TV News LIES

The noted banjo player Béla Fleck has canceled three performances scheduled for next month with the National Symphony Orchestra, or NSO, at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Fleck, who has won 18 Grammy Awards and often performs with symphonies around the country, is the latest artist to cancel engagements at the Kennedy Center amidst many administrative and curatorial changes at the Washington, D.C. arts complex.

In a post published to social media Tuesday evening, Fleck wrote: "I have withdrawn from my upcoming performance with the NSO at The Kennedy Center. Performing there has become charged and political, at an institution where the focus should be on the music. I look forward to playing with the NSO another time in the future when we can together share and celebrate art."

The National Symphony Orchestra did not respond to requests for a response to Fleck's decision to cancel. Tuesday evening, however, the center's president, Richard Grenell, wrote on X: "You just made it political and caved to the woke mob who wants you to perform for only Lefties. This mob pressuring you will never be happy until you only play for Democrats. The Trump Kennedy Center believes all people are welcome — Democrats and Republicans and people uninterested in politics. We want performers who aren't political — who simply love entertaining everyone regardless of who they voted for."

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The United States seized two sanctioned oil tankers linked to Venezuela in back-to-back actions in the North Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea, officials said Wednesday, and is removing sanctions to enable the shipping and sale of oil from the South American country to markets worldwide.

U.S. European Command announced the seizure of the merchant vessel Bella 1 for “violations of U.S. sanctions” in a social media post. The U.S. had been pursuing the tanker since last month after it tried to evade a U.S. blockade on sanctioned oil vessels around Venezuela.

Then, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem revealed that U.S. forces also took control of the tanker Sophia in the Caribbean. Noem said in a social media post both ships were “either last docked in Venezuela or en route to it.”

Noem said that both ships are part of a large “ghost fleet” of sanctioned vessels that carry oil from Russia, Iran and Venezuela in defiance of Western sanctions, mostly to customers in Asia.

The Trump administration is “selectively” removing sanctions to enable the shipping and sale of Venezuelan oil to global markets, according to an outline of the policies published Wednesday by the Energy Department.

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A U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement agent fatally shot a 37-year-old woman in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as authorities surged into the city as part of what the federal government described as the "largest immigration operation ever."

Officials have so far provided conflicting accounts of the shooting, which occurred early on Dec. 7 in a residential neighborhood outside downtown Minneapolis.

The Department of Homeland Security said the agent "fired defensive shots" after the woman allegedly attempted to ram officials with her vehicle. But Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey disputed those claims at a news conference, saying videos show the woman driving away from federal agents, not toward them.

"They are already trying to spin this as an action of self defense," Frey said. "Having seen the video myself I want to everybody directly, that is bull----."

"To ICE, get the f--- out of Minneapolis," he said. "We do not want you here. Your stated reason for being in this city is to create some kind of safety, and you are doing exactly the opposite."

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Israeli forces clashed Tuesday with students during a raid at Birzeit University, north of Ramallah in the West Bank, in what the military said was an operation aimed at disrupting a pro-terror gathering.

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society said 11 students were hospitalized, including five with bullet wounds. No troops were reported injured.

WAFA, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, reported that Israeli forces broke into campus buildings and seized property belonging to a Hamas-affiliated student bloc.

Israeli forces clashed Tuesday with students during a raid at Birzeit University, north of Ramallah in the West Bank, in what the military said was an operation aimed at disrupting a pro-terror gathering.

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society said 11 students were hospitalized, including five with bullet wounds. No troops were reported injured.

WAFA, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, reported that Israeli forces broke into campus buildings and seized property belonging to a Hamas-affiliated student bloc.

The IDF said the raid was prompted by intelligence indicating that a “gathering in support of terrorism” was expected to take place on campus.

According to the military, IDF troops and Border Police officers entered the university area as the gathering began, used crowd-dispersal measures and fired warning shots only, eventually dispersing the crowd.

TVNL Comment:  The phrase "in support of terrorism" is used to describe anyone, even a college student, who opposes Israeli oppression.  It is used to justify killing anyone, anywhere, who does not announce support of Israel in its Zionist murderers.  The world remains silent.

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Ask anybody about the Jewish vote for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani in the election, and they’ll tell you he lost it badly. If they saw the news coverage, the headlines put a number on it: One-third went to Mamdani, and two-thirds went to his opponent Andrew Cuomo. To backers of Israel, the support for Mamdani was too high. To others, it was read as a sign that Mamdani was too divisive for the Democratic Party coalition—alienating large segments of New York City’s Jewish electorate.

On his first day as Mayor, Mamdani rescinded all executive orders issued by Eric Adams following his federal criminal indictment. This included revoking the Adams administration’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which equates criticism of the state of Israel and Zionism with antisemitism, even as Mamdani maintained the newly-created Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism.

Unsurprisingly, Mamdani, the first Muslim mayor in the city’s history, has routinely been accused of antisemitism from segments of the Democratic and Republican Party establishments, given his advocacy for the Palestinian cause. Regardless, the election results have been used to promote the narrative that Mamdani has little more than marginal support within the Jewish community. But an exit poll of Jewish voters that tells us nothing about their denomination or the wealth of their neighborhood might be missing crucial variables.

A closer block-by-block analysis, in fact, reveals an entirely different story. Whether a voter was Jewish or not turns out to have little to do with their preference for Mamdani or his opponent. Jewish voters, like New York City as a whole, were split between New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his erstwhile opponent Andrew Cuomo based on culture, denomination, age, and income. Block-level results show that Jewish voters routinely voted in line with their neighbors.

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Ukraine's allies said Tuesday they had agreed to provide the country with multilayered international defense guarantees as part of a proposal to end Russia's nearly 4-year-old invasion of its neighbor.

At a key meeting in Paris, leaders from European countries and Canada, as well as U.S. representatives and top officials from the European Union and NATO, said they would provide Kyiv's front-line forces with equipment and training and back them up with air, land and sea support to deter any future Russian attack.

The size of the supporting forces was not made public, and many of the plan's details remain unclear.

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the meeting made "excellent progress" but cautioned that "the hardest yards are still ahead," noting that Russian attacks on Ukraine continue.

He said allies will participate in U.S.-led monitoring and verification of any ceasefire, support the long-term provision of armaments for Ukraine's defense, and work toward binding commitments to support Ukraine in the case of any future attack by Russia.

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Approaching the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, the official plaque honoring the police who defended democracy that day is nowhere to be found.

It's not on display at the Capitol, as is required by law. Its whereabouts aren't publicly known, though it's believed to be in storage.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, has yet to formally unveil the plaque. And the Trump administration's Department of Justice is seeking to dismiss a police officers' lawsuit asking that it be displayed as intended. The Architect of the Capitol, which was responsible for obtaining and displaying the plaque, said in light of the federal litigation, it cannot comment.

Determined to preserve the nation's history, some 100 members of Congress, mostly Democrats, have taken it upon themselves to memorialize the moment. For months, they've mounted poster board-style replicas of the Jan. 6 plaque outside their office doors, resulting in a Capitol complex awash with makeshift remembrances

"On behalf of a grateful Congress, this plaque honors the extraordinary individuals who bravely protected and defended this symbol of democracy on Jan. 6, 2021," reads the faux bronze stand-in for the real thing. "Their heroism will never be forgotten."

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The Pentagon is mounting a six-month review of women in ground combat jobs, to ensure what it calls the military "effectiveness" of having several thousand female soldiers and Marines in infantry, armor and artillery, according to a memo obtained by NPR.

Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel Anthony Tata wrote in a memo last month that the effort is to determine the "operational effectiveness of ground combat units 10 years after the Department lifted all remaining restrictions on women serving in combat roles."

Tata requested Army and Marine Corps leaders to provide data on the readiness, training, performance, casualties and command climate of ground combat units and personnel. The services are to provide points of contact no later than Jan. 15 to the Institute for Defense Analyses, a nonprofit corporation that assists the government on national security issues. The memo says the data should include "all available metrics describing that individual's readiness and ability to deploy (including physical, medical, and other measures of ability to deploy.)"

Moreover, the seven-page memo calls for any internal research and studies — not publicly available — on "the integration of women in combat."
"We should not have women in combat roles"

Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson wrote in an email to NPR that the study is to "ensure standards are met and the United States maintains the most lethal military. Our standards for combat arms positions will be elite uniform, and sex neutral because the weight of a rucksack or a human being doesn't care if you're a man or a woman. Under [Defense] Secretary [Pete] Hegseth, the Department of War's [sic] will not compromise standards to satisfy quotas or an ideological agenda—this is common sense."

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