TV News LIES

The United Nations mission to Iraq said Sunday that violence in the country amid the war against the extremist Islamic State group killed at least 1,375 people in January.

The U.N. Assistance Mission in Iraq, known as UNAMI, put the number of civilians killed at 790, while identifying the rest as security forces members. It said at least 1,469 civilians and 771 security forces members were wounded.

It said the worst affected city was the capital, Baghdad, with 256 civilians killed and 758 wounded.

The Israeli government on Friday published tenders to build 450 settler homes in the West Bank, the head of an NGO that monitors settlement activity told AFP, in what a senior PLO official called a “war crime.” The Housing Ministry denied the tenders were new.

“It’s the opening of the settlement floodgates,” said Daniel Seidemann, head of the Terrestrial Jerusalem group, adding that the announcements were the first since October 2014 and unlikely to be the last before the March 17 general election.

An explosion ripped through a Shia mosque in Pakistan on Friday, just as worshippers were gathering for prayers. The blast killed 35 people and wounded dozens more, underscoring a growing tide of sectarian violence in the South Asian nation.

Attacks against religious minorities have been on the rise in Pakistan, where armed Sunni armed groups often target mosques frequented by Shia, whom the groups do not consider to be true Muslims.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has confirmed that the Palestinians will officially become a member of the International Criminal Court on April 1, the U.N. press office said on Wednesday.

On Friday the Palestinians delivered to U.N. headquarters documents on joining the Rome Statute of the ICC and other international treaties, in a move that has heightened tensions with Israel and could lead to cuts in U.S. aid.

In November, a bilingual Arabic and Hebrew school in Jerusalem was set on fire and vandalized by a group of right-wing hard-liners. The arsonists scrawled slogans such as "Death to Arabs," "You can't coexist with cancer," and "Enough with assimilation" on the walls of a classroom in the school, which strives to set an example for Israeli-Palestinian coexistence.

In the weeks that followed, Israeli authorities detained 21 suspects connected to the Lehava extremist group on charges of incitement to hatred. Three youths, two 18-year-olds and a 20-year-old, have been charged with carrying out the act. Now, after remarks by Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, it appears that the government is considering listing Lehava as a terrorist group and banning it.

Freelance photographer Lazar Simeonov watched from his Gaza apartment window on the afternoon July 16 as three Israeli shells struck a shack at the edge of a beach where seven young boys played. When the dust settled, four of them — all members of the Bakr extended family — lay dead, apparently victims of a mistake by the Israeli military on the ninth day of its Operation Protective Edge in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

Simeonov and a number of other foreign journalists staying nearby ran to the beach. He was horrified by the scene he found there: Four children lay dead on the sand and nearby dock, their lifeless bodies torn apart by the blasts.