TV News LIES

President Volodymyr Zelensky made a rare reference to Ukraine’s casualty figures on Wednesday – revealing that 55,000 Ukrainian troops are officially listed as killed in action.

“In Ukraine, officially, on the battlefield, the number of soldiers killed is 55,000, including both professional soldiers and people who were mobilized,” he said in a pre-recorded interview with France 2, as per Le Monde.

A “great number of people” are also considered missing in action, Zelensky added.

This is the first time Zelensky has commented on Ukraine’s military death toll since February 2025, when he put the figure at 46,000.

On Jan. 27, the US Center for Strategic & International Studies think tank estimated that the total number of military deaths – including all the Ukrainian and Russian soldiers dead, injured, and missing – is approaching two million.

More...

Israeli strikes in Gaza killed at least 19 Palestinians, most of them women and children, by midday Wednesday, according to hospital officials. Israel pledged to continue strikes, saying that it was responding to a militant attack on Israeli soldiers that seriously wounded one.

Among the Palestinians killed were five children, including a 5-month-old and a baby just 10 days old; seven women; and a paramedic, said hospital officials. They are the latest Palestinians in Gaza to die since a ceasefire deal, which has been punctuated by deadly Israeli strikes, came into effect on Oct. 10, 2025. More than 530 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli in that time, according to Gaza's health ministry.

The escalating Palestinian death toll has rocked the U.S.-backed truce and caused Palestinians in the strip to say it does not feel like the war has ended.

"The genocidal war against our people in the Gaza Strip continues," said Dr. Mohamed Abu Selmiya, director of Gaza City's Shifa Hospital, in a Facebook post. "Where is the ceasefire? Where are the mediators?"

More...

Florida legislators are pushing to pass legislation that would ban the use of the term “West Bank” in K-12 public schools and state agencies, including public colleges and universities, and mandate use of the term “Judea and Samaria”.

The West Bank is the internationally recognized term for the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory west of the Jordan River that was seized from Jordan by Israel in 1967. The rightwing Israeli government refers to the area as “Judea and Samaria” in reference to the biblical kingdoms of ancient Israel as part of broader efforts to bolster historical and religious claims to the land. The international community, on the other hand, broadly recognizes the West Bank as occupied land that must be part of a future Palestinian state.

Florida bill seeks to ban use of ‘West Bank’ in schools and state agencies

The bill would mandate use of the biblical term ‘Judea and Samaria’ after a similar effort passed in Arkansas.

Florida legislators are pushing to pass legislation that would ban the use of the term “West Bank” in K-12 public schools and state agencies, including public colleges and universities, and mandate use of the term “Judea and Samaria”.

The West Bank is the internationally recognized term for the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory west of the Jordan River that was seized from Jordan by Israel in 1967. The rightwing Israeli government refers to the area as “Judea and Samaria” in reference to the biblical kingdoms of ancient Israel as part of broader efforts to bolster historical and religious claims to the land. The international community, on the other hand, broadly recognizes the West Bank as occupied land that must be part of a future Palestinian state.

The term “Judea and Samaria” has been embraced by many US Republicans since the first Trump administration, including the former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who Donald Trump appointed as ambassador to Israel last year. Arkansas became the first US state to mandate replacing references to the “West Bank” in state institutions with “Judea and Samaria” in April last year. Similar bills have been proposed in the US Congress but have not come up for vote.

More...

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) warned Tuesday that 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos’s detention could be far from an isolated case.

“Here’s the thing, we don’t know how many others are in the same situation that didn’t get a photo that went viral,” Walz said during a Tuesday press conference as he denounced the ways ICE had targeted schools and students.

In a letter he sent this week, Walz also pressed Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to reveal the number of children who’ve been detained in Minnesota.

“Incredibly, his case is only one of many. Each day brings new reports of children detained by ICE,” Walz wrote.

Walz’s statements underscore how the detention of children has skyrocketed under the Trump administration, and also point to how limited the oversight is of the treatment of kids in federal detention.

According to an analysis by The Marshall Project, ICE held roughly 170 children on an average day during President Donald Trump’s second term, a major uptick compared to the last year of former President Joe Biden’s administration. In the last 16 months of the Biden administration, ICE held about 25 children per day.

More....

The Washington Post’s international desks and reporters who covered Silicon Valley — including the one assigned to Jeff Bezos’ sprawling e-commerce empire — were among the hardest hit when the capital’s most storied newspaper announced sweeping layoffs on Wednesday.

The bloodbath left the Post’s newsroom questioning the paper’s future, with one anonymous laid-off reporter telling HuffPost: “Are we a global news organization or do we just want to be Politico now?”

Matt Murray, the Post’s executive editor, said in an all-staff Zoom call that the publication would undergo “a broad strategic reset” leading to “a significant staff reduction.”

In practice, this means big hits to local coverage, closing the sports section “in its current form,” eliminating the books section, shrinking the international team, restructuring the metro section, flattening the photography team and suspending its “Post Reports” podcast ― effectively gutting a legendary newsroom famed for breaking the Watergate scandal as it looks to respond to shifts in news consumption.

More...

President Donald Trump said Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, should be worried about a U.S. military building up in the region, and hinted at a new round of strikes if Tehran attempts to restart its nuclear program.

"I would say he should be very worried," Trump said of Khamenei during an NBC News interview. "Yeah, he should be."

Trump has been trading bellicose barbs with Khamenei for weeks and had threatened military action in response to a violent crackdown on protesters, in which the Iranian government is accused of killing thousands. He has also said the country needs "new leadership" and repeatedly talked up an "armada" of warships he's deployed to the region.

The U.S. president previously credited himself with preventing mass executions in Iran, and said in the NBC interview that he'd had protesters' backs. He invoked U.S. strikes last summer on Iran's nuclear facilities and said he'd been told Iran is trying to restart its nuclear program.

"We said, 'You do that, we're going to do very bad things to you,'" Trump added.

Khamenei has hit back, accusing the U.S. of trying to "seize control" of the country. He said on Feb. 1 that any country that initiates war with Iran will "face a decisive blow" and warned that a conflict with America would become a regional war.

Special envoy Steve Witkoff is expected to meet with Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, this week for direct talks that could lay the groundwork an agreement between the two nations. Trump told reporters this week that he'd like to strike a deal with Tehran. "And if we can't, probably bad things would happen," he said on Feb. 2.

The U.S. president previously credited himself with preventing mass executions in Iran, and said in the NBC interview that he'd had protesters' backs. He invoked U.S. strikes last summer on Iran's nuclear facilities and said he'd been told Iran is trying to restart its nuclear program.

"We said, 'You do that, we're going to do very bad things to you,'" Trump added.

More...

The Supreme Court on Wednesday cleared the way for California to use its new congressional map that adds up to five Democratic-leaning seats for the midterms, rejecting Republicans’ emergency bid to block it. 

Supported by the Trump administration, the California GOP has challenged the map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. They point to the mapmaker’s comments boasting about strengthened Latino voting power under the new design.

In a one-sentence order without any noted dissents, the Supreme Court declined the emergency application to halt the design for the midterms. It is not a final ruling, and the case could return to the justices and impact future election cycles.

The decision was not entirely surprising, given the court signaled in a separate ruling related to the use of Texas’s new GOP-favored House map ahead of 2026 that both Texas and California had drawn their new set of congressional lines for partisan gainCalifornia Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) called for the map after Texas Republicans began a mid-decade redistricting war by passing a new map that nets up to five GOP-leaning seats.

More...

The Israel-Palestine director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), Omar Shakir, resigned effective on Monday after over almost a decade at the organization in protest of a top-level decision to shelve a report that characterized Israel’s decades-long campaign to deny Palestinians the right of return to their homes and land a “crime against humanity.”

The 43-page report formally underwent every step in Human Rights Watch’s internal review process, including evaluations by the divisions covering refugees, international justice, women and children’s rights, and the legal team over seven months. After that process was completed, incoming Executive Director Philippe Bolopion halted the report roughly two weeks before its scheduled publication on December 4. Shakir was informed of the decision by a phone call.

The report, which cites interviews with 53 Palestinian refugees and included fieldwork in refugee camps across Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, connected the expulsions of 1948 all the way to the present moment with the emptying of the camps in Gaza and the West Bank over the past two years. Shakir hoped that the report would open “a path to justice for Palestinian refugees.”

Bolopion’s decision came after a senior official at HRW raised concerns about the publication of the report. Shakir said in his resignation email that one senior leader told him it would be perceived as a call to “demographically extinguish the Jewishness of the Israeli state.”

More,,,