TV News LIES

A giant radio telescope in Crimea used in the past to support missions to Mars and Venus and attempt to contact alien civilizations has been destroyed in a drone attack.

Ukrainian defense forces took down the 230-foot (70 meters) antenna dish to prevent Russian forces from using it to guide attacks on its territory. The RT-70 radio telescope has been under Russian control since the annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014. According to Defense Express, Russians carried out major upgrades to the 5,000 metric ton structure to use it for military communications.

In late August, footage emerged captured by a drone slamming into the 50-year-old radio telescope. The drone, according to Defense Express, aimed at the 200-kilowatt radio receiver at the heart of the telescope. The custom-made receiver produced in 2011 in Moscow during the last major upgrade of the telescope will be hard to replace, Defense Express said, meaning Russia will not likely be able to repair the antenna any time soon.

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The families of four passengers who died in the Air India crash in June have sued the aerospace manufacturers Boeing and Honeywell, blaming negligence and a faulty fuel cutoff switch for the disaster that killed 260 people.

Air India flight 171 crashed shortly after takeoff from Ahmedabad en route to London on 12 June.

In a complaint filed on Tuesday in Delaware superior court, the plaintiffs said the locking mechanism for the switch on the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner could be turned off inadvertently, causing a loss of fuel supply and loss of thrust needed for takeoff.

They said Boeing and Honeywell, which respectively installed and manufactured the switch, knew about that risk, especially after the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) cautioned in 2018 about disengaged locking mechanisms on several Boeing aircraft.

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The time has come to ban the “revolving door” between the White House and the Federal Reserve, two academics argued last year. Doing so would be “critical to reducing the incentives for officials to act in the short-term political interests of the president”, they wrote.

Eight months ago, the two writers – Dan Katz and Stephen Miran – joined the Trump administration in senior roles. On Tuesday, Miran, the chair of the US council of economic advisers, walked into the Fed as a governor.

Strolling through the revolving door himself, Miran pledged during his confirmation hearing to preserve the Fed’s independence, but made clear he would not resign from the White House, just take unpaid leave.

Having expressed concern last year about the Fed’s vulnerability to the short-term political interests of the president, Miran was rushed into his new seat on the central bank’s board of governors hours before its latest meeting – as Donald Trump continued to push to have another voting member removed.

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Late-night show hosts including Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers and David Letterman have rallied behind Jimmy Kimmel following ABC’s decision to indefinitely suspend his popular late-night show after his comments about the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk.

In his opening monologue on Thursday night, Stephen Colbert mocked executives at Disney, ABC’s parent company, for caving to threats from Brendan Carr, the FCC chairman, when they pulled Kimmel off the air.

In an excerpt posted on Instagram before broadcast, Colbert also scolded Carr for calling Kimmel’s commentary on the rush to politicize Kirk’s murder an affront to community values. “Well, you know what my community values are, Buster?” Colbert asked. “Freedom of speech.”

“People across the country are shocked by this blatant assault on the freedom of speech,” Colbert added.

Colbert went on to poke fun at Disney executives, saying: “As one source at ABC put it, they were pissing themselves all day” over the threat of Trump’s administration’s retaliation against the network. “On the bright side, that proves Disney is No 1 in streaming,” he joked.

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Paul Nguyen faced up to eight years in prison for allegedly assaulting a Department of Homeland Security agent during President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of policing in Washington, D.C.

But like so many other felony assault cases recently brought by Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox News host turned U.S. attorney for D.C., the charge against Nguyen crumbled in less than a month.

A prosecutor from Pirro’s office told a magistrate judge on Tuesday The Maryland resident said he won’t forget the four nights he spent in D.C. Jail, all for a charge that would soon be dropped.the office no longer plans to pursue any charges “based on current evidence,” a strong indication that, after reviewing body cam footage and any witness statements, it doesn’t believe it has a case. Nguyen had been accused of injuring the DHS agent during an early-morning scuffle along one of the city’s nightlife strips.

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The Senate has confirmed 48 of President Donald Trump’s nominees at once, voting for the first time under new rules to begin clearing a backlog of executive branch positions that had been delayed by Democrats.

Frustrated by the stalling tactics, Senate Republicans moved last week to make it easier to confirm large groups of lower-level, non-judicial nominations. Democrats had forced multiple votes on almost every one of Trump’s picks, infuriating the president and tying up the Senate floor.

The new rules allow Senate Republicans to move multiple nominees with a simple majority vote — a process that would have previously been blocked with just one objection. The rules don’t apply to judicial nominations or high-level Cabinet posts.

“Republicans have fixed a broken process,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said ahead of the vote.

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More than a dozen elected officials were arrested Thursday while protesting conditions at a New York City immigration holding facility where a federal judge this week extended a court order requiring the government to shape up its treatment of detainees.

The officials — including the city’s fiscal watchdog and state lawmakers — were among 77 people detained during protests at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan. The government building, home to immigration court, the FBI‘s New York field office and other federal offices, has become a hotbed of arrests and detention amid President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.

Eleven officials were arrested inside the building while attempting to inspect holding rooms on the 10th floor that are the subject of ongoing litigation alleging squalid conditions and overcrowding, according to a coalition of politicians, advocates and faith leaders involved in the protest. They were given summonses and released. The building was later locked down because of a telephoned bomb threat, authorities said.

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The Trump administration has been handed a double defeat by judges in immigration cases, barring the executive branch from deporting a group of Guatemalan children and from slashing protections for many Venezuelans in the US.

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the administration to refrain from deporting Guatemalan unaccompanied immigrant children with active immigration cases while a legal challenge plays out.

Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee based in Washington DC, kept in place an earlier judicial block on the policy, sharply criticizing the administration’s unproven assertion that the children’s parents wanted them deported.

The administration attempted to deport 76 Guatemalan minors being held in US custody in a surprise move in the early morning on 31 August, sparking a lawsuit and emergency hearing that temporarily halted the move.

The Department of Justice lawyer Drew Ensign initially said that the children’s parents had requested they be returned home, but the department later withdrew that claim. Reuters published a Guatemalan government report saying that most parents of the roughly 600 Guatemalan children in US custody could not be contacted and of those who could, many did not want their children forced back to the country.

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