TV News LIES

The Israeli military has carried out air raids in the suburbs of Beirut for the fourth consecutive day as Lebanese officials studied a US plan for a ceasefire.

Israeli air strikes flattened five buildings in the Lebanese capital’s southern suburbs on Friday. One of them was located near one of Beirut’s busiest traffic junctions, Tayouneh.

The Israeli military said its fighter jets attacked munitions warehouses, a headquarters and other infrastructure used by the Lebanese group Hezbollah.

Reporting from Beirut, Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr said the Israeli military had issued two forced evacuation orders before the attacks.

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Russian troops disguised themselves as Ukrainian soldiers as they launched new attacks in the outskirts of the northeastern city of Kupiansk, Kyiv said while confirming a frontline breach.

The Russians attacked in four waves and used troops disguised as Ukrainian soldiers but were repelled from the city, Ukraine’s General Staff said.

“They partially entered the suburbs, the industrial zone, and were destroyed by our troops,” the city’s military administration chief Andriy Besedin said. “There were assault actions using heavy armoured vehicles, there were attempts to bring in infantry.”

Kupiansk was captured by Russian forces in the early days after the February 2022 invasion but liberated by Ukraine in a counteroffensive a few months later. The Russians are now making a renewed bid to recapture the region.

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Three daughters of Malcolm X have accused the CIA, FBI, the New York Police Department and others in a $100 million lawsuit Friday of playing roles in the 1965 assassination of the civil rights leader.

In the lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court, the daughters — along with the Malcolm X estate — claimed that the agencies were aware of and were involved in the assassination plot and failed to stop the killing.

At a morning news conference, attorney Ben Crump stood with family members as he described the lawsuit, saying he hoped federal and city officials would read it "and learn all the dastardly deeds that were done by their predecessors and try to right these historic wrongs."

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President-elect Donald Trump has selected longtime aide and media personality Karoline Leavitt to be his White House press secretary and carry the message of his administration publicly as he returns to the Oval Office.

Leavitt has become a prominent face on the Trump team, serving as national press secretary for the campaign and now for the transition team. She is also an alum of the president-elect's first White House administration, where she worked as an assistant press secretary.

"Karoline is smart, tough, and has proven to be a highly effective communicator," Trump said in a statement. "I have the utmost confidence she will excel at the podium, and help deliver our message to the American people."

At 27 years old, Leavitt will be the youngest person to hold the position of top White House spokesperson. The position hasn't been held by someone under 30 since former President Richard Nixon's administration in 1969.

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Extremism experts are sounding the alarm about Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, whose writings and online presence reveal someone immersed in a culture of rightwing Christianity, political extremism and violent ideation.

The Fox & Friends host, who has served in the US army but has no experience in government, drew shock from Pentagon officials when Trump nominated him. Hegseth’s books on American culture and the military, his commentary on Fox and his frequent posts on social media showcase his far-right ideology. On these platforms, Hegseth telegraphs paranoia and anger toward “leftists”, an ultra-masculine Maga persona and apparent revulsion toward service members who do not fit his vision – including women.

“The thing that really worries me, is both the ideology of Christian nationalism and what that’s going to mean for the kind of policies he tries to put in place for the defense department,” said Thomas Lecaque, a historian focusing on religion and political violence.

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Hell is other people. Or, more specifically, other people on social media. Hell is millions of people who would avoid each other like the plague if they met in real life, but who are shoved into each other’s faces and essentially egged on to punch each other online; it’s people endlessly winding each other up out of boredom or frustration or desperation to be part of some gang, which ends in viral bullying, death threats, children ripping other children to shreds on platforms they are legally not old enough to join.

Hell is a social circle so vast and remote that human brains just aren’t wired to cope with it: it’s sociability without accountability, and it was making us miserably stressed long before Elon Musk bought X and drove it at a wall. But even then, people stayed for the reasons people do stay in toxic relationships – inertia, fear of being lonely, misplaced hope it may get better – and because it seemed intrinsic to many working lives.

You had to be on X because everyone else was, a circular logic that this week finally snapped: a stampede away from X has seen rival Bluesky add 1 million users since the US election, with several prominent Labour MPs joining the charge. What’s the point, the chair of the women and equalities committee, Sarah Owen, asked, in being on a site that’s “gone from cat memes, to sharing Wordle scores, to calling people whores just for having a different political opinion”?

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The FBI confirmed it is “aware” of bomb threats that targeted election offices in several Oregon counties. Local clerks in Deschutes, Crook, and Jefferson reported receiving threatening emails last week, just days after election day.

The FBI said that none of the threats were deemed credible.

“Election integrity is among the FBI’s highest priorities,” the FBI said in a statement. “We will continue to work closely with our state and local law enforcement partners to respond to any threats to election officials and to protect our communities.”

The Deschutes county clerk, Steve Dennison, told Central Oregon Daily News: “We’ve referred these threats to our partners in law enforcement as well as the secretary of state’s office.”

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The Palm Springs city council on Thursday unanimously approved a $5.9m reparations settlement with former residents of a largely Black neighborhood that was leveled in the 1960s for commercial development.

The city council was also set to approve another $21m for housing and small business support aimed at the former residents and their descendants.

Former residents of the Section 14 neighborhood, which also included Latino families and other immigrants, have fought for decades to receive compensation for being pushed out of their neighborhood in the California resort town located about 70 miles (113km) east of Los Angeles.

Palm Springs’ mayor, Jeffrey Bernstein, before casting his vote to approve the settlement, said he knew it was a mostly symbolic measure.

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