TV News LIES

Rebels in eastern Ukraine have handed over two flight-data recorders from the downed MH17 plane to Malaysian experts.

A senior rebel leader signed them over to the Malaysian officials at a meeting in the city of Donetsk. The handover came hours after the UN Security Council voted unanimously to demand immediate international access to the crash site.

The Malaysian Airlines passenger jet crashed last Thursday, killing all 298 people on board.

As Israeli troops pushed into Gaza overnight, intense tank fire shook parts of Khan Yunis, sending a flood of patients into the southern city's Nasser hospital.The shells smashed into buildings near the border with Israel, prompting thousands to flee their homes under the cover of darkness, only missiles lighting up the sky.

At Nasser hospital, doctors and nurses working 24-hour shifts were on alert for the wave of patients who began arriving in the early hours.

"The situation is very, very difficult," said doctor Kamel Zaqzuq.

Emergency workers, police officers and even off-duty coal miners — dressed in overalls and covered in soot — searched Friday through wreckage and bodies scattered over a wide stretch of Ukrainian farmland after a Malaysian jetliner flying high above Ukraine's battlefield was shot down from the sky, killing 298 people.

Separatist rebels who control the area where the plane went down said they had recovered most of the plane's black boxes and were considering what to do with them. Their statement had profound implications for the integrity of the plane crash investigation.

Israeli airstrikes targeting Hamas in Gaza hit a mosque and a center for the disabled where two women were killed Saturday, raising the Palestinian death toll from the offensive to more than 120, Palestinian officials said.

The Israeli military said the mosque concealed rockets like those used in the barrage of nearly 700 fired by Gaza militants at Israel over the five-day offensive, while saying it was investigating claims about the other sites hit. However, the strikes in the densely populated Gaza Strip show the challenge facing Israel as it considers a ground operation in the region and potential further dangers posed to civilians.

In the flood of angry words that poured out of Israel and Gaza during a week of spiraling violence, few statements were more blunt, or more telling, than this throwaway line by the chief spokesman of the Israeli military, Brigadier General Moti Almoz, speaking July 8 on Army Radio’s morning show: “We have been instructed by the political echelon to hit Hamas hard.”

That’s unusual language for a military mouthpiece. Typically they spout lines like “We will take all necessary actions” or “The state of Israel will defend its citizens.” You don’t expect to hear: “This is the politicians’ idea. They’re making us do it.”

A magnitude-6.9 earthquake on the Pacific Coast jolted a wide area of southern Mexico and Central America Monday, killing at least three people and damaging dozens of homes.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake hit at 6:23 a.m. (7:23 a.m. EDT) on the Pacific Coast 1 mile (2 kilometers) north-northeast of Puerto Madero, near the Guatemala border. It initially calculated the magnitude at 7.1 but later lowered the figure to 6.9.