TV News LIES

A suicide bomber struck outside the gates of a district court in Islamabad on Tuesday, detonating his explosives next to a police car and killing 12 people, Pakistan's interior minister said, the latest in an uptick in violence across the country.

Witnesses described scenes of mayhem in the immediate aftermath of the explosion, which also wounded 27 people. The blast was heard for miles away and came at a busy time of day when the area outside the court is typically crowded with hundreds of visitors attending court hearings.

A breakaway faction of the Pakistani Taliban, the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar group, claimed responsibility for the attack. But shortly after, Sarbakaf Mohmand, a commander from the group, sent WhatsApp messages insisting they had not made any such claim.

His group quit the Pakistani Taliban, or TTP, after the head of Jamaat-ul-Ahrar was killed in a blast in Afghanistan in 2022. Though some members recently rejoined TTP, others keep their distance, indicating continuing differences among the insurgents.

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UNICEF said on Tuesday essential items including syringes to vaccinate children and bottles for baby formula are being denied entry into Gaza by Israel, preventing aid agencies from reaching those in need in the war-devastated territory.

As UNICEF undertakes a mass children's vaccination campaign with a fragile ceasefire in place, it said it faces serious challenges getting 1.6 million syringes and solar-powered fridges to store vaccine vials into Gaza. The syringes have awaited customs clearance since August, UNICEF said.

"Both the syringes and the ... refrigerators are considered dual-use by Israel and these items we're finding very hard to get them through clearances and inspections, yet they are urgent," UNICEF spokesperson Ricardo Pires said.

"Dual-use" refers to items Israel deems to have possible military as well as civilian applications.

COGAT, the arm of the Israeli military that oversees aid flows into Gaza, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It has previously said it is not limiting the entry of food, water, medical supplies and shelter items. It has also accused Hamas of stealing humanitarian supplies, accusations the Palestinian militant group denies.

UNICEF launched the first of three rounds of catch-up immunisations on Sunday to reach over 40,000 children under three who missed routine vaccines against polio, measles and pneumonia, following two years of war in Gaza.

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Maryna Mytsiuk spends her free time at a shooting range outside Kyiv, hyper-focused on hitting her targets. She's got to practice. She's waiting for a call that, any day, will send her to war.

"Of course, I'd like to be in a combat position," said Mytsiuk, a 27-year-old folklore scholar who speaks Japanese and works at a nonprofit. "With my build and height, I'm not a natural fit for that … so I'm training very hard."

She is among a growing number of Ukrainian women joining the military as Russia's full-scale war on the country nears its fourth year, and troops remain in short supply. This comes as an end to the fighting appears no closer than it was when President Trump took office in January vowing to quickly broker peace.

Mytsiuk said the Ukrainian military has become much more receptive to women since the early days of the full-scale invasion, when Ukrainian men were lining up at recruitment centers to become soldiers.

She wanted to sign up, too, but was told she would be best off in the kitchen, she said, "where I could make dumplings."

Mytsiuk, however, plowed ahead. She enrolled at a military university for a second degree, graduating this summer. She looked into several brigades and applied to those with special forces units. She had difficult conversations with her mother and her boyfriend, a soldier. Both strongly oppose her decision.

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A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent briefly held at gunpoint a woman whom he claimed was following him, prompting a southern California police officer to intervene, authorities said.

The police department in Fullerton, a city in Orange county almost 30 miles (48km) from Los Angeles, said that on Sunday one of its officers had just finished taking an incarcerated person to a county jail when he saw two vehicles stopped in an intersection in Santa Ana.

The officer stopped when he saw a man exit one of the vehicles and point a firearm at the other driver, the agency said in a statement. He did not initially know the identity of the armed man, who was dressed in plain clothes and soon provided credentials showing he was an ICE agent.

Video of the incident surfaced online appearing to show the police officer “assisting” the ICE agent, and the department sought to clarify its role in a press release. In footage of the incident, a man in sunglasses and a green shirt can be seen standing in the middle of an intersection, pointing a gun at a driver when an officer pulls up.

“What are you doing?” the woman being held at gunpoint asked in the video. “Are you for real right now? And now these cops are helping them … I’m just driving.”

The agent said the woman had been following and filming him, the department said, and the officer informed him he could not assist if no crime had been committed. The woman soon left, followed by the officer, according to the statement.

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The US navy has announced that the USS Gerald R Ford, regarded as the world’s newest and largest aircraft carrier, has entered the area of responsibility of the US Southern Command, which covers Latin America and the Caribbean.

The deployment of the ship and the strike group it leads – which includes dozens of aircraft and destroyer ships – had been announced nearly three weeks ago, and its arrival marks an escalation in the military buildup between the US and Venezuela.

The regime of the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, meanwhile, announced what it called a “massive deployment” of land, sea, air, river and missile forces, as well as civilian militia, to counter the US naval presence off its coast.

The US carrier joins other warships, a nuclear-powered submarine and aircraft based in Puerto Rico, forming the largest US military presence in the region in decades – seen as the biggest since the invasion of Panama in 1989.

Donald Trump has sought to justify the massive military buildup as part of his “war on drugs”, targeting traffickers allegedly smuggling narcotics through Caribbean and Pacific waters. That campaign has included airstrikes on boats that have so far killed at least 76 people in South American waters since September.

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Ethics officials at Fannie Mae were removed from their jobs as they investigated whether a top Trump ally improperly accessed mortgage documents of Letitia James, the New York attorney general, and other Democratic officials, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.

William Pulte, a staunch Trump defender and the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), has accused James, Adam Schiff, a California senator, and Lisa Cook, a federal reserve governor, of mortgage fraud. All three have denied the accusations and James was indicted on specious federal charges last month.

Experts have raised questions about all three referrals and see them as a thinly veiled effort by Trump to target political rivals.

After Pulte made the referrals, former agency officials and experts told the Guardian they were highly unusual. Individualized mortgage data is highly sensitive and protected. And investigations into mortgage fraud are not typically handled by the FHFA inspector general, an agency watchdog staffed with investigative agents.

Ethics and internal investigation officials at Fannie Mae, the mortgage financing provider, had received internal complaints that senior officials at FHFA had ordered employees to access the mortgage documents of James and others, the Journal reported on Tuesday. They passed on their investigation to the inspector general’s office, who subsequently forwarded it to the US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia. Trump installed an ally, Lindsey Halligan, in that job last month.

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The United Kingdom has suspended some intelligence sharing with the United States, its close ally, over the U.S. military’s lethal strikes against alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean, since London thinks the attacks are illegal and does not want to be implicated, multiple outlets reported on Tuesday. 

The decision to halt intelligence sharing, which took place earlier this fall, highlights the range of skepticism regarding the Trump administration’s legal justification for the vessel strikes, which so far have killed at least 76 people.

The U.S. garners intelligence from a variety of sources, including the UK, which oversees some territories in the Caribbean and offers information that assists the U.S. in identifying boats suspected of smuggling narcotics in the region. 

The gathered intelligence is normally delivered to the Joint Interagency Task Force South (JIATFS), based in Key West, Fla., which works on monitoring and detecting suspected illegal trafficking targets and conducting counter-narcotic operations. 

More than a dozen countries, including close U.S. allies, have liaison officers based at JIATFS, which is led by Coast Guard Rear Adm. Jeff Randall.

The Hill has reached out to JIATFS for comment. 

A DOD official told The Hill on Tuesday that the Pentagon does not “discuss intelligence matters.”

A UK government spokesperson told The Hill that it is “our longstanding policy to not comment on intelligence matters.”

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Cleto Escobedo III, the bandleader for the "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" in-house band Cleto and the Cletones, has died. He was 59.

Kimmel shared the news about his childhood friend on social media on Tuesday, Nov. 11.

"Early this morning, we lost a great friend, father, son, musician and man, my longtime bandleader Cleto Escobedo III," Kimmel wrote. "To say that we are heartbroken is an understatement."

"Cleto and I have been inseparable since I was nine years old. The fact that we got to work together every day is a dream neither of us could ever have imagined would come true," he added. "Cherish your friends and please keep Cleto’s wife, children and parents in your prayers."

A cause of death was not immediately available.

Beginning in the late '70s, Kimmel and Escobedo grew up together as neighbors in Las Vegas. Escobedo went on to form the band Cleto and the Cletones, playing the saxophone mostly, with Toshi Yanagi, Jimmy Earl, Jonathan Dresel and Jeff Babko.

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