TV News LIES

Two-thirds of Antarctica’s native species, including emperor penguins, are under threat of extinction or major population declines by 2100 under current trajectories of global heating, according to new research that outlines priorities for protecting the continent’s biodiversity.

The study, an international collaboration between scientists, conservationists and policymakers from 28 institutions in 12 countries, identified emperor penguins as the Antarctic species at greatest risk of extinction, followed by other seabirds and dry soil nematodes.

The w​inter storm that forecasters dubbed Elliott intensified into a bomb cyclone near the Great Lakes on Friday, bringing high winds and blizzard conditions from the Northern Plains to western and upstate New York, along with life-threatening flooding, flash-freezing and travel chaos as it went.

More than 4,600 flights were canceled as of 3pm, on top of 2,700 cancellations Thursday, grounding tens of thousands of holiday travelers in airports with limited expectations of making further progress, according to FlightAware.

US forecasters warned on Thursday of “potentially crippling impacts across central and eastern” parts of the country, producing widespread disruption to travel and utilities over the holiday season, as an arctic blast surged from west to east.

About 200 million people in the lower 48 states were under extreme weather alerts as a freezing air mass sent temperatures into a nosedive, said Bob Oravec, a forecaster with the National Weather Service (NWS) in College Park, Maryland.

An NWS advisory said the “powerful winter storm” would “produce widespread disruptive and potentially crippling impacts across the central and eastern United States”.

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China is now facing what is likely the world's largest COVID surge of the pandemic. China's public health officials say that possibly 800 million people could be infected with the coronavirus over the next few months. And several models predict that a half million people could die, possibly more.

"Recently, the deputy director of China CDC, Xiaofeng Liang, who' s a good friend of mine, was announcing through the public media that the first COVID wave may, in fact, infect around 60% of the population," says Xi Chen, who's a global health researcher at Yale University and an expert on China's health-care system.

That means about 10% of the planet's population may become infected over the course of the next 90 days.

Epidemiologist Ben Cowling agrees with this prediction. "This surge is going to come very fast, unfortunately. That's the worst thing," says Cowling, who's at the University of Hong Kong. "If it was slower, China would have time to prepare. But this is so fast. In Beijing, there's already a load of cases and [in] other major cities because it's spreading so fast.

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Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and former chief executive of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, has been charged with fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to defraud the US and violate campaign finance laws.

The eight criminal charges filed by the US attorney’s office for the southern district of New York on Tuesday follow civil charges brought by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) accusing the 30-year-old former billionaire of defrauding investors by building a company that was a “house of cards”.

“This is one of the biggest financial frauds in American history,” said Damian Williams, United States attorney for the southern district of New York. He said that while only Bankman-Fried had been charged so far: “We are not done.”

On Monday, police in the Bahamas arrested Bankman-Fried after receiving formal notification from the US of criminal charges against him.

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A Qatari photojournalist covering the World Cup in Qatar has died, according to local reports, bringing the number of journalist fatalities at the contest to two, following the death of US sports journalist Grant Wahl last Friday.

English-language Qatari news service Gulf News reported on Saturday the death of Khalid al-Misslam, citing the Qatari TV news outlet he worked for, Al Kass TV.

Few detail, such as when and how al-Misslam died, have been released, and Qatar's Ministry of Health was unavailable for comment when contacted at time of publication.

According to Gulf News, al-Misslam died "suddenly while covering the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022."

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Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a pioneering Black feminist, child welfare advocate and lifelong community activist who toured the country speaking with Gloria Steinem in the 1970s and appears with her in one of the most iconic photos of the second-wave feminist movement, has died. She was 84.

The US Senate has passed the Respect for Marriage Act, legislation to protect same-sex unions that Democrats are hurrying to get to Joe Biden to be signed into law before Republicans take over the House next year.

The House must now pass the bill, a step the majority leader, Steny Hoyer, said could come as soon as Tuesday 6 December. Nearly 50 House Republicans supported the measure earlier this year. In the Senate, support from 12 Republicans was enough to override the filibuster and advance the bill to Tuesday’s majority vote, which ended 61-36.

Although the Respect for Marriage Act would not codify Obergefell v Hodges, the 2015 supreme court decision which made same-sex marriage legal nationwide, it would require states to recognise all marriages that were legal when performed, including in other states. Interracial marriages would also be protected, with states required to recognise legal marriage regardless of “sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin”.

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