TV News LIES

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has told European allies that the U.S. wants a peace deal before it agrees to any security guarantees for Ukraine, according to a European diplomat and a person with knowledge of the conversations.

That condition has underscored American proposals to Kyiv over the past week, the people said. Rubio, on a Tuesday call with European officials, argued President Donald Trump will negotiate long-term guarantees for Ukraine’s safety, they said, that would ensure Kyiv feels secure.

Ukraine’s leaders have held Western security guarantees as a cornerstone for any feasible deal with Russia, although NATO members have struggled to figure out how to support the war-scarred country either militarily or with intelligence support. Trump has said he won’t invite Ukraine’s leader to the White House until a deal is signed.

The situation is changing rapidly and European allies are scrambling to understand the multiple messages from the administration. Rubio also told European allies that security guarantees for Ukraine are a priority for the administration, and an issue separate from other points of discussion that have already been agreed on, according to a second European diplomat, and the U.S. wants an entire package done quickly.

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The fate of one French judge is a case study in the west’s long unravelling. Nicolas Guillou cannot shop online. When he used Expedia to book a hotel in his own country, the reservation was cancelled within hours. He is “blacklisted by much of the world’s banking system”, unable to use most bank cards.

Guillou, you see, has been sanctioned by the United States, putting him on a 15,000-strong list alongside al-Qaida terrorists, drug cartels and Vladimir Putin. Why? Because alongside two other judges of the international criminal court pre-trial chamber I, he approved arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, and Mohammed Deif, the former commander of Hamas’s military wing. Guillou and his colleagues had “actively engaged in the ICC’s illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America or our close ally, Israel”, the US claimed when imposing the sanctions in June. All are now barred from entering the US – but that is the least of the consequences.

The rationale is brutally clear. The rule of law does not apply to the world’s hegemon or its closest allies. This was bluntly spelled out by Republican senator Lindsey Graham, who told the ICC chief prosecutor, Karim Khan – himself sanctioned – that the ICC was “made for Africa and thugs like Putin, not democracies like Israel”. The US refused to sign up to the court, clearly fearing that its propensity to commit war crimes in foreign lands would lead to prosecutions. That put Washington in the same bracket as human rights abusers like China, Russia and indeed Israel. Only because Palestine acceded to the court a decade ago does the ICC now have jurisdiction over crimes committed on its territory or by its citizens.

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A handful of US representatives have reacted furiously to a leaked recording in which the special envoy to Ukraine reportedly coached Moscow on how to handle Donald Trump, but most have so far remained mute on the revelation that American officials were advising a US adversary.

Don Bacon, a Republican representative, called for Steve Witkoff’s immediate dismissal. “For those who oppose the Russian invasion and want to see Ukraine prevail as a sovereign & democratic country, it is clear that Witkoff fully favors the Russians,” the Nebraska lawmaker wrote on X.

“He cannot be trusted to lead these negotiations. Would a Russian paid agent do less than he? He should be fired.”

Brian Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican wrote that the leak represented “a major problem” and “one of the many reasons why these ridiculous side shows and secret meetings need to stop”. He urged that the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, be allowed to “do his job in a fair and objective manner”.

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A massive fire ripped through high-rise residential buildings in Hong Kong on Nov. 26, killing dozens of people as authorities search for hundreds of missing pepole.

The fire broke out in Wang Fuk Court, a 32-story high-rise housing complex that houses 2,000 residential apartments across eight blocks, according to Reuters. The complex is located in the Tai Po district of Hong Kong, near the border between Hong Kong and mainland China.

The fire - the deadliest blaze in Hong Kong in three decades - left at least 36 people dead, including a firefighter, 29 hospitalized and 279 missing. About 900 people were in shelters.

Dramatic images from the scene showed the building's bamboo scaffolding engulfed in flames and thick plumes of dark smoke rising as firefighters below battled the blaze.

Harry Cheung, 66, who has lived in one of the complexes for more than 40 years, told Reuters he heard a loud noise around 2:45 p.m. local time and saw fire erupt in a nearby block.

"I don't even know how I feel right now. I'm just thinking about where I'm going to sleep tonight because I probably won't be able to go back home."

China's President Xi Jinping urged an "all-out effort" to extinguish the fire and to minimize casualties and losses, China's state broadcaster CCTV said. But Derek Armstrong Chan, deputy director of the Hong Kong Fire Department, told reporters at a news conference the "extremely high temperatures” are making it difficult to reach those trapped inside, CNN reported.

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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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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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