TV News LIES

New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani will be sworn in, not inside City Hall on New Year's Day, but dozens of feet below it.

The incoming Democratic mayor will be sworn in at the Old City Hall subway station during a private midnight ceremony, according to a Dec. 29 news release. New York Attorney General Letitia James will administer the oath of office, and the underground ceremony will be attended by Mamdani's family.

In a statement, Mamdani said the station is a "physical monument" to the city and called its subway system a lifeblood of New York.

“When I take my oath from the station at the dawn of the New Year, I will do so humbled by the opportunity to lead millions of New Yorkers into a new era of opportunity, and honored to carry forward our city’s legacy of greatness," Mamdani said in the news release.

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US senator Bernie Sanders amplified his recent criticism of artificial intelligence on Sunday, explicitly linking the financial ambition of “the richest people in the world” to economic insecurity for millions of Americans – and calling for a potential moratorium on new datacenters.

Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with the Democratic party, said on CNN’s State of the Union that he was “fearful of a lot” when it came to AI. And the senator called it “the most consequential technology in the history of humanity” that will “transform” the US and the world in ways that had not been fully discussed.

“If there are no jobs and humans won’t be needed for most things, how do people get an income to feed their families, to get healthcare or to pay the rent?” Sanders said. “There’s not been one serious word of discussion in the Congress about that reality.”

Days from being scheduled to help swear New York mayor-elect and democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani into office, Sanders said “the richest people in the world” were pushing the technology. He singled out tech moguls Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel while questioning their motives.

“You think they’re staying up nights worrying about working people and how this technology will impact those people?” Sanders said. “They are not. They are doing it to get richer and even more powerful.”

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The FBI has deployed additional personnel and investigative resources to Minnesota to “dismantle large-scale fraud schemes exploiting federal programs”, director Kash Patel said on social media on Sunday.

The FBI director said the agency had already dismantled a $250m fraud scheme that stole federal food aid meant for vulnerable children during the Covid pandemic in a case that led to 78 indictments and 57 convictions.

Patel said the FBI believes “this is just the tip of a very large iceberg”. Some of those involved in the alleged scheme are being “referred to immigrations officials for possible further denaturalization and deportation proceedings where eligible”.

Patel’s comments comes after federal prosecutors estimate as much as $9bn has been stolen across schemes linked to the state’s Somalia population, a figure nearly equivalent to Somalia’s entire GDP.

The FBI director also said he was aware of recent social media reports in Minnesota, which appears to refer to an online report by independent journalist Nick Shirley about a daycare center in Minneapolis that received $4m despite reportedly having no enrolled kids. The 42-minute video has been viewed 84m times since it was posted on 26 December.

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New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani (D) challenged Elon Musk for claiming that people will “die” over his appointment of a non-firefighter as the new head of the Fire Department of New York (FDNY).

“Experience does matter, which is why I appointed the person who spent more than 30 years at EMS. You know, the workforce that addresses at least 70% of all calls coming into FDNY?” Mamdani wrote in response to Musk in an X post Saturday.

Mamdani’s remarks came after the tech billionaire condemned the self-proclaimed democratic socialist’s decision to appoint Lillian Bonsignore in a Friday X post.

“People will die because of this. Proven experience matters when lives are at stake,” Musk wrote alongside a clip of Mamdani announcing Bonsignore’s new role.

Last week, Mamdani appointed Bonsignore, a FDNY veteran who helmed Emergency Medical Services Operations before retiring from the department in 2022, as FDNY commissioner. She is the second woman to hold the position and the department’s first openly LGBTQ+ commissioner.

Bonsignore is also the first woman to achieve a 4-star rank in FDNY history, Mamdani said in a separate X post celebrating her new position.

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When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) set its sights on Chicago in September, Chicagoans sprang into action to protect their immigrant neighbors: teaching each other how to recognize and safely document ICE agents, setting up “know your rights” trainings, and distributing whistles en masse so people could loudly alert anyone in the vicinity when ICE was spotted.

In the months since, whistles have become a popular raid alert tool in other cities across the country – New Yorkers wear them around their necks to warn neighbors, the people of New Orleans blast them outside ICE facilities and Charlotte residents used them to ward off Customs and Border Protection officials. While strongly associated with Chicago, the tactic is actually one that city organizers learned in part from groups in Los Angeles. Its spread is illustrative of the many ways cities are helping inspire and equip one another in the face of often unlawful federal activities.

Rain Skau, a co-coordinator of the Fight Fascism campaign of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Los Angeles, said Angelenos began to use whistles to alert neighbors about ICE presence when agents first started hitting the city in June. Despite the federal government’s claims that these raids were targeting hardened criminals, Skau described one of the first raids at a Home Depot as mostly snatching women vending food in the parking lot, stuffing them into vans as meat sizzled on the grills they left behind.

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The president of the Kennedy Center has demanded $1m in damages and fiercely criticized a musician’s sudden decision to cancel a Christmas Eve performance at the venue days after the White House announced that Donald Trump’s name would be added to the facility.

“Your decision to withdraw at the last moment – explicitly in response to the Center’s recent renaming, which honors President Trump’s extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure – is classic intolerance and very costly to a non-profit Arts institution,” the venue’s president, Richard Grenell, wrote in a letter to musician Chuck Redd that was shared with the Associated Press.

In the letter, Grenell said he would seek $1m in damages “for this political stunt”.

Redd did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A drummer and vibraphone player, Redd has presided over holiday Jazz Jams at the Kennedy Center since 2006, succeeding bassist William “Keter” Betts. In an email Wednesday to the Associated Press, Redd said he pulled out of the concert in the wake of the renaming.

“When I saw the name change on the Kennedy Center website and then hours later on the building, I chose to cancel our concert,” Redd said. He added on Wednesday that the event has been a “very popular holiday tradition” and that he often featured at least one student musician.

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