TV News LIES

he few Republicans who have not succumbed to the cult of Donald Trump cling to one last hope. They are crossing their fingers that on Tuesday night the ex-president’s march to his party’s nomination will be halted, or at least delayed, by a defeat in the New Hampshire primary at the hands of the former governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley. But it is a thin hope.

Even if Haley wins a famous victory in this snowbound state, the battles ahead are on terrain far more tricky for her and congenial to him. On Monday, Trump won his party’s contest in Iowa by a record-breaking margin, amassing more votes than all his rivals combined – and the primary electorates that come next look more like Iowa’s than New Hampshire’s, which, unusually, includes a big slice of Trump-sceptic independents.

 

“Honeymooners” actress Joyce Randolph, who played Ed Norton’s sarcastic wife Trixie, has died. She was 99.

Randolph died of natural causes Saturday night at her home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, her son Randolph Charles told The Associated Press Sunday.

She was the last surviving main character of the beloved comedy from television’s golden age of the 1950s.

“The Honeymooners” was an affectionate look at Brooklyn tenement life, based in part on star Jackie Gleason’s childhood. Gleason played the blustering bus driver Ralph Kramden. Audrey Meadows was his wisecracking, strong-willed wife Alice, and Art Carney the cheerful sewer worker Ed Norton. Alice and Trixie often found themselves commiserating over their husbands’ various follies and mishaps, whether unknowingly marketing dogfood as a popular snack or trying in vain to resist a rent hike, or freezing in the winter as their heat is shut off.

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Watching lawyers for South Africa and Israel debate whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza was like observing two versions of reality that barely intersect.

Each set of counsel, appearing before the international court of justice at The Hague, largely avoided the most powerful evidence contradicting their case, and the absence of a factual hearing or any questioning left it unclear how the judges will resolve the dispute. Yet I would wager that South Africa’s case was strong enough that the court will impose some provisional measures on Israel in the hope of mitigating the enormous civilian harm caused by Israel’s approach to fighting Hamas.

Genocide, as defined in a widely ratified treaty, has essentially two elements. First, an offender must commit certain acts against a targeted group such as “killing” or “deliberately inflicting … conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part”. Second, these acts must be committed with genocidal intent, meaning an “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”. Both parts of the crime were deeply contested by the lawyers in The Hague.

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A 4.1-magnitude earthquake shook central Oklahoma early Saturday morning following a slightly stronger earthquake the night before and amid a series of smaller quakes.

The earthquake occurred just after 5:30 a.m. local time about 19 miles north of Oklahoma City, near the Northeast Edmond Gas and Oil Field. The quake, which had a depth of about 4.1 miles, was part of a series of several earthquakes clustered together Friday and Saturday, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

On Saturday morning, the Oklahoma Geological Survey said in a statement that there have been reports of strong shaking in the immediate area and across Oklahoma City.

State seismologist Jake Walter told USA TODAY the area has recorded about 18 earthquakes in a 12-hour span. Connecting the dots, Walter added, the quakes follow a fault identified by researchers.

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U.S. prosecutors will seek the death penalty against the white supremacist who killed 10 Black people at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store in 2022, marking the first time the Biden administration has initiated capital punishment proceedings.

The U.S. Justice Department in a court filing on Friday said it would seek the death penalty for Payton Gendron for killings motivated by his "animus toward Black persons."

Gendron, who was 18 at the time of the mass shooting, has already pleaded guilty to separate state charges of murder and domestic terrorism and was sentenced last February to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Gendron's defense lawyers previously said he would consider pleading guilty to more than two dozen federal charges - including hate crime and firearm offenses - if the death penalty was taken off the table.

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US corporations and their supporters in Washington are pushing aggressively to roll back tax policies they once endorsed, in a move that could return hundreds of billions of dollars to some of America’s biggest companies.

As congressional negotiators attempt to keep the government funded past 19 January, an agreement is emerging that ties the corporate tax breaks to an increase in support for vulnerable American families – an effort to make the deal more palatable for Democrats.

Just six years ago the Business Roundtable, a lobbying group for CEOs of large US firms, described the Trump-era Tax Cuts and Jobs Act as “a remarkable, once-in-a-generation opportunity”. Now, the group is leading “a six-figure advocacy campaign” to roll back parts of it, according to Politico, and threatening that failing to secure new tax cuts will lead to “slower job creation, smaller wage increases and lower overall economic growth”.

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Infowars host Owen Shroyer was sentenced on Tuesday to two months behind bars for joining the mob’s riot at the U.S. Capitol, which prosecutors said he “helped create” by spewing violent rhetoric and spreading baseless claims of election fraud to hundreds of thousands of viewers.

Shroyer hosts a daily show called “The War Room With Owen Shroyer” for the website operated by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Prosecutors said Shroyer used his online platform — and later a megaphone outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — to amplify lies that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump, who was the Republican incumbent.

Shroyer didn’t enter the Capitol, but he led a march to the building and led rioters in chants near the top of the building’s steps. He’s among only a few people charged in the riot who neither went inside the building nor were accused of engaging in violence or destruction.

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