TV News LIES

At least 188 people died and nearly 1,500 were injured June 24 after two devastating earthquakes hit a minute apart in northern Venezuela, the Caribbean nation with a long and deadly quake history.

The U.S. Geological Survey, using predictive modeling to estimate the death toll, said it would most likely run into the thousands, with a substantial probability of exceeding 10,000. A website set up to track missing people by leaders from the country's opposition said that about 24,000 people remain unaccounted for, Reuters reported.

The two quakes, with magnitudes of 7.2 and 7.5, struck shortly after 6 p.m. local time. They were two of the strongest quakes to hit Venezuela in more than a century.

Quakes of 7.0 to 7.9 magnitude are considered major, capable of causing severe, widespread damage.

Venezuela is vulnerable to powerful quakes because it’s on the active tectonic boundary between the Caribbean Plate and the South American Plate. The two giant plates grind past each other, building stress across several major faults.

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Naftali Bennett, the former Israeli prime minister and aspirant for the top job in this year’s election, was upset. 

He slammed Benjamin Netanyahu after the recent announcement of a deal between Tehran and Washington, arguing that the current prime minister had squandered a unique opportunity.

Bennett praised the “extraordinary performance” of the Israeli army and security forces on the front lines during the war with Iran, “and the courage of the Israeli public on the home front”.

But in the end, Bennett said, “the government is once again incapable of turning all of that into lasting security achievements”.

The political era of Netanyahu has been the longest in the country’s history. His vision for the occupied West Bank and Gaza has been to crush the ambitions of the Palestinian people, forcing them to accept second-class status in perpetuity.

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Senior Israeli security officials met on Tuesday to discuss the possibility of expelling Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, despite repeated previous failures to advance such plans, according to Haaretz.

The Israeli daily reported that Shmuel Ben Ezra, head of the National Security Council, convened an urgent meeting with defence officials to discuss what was described as “encouraging voluntary emigration” from Gaza.

Officials from the Israeli army, Shin Bet and Mossad were among those invited.

During the meeting, Mossad representatives reportedly said the agency has not identified any country willing to accept Palestinians from Gaza.

Defence officials told Haaretz they were surprised by the urgency of the discussion, noting the issue has been raised repeatedly in the past without progress.

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Ukraine is improving the quality of its international military support package, as Denmark has agreed to supply 15,000 long-range artillery rounds.

Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov announced on Telegram that Kyiv has been working with partners to increase the volume of aid and redirect it toward capabilities that have the biggest battlefield impact – air defense systems, long-range artillery and Ukrainian-made drones.

“We have three unchanged priorities: air defense, long-range artillery and Ukrainian drones,” Fedorov said, adding that Ukraine is “fighting for every dollar of international support” while seeking to ensure partners’ funds are used as efficiently as possible.

Ukrainian authorities praised Denmark’s prompt response to Kyiv’s request to revise its planned assistance, shifting resources from short-range artillery ammunition to long-range solutions better suited to current battlefield demands.

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It’s the day after Mother’s Day, the first one Elizabeth Soto has spent apart from her three children. Sitting in jail in Wichita Falls, Texas, her face is washed out by the overhead fluorescent lighting, and her dingy jumpsuit blends into the cinder block walls surrounding her.

Speaking through a glass separator, she tells me she celebrated the holiday with her children over the jail’s video-call system while they had dinner at their grandmother’s. “I’ve been a full-time mother all of their lives,” she said. “I’ve never been away from them.”

Soto’s children have not visited her in jail, which lies on Texas’s northern border near Oklahoma, hours from their home in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Elizabeth Soto has only seen her husband, Ines Soto, once over the past year, the longest they’ve spent apart since they first started dating more than 20 years ago. He is being held in a federal prison more than 100 miles away.

On Tuesday, Elizabeth was sentenced to 50 years in federal prison; Ines’s sentencing is set for 1 July. All because, as she put it: “They didn’t like my book club.” Her laugh doesn’t quite reach her eyes.

Last year on the Fourth of July, a small group from Dallas-Fort Worth held a night-time noise demonstration, setting off fireworks outside the Prairieland Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility south of the cities, in solidarity with the detainees. A few protesters broke away and spray-painted graffiti on employees’ cars and a security post, slashed the tires on a government van, and broke a security camera. The facility’s guards ordered the protesters to disperse, and most of them did. When a police officer arrived at the scene, drawing his gun, an armed protester shot her rifle, hitting the officer in the shoulder. The officer survived.

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On Wednesday night Britain's most notorious anti-Islam activist was hosted at the Oxford Union by a Palestinian student from Gaza who said she was upholding his right to free speech, before roundly defeating him in a debate on Islam.

Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, arrived at the debating society to speak in support of the motion "This House believes the West is right to be suspicious of Islam". It failed to pass.

The union is a globally famous institution. Many of its debates have gone down in history.

There is little doubt that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, will watch this debate online when it is published later this year.

But the audience inside the chamber on Wednesday night was extraordinarily small, owing to a crowd of hundreds of protestors who had prevented people - including speakers - from entering and delayed the event by hours.

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A 22-year-old visitor to Yosemite national park in California died after he was swept over a 594ft-high waterfall on Saturday, officials confirmed this week.

A fellow parkgoer, Freesia Gaul, was capturing a photo when she noticed the man, reportedly identified by local authorities as Josue Baires Alfaro, in the Merced River.

He did not appear to be a “strong swimmer”, Gaul told SFGate. A former volunteer lifeguard, Gaul jumped into the water in hopes of rescuing him.

“People see calm water, but they don’t realize that under that there’s a huge undercurrent,” she said.

“When you see someone like that, when you make direct eye contact with someone who you know is going to go over, you can’t turn around.”

In turbulent waters, Gaul could not reach Alfaro and struggled herself to stay afloat, SFGate reported. She thought her survival odds were bleak, until a bystander put forth a walking stick that she clung on to to avoid going over Nevada Fall.

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The Microsoft founder Bill Gates told US members of Congress that the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein had sought to “blackmail” him over his extramarital affairs, according to a transcript of the testimony.

The tech pioneer testified behind closed doors before the House oversight committee on 10 June regarding his friendship with Epstein, who died in prison in 2019 as he awaited trial for sex crimes.

According to the transcript released by the committee on Tuesday, Gates spoke of “veiled” threats and said Epstein had considered exploiting his own knowledge of Gates’s extramarital affairs to force him to remain in Epstein’s orbit, even as Gates was distancing himself from Epstein.

“I was not blackmailed, but you know, as you look at these emails, you know, it looks like Mr Epstein’s brainstorming was going in that direction,” Gates added, referring to documents from the Epstein case released in January by the US Department of Justice.

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