TV News LIES

Ukrainian forces repelled major Russian assaults in a single day in the Pokrovsk direction (Donetsk region), killing around 90 Russian soldiers.

In a Jan. 31 Telegram report, the Spartan National Guard brigade said it had jointly repelled a Russian assault alongside the “Ptakhy Madyara” unit and adjacent forces, as Moscow committed up to 90 assault troops to the attack.

“The enemy attempted an offensive in the Pokrovsk direction. Under the cover of fog, the enemy tried to advance using cars, motorcycles, and ATVs,” the report said.

Ukrainian units stopped the assault completely, destroying Russian manpower and equipment.

“Spartan, together with adjacent units, repelled the enemy assault - almost four platoons of Russians were destroyed in a single day,” the brigade said.

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For 200 days, Abu Ismail Hammad has been digging beneath his home in Gaza City, painstakingly collecting the remains of his wife and unborn child. He has been using a flour sifter to find their bone fragments hidden in the sand.

His entire family was killed just under two months into Israel’s genocidal assault, when an airstrike hit their home in the Sabra neighborhood on December 6, 2023. His five children—Ismail, Mohammed, Ghaith, Jana, and Joudi—aged between eight to 16 years old, were all killed, along with his wife, Naama Alaa Al-Din Hammad. Naama was nine months pregnant with their sixth child, a girl they were planning to name Haifa, after her martyred aunt. His brother, sister-in-law and all of their children were also killed.

Hammad had left the apartment to go upstairs to another floor just 15 minutes before the strike. He was badly injured in the attack. Hammad was the sole survivor.

Wounded and displaced, and with the war raging, it took him a year before he was able to return, at the end of 2024, to begin trying to recover their bodies. After a few weeks, he was forced to stop again as Israel’s assault in the area intensified again. In November, soon after the so-called ceasefire went into effect, Hammad returned once more to find them.

He showed Drop Site pictures of them all together, smiling before the war, their faces slightly distorted by his heavily cracked phone screen.

Hammad spent weeks clearing away tons of rubble and then began to dig. “I was able to recover my brother, his wife, and their children. When I reached the living room in my home, it became clear that it was completely burned. I realized that the fate of my children was unknown—that they were burned and their bones had melted away. I then went to the room where my wife had been and I found her bones,” Hammad told Drop Site News. “How did I know it was my wife? First, the location of the room. Second, the bones of the unborn child were found in the same place, because the pregnancy was complete.”

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Israel’s government is deepening a push by far-right ministers to expand its authority and settlements in the West Bank, giving it broad new powers in a territory that would make up the heart of any future Palestinian state.

Israel’s security cabinet on Sunday approved new measures that would ease land purchases by Israelis from Palestinians and grant Israel the authority to police water-related offenses, damage to archaeological sites and environmental hazards in so-called Areas A and B. The areas are now administered by the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo Accords, which aimed to achieve peace between Israelis and Palestinians through a two-state solution.

Under the new changes, sealed land registries will be published, making it easier for prospective buyers to find and approach owners. A law preventing the sale of West Bank land to outsiders that has been in place since Jordan controlled the territory will now be repealed.

The moves follow Israel’s approval last summer of thousands of housing units in a controversial settlement near East Jerusalem, and the rapid expansion of outposts and roads that have further divided Palestinian areas.

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As Democrats prepare to force a vote in the US House this week on Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canada, the president posted a lengthy diatribe on his social media platform in which he threatened to block a bridge connecting the US and Canada and made a bizarre false claim that increased trade between Canada and China would include a ban on Canadians playing ice hockey.

Trump began his latest screed against the US’s second-largest trading partner by claiming that “everyone knows, the Country of Canada has treated the United States very unfairly for decades”.

The president also threatened to block the scheduled opening of the $4.6bn Gordie Howe International Bridge, connecting Windsor, Ontario and Detroit, Michigan, built by a binational partnership that won approval during the Obama administration but began construction in 2018, when Trump was president.

“I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated for everything we have given them, and also, importantly, Canada treats the United States with the Fairness and Respect that we deserve,” Trump wrote on Monday.

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Europe has come to the painful realisation that it needs to be more assertive and more militarily independent from an authoritarian US administration that no longer shares a commitment to liberal democratic norms and values, a report prepared by the Munich Security Conference asserts.

The report sets the scene for an all-out ideological confrontation with the Trump White House at the high-level annual meeting of security policy specialists, which starts on Friday.

In a now infamous speech to last year’s MSC, the US vice-president, JD Vance, claimed European elites were suppressing free speech and “opening the floodgates” to mass migration. The address marked the moment Europe realised the Trump administration would no longer be a reliable trading and security partner.

Since then European leaders and Donald Trump’s team have waged a series of running battles over topics including the US push to force Ukraine to make territorial concessions to Russia, Trump’s threats to seize Greenland, and a series of protectionist US measures ranging from tariff barriers to inward investment bans.

The divide was starkly set out in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month by the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, who warned of a rupture between the US and its western allies.

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