Joaquin District Attorney Ron Frietas said at a Nov. 29 news conference, shortly after the incident, that the suspect was still at large. Officials asked anyone with information to contact the sheriff’s office.  

“This is a very active and ongoing investigation," Brent said at the news conference.

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Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff told a senior Kremlin official last month that achieving peace in Ukraine would require Russia gaining control of Donetsk and potentially a separate territorial exchange, according to a recording of their conversation obtained by Bloomberg.

In the 14 October phone call with Yuri Ushakov, the top foreign policy aide to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, Witkoff said he believed the land concessions were necessary all while advising Ushakov to congratulate Trump and frame discussions more optimistically.

“Now, me to you, I know what it’s going to take to get a peace deal done: Donetsk and maybe a land swap somewhere,” Witkoff told Ushakov during the five-minute conversation, according to Bloomberg’s transcript. “But I’m saying instead of talking like that, let’s talk more hopefully because I think we’re going to get to a deal here.”

The recording offers direct insight into Witkoff’s negotiating approach and appears to reveal the origins of the controversial 28-point peace proposal that emerged earlier in November.

TVNL Comment:  Guess who authored this deal way back when.

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Ten-year-old Rateb Abu Qleiq sat in a rusted chair in front of his tent in Deir al-Balah. As he spoke, he unconsciously swung his right leg, which was amputated just below the knee, back and forth—the stub tracing a short arc in the air. On his lap he cradled a makeshift prosthetic, nothing more than a piece of plastic sewage pipe outfitted with an orange covering secured by a piece of string.

“My leg is gone,” Rateb told Drop Site. “This pipe doesn’t make up for my leg.”
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/gaza-child-amputees-makeshift-prosthetics-limbs-israeli-restrictions-hamad-hospital
Rateb was severely wounded in an Israeli airstrike in Khan Younis earlier this year that killed his mother and brother. His right leg was crushed and had to be amputated. He has undergone five surgeries in his abdomen since the attack.

“I felt sad that I’m no longer like the other kids because my leg was amputated. I don’t know how to play with them. I wish I had a leg so I could play with my friends,” he said.

Desperate to move again, Rateb and his cousin fashioned the prosthetic leg out of a plastic sewage pipe he found in the street. “I don’t want to give up, and my determination is strong. I dream of having a real prosthetic limb,” Rateb said. “If my leg hadn’t been cut off, the first place I’d go is the field to play football. I want to return to our home and have my mom, my dad, and my leg with me.”

“When he first wore it, he was so happy, as if it were his real leg, he would walk on it. But poor thing, because it was made of plastic, it started to hurt his leg. No matter what, it’s still just a sewage pipe,” Rateb’s uncle, Mohammed Abu Qleiq, told Drop Site. “It doesn’t replace a real prosthetic limb, and it doesn’t make up for his leg. But this was the simplest thing we had.”

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In March 2006, the Harvard Kennedy School published a working paper, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” by influential political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. The paper, which ran in the London Review of Books and became the basis for a book published the following year, was an unflinching analysis of the impact of pro-Israel advocacy and lobbying groups on the U.S. political system, and the role of organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in shaping U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East.

Mearsheimer and Walt described a loose coalition of philanthropists, think tanks, advocacy groups, and Christian Zionist organizations that routinely pulled U.S. policy toward the Middle East away from America’s national interest, as the U.S. was being drawn into a military quagmire in Iraq. “Other special interest groups have managed to skew U.S. foreign policy in directions they favored,” Walt and Mearsheimer wrote, “but no lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical.”

Even before the Kennedy School posted the paper online, the project had already spooked editors at The Atlantic, who originally commissioned the essay in the early 2000s. In an interview with Tucker Carlson earlier this year, Mearsheimer revealed that the editor of The Atlantic offered them a “$10,000 kill fee” if the publication didn’t print the article. Mearsheimer said, “That’s the fastest $10,000 we ever made.”

The paper was written by two highly esteemed scholars of international relations; Walt had been serving since 2002 as Academic Dean at Harvard’s Kennedy School, as prestigious an appointment as exists in the field, and Mearsheimer taught at the University of Chicago. But the backlash against it was swift, intense, and unusually public in the world of academia. A wave of news articles described the authors as antisemites, while the Anti-Defamation League weighed in to denounce what they called an “anti-Jewish screed.” The pressure became so intense that the Kennedy School removed its logo from the paper and added a disclaimer distancing the institution from its arguments.

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The Trump administration is framing its boat strikes against drug cartels in the Caribbean in part as a collective self-defense effort on behalf of US allies in the region, according to three people directly familiar with the administration’s internal legal argument.

The legal analysis rests on a premise – for which there is no immediate public evidence – that the cartels are waging armed violence against the security forces of allies like Mexico, and that the violence is financed by cocaine shipments.

As a result, according to the legal analysis, the strikes are targeting the cocaine, and the deaths of anyone on board should be treated as an enemy casualty or collateral damage if any civilians are killed, rather than murder.

That line of reasoning, which forms the backbone of a classified justice department office of legal counsel (OLC) opinion, provides the clearest explanation to date how the US satisfied the conditions to use lethal force.

But it marks a sharp departure from Donald Trump’s narrative to the public every time he has discussed the 21 strikes that have killed more than 80 people, which he has portrayed as an effort to stop overdose deaths.

A White House official responded that Trump has not been making a legal argument. Still, Trump’s remarks remain the only public reason for why the US is firing missiles – when the legal justification is in fact very different.

And it would also be the first time the US has claimed – dubiously, and contrary to the widely held understanding – that the cartels are using cocaine proceeds to wage wars, rather than to make money.

In a statement, a justice department spokesperson said: “These operations were ordered consistent with the law of armed conflict.” The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.

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The Trump administration has ordered a review of all refugees already cleared to enter the U.S. during the Biden era and may require them to undergo a re-interview, according to a memo from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services obtained by USA TODAY.

All refugees admitted between Jan. 20, 2021, the day before former President Joe Biden took office, and Feb. 20, 2025 will have their applications re-reviewed even if they were already admitted entry to the U.S., according to the memo, which is dated Nov. 21. Refugees admitted outside that time frame could also be re-reviewed, the memo states.

Refugees who were already admitted also may need to submit to another interview to prove they face "past persecution or a well-founded fear," according to the memo. Refugees whose applications are rejected will have no pathway to appeal the decision, it reads.

Almost 197,000 refugees were admitted to the U.S. from 2021 to 2024, an increase from the 118,000 admitted during Trump's first term, but still less than under any other president for the previous half-century, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

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