TV News LIES

Thirty-five countries signed a convention in the Netherlands on Tuesday, Dec. 16, establishing an International Claims Commission for Ukraine to address damage caused by Russia’s invasion.

“In the Hague, together with 34 states and the European Union, and on the instructions of President Volodymyr Zelensky, I had the honor of signing the Convention establishing an International Claims Commission for Ukraine. Thirty-five is a record number of states. This is a historic step,” Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha wrote on X.

The convention stipulates that the commission will operate under the auspices of the Council of Europe.

Council of Europe Secretary General Alain Berset said the creation of the Register of Damage for Ukraine in 2023 marked the first step of an international compensation mechanism, according to Ukrainian media reports.

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The job market continues to show signs of cooling.

U.S. employers added just 64,000 jobs in November, according to a delayed report from the Labor Department Tuesday, while the unemployment rate rose to 4.6% from 4.4% in September. That's the highest unemployment rate in more than four years.

The jobs report was initially set to come out earlier this month, but the government's ability to monitor the job market was hampered by the six-week federal shutdown.

https://www.npr.org/2025/12/16/nx-s1-5645023/jobs-employment-labor-marketThat delayed job tallies for October and November, both of which were released on Tuesday. The report showed the U.S. saw a net loss of 105,000 jobs in October. That was led by a large drop in the federal workforce, as 162,000 government workers who'd taken buyouts earlier in the year were officially dropped from the payrolls.

Furloughed federal workers were unable to conduct their usual survey of households in October, so the unemployment rate for that month remains unknown.

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Nick Reiner will be charged with two counts of first-degree murder, after he was arrested on suspicion of murdering his parents, the director and actor Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, the Los Angeles district attorney has said.

Nathan Hochman, the district attorney of Los Angeles, said the charges could carry the death penalty, and said that the counts against Nick Reiner include a special circumstance of multiple murders and a special allegation that he used a deadly weapon or knife to commit murder.

At a press conference on Tuesday, Hochman said the charges would be officially filed later today. Nick Reiner will brought to court to be arraigned on the charges after he has been medically cleared to be transferred from the jail, Hochman said.

“This case is heartbreaking and deeply personal, not only for the Reiner family and their loved ones, but for our entire city,” said Jim McDonnell, the chief of the Los Angeles police department.

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A leading Muslim civil rights group in the US has sued Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, over his order designating it and another organization as a “foreign terrorist organization”, saying the directive was unconstitutional.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, known as Cair, has more than 20 chapters across the United States and its work involves legal actions, advocacy and education outreach.

The lawsuit was filed late Monday by the Cair-Foundation and Cair-Florida, its affiliate in the state. The suit asked a federal judge in Tallahassee to declare DeSantis’s order unlawful and unconstitutional and prevent it from being enforced.

“He has usurped the exclusive authority of the federal government to identify and designate terrorist organizations by baselessly declaring Cair a terrorist organization,” the lawsuit says.

Cair said in the lawsuit that it was targeted by DeSantis for defending the free speech rights of people in cases in which state officials and officials elsewhere had tried to punish or silence those who had expressed support for Palestinian human rights.

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Donald Trump has ordered “a total and complete” blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers entering and leaving Venezuela, ramping up pressure on the country’s authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro.

The move comes amid an escalating campaign by the Trump administration against Maduro that has included a ramped-up military presence in the region and more than two dozen military strikes on vessels in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea near Venezuela, which have killed dozens of people.

Last week, US forces seized an oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast that was traveling across the Caribbean. The tanker was thought to be loaded with about 2m barrels of Venezuela’s heavy crude, according to the New York Times. The Venezuelan government accused the US of “blatant theft” and described the seizure as “an act of international piracy”, further heightening tensions between the two countries.

In a post on social media on Tuesday night announcing the blockade, Trump alleged Venezuela was using oil to fund drug trafficking and other crimes and vowed to escalate the military buildup.

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WWE Hall of Famer Mick Foley said Tuesday he is cutting ties with the professional wrestling organization, citing its close relationship with the Trump administration.

Foley, who’s long been critical of President Trump, said the president’s comments on the death of acclaimed actor-director Rob Reiner were the “final straw” compelling the wrestler to inform WWE he would no longer make public appearances on behalf of the company.

“While I have been concerned about WWE‘s close relationship with Donald Trump for several months — especially in light of his administration’s ongoing cruel and inhumane treatment of immigrants (and pretty much anyone who ‘looks like an immigrant’) — reading the President’s incredibly cruel comments in the wake of Rob Reiner’s death is the final straw for me,” Foley wrote in an Instagram post on Tuesday.

“I no longer wish to represent a company that coddles a man so seemingly void of compassion as he marches our country towards autocracy,” he continued.

Foley said he told WWE talent relations Monday night that he “would not be making any appearances for the company as long as this man remains in office.” He also said he would not re-sign his Legends deal when his contract expires in June.

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President Trump led an effort to close ranks around White House chief of staff Susie Wiles on Tuesday, seeking to contain damage of Wiles’s own making.

The furor was kicked off by a move that stunned Washington. 

Wiles — known both for a relative aversion to the spotlight and for imposing some discipline on the chaotic world around Trump — gave 11 interviews to author and journalist Chris Whipple, resulting in a Vanity Fair story published Tuesday morning.

In those interviews, Wiles offered startlingly candid views on a number of people in Trump’s orbit.

She alluded to Elon Musk’s ketamine use and said his assailing of the United States Agency for International Development had at first left her “aghast.” She said Attorney General Pam Bondi had “completely whiffed” in her initial handling of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. In the process of suggesting Vice President Vance was more attuned to the base’s feelings on the Epstein matter than Bondi was, Wiles called Vance “a conspiracy theorist for a decade.”

As for budget director Russell Vought, he was “a right-wing absolute zealot,” in Wiles’s estimation — though it’s not clear the deeply conservative Wiles meant this as a criticism.

As for the president himself, he as “an alcoholic’s personality,” according to Wiles.

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A top official at the U.S. Department of Education has been keeping a controversial flag linked to Christian nationalism and the Jan. 6 insurrection hung outside his office, according to the agency's union and a department employee who has observed it.

It's the latest in a series of instances in which the flag – which depicts a pine tree and the words "An Appeal to Heaven" – has been associated with agencies and figures at the highest levels of the federal government.

Though long tied to the American Revolution, the banner in more recent years "has been adopted primarily by evangelical Christian nationalist groups," as well as the Proud Boys and certain neo-Nazi groups, according to the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, an independent nonprofit organization. It was flown in 2021 by rioters at the U.S. Capitol as they tried to prevent Congress from certifying the 2020 presidential election results.

The symbol's emergence at the agency responsible for overseeing billions of dollars in federal funding for the nation's schools is already raising concerns about the separation of church and state.

Rachel Gittleman, the president of the union for Education Department workers nationwide, said in a statement that the agency "has no place for symbols that were carried by insurrectionists."

“Since January, hardworking public servants at the U.S. Department of Education have been subjected to threats, harassment, and sustained demoralization," she said. "Now, they are being asked to work in an environment where a senior leader is prominently displaying an offensive flag – one that, regardless of its origins in the American Revolution, has come to represent intolerance, hatred, and extremism."

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