TV News LIES

Tourists and residents of a town in south-west Iceland have been evacuated after a volcanic eruption.

The volcano is close to the fishing town of Grindavik and the famous Blue Lagoon spa, which is a popular attraction. A small number of people refused to evacuate the town, local media reported.

The volcano has been spewing lava and smoke in a fiery display of orange and red since Tuesday morning, creating a huge crack in the ground which has grown to 1.2km (0.75 miles) long.

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Moscow has offered another phone call between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin after the US president said he was “p***** off” with the Russian leader.

Mr Trump told NBC News he was very angry after Mr Putin criticised the credibility of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. The US president suggested he could impose secondary tariffs of 25-50 per cent on buyers of Russian oil.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Moscow was continuing to work with Washington and that Mr Putin remained open to contacts with Mr Trump.

A call between both the presidents, Mr Peskov said, could be arranged at short notice if necessary, though none was scheduled for this week.

But Washington must not be misled by Putin’s “stalling tactics”, outgoing German foreign minister Anna Baerbock said in a statement during a farewell visit to Kyiv.

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Late on Friday evening, the trustees of Columbia University announced that its interim president, Katrina Armstrong, was leaving her post.

Six days earlier, she had convened an emergency meeting with 75 faculty members after the university had cravenly surrendered to the demands of the Trump administration in the hopes of recovering $400m in federal grants and contracts. The president and her staff called their predicament “heartbreaking” and sought to reassure faculty that academic freedom and departmental autonomy remained intact.

A transcript of the meeting was leaked. Two days later, the president was “returning to lead” the university’s medical center. She was replaced by a trustee.

An attempt by Republican leaders to stop new parents from voting by proxy sparked a bipartisan mutiny in the House of Representatives on Tuesday, during which a small group of GOP lawmakers joined with all Democrats to obstruct a key procedural motion and paralyze the chamber.

The revolt was the first legislative setback Republicans have faced since Donald Trump returned to the White House with the GOP holding a slim majority in Congress’s lower chamber. It also delayed consideration of House speaker Mike Johnson’s legislative agenda for the week, which included a bill to stop federal judges from issuing nationwide injunctions – as several have done for Trump’s executive orders – and to require proof of citizenship to vote.

Fueling the split was an attempt by the Republican Anna Paulina Luna and the Democrat Brittany Pettersen to force consideration of a measure allowing new parents to temporarily designate someone else to vote in their place. House leaders attempted an unusual parliamentary tactic to prevent the proposal from going forward, but were blocked by the votes of all 213 Democrats and nine Republicans.

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Former Costa Rican president and Nobel winner Óscar Arias said on Tuesday that the US had revoked his visa to enter the country, weeks after he criticized Donald Trump on social media saying he was behaving like “a Roman emperor”.

Arias, 84, was president between 1986 and 1990 and again between 2006 and 2010. A self-declared pacifist, he won the 1987 Nobel peace prize for his role in brokering peace during the Central American conflicts of the 1980s.

Arias also promoted a free trade agreement with the US during his last term and in 2007 established diplomatic ties with China.

“I received an email from the US government informing me that they have suspended the visa I have in my passport. The communication was very terse, it does not give reasons. One could have conjectures,” Arias told reporters outside his home, without elaborating on his suspicions.

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