TV News LIES

Retired NASCAR driver Greg Biffle, his immediate family and others on board a business jet were killed after the plane crashed and burst into flames in western North Carolina on Thursday, Dec. 18, according to the family members of the people on board and NASCAR.

The Cessna C550 crashed about 10:15 a.m. local time while landing at Statesville Regional Airport in Iredell County, about 40 miles north of Charlotte, according to local officials and the Federal Aviation Administration. The airport confirmed that seven people were on board the plane at the time of the crash.

The North Carolina Highway Patrol said it is believed that Biffle and members of his family were among those killed in the crash, but a formal confirmation has not been completed due to a severe post-crash fire. Identification of the victims is pending confirmation from the medical examiner’s office.

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Families in Gaza face an agonizing choice following last week's winter storm: endure exposure in tents after floods destroyed encampment shelters along with their possessions, killing one baby due to exposure — or shelter in buildings damaged in Israeli strikes earlier in the war that could collapse without warning.

A two-storey home in northwest Gaza City was the latest to partially collapse Tuesday, trapping a family underneath the rubble, killing a man and seriously injuring a family of five, local authorities say. The latest collapse comes as authorities warned a day earlier that more weakened buildings are at risk of falling as strong winds and heavy rain persist in Gaza.

Abu Rami Al-Husari, 46, said his brother and nephews were in the Hamid Junction in northwest Gaza City when the top floor of a two-storey home they were sheltering in, which had been damaged by Israeli bombing in the war, caved in on them.

“This [winter storm] wave affected everything so the home collapsed on them,” Al-Husari told CBC's Mohamed El Saife on Tuesday.

“There’s no place to live … there’s no space anywhere. They were forced to live here.”

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Encircled Russian troops in Kupiansk are still getting limited drone drops — and a Ukrainian official says some included flags, not food.

Approximately 120 Russian troops remain encircled in Kupiansk as of mid-December, Viktor Tregubov, head of communications for Ukraine’s Joint Forces, told the Kyiv Independent on Dec.15.

"As of late last week, our intelligence assessed about 40 active call signs on Russian radio channels in Kupiansk. Typically, that means one radio for three to four soldiers. So we estimate around 120 Russian troops remain encircled," he said.

Tregubov confirmed that the encircled Russian troops are still receiving limited supplies via "air bridge."

"Yes, that’s confirmed. In fact, there were ironic cases where they were being sent not food, but flags, so they could wave them and pretend everything was under control," he said.

"Drones are dropping small payloads — food, water, or symbolic items — but you can't air-drop a new soldier."

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Last Tuesday afternoon, Dean Andrea Baccarelli at the Harvard School of Public Health sent out a brief message announcing that one of the country’s most experienced and accomplished public health leaders, Dr Mary T Bassett, would “step down” as director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights. The email struck a polite, bureaucratic tone, thanking her for her service and offering an upbeat rationale for a new “focus on children’s health”.

It omitted the fact that, according to a Harvard Crimson source, Bassett had been asked to resign just two hours earlier and instructed to vacate her office by the end of the year. The decision was not a routine administrative transition. It was the culmination of a year of escalating pressure on the Center for Health and Human Rights for its work on the health and human rights of Palestinians.

Powerful figures inside and outside Harvard, including the former Harvard president and now thoroughly disgraced economist Larry Summers, condemned this work and claimed it “foments antisemitism”. A leading public health scholar whose career has been defined by work on racial justice, poverty, HIV, and global inequality appears to have been removed not because her commitments shifted, but because the political costs of applying those commitments to Palestinians became too great for Harvard to tolerate.

Bassett’s ouster from the center, since denounced by hundreds of Harvard faculty and students, is not an isolated institutional failure. It exposes a deeper crisis in three intertwined domains often treated as guardians of modern moral universalism: human rights institutions, global public health organizations, and American universities.

All have long claimed to speak for everyone. All have repeatedly insisted that their missions transcend partisanship, borders, racial and gender differences, class, and interest groups. And all – when confronted with the political pressures surrounding Palestine – have shown how conditional their commitments have always been.

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The US military carried out a lethal strike on a vessel in the eastern Pacific, killing four people, according to defense secretary Pete Hegseth.

In a post on Twitter/X, Hegseth wrote: “Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by a Designated Terrorist Organizations in international waters. Intelligence confirmed that the vessel was transiting along a known narco-trafficking route in the Eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations. A total of four male narco-terrorists were killed, and no US military forces were harmed.”

The announcement comes a day after Donald Trump announced a blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers entering and leaving Venezuela. In announcing the blockade on social media, the US president accused Venezuela of using oil to fund drug trafficking and other crimes and vowed to escalate the military buildup.

On Tuesday, the Pentagon said it had carried out strikes on three boats it accused of trafficking drugs in the Pacific, killing eight people. Since 2 September, more than 20 strikes have killed at least 99 people, most off the coast of Venezuela.

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A federal judge on Wednesday said she would block Donald Trump’s administration from laying off hundreds of federal employees, the latest legal setback for the president’s efforts to downsize the US government workforce.

US district judge Susan Illston during a hearing in San Francisco said hundreds of layoffs at four agencies were likely not allowed under a law Congress passed last month to end a 43-day government shutdown.

“The chaotic nature of these has been continuing and has affected employees of the government in many ways, including loss of potential alternative jobs and loss of healthcare coverage,” Illston said.

Illston, an appointee of Democratic former president Bill Clinton, said she would block the US state department and education department from laying off about 250 and 150 employees respectively, pending the outcome of a lawsuit by unions.

She also said she intended to order state, the defense department, the General Services Administration, and the Small Business Administration to reinstate roughly 300 people who lost their jobs during the shutdown.

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The US government admitted Wednesday that the Federal Aviation Administration and the army played a role in causing the collision in January between an airliner and a Black Hawk helicopter near the nation’s capital, killing 67 people in the deadliest crash on American soil in more than two decades.

The official response to the first lawsuit filed by one of the victims’ families said that the government is liable in the crash partly because the air traffic controller violated procedures about when to rely on pilots to maintain visual separation that night. Plus, the filing said, the army helicopter pilots’ “failure to maintain vigilance so as to see and avoid” the airline jet makes the government liable.

But the filing suggested that others, including the pilots of the jet and the airlines, may also have played a role. The lawsuit also blamed American Airlines and its regional partner, PSA Airlines, for roles in the crash, but those airlines have filed motions to dismiss.

At least 28 bodies were pulled from the icy waters of the Potomac River after the helicopter apparently flew into the path of the American Airlines regional jet while it was landing at Ronald Reagan airport in northern Virginia, just across the river from Washington, DC, officials said. The plane carried 60 passengers and four crew members, and three soldiers were aboard the helicopter.

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