TV News LIES

US civil rights pioneer Claudette Colvin, arrested at age 15 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white woman in Montgomery, Alabama, nine months before Rosa Parks’s similar but more famous act of defiance, died on Tuesday at age 86.

Although she remained a largely unsung figure in the civil rights movement for decades, Colvin’s 1955 act of rebellion inspired Parks and others and helped form the basis for the federal lawsuit that outlawed racial segregation in US public transportation.

Her death, under hospice care in Texas, was confirmed by Ashley Roseboro, a spokesperson for her family and the Claudette Colvin Foundation.

In one of the first publicized acts of civil disobedience against Montgomery’s Jim Crow rules governing city bus seating by race, Colvin refused to relinquish her seat for a white woman, as ordered by the driver, and stayed put until she was dragged off the bus by police.

According to accounts of her testimony in court, Colvin recalled she had been studying anti-slavery abolitionist heroes in school, and felt that she had Harriet Tubman on one shoulder, Sojourner Truth on the other, and “history had me glued to the seat.”

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Russian strikes damaged the Polish consulate in the southern Ukrainian city of Odesa overnight, according to Poland’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Maciej Wewiór.

"As a result of the overnight bombardment, the Polish consulate in Odesa was damaged,” Wewiór wrote on X, describing it as “another night of Russian terror.”

He added that no consulate employees had been injured and praised the diplomats’ work, saying: “Great respect for the entire [Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs] team working in Ukraine.”

Russia overnight struck cities across the country in one of its largest attacks of the yr so far.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Moscow had launched almost 300 drones, 18 ballistic missiles and seven cruise missiles in the sweeping attacks which affected eight regions and targeted energy-generation facilities and substations.

Four people were killed in Kharkiv when missiles and drones hit a postal terminal.

At least five people were injured in Odesa as temperatures dropped to –7°C and fires broke out at a residential building, a fitness center and a garage, causing extensive damage.

Emergency psychologists were forced to assist 14 people, including one child.

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Several faculty groups have denounced the Trump administration’s efforts to obtain information about Jewish professors, staff and students at the University of Pennsylvania – including personal emails, phone numbers and home addresses – as government abuse with “ominous historical overtones”.

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is demanding the university turn over names and personal information about Jewish members of the Penn community as part of the administration’s stated goal to combat antisemitism on campuses. But some Jewish faculty and staff have condemned the government’s demand as “a visceral threat to the safety of those who would find themselves identified because compiling and turning over to the government ‘lists of Jews’ conjures a terrifying history”, according to a press release put out by the groups’ lawyers.

The EEOC sued Penn in November over the university’s refusal to fully comply with its demands. On Tuesday, the American Association of University Professors’ national and Penn chapters, the university’s Jewish Law Students Association and its Association of Senior and Emeritus Faculty, and the American Academy of Jewish Research filed a motion in federal court to intervene in the case.

“These requests would require Penn to create and turn over a centralized registry of Jewish students, faculty, and staff – a profoundly invasive and dangerous demand that intrudes deeply into the freedoms of association, religion, speech, and privacy enshrined in the First Amendment,” the groups argued.

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A federal judge late Sunday ordered the Trump administration to restore nearly $12 million in grants to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), after the organization’s funding was abruptly cut last month. 

Judgeof  the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted a preliminary injunction that will restore the grants and block the cuts from taking effect while the case proceeds.

Howell concluded that the Department of Health and Human Services had a likely “retaliatory motive” for the terminations, due to the AAP’s outspoken opposition to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

“This is not a case about whether AAP or HHS is right or even has the better position on vaccinations and gender-affirming care for children, or any other public health policy,” Howell wrote. “This is a case about whether the federal government has exercised power in a manner designed to chill public health policy debate by retaliating against a leading and generally trusted pediatrician member professional organization focused on improving the health of children.”

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Ukraine was a priority, not the priority, as Germany’s foreign minister Johann Wadephul touched down in Washington early this week.

Russia’s war is entering a more fragile phase, European anxiety is rising, and Berlin wanted to hear directly how firmly the US still sees itself anchored to Kyiv’s defense.

The visit came just days after German Chancellor Friedrich Merz urged Europe to “raise the price of the war in Ukraine” to force Russia into accepting a ceasefire – a signal that patience in Berlin is wearing thin.

Wadephul’s meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio opened with Ukraine, according to officials familiar with the talks, reflecting Germany’s concern that the conflict might slip amid a crowded global agenda.

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The Department of Homeland Security blocked federal lawmakers from visiting an immigration detention facility in Minneapolis this weekend under a new visitation policy from the head of the department.

Under federal law, members of Congress have the right to make unannounced visits to Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities. A D.C. federal court ruling affirmed this last month, saying it applies to facilities that are funded by regular congressional appropriations.

But in a Jan. 8 memo from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem obtained by NPR, Noem instructs her staff that visits should be requested at least seven days in advance. She said the detention facilities are run with money from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a different bucket of federal funds, and therefore the policy on unannounced visits doesn't apply to them.

The new policy seemed to have been cited on Saturday to block the visit of three Minnesota congresswomen to an ICE detention facility in Minneapolis.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a reconciliation measure that Congress passed last summer with only Republican support, allocated some $45 billion for immigration detention centers as many were operating over their capacity. It also provided about $30 billion to hire more ICE personnel, for transportation costs, and to maintain ICE facilities, among other spending.

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At least four tankers, most of them loaded, that had departed from Venezuela in early January in "dark mode" — or with their transponders off amid a strict U.S. blockade — are now back in the South American country’s waters, according to state company PDVSA and monitoring service TankerTrackers.com.

A flotilla of about a dozen loaded vessels and at least three other empty ships left Venezuelan waters last month in apparent defiance of an embargo imposed by President Donald Trump since mid-December, which has dragged down the country’s oil exports to minimum.

One of the ships, the Panama-flagged supertanker M Sophia, was intercepted and seized by the U.S. this week when returning to the country; while another, the Aframax tanker Olina with a flag from Sao Tome And Principe, was intercepted but released to Venezuela on Friday, state company PDVSA said.

Three more of the vessels that had departed in that flotilla, Panama-flagged Merope, Cook Islands-flagged Min Hang and Panama-flagged Thalia III, were spotted by Tankertrackers.com in Venezuelan waters late on Friday through satellite images.

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Eleven-year-old Hamsa Housou lay dead on a cold metal table at the morgue in Al-Shifa hospital. Blood covered her face and the upper part of her striped pajamas as one of her relatives gently wiped her mouth and cheek with a damp cloth, crying as he did so. She had been asleep in her bed early Thursday morning when she was fatally struck by Israeli gunfire. Her family’s home in Jabaliya, west of the so-called yellow line, is in an area designated as safe.

“We were sleeping, and suddenly, around 5 a.m., there were bangs—loud bangs and shells,” Hamsa’s uncle, Aouni Housou, said, standing over her small body. “I live upstairs, and there was screaming. We ran downstairs and they said the girl had been injured. We went to see her and she was covered in blood.” It took half an hour for an ambulance to arrive. When they finally reached the hospital, Hamsa had died.

The eleven-year-old was just one of as many as 14 Palestinians, including five children, killed in Israeli attacks across the Gaza Strip over the past 24 hours, according to an Al Jazeera toll. Since the so-called ceasefire went into effect on October 10, Israel has killed Palestinians in Gaza on an almost daily basis. The missile strikes, shootings, and shelling occur in areas both east of the yellow line, which Israeli troops are occupying as part of the initial agreement, and west of it, where the majority of Palestinians are crammed into less than half of Gaza’s territory. At least 425 Palestinians have been killed and over 1,200 wounded over the past three months of the “ceasefire”—a rate of nearly five Palestinians killed every day.

“Every night there is bombing, shooting, fire belts, robots. Every night. Shrapnel hits our home. What ceasefire? This ceasefire is just theater in front of the world. What caused them to kill her?” Housou said, pointing at his dead niece, unable to hold back the tears.

While much of the world’s attention has turned away from Gaza since the “ceasefire” took hold, the genocide has continued, with daily Israeli military attacks and heavy restrictions on life essentials, including medical supplies, food, building materials, and other items.

Over the course of a single day—overnight on Wednesday into Thursday evening—the Israeli military targeted residential homes, schools sheltering displaced Palestinians, and tent encampments. In Mawasi Khan Younis, an area close to the sea, two separate airstrikes killed four Palestinians in their tents on the beach, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa.

Another Palestinian was killed when Israeli forces bombed a tent sheltering displaced people in the Al-Attar area of Khan Younis. In the Jabaliya refugee camp, two Palestinians were killed when Israeli forces struck the Abu Hussein School, which was sheltering several displaced families. In the Al-Tuffah neighborhood northeast of Gaza City, an Israeli airstrike slammed into a residential building, killing two and wounding five.

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