TV News LIES

Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko said Thursday that Russia has deployed a newly developed hypersonic, nuclear-capable missile known as the Oreshnik on Belarusian territory and placed it on combat duty.

“Oreshnik has been in Belarus since yesterday. And it’s going on combat duty,” Lukashenko said during his annual address. He had previously said the Russian missile system would be placed on combat duty in December.

Russia first unveiled the weapon last year after using it in a strike on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro on Nov. 21, 2024. Moscow had already stationed tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus in 2023 and earlier said it could deploy the Oreshnik missile there by the end of 2025.

Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service said Saturday, Dec. 13, that Russia is preparing to deploy the Oreshnik medium-range ballistic missile in Belarus as part of a broader effort to pressure European countries.

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Peter Arnett, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who spent decades dodging bullets and bombs to bring the world eyewitness accounts of war from the rice paddies of Vietnam to the deserts of Iraq, has died. He was 91.

Arnett, who won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for his Vietnam War coverage for The Associated Press, died Wednesday in Newport Beach and was surrounded by friends and family, said his son Andrew Arnett. He had been suffering from prostate cancer.

"Peter Arnett was one of the greatest war correspondents of his generation — intrepid, fearless, and a beautiful writer and storyteller. His reporting in print and on camera will remain a legacy for aspiring journalists and historians for generations to come," said Edith Lederer, who was a fellow AP war correspondent in Vietnam in 1972-73 and is now AP's chief correspondent at the United Nations.

As a wire-service correspondent, Arnett was known mostly to fellow journalists when he reported in Vietnam from 1962 until the war's end in 1975. He became something of a household name in 1991, however, after he broadcast live updates for CNN from Iraq during the first Gulf War.

While almost all Western reporters had fled Baghdad in the days before the U.S.-led attack, Arnett stayed. As missiles began raining on the city, he broadcast a live account by cellphone from his hotel room.

"There was an explosion right near me, you may have heard," he said in a calm, New Zealand-accented voice moments after the loud boom of a missile strike rattled across the airwaves. As he continued to speak air-raid sirens blared in the background.

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TikTok has signed a deal to spin-off its U.S. operations to a group controlled by mostly American investors, including software giant Oracle, a company run by billionaire Trump ally Larry Ellison.

TikTok's hyper-engaging algorithm and the massive amount of data the app has collected on millions of Americans is set to be overseen by the new U.S. firm. According to the agreement, TikTok's U.S. algorithm will be retrained with only Americans' data. Content moderation rules around what is permitted and what is not will be set by the new investor-controlled entity.

Yet the underlying algorithm will still be owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, with the blessing of American auditors, according to an internal TikTok memo reviewed by NPR and two sources familiar with the deal who were not authorized to speak publicly.

"With an American majority running the content moderation, concerns about foreign propaganda seem to have been alleviated," said Anupam Chander, a professor of law and technology at Georgetown University who studies the regulation of new technology. "But it is possible that the American TikTok might end up censoring or hiding speech that is permissible on the global TikTok platform. I would hope that the U.S. content moderation team would allow speech that the American owners might dislike."

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A former law enforcement officer in Tennessee is suing his county and sheriff after he was jailed for more than a month for posting a meme on Facebook related to the 10 September assassination of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

According to the new 30-page lawsuit filed this week, 10 days after Kirk’s killing, Larry Bushart, 61, shared a post in the comments of a Facebook post about a vigil for Kirk in Perry county, Tennessee.

The post showed a photo of Donald Trump alongside a remark the US president made following the 2024 shooting at Perry high school in Iowa: “We have to get over it.”

Bushart captioned the image: “This seems relevant today.”

According to the lawsuit, police came to Bushart’s home the following day, took him into custody and charged with “threatening mass violence at a school”.

He was unable to pay the $2m bond and was jailed for 37 days.

The lawsuit states that Nick Weems, the Perry county sheriff, claimed at the time that some residents might have interpreted the meme as a threat to the county’s local high school, Perry county high school, even though the meme was referencing Perry high school in Iowa, where the 2024 shooting occurred.

In an interview with local news at the time, Weems said that the post caused “multiple people” to become “scared to send their kids to school”.

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Warner Bros Discovery is poised to tell shareholders to reject Paramount’s $108bn (£81bn) hostile bid, according to reports, clearing the way for Netflix to proceed with its buyout of the Hollywood film and TV group.

The board could announce a decision as early as Wednesday after Paramount Skydance – run by David Ellison and bankrolled by his billionaire father, Larry, who founded Oracle – went directly to shareholders with its rival offer almost two weeks ago.

Netflix had won the auction for the studio and streaming company with an $82.7bn bid a few days earlier – taking control of prize assets including the Harry Potter and DC Comics superhero film franchises, as well as HBO, home to hit shows including Game of Thrones, The White Lotus and Succession.

The streaming company’s deal does not cover WBD’s cable channels, which include CNN, TBS and TNT, which are set to be spun off into a separate company next year.

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US prices rose 2.7% in the year to November, according to federal data released a day after Donald Trump claimed they were falling “very fast” on his watch.

The latest consumer price index, released on Wednesday morning, was down from 3% in September, and short of economists’ expectations of about 3.1% for last month.

It comes amid questions over the strength of the US economy. The longest US federal government shutdown in history halted collection of key data. There was no inflation report for October, and data was only collected for the second half of November.

In a live TV address on Tuesday night, Trump claimed prices were falling “rapidly”, despite evidence to the contrary. “I am bringing those high prices down, and bringing them down very fast,” the US president said.

Price growth, which surged in the US to its highest level in a generation three years ago amid economic disruption wrought by Covid, fell back sharply. It has stubbornly remained above standard levels, however, and after retreating to 2.3% in April, it has since climbed higher – amid persisting concerns around affordability.

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DoJ racing to redact documents ahead of deadline to release Epstein files - report

Congress has mandated that the Trump administration release a trove of Epstein-related files by tomorrow – and the Justice Department is racing to process thousands of pages of documents and images.

In an exclusive, CNN reports that the Justice Department is racing to redact thousands of pages in oder to protect victims, and address executive and legal privacy concerns. Per CNN, counterintelligence specialists “ were asked to drop nearly all of their other work”.

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Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), an ex officio member of the Kennedy Center board of trustees, disputed the White House’s claim that the vote was “unanimous” to rename the performing arts center to the Trump-Kennedy Center.

In a short video post on the social platform X, the Ohio Democrat said she tried to voice her opposition to the name-change decision but was muted on the call and not permitted to speak.

“For the record. This was not unanimous,” she wrote in a message along with her video.

She also said the vote was not on the meeting’s agenda, adding, “This was not consensus. This is censorship.”

Beatty also pushed back on the legality of the name change, noting, “Clearly, the Congress has a say in this. This center, the Kennedy Center, was created by the Congress.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced earlier Thursday that the Kennedy Center’s board — whose members were hand-selected by President Trump — voted “unanimously” to rename D.C.’s renowned performing arts center the Trump-Kennedy Center.

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