TV News LIES

The Biden administration will provide $89 million to help Kyiv clear land mines that now litter huge swaths of Ukraine after Russia’s February invasion, according to a senior State Department official.

The money will fund 100 de-mining teams in Ukraine for the next year, the official told reporters on Tuesday. The U.S. will also help Kyiv identify the areas of greatest contamination, and help train and equip Ukrainian forces tasked with removing the mines, the official said.

Since invading Ukraine in February, Russian forces have littered the country with land mines and other explosive munitions “in an irresponsible and brutal manner,” the official told reporters. In particular, the official condemned Russia’s use of cluster munitions and butterfly mines, weapons that Moscow also deployed in Afghanistan in the early 1980s and which continue to kill civilians today.

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Residents of the Gaza Strip were bracing for the possibility of a new round of war on Saturday after two days of “pre-emptive” Israeli airstrikes against a Palestinian militant group.

Israeli warplanes hit several sites in the blockaded territory on Friday, part of a surprise operation named “Breaking Dawn” that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said thwarted alleged planned rocket attacks by Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

After retaliatory fire from the militants, Israel warned on Saturday that its bombing campaign could last a week, in the worst escalation of violence since last May’s 11-day conflict.

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The UN nuclear watchdog has called for an immediate end to all military action near Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant after it was hit by shelling, causing one of the reactors to shut down and creating a “very real risk of a nuclear disaster”.

Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said he was “extremely concerned” by reports of damage at the plant and called for IAEA experts to be allowed to inspect the damage.

“I’m extremely concerned by the shelling yesterday at Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, which underlines the very real risk of a nuclear disaster that could threaten public health and the environment in Ukraine and beyond,” he said.

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Inside her metal courtroom cage, a solemn, stone-faced Brittney Griner learned how long she’ll be locked away in Russian prison if the Biden administration can’t broker a deal to secure her release.

A Russian judge handed down a harsh 9-year sentence on Thursday, rejecting the WNBA star’s emotional apology and plea for leniency for the “honest mistake” of bringing less than a gram of cannabis oil into the country last February.

Griner was found guilty of drug possession and drug smuggling with criminal intent. The judge fined her 1 million rubles, roughly $16,300 US dollars, in addition to sentencing Grine to just shy of the maximum 10 years that she was eligible to receive.

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In a battered building surrounded by an iron fence and an overgrown garden, an aide offers tea while we wait to meet Col. Serhiy Shatalov. Just 29 years old, Shatalov leads the 98th Infantry Battalion, which is pushing south toward Russian-occupied Kherson, part of Ukraine's first major counteroffensive of the war.

His force is made up of roughly 600 men, many of them civilians just a few months ago. Shatalov, a stocky man with a couple days' growth beard and close-cropped black hair, is wearing simple combat fatigues.

"They are 11 kilometers away," he says, referring to the Russian soldiers — about 7 miles.

They'd been closer, threatening the outskirts of this half-abandoned industrial town. But Shatalov's men had steadily pushed them back over several weeks of hard fighting across a maze of farm fields, rivers, villages and old industrial sites.

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi landed in Taiwan on Tuesday, a highly anticipated visit that came amid increasingly harsh warnings of Chinese retaliation and escalating Washington-Beijing tensions.

Pelosi, wearing a face mask, stepped off the plane around 10:50 p.m. local time and posed for photos with a contingent of Taiwan officials who greeted her on the tarmac.

Pelosi, who has a long record of tangling with Beijing over its human rights record, is the highest ranking American official to visit the self-governing island in 25 years.

The California Democrat's office would not confirm the travel in advance, citing security protocols, but her travel plans leaked amid rampant speculation about the fallout from such a visit.

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