TV News LIES

News of the phone call between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday, in which they agreed to meet in person to discuss the war in Ukraine, will have come as an unwelcome surprise to Kyiv.

The country is being hit hard.

The last 24 hours alone have seen Russia launch dozens of missiles and more than 300 drones at multiple targets.

Once again, they include a large amount of civilian infrastructure with further damage to the country's gas supply network, just as the first signs of cold herald a long, hard winter ahead.

Attacks on the electrical grid are already leading to nationwide power outages.

For Ukraine's government it's a sign of Russian desperation.

The frontlines are at effective stalemate, involving huge loss of life for incremental territorial gains.

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The US military carried out a new strike on Thursday against a suspected drug vessel in the Caribbean, and in what is believed to be the first such case, there were survivors among the crew, a US official told Reuters.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, did not offer additional details about the incident, which has not been previously reported. But it raises new questions, including whether the US military rendered aid to the survivors and whether they are now in US military custody.

The Pentagon, which has labeled those it has targeted in the strikes as “narcoterrorists”, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Prior to Thursday’s operation, US military strikes against suspected drug boats off Venezuela killed at least 27 people, raising alarms among some legal experts and Democratic lawmakers, who question whether they adhere to the laws of war.

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Israel has imposed new restrictions on aid entering the besieged Gaza Strip and will not open the Rafah crossing as planned, while Israeli forces killed at least nine people in the Palestinian territory as the Israel-Hamas ceasefire came under growing strain.

Israel notified the United Nations on Tuesday that it will only allow 300 aid trucks – half of the number it originally agreed to – daily into the Gaza Strip from Wednesday.

Olga Cherevko, a spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Gaza, confirmed the UN had received the note from the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the arm of the Israeli military that oversees aid flows into Gaza.

The COGAT note said no fuel or gas will be allowed into the war-torn enclave except for specific needs related to humanitarian infrastructure.

Reporting from Gaza City, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud noted that allowing 300 trucks of aid each day was “not nearly enough” for famine-stricken Gaza.

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At least five Palestinians have been killed in an Israeli attack in Gaza City, medical sources told Al Jazeera, despite a ceasefire agreed between Hamas and Israel.

Sources from al-Ahli Arab Hospital in told Al Jazeera Arabic on Tuesday that Israeli soldiers killed five Palestinians in the Shujayea neighbourhood of Gaza City.

The Israeli military said it opened fire to remove a threat posed by people who approached its forces in northern Gaza.

It said soldiers fired against “suspects” who were “crossing the yellow line” – the line to which Israel’s military pulled back under the ceasefire deal that took effect on Friday – and were approaching soldiers in breach of the agreement.
Will the ceasefire last?

Hamas and Israel agreed last week to cease hostilities and return all remaining Israeli captives – dead and alive – in exchange for about 2,000 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.

The first phase of the agreement should also see a phased withdrawal of Israeli troops. The first step is to relocate soldiers away from the front line to the yellow redeployment line.

TVNL Comment:  Does anyone really believe that Israel will honor a cease fire?  The never have, and never will.  Wait and see.

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Propped up in her hospital bed, railway conductor Olha Zolotova speaks slowly and quietly as she talks about the day her train was hit by a Russian drone.

"When the Shahed [drone] hit I was covered in rubble. I was in the second car. People pulled me out," she says.

"My eyes went dark. There was fire everywhere, everything was burning, my hair caught fire a little. I was trapped."

Olha is a victim of Russia's increasingly frequent attacks on the Ukrainian railway system – vital infrastructure that keeps the country moving three and a half years since Moscow's full-scale invasion.

Ukraine's 21,000km-long (13,000-mile) railway system is not merely a mode of transport, it is a central pillar of Ukraine's war effort and a powerful national symbol of resilience.

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Donald Trump said on Wednesday he had authorized the CIA to carry out covert operations in Venezuela, marking a sharp escalation in his administration’s pressure campaign against Nicolás Maduro’s government.

Trump further suggested he was considering strikes on Venezuelan territory, a dramatic step that would go beyond a series of recent lethal attacks on boats in the Caribbean, which Democrats and United Nations experts have forcefully condemned as unlawful.

Maduro decried what he called “coups d’etat orchestrated by the CIA” after Trump’s comments.

“No to war in the Caribbean … No to regime change … No to coups d’etat orchestrated by the CIA,” the leftist leader said in an address to a committee set up after Washington deployed warships in the Caribbean for what it said was an anti-drug operation.

Trump’s remarks about the CIA confirmed an earlier story from the New York Times, which had reported on a classified directive about the secretive operation in Venezuela.

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