TV News LIES

President Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday called for a complete end to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – not just a pause in the fighting that has raged since February 2022 – ahead of US-Russia talks in Moscow centering on a peace plan aimed at ending Europe’s deadliest war since World War II.

Zelensk is seeking support from European allies, who fear the US plan – which is rumored to have been drafted in Mosclw – reads like a wishlist for Putin.

“Our common task is to end the war, not just to achieve a pause in hostilities. A dignified peace is needed. For this to truly happen, everyone must be on the side of peace,” he said at a joint press conference with Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin during his official visit to Ireland.

Earlier on Tuesday, following his arrival in Ireland, Zelensky received a detailed briefing on recent US-Ukraine negotiations in Miami, Florida, where Ukraine’s negotiators reported “significant progress” in revising the initial plan, but noted that challenging issues remain.

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Israeli attacks in Gaza have killed more than 70,000 people in over two years of war, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, as the death toll continues to climb despite the ongoing ceasefire.

Israel’s offensive in Gaza has killed at least 70,100 people since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which equates to more than 3% of the 2.3 million people living in the enclave. A further 170,983 people have been wounded.

The World Health Organization has said that the numbers given by health officials in Gaza are reputable.

A ceasefire between Israel and Hamas remains in effect but has been tested by repeated outbreaks of violence, as Gaza’s residents face hunger, flooding and the onset of a bitter winter.

Israeli fire killed two Palestinian children in the southern Gaza Strip on Saturday. The two brothers, ages 11 and 8, died when an Israeli drone struck close to a school sheltering displaced people in the town of Beni Suhaila, according to staff at Nasser Hospital, which received the bodies.

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has asked Israel's president to grant him a pardon during his long-running corruption trial that's bitterly divided the country.

In a statement Sunday the prime minister's office said that Netanyahu had submitted a request for a pardon to the legal department of the Office of the President. The president's office called it an "extraordinary request," carrying with it "significant implications."

Netanyahu is the only sitting prime minister in Israeli history to stand trial, after being charged with fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes in three separate cases accusing him of exchanging favors with wealthy political supporters. He has not yet been convicted of anything.

The request comes weeks after U.S. President Donald Trump urged Israel to pardon Netanyahu.

In a videotaped statement, Netanyahu said the trial has divided the country and that a pardon would help restore national unity. He also said the requirement that he appear in court three times a week is a distraction that makes it difficult for him to lead the country.

Netanyahu's request consisted of two documents — a detailed letter signed by his lawyer and a letter signed by Netanyahu. They'll be sent to the justice ministry for opinions and will then be transferred to the Legal Advisor in the Office of the President, which will formulate additional opinions for the president.

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For more than four centuries, people believed it had vanished.

But after being discovered in a Paris townhouse, a painting from the 17th century Baroque master Peter Paul Rubens sold Sunday at the Osenat auction house in Versailles for 2.3 million euros ($2.7 million).

The painting, titled Christ on the Cross, was completed in 1613 but soon vanished from public view. For centuries, its existence was known only through engravings, printed reproductions made by other artists. Its whereabouts remained a mystery until the auctioneer Jean-Pierre Osenat uncovered it in September 2024 during a routine inspection of a Paris home he was preparing to sell.

"It is a masterpiece," Osenat told the French wire agency AFP shortly after making the discovery, adding the artwork was in "very good condition."

Still, Osenat had doubts that what he stumbled upon was so uniquely valuable. It was initially believed the piece was produced from one of the many Rubens workshops. The painter had set up a large studio where he collaborated on pieces with a team of assistants.

Yet Osenat says he had a hunch that maybe this piece was not like all other pieces.

"I did everything I could to try and have it authenticated," Osenat told the Associated Press.

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Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff told a senior Kremlin official last month that achieving peace in Ukraine would require Russia gaining control of Donetsk and potentially a separate territorial exchange, according to a recording of their conversation obtained by Bloomberg.

In the 14 October phone call with Yuri Ushakov, the top foreign policy aide to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, Witkoff said he believed the land concessions were necessary all while advising Ushakov to congratulate Trump and frame discussions more optimistically.

“Now, me to you, I know what it’s going to take to get a peace deal done: Donetsk and maybe a land swap somewhere,” Witkoff told Ushakov during the five-minute conversation, according to Bloomberg’s transcript. “But I’m saying instead of talking like that, let’s talk more hopefully because I think we’re going to get to a deal here.”

The recording offers direct insight into Witkoff’s negotiating approach and appears to reveal the origins of the controversial 28-point peace proposal that emerged earlier in November.

TVNL Comment:  Guess who authored this deal way back when.

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In March 2006, the Harvard Kennedy School published a working paper, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” by influential political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. The paper, which ran in the London Review of Books and became the basis for a book published the following year, was an unflinching analysis of the impact of pro-Israel advocacy and lobbying groups on the U.S. political system, and the role of organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in shaping U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East.

Mearsheimer and Walt described a loose coalition of philanthropists, think tanks, advocacy groups, and Christian Zionist organizations that routinely pulled U.S. policy toward the Middle East away from America’s national interest, as the U.S. was being drawn into a military quagmire in Iraq. “Other special interest groups have managed to skew U.S. foreign policy in directions they favored,” Walt and Mearsheimer wrote, “but no lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical.”

Even before the Kennedy School posted the paper online, the project had already spooked editors at The Atlantic, who originally commissioned the essay in the early 2000s. In an interview with Tucker Carlson earlier this year, Mearsheimer revealed that the editor of The Atlantic offered them a “$10,000 kill fee” if the publication didn’t print the article. Mearsheimer said, “That’s the fastest $10,000 we ever made.”

The paper was written by two highly esteemed scholars of international relations; Walt had been serving since 2002 as Academic Dean at Harvard’s Kennedy School, as prestigious an appointment as exists in the field, and Mearsheimer taught at the University of Chicago. But the backlash against it was swift, intense, and unusually public in the world of academia. A wave of news articles described the authors as antisemites, while the Anti-Defamation League weighed in to denounce what they called an “anti-Jewish screed.” The pressure became so intense that the Kennedy School removed its logo from the paper and added a disclaimer distancing the institution from its arguments.

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