TV News LIES

Israel’s government is deepening a push by far-right ministers to expand its authority and settlements in the West Bank, giving it broad new powers in a territory that would make up the heart of any future Palestinian state.

Israel’s security cabinet on Sunday approved new measures that would ease land purchases by Israelis from Palestinians and grant Israel the authority to police water-related offenses, damage to archaeological sites and environmental hazards in so-called Areas A and B. The areas are now administered by the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo Accords, which aimed to achieve peace between Israelis and Palestinians through a two-state solution.

Under the new changes, sealed land registries will be published, making it easier for prospective buyers to find and approach owners. A law preventing the sale of West Bank land to outsiders that has been in place since Jordan controlled the territory will now be repealed.

The moves follow Israel’s approval last summer of thousands of housing units in a controversial settlement near East Jerusalem, and the rapid expansion of outposts and roads that have further divided Palestinian areas.

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Nurses have reached tentative deals on new contracts to end their strikes at hospitals run by Mount Sinai and Montefiore after nearly a month on the picketline, the New York State Nurses Association announced Monday.

Nurses must first vote on whether to ratify the tentative agreements before they can go back to work. Voting on the contracts was set to start Monday afternoon at the two hospital systems and continue through Wednesday, according to NYSNA. If the contracts are ratified, nurses will return to work by Saturday, NYSNA said.

Nurses at NewYork-Presbyterian said they were still negotiating Monday morning. A spokesperson for the hospital said there was movement at the bargaining table over the weekend.

“We reached a tentative contact agreement!” announced one email sent by Mount Sinai Hospital’s nurses union executive committee at 4:45 a.m. Monday.

A Montefiore spokesperson confirmed the tentative deal. At Mount Sinai, CEO Brendan Carr wrote in a message to employees, “This process has been difficult for all of us." He added, "I commit to you that we will heal the organization together in the service of continuing to help people to live longer and better lives.”

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As Democrats prepare to force a vote in the US House this week on Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canada, the president posted a lengthy diatribe on his social media platform in which he threatened to block a bridge connecting the US and Canada and made a bizarre false claim that increased trade between Canada and China would include a ban on Canadians playing ice hockey.

Trump began his latest screed against the US’s second-largest trading partner by claiming that “everyone knows, the Country of Canada has treated the United States very unfairly for decades”.

The president also threatened to block the scheduled opening of the $4.6bn Gordie Howe International Bridge, connecting Windsor, Ontario and Detroit, Michigan, built by a binational partnership that won approval during the Obama administration but began construction in 2018, when Trump was president.

“I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated for everything we have given them, and also, importantly, Canada treats the United States with the Fairness and Respect that we deserve,” Trump wrote on Monday.

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Europe has come to the painful realisation that it needs to be more assertive and more militarily independent from an authoritarian US administration that no longer shares a commitment to liberal democratic norms and values, a report prepared by the Munich Security Conference asserts.

The report sets the scene for an all-out ideological confrontation with the Trump White House at the high-level annual meeting of security policy specialists, which starts on Friday.

In a now infamous speech to last year’s MSC, the US vice-president, JD Vance, claimed European elites were suppressing free speech and “opening the floodgates” to mass migration. The address marked the moment Europe realised the Trump administration would no longer be a reliable trading and security partner.

Since then European leaders and Donald Trump’s team have waged a series of running battles over topics including the US push to force Ukraine to make territorial concessions to Russia, Trump’s threats to seize Greenland, and a series of protectionist US measures ranging from tariff barriers to inward investment bans.

The divide was starkly set out in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month by the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, who warned of a rupture between the US and its western allies.

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An immigration judge has rejected the Trump administration’s efforts to deport Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University PhD student, who was arrested last year as part of its targeting of pro-Palestinian campus activists, her lawyers said on Monday.

Lawyers for the Turkish student detailed the immigration judge’s decision in a filing with the New York-based second US circuit court of appeals, which had been reviewing a ruling that led to her release from immigration custody in May.

An immigration judge on 29 January concluded the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had not met its burden of proving she was removable and terminated the proceedings against her, her lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union wrote.

Her immigration lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai, said the decision was issued by immigration judge Roopal Patel in Boston.

That ended, for now, proceedings that began with Öztürk’s arrest by immigration authorities in March on a street in Massachusetts after DHS revoked her student visa.

The sole basis authorities provided for revoking her visa was an editorial she co-authored in Tufts’s student newspaper a year earlier criticizing her school’s response to Israel’s war on Gaza.

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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) launched a probe into ABC’s “The View” after the program held an interview with Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, according to multiple outlets.

Reuters reported Saturday that, per a source, the FCC began an investigation on whether “The View” broke rules for equal time when it comes to interviewing political candidates.

Fox News, which was the first to report on the probe, reported that the investigation was prompted by Talarico’s “The View” appearance, according to an FCC source.

In January, the agency shook up its rules, which exempted some late-night and daytime talk shows from having to give equal airtime to opposing political candidates.

“Importantly, the FCC has not been presented with any evidence that the interview portion of any late night or daytime television talk show program on air presently would qualify for the bona fide news exemption,” the FCC said in a public notice last month.

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The Trump administration on Monday proposed stripping the power of an independent board to review challenges from fired federal workers while barring employees from taking the matter to court.

The new proposed rule would impact federal workers fired through a Reduction in Force (RIF), the process used at 22 different agencies last year as the Trump administration conducted widespread layoffs.

If finalized, any federal worker fired in a future RIF would not be able to plead their case before the quasi-judicial Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), which last year found that some agencies had “engaged in a prohibited personnel practice” in firing the workers. 

Instead, any challenges would be reviewed by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which last year alongside the Office of Management and Budget instructed agencies to begin RIFs.

“Eliminating independent review of federal RIF actions would not only make it harder for employees to challenge their proposed terminations, but would essentially give the administration free rein to terminate huge swaths of the federal workforce without meaningful independent oversight,” Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal worker union, said in a statement.

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