TV News LIES

The pounding of the besieged southern port city of Mariupol intensified Sunday and a top U.S. official expressed concern about the prospect of Russian-organized "concentration and prisoner camps" as Russia's bloody assault on Ukraine waded deeper into its fourth week.

The Mariupol city council accused the Russian military of bombing an art school where about 400 people had taken shelter. There was no immediate word on casualties at the art school, but the city council said on social media the building was destroyed and people could remain under the rubble.

A few days earlier, Russian forces bombed a theater in Mariupol where civilians took shelter. Mariupol, a strategic port on the Azov Sea, has been encircled by Russian troops for weeks, cut off from energy, food and water supplies and facing a relentless bombardment.

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• Russian forces bombarded Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, again on Saturday night, after a day of pitched fights around the city. Most of the more than 150,000 Russian troops who had massed around Ukraine are now fighting in the country, U.S. officials said.

• The Biden administration and key European allies announced on Saturday that they would remove certain Russian banks from the SWIFT financial messaging system, essentially barring them from international transactions.

• President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine tried to rally international support and said in a video that his country’s fighters had “withstood and successfully repelled enemy attacks.”

• Russian forces have killed at least 198 people, including three children, and 1,115 people, including 33 children, have been wounded, according to the Ukrainian National Guard, and a U.N. official said more than 150,000 Ukrainian refugees had fled.

A French fashion agent linked to Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his prison cell on Friday night, the Paris prosecutor’s office said.

Jean-Luc Brunel, 76, was in detention awaiting a trial on charges of rape of a minor and sexual harassment.

He was suspected of being involved in a global paedophile ring organised by the late disgraced financier Epstein, who took his own life in prison while awaiting trial for sex crimes, in 2019.

US prosecutors accused Brunel of finding young girls for his longtime associate and financier.

The celebrated Kenyan conservationist and fossil hunter Richard Leakey, whose groundbreaking discoveries helped prove that humankind evolved in Africa, has died aged 77.

The president of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta, announced Leakey’s death with “deep sorrow”.

The famed palaeoanthropologist had remained energetic into his 70s, despite bouts of skin cancer and kidney and liver disease.

Posting on Twitter, the Leakey Foundation wrote of its “deep sadness” at his death, adding: “He was a visionary whose great contributions to human origins and wildlife conservation will never be forgotten.”

Leakey was born in Nairobi on 19 December 1944 – and it was perhaps inevitable that he would become a fossil hunter given his parents were Louis and Mary Leakey, perhaps the world’s most famous discoverers of ancestral hominids.

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With tensions between the United States and Russia already at a boiling point, the Kremlin’s extensive propaganda apparatus is throwing more gasoline at the fire.

Appearing on state TV show 60 Minutes on Wednesday, State Duma member and chairman of Russia’s nationalist Rodina party Aleksei Zhuravlyov openly advocated for the abduction and imprisonment of U.S Congressman Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) over comments he made about how to handle the ongoing Ukraine-Russia crisis.

After returning to the United States from his recent trip to Ukraine, Gallego urged the Biden administration to take additional steps to deter further Russian aggression toward its neighbor by sanctioning Russia and arming Ukraine. In his interview from Kyiv on Sunday, Gallego told CNN’s Fredricka Whitfield that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s appetite for another escalation in Ukraine may be tempered only by a harsh military response.

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