TV News LIES

The United States will “run” Venezuela following an overnight military operation where Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife were captured and explosions rocked the country’s capital of Caracas, President Donald Trump said Saturday.

"We're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition," Trump said at a press conference from his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. “It has to be judicious, because that's what we are all about.”

The president did not provide details of how the United States will run Venezuela, but said that his administration is determining who will be in charge of the country. He declined to endorse Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025, to lead the country. He also did not provide a timeline for how long the U.S. will run the country, saying that it will be “a period of time” as they rebuild Venezuela’s infrastructure.

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United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called on Israel to reverse a pending ban on 37 nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) working in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

In a statement on Friday, Guterres called the work of the groups “indispensable to life-saving humanitarian work”, according to spokesperson Stephane Dujarric. He added that the “suspension risks undermining the fragile progress made during the ceasefire”.

Israel banned the humanitarian groups for failing to meet new registration rules requiring aid groups working in the occupied territory to provide “detailed information on their staff members, funding and operations”. It has pledged to enforce the ban starting March 1.

Experts have denounced the requirements as arbitrary and in violation of humanitarian principles. Aid groups have said that providing personal information about their Palestinian employees to Israel could put them at risk.

The targeted groups include several country chapters of Doctors Without Borders (known by its French acronym, MSF), the Norwegian Refugee Council, and the International Rescue Committee.

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Russian forces on Jan. 2 launched a missile attack on a residential neighborhood in the city of Kharkiv, killing a child and injuring at least 19 people, including a six-month-old baby, regional authorities said.

The body of a three-year-old boy was recovered from the rubble of a destroyed apartment building after the attack, Kharkiv Oblast Governor Oleh Syniehubov reported. The boy's mother is considered missing. Search and rescue operations are ongoing at the site.

Sixteen of the wounded were hospitalized, including a woman in serious condition, Syniehubov said. He added that the baby did not require hospitalization.

In total, 28 people sought medical assistance following the attack, which included at least six people who suffered from severe stress due to the attack, according to Syniehubov.

The attack destroyed a five-story apartment and damaged other civilian infrastructure, a shopping center, and cars, according to the local authorities. The entrance to another four-story apartment building was damaged, as were contact networks, traffic signals, and power lines.

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The journey that brought Kaohly Her to St. Paul’s mayor’s office started in a bamboo hut some 8,000 miles from Minnesota's capital city.

Her, 52, was born in the mountains of Laos. When she was still young, her family fled war, ending up in the United States as refugees, first in Illinois and Wisconsin and later Minnesota.

On Friday afternoon at St. Catherine University, Her was sworn in as the 56th mayor of St. Paul, becoming the first woman and first person of Hmong ancestry to hold the title.

With her hand on the family Bible and her husband, father and children by her side, she took the oath of office in a ceremony led by the Rev. Daniel Johnson of Park Avenue United Methodist Church in Minneapolis, a family friend.

After she was sworn in, she was greeted by other community leaders and six other “firsts,” including Debbie Montgomery, the first woman to become a St Paul police offer and the first Black woman elected to St. Paul City Council and Choua Lee, the first person of Hmong ancestry elected to a school board seat in the United States.

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As Gaza enters the bleakest period of winter, children are dying of hypothermia, drowning in flooded camps and burning to death as their families try to cook in flimsy tents. Israel destroyed nine out of 10 homes over more than two years of war. Camped amid the ruins, Palestinians struggle against strong winds, heavy rain and freezing temperatures.

Aid deliveries resumed following the ceasefire, staving off the famine that had taken hold in parts of the territory, but remain wholly insufficient: 1.6 million people face acute food insecurity. The sanitation infrastructure has collapsed.

The UK, Canada, Japan, France and six other nations have jointly warned that the situation is catastrophic. Yet Israel is now deepening one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. On Tuesday, it announced that it is deregistering 37 NGOs active in Gaza. They must cease all operations there by 1 March unless they meet its new “security and transparency standards” – including by disclosing the personal details of staff. Many of the listed groups are among the best-regarded in their field, including Oxfam, Médecins Sans Frontières and the Norwegian Refugee Council.

Volker Türk, the UN human rights chief, was right to describe this as outrageous – and as part of a pattern of unlawful restrictions on humanitarian access. Israeli NGOs have warned that it breaks the principles of independence and neutrality for humanitarian organisations.

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Billionaires raised fortunes against him. The president threatened to strip his citizenship. Mainstream synagogues slandered him as the spawn of Osama bin Laden and Chairman Mao. But today, Zohran Mamdani became the first socialist mayor of New York City.

For all the hysteria, when I look at Mamdani, I didn’t see some radical departure from the past. I see him as the heir to an old and venerable Jewish tradition – that of Yiddish socialism – which helped build New York.

In some cases, the link is direct. Bruce Vladeck, a member of one of Mamdani’s transition committees, is a well-respected expert on Medicare, but for the sake of this article, his credentials matter less than his surname.

Vladeck is the grandson of Baruch Charney Vladeck, a Marxist troublemaker from the Pale of Settlement, a tract of land in the Russian empire where Jews were permitted to live at a time of rampant antisemitic oppression. Baruch showed up in New York after the failed Russian revolution of 1905 with a Cossack’s saber scars all over his face. He later became a socialist alderman and member of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s housing administration. Vladeck was not actually his birth name. It was rather a nom de guerre, adopted when he joined the Jewish Labor Bund, the socialist, secular and defiantly anti-Zionist movement whose slogan, “here where we live is our country,” would make an apt tagline for Mamdani’s New York.

In our city, exiled revolutionaries like Vladeck found fertile ground. At the dawn of the 20th century, New York was home to nearly 600,000 Jews, making it the largest Jewish city on Earth, a title it still holds. They packed 10 to a room, into the squalid tenements of the Lower East Side, where they toiled in garment sweatshops, and where the fires caused by their in-home piecework businesses mirror those caused by the exploding lithium-ion batteries of e-bikes today. They soon transformed into a clamorous, disputatious and utterly radical proletariat – the same sort of constituency that powered Mamdani’s campaign.

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A state law creating the first registry of people convicted of domestic abuse in the US took effect Thursday in Tennessee.

Named after Savanna Puckett, a woman who was shot to death by her ex-boyfriend in January 2022, “Savanna’s law” requires the Tennessee bureau of investigation to maintain a database of people who have been convicted of or pleaded guilty to at least two domestic violence offenses.

The database will include the offender’s name, date of birth, and a photo and location of their convictions. It will not include their address.The database can include information about offenders for up to 20 years after their last conviction, although it is not retroactive. People will only be eligible for the database if they plead guilty to or are convicted of offenses after 1 January.

In January 2022, after Puckett failed to appear for work as a sheriff’s deputy in Robertson county in northern Tennessee, a co-worker went to her home and found it in flames. Firefighters later discovered Puckett’s body, which had been shot multiple times. James Jackson Conn, Puckett’s ex-boyfriend, pleaded guilty to a charge of first-degree murder. He is now serving a life sentence.

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The Coast Guard said Friday that it is coordinating the search with multiple vessels, including those from partner nations and commercial fishing boats in the water about 400 nautical miles southwest of Mexico’s border with Guatemala, covering an area spanning more than 1,000 nautical miles. 

“Weather reported in the area was nine-foot seas, and 40-knot winds,” it said in a statement shared with The Hill.

The Coast Guard dispatched its HC-130J Super Hercules, a surveillance aircraft with long-range maritime patrol capability, from Sacramento, Calif., to search the area and sent out an urgent “marine information broadcast” to mariners in the region. 

As of Friday, the Coast Guard said it had spent more than 65 hours in its search efforts for the survivors, who jumped into the water after the U.S. military struck the first of the three alleged drug-smuggling vessels Tuesday. 

It is unclear how many people may have survived the Tuesday attack, but the U.S. has said three were killed.

The U.S. Southern Command (Southcom) said the U.S. military conducted strikes against an alleged drug-smuggling convoy operated by a designated terrorist organization. It is unclear which terrorist group the U.S. military was referring to.

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