TV News LIES

There's electricity on Kyiv's left bank today, so a small elevator carries visitors up to Liliya Martynivna Lapina's 10th-floor apartment. The 88-year-old has been spending her days in her bed under a pile of blankets by a bright but cold window, trying to stay warm.

She sits bolt upright and seems to come alive as visitors enter her apartment, erupting in a stream of words and enthusiasm over the care package of pasta, sugar, tea and cooking oil that has been delivered. Lapina is wearing multiple layers of colorful wool sweaters and a headscarf.

NPR is accompanying the aid group Starenki, which delivers food and fellowship to the mostly older people stuck in their apartments this winter as they try to survive the frequent heat and power cuts brought on by Russia's assault on Ukraine's energy infrastructure.

As Russian President Vladimir Putin fails to make significant progress on the battlefield, he is trying to break the Ukrainian people's will by plunging them into the cold and dark in one of the coldest winters in years. The capital, Kyiv, has been particularly hard hit. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko urged those who could to leave the city. But many people, especially older adults, have nowhere else to go.

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As news reports circulated that Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, had been killed in US and Israeli airstrikes on Tehran, anti-war protesters gathered across the United States, including outside the White House and in New York’s Times Square to voice opposition to US military involvement in the region.

“It wasn’t sanctioned by Congress, so what Trump is doing is on his own terms, it’s making him a fascist and it’s making the country into a fascist state,” said Sue Johnson, a protester.

Trump, she added, “just couldn’t wait. He’s such an impatient child. He’s like, ‘Well ICE didn’t work, so let’s go stir things up in the Middle East. He bombed Iran for no specific reason.”

“No president can attack or kidnap or bomb another country without the permission of the Congress,” she said, but conceded that “it’s irrelevant what Congress thinks because this president goes and does whatever he wants to do to any country.”

That sense of fait accompli that accompanies recent Trump administration foreign policy actions, including the capture of Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan president, permeated the New York gathering of several hundred protesters.

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Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei has been killed, Iranian state media confirmed early on Sunday, in the opening salvo of a war aimed at regime change that was launched on Saturday by the US and Israel.

Khamenei had not been heard from since the strikes began, and satellite imagery showed that his secure compound was heavily damaged in the initial barrage on Saturday.

The confirmation came hours after Donald Trump announced the death of the ayatollah, who has ruled Iran as supreme leader since 1989, in a post on Truth Social.

“Khamenei, one of the most evil people in History, is dead,” Trump wrote. “He was unable to avoid our Intelligence and Highly Sophisticated Tracking Systems and, working closely with Israel, there was not a thing he, or the other leaders that have been killed along with him, could do.”

Trump said that the goal of the military campaign, which began on Saturday morning with a barrage of missiles and airstrikes, was regime change.

“This is the single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their Country,” he wrote.

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Iran struck the world-famous Fairmont hotel in Dubai, setting the hotel alight, as the war launched by the US and Israel on Iran quickly spread to the rest of the Middle East on Saturday.

Residents watched in shock as an Iranian missile hit the five-star hotel in Dubai’s luxurious Palm Jumeirah area. Social media videos showed fires breaking out near the entrance of the hotel, which led to four people being injured.

Later Dubai authorities said debris from an intercepted drone caused a fire at the city’s famous luxury hotel the Burj Al Arab.

“Civil Defence teams responded immediately and brought the incident under control. No injuries have been reported,” the Dubai media office wrote on its X account.

The media office also said that part of Dubai’s international airport “sustained minor damage in an incident,” without giving further details.

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Shajareh Tayyebeh is an all-girls' school located in the southern Iranian town of Minab. Minab is in Hormozgan Province, which is along the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic international shipping lane, according to the New York Times.

Hossein Kermanpour, a spokesman for Iran’s health ministry, shared an X post on Feb. 28, calling the majority of those killed at the school "young child martyrs."

“God knows how many more children will be pulled out of the rubble,” he wrote in the social media post. “May God give their families strength and patience.”

When the strike hit, Shajareh Tayyebeh, described as an elementary school, was holding its first of multiple rotating school shifts, according to Hengaw, a Norway-based organization focusing on human rights violations in Iran. The group added that around 170 students are enrolled in the school’s morning shift; however, it is unclear how many were in the building during the strike

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The United Stated launched military strikes and "major combat operations" against Iran on Feb. 28, President Donald Trump said, targeting the country's missile capabilities.

"Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime, a vicious group of very hard terrible people," Trump said.

"The lives of courage American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties, that often happens in war, but we're doing this not for now, we're doing this for the future, and it's a noble mission," the president said.

Israeli forces also struck Iranian sites overnight. Explosions were heard in Tehran on Saturday.

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Palantir Technologies has a permanent desk at the U.S.-led Civil Military Coordination Center (CMCC) headquarters in southern Israel, three sources from the diplomatic community inside the CMCC told Drop Site News. According to the sources, the artificial intelligence data analytics giant is providing the technological architecture for tracking the delivery and distribution of aid to Gaza.

The presence of Palantir and other corporations—along with recent changes banning non-profits unwilling to give data to Israeli authorities—is creating a situation in which the delivery of aid is taking a backseat to the pursuit of profit, investment, and the training of AI products, experts say.

The CMCC was established by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) in October, one week after the so-called ceasefire went into effect in Gaza to “monitor implementation of the ceasefire” and “help facilitate the flow of humanitarian, logistical, and security assistance from international counterparts into Gaza.” Last week, at the inaugural summit of the Board of Peace in Washington, D.C., Major General Jasper Jeffers—who was tapped in January to lead the International Stabilization Force in Gaza—announced that the CMCC will serve as the Board of Peace’s operational headquarters.

According to the sources, a representative from Palantir sits in the CMCC operations room where aid convoys and distributions inside Gaza are monitored through drone surveillance. The representative integrates convoy and distribution-related data into Palantir’s systems, the sources said.

“The United Nations already has a humanitarian architecture in place to step in during crises, abiding by humanitarian principles and grounded in international law,” UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territory Francesca Albanese told Drop Site. “This profit-driven parallel system involving companies like Palantir, already linked to Israel’s unlawful conduct, can only be regarded as a monstrosity.”

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A message blazoned on the wall of a ruined building in the Donetsk region quickly went viral on Ukrainian social media: “Mr. Trump! I am from Donbas – why should I surrender my home and my region to Russia? Donbas is Ukraine.”

In the photo, on the right, stands Vitaliy Ovcharenko, a sergeant in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, who painted this message on a destroyed building in the Donetsk combat zone.

By 2026, Russia’s offensive has slowed to a crawl, while its losses have mounted. The front in Donbas has barely shifted in six months, and the battles for the mining town of Pokrovsk – once home to 60,000 people, now a wasteland where Ukrainian and Russian forces fight over the remnants of apartment blocks – have dragged on for more than a year.

The pace of Russia’s offensive, in 2026, has slowed to a crawl, while losses have mounted. The front in Donbas has barely moved for half a year, and the battles for the mining town of Pokrovsk, once home to 60,000 people, now a wasteland where Ukrainian and Russian forces fight over the remnants of apartment blocks – have dragged on for more than a year.

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