TV News LIES

Fighting raged in parts of east Ukraine on Thursday despite European efforts to resurrect a stillborn ceasefire, a day after pro-Russian separatists spurned the truce by forcing thousands of government troops out of a strategic town.

Western nations are refusing to give up on a peace deal brokered by France and Germany last week even though the rebels disavowed it to seize the important railway hub of Debaltseve.

The United States accused Israel on Wednesday of leaking inaccurate information about nuclear negotiations with Iran, intensifying tensions over the issue before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's contentious March visit to Washington.

President Barack Obama's spokesman accused Israel of misrepresenting the U.S. position. White House spokesman Josh Earnest criticized the "continued practice of cherry-picking specific pieces of information and using them out of context to distort the negotiating position of the United States."

Professor Chan Kin-man is not an overly suspicious fellow. Yet recent harassment here has led him to sweep his rooms for bugging devices, and to fit a security chain and combination lock on his university office door.

For a year and a half, the Yale-educated sociologist has received dozens of hate letters, including death threats, with many of them cursing him as a traitor for helping found the Occupy Central civil disobedience movement that partly shut down Hong Kong last fall.

Geneva's public prosecutor raided HSBC's lakeside Swiss office on Wednesday after opening a criminal inquiry into allegations of aggravated money laundering, the second probe to hit the bank this week.

Europe's largest lender is in regulators' sights after details about how its Swiss private bank allegedly helped wealthy clients evade taxes were leaked to the media and published last week.

The murder of a woman who tried to stop a man raping her has sparked mass protests in Turkey and prompted women to share their stories of sexual harassment, violence and fear in a growing Twitter campaign.

Twenty-year-old student Ozgecan Aslan was traveling on a minibus in the south-east seaside province of Mersin on Wednesday when a man tried to rape her, according to local media.

A damning official report into spending by Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu at his official residence in Jerusalem and private seaside home has accused him of excessive and improper use of public funds, including spending huge amounts on takeaway food, hairdressing and cleaning..

Prepared by Israel’s state comptroller, Yosef Shapira – and passed to the country’s attorney general to consider whether any laws have been broken – the report is potentially highly damaging to Netanyahu coming only a month before Israel’s elections.