TV News LIES

The Illinois Supreme Court has overturned actor Jussie Smollett's conviction for staging a fake hate crime against himself.

In a decision issued Thursday, the court said the "Empire" actor, 42, should not have been charged for the same incident a second time after the original charges brought against him were dropped in 2019. Smollett was alleged to have falsely reported to police that he was the victim of a hate crime. He was found guilty in 2021 on five counts of disorderly conduct.

"Because the initial charges were dismissed as part of an agreement" with Smollett and he "performed his part of the agreement, the second prosecution was barred," the ruling said.

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The warrants said there was reason to believe Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant have used “starvation as a method of warfare” by restricting humanitarian aid and have intentionally targeted civilians in Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza — charges Israeli officials deny.

The action by the International Criminal Court came as the death toll from Israel’s campaign in Gaza passed 44,000 people, according to local health authorities, who say more than half of those killed were women and children. Their count does not differentiate between civilians and combatants.

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"It is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition," Gaetz wrote on Thursday in a post on X, formerly Twitter. "There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I'll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General."

Republicans will control the U.S. Senate 53-47 next year, but it became clear there were not enough Republicans willing to support the controversial nominee.

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JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

Last week British surgeon Nizam Mamode testified in front of a committee in the U.K. Parliament.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

NIZAM MAMODE: What I think I found particularly disturbing...

SUMMERS: Dr. Mamode had recently returned from working at a hospital in Central Gaza, and he told parliamentary members what he witnessed, including...

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MAMODE: A bomb would drop, maybe on a crowded, tented area. And then the drones would come down, and...

SUMMERS: A new kind of drone in the Israeli arsenal, one with a gun and a camera attached that can shoot remotely.

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• Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said Ukraine can take back Crimea only through diplomatic means. “We cannot spend dozens of, thousands of our people so that they perish for the sake of Crimea coming back … we understand that Crimea can be brought back diplomatically,” the Ukrainian president told Fox News. Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014. “I was already mentioning that we are ready to bring Crimea back diplomatically,” Zelenskyy said.

• Asked on Fox whether Ukraine might give up territory for peace, Zelenskyy said: “We cannot legally acknowledge any occupied territory of Ukraine as Russian. That is about those territories … occupied by Putin before the full-scale invasion, since 2014. Legally, we are not acknowledging that, we are not adopting that.”

• Russia staged “a massive information-psychological attack” against Ukraine by spreading a fake warning, purportedly from Ukrainian military intelligence, about an imminent mass air attack, Kyiv’s Main Directorate of Intelligence said on Wednesday. “This message is a fake, it contains grammatical errors typical of Russian information and psychological operations.

A set of powerful storms that could rank among the strongest in decades will slam British Columbia, thepacific north-west, and northern California this week, with torrents of rain, inches of snow in high altitudes and damaging winds. The region is bracing for widespread power outages and flash flooding, with extreme rainfall that could linger until the weekend.

After a relatively mild autumn, these rains are part of a familiar pattern caused by atmospheric rivers – strong storm systems that can bring both relief and ruin.

This week’s weather event is predicted to be the strongest atmospheric river the regions have seen this season. Heavy rainfall started Tuesday evening with the worst of the event unfolding throughout the rest of the week, causing “life threatening” conditions, according to the weather prediction center for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (Noaa).

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Heading into a second term, New Yorker editor David Remnick says Donald Trump's anger "has been never so intense as it's been against the press." The president-elect has referred to the news media as the "Enemy of the American people," has threatened retribution against outlets that have covered him negatively and has suggested that that NBC, CBS and ABC should have their licenses revoked.

Marty Baron, the former executive editor of the Washington Post, says he expects the incoming administration "to go after the press in every conceivable way ... [using] every tool in the toolbox — and there are a lot of tools."

"I think [Trump's] salivating for the opportunity to prosecute and imprison journalists for leaks of national security information — or what they would call national security information," Baron says. "I would expect that he would deny funding to public radio ... and TV. And that he will seek to exercise control over the Voice of America and its parent company, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, as he did in his previous administration, trying to turn it into a propaganda outlet."

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