TV News LIES

He spent the twilight of his career denouncing Donald Trump as a threat to the republic he loved. But Dick Cheney arguably laid the foundations of Trump’s authoritarian takeover of the United States.

Cheney, who served under George W Bush for eight years, was one of the most influential and polarising vice-presidents in US history. Some critics said they would never forgive him for pushing the US to invade Iraq on a false pretext but suggested that his opposition to Trump offered a measure of redemption.

Perhaps Cheney’s defining legacy, however, was the expansion of powers for a position that he never held himself: the presidency. Cheney used the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks as a pretext to assert a muscular executive authority that Trump now amplifies and exploits to challenge the system of checks and balances.

The former vice-president died on Monday aged 84. The White House lowered flags to half-mast in remembrance of him but without the usual announcement or proclamation praising the deceased.

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The US Senate on Sunday took a key vote on a bill that would end the record-setting federal government shutdown without extending the healthcare subsidies that Democrats have demanded.

Senators began voting on Sunday night to advance House-passed stopgap funding legislation that Senate majority leader John Thune said would be amended to combine another short-term spending measure with a package of three full-year appropriations bills.

The package would still have to be passed by the House of Representatives and sent to Donald Trump for his signature, a process that could take several days.

Senate Democrats so far have resisted efforts to reopen the government, aiming to pressure Republicans into agreeing to extend subsidies for Affordable Care Act health plans, which expire at the end of the year. Thune said that, per the deal under consideration, the Senate would agree to hold a separate vote later on the subsidies.Richard Blumenthal, a Democratic senator for Connecticut, told reporters that he would vote against the funding measure but suggested there could be enough Democratic support to pass it.

“I am unwilling to accept a vague promise of a vote at some indeterminate time, on some undefined measure that extends the healthcare tax credits,” Blumenthal said.

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The head of the BBC and the British broadcaster’s top news executive both resigned Sunday after criticism of the way the organization edited a speech by U.S. President Donald Trump.

The BBC said Director-General Tim Davie and news CEO Deborah Turness had both decided to leave the corporation.

Britain’s publicly funded national broadcaster has been criticized for editing a speech Trump made on Jan. 6, 2021, before protesters attacked the Capitol in Washington.

Critics said the way the speech was edited for a BBC documentary last year was misleading and cut out a section where Trump said he wanted supporters to demonstrate peacefully.

A clip of the BBC “Panorama” episode shared by The Daily Telegraph appears to show different parts of Trump’s speech edited into one quote. In the episode, Trump is shown saying: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”

According to video and a transcript from Trump’s comments that day, he said:  “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.

“Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated.

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Cancer continues to be one of the world's top causes of death, due in part to delayed discovery of the disease. But according to a recently released study, a simple blood test may be able to identify a variety of cancers in their early stages.

In addition to earlier detection, the study from GRAIL, a biotechnology company, showed that its multi-cancer early detection (MCED) testing method found cancers in organs that don't have routine screening tests. The test, known as Galleri, picked up cancer signals in 216 people, and 133 of them were found to actually have cancer. The study also found that the test correctly predicted the cancer's origin 92% of the time.

Shifting cancer screening options

Because of the lack of screening for many of the most serious cancers, they tend to be found after it is too late. But when tumors are found early on, they are more treatable and possibly curable.

There are currently established screening methods for various cancers, including mammograms, pap tests, colonoscopies, and tests for the prostate and lungs.

The FDA has not yet approved the Galleri MCED testing method; more research is currently ongoing.

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It was a moment of triumph for a man who has faced continual heartache over the past two years.

On Thursday, Dr. Jamal Eltaeb of Sudan was named the winner of the $1 million Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity, which recognizes individuals who risk their lives to save others. The prize committee praised his "extraordinary courage and steadfast dedication to providing care for those trapped in conflict."

His country's civil war broke out in 2023, with a paramilitary group battling government forces. "Everywhere you look, there is pain that words cannot capture," Eltaeb told NPR in a Zoom interview.

That sentiment is echoed by the United Nations, which has described the country's civil war as the most devastating humanitarian crisis in the world. Over 150,000 have been killed and more than 12 million people displaced. Yet Eltaeb has been steadfast in serving the Sudanese people. An orthopedic surgeon, he is the director of Al Nao Hospital in Omdurman, one of the hospitals still functioning in areas surrounding the capital of Khartoum.

"It was my duty to my country and to my people," he says. "People need somebody to stay there for them."

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A Russian drone slammed into an apartment building in eastern Ukraine early Saturday while many were sleeping, killing four people — three in Dnipro and one in Kharkiv — and wounding 12 others, Ukrainian authorities reported.

The attack in Dnipro, Ukraine’s fourth-largest city, was part of a large Russian missile and drone barrage across the country that targeted power infrastructure. It also killed a worker at an energy company in Kharkiv, farther north, a local official said.

A fire broke out and several apartments were destroyed in the nine-story building in Dnipro, the emergency services said. Rescuers recovered the bodies of three people, while two children were among the wounded.

Russia fired a total of 458 drones and 45 missiles, including 32 ballistic missiles. Ukrainian forces shot down and neutralized 406 drones and nine missiles, the air force said, adding that 25 locations were struck.

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Last February, Mohammed Ibrahim — then 15 — was awoken and pulled from his bed by Israeli soldiers, who said he'd been spotted throwing stones in the occupied West Bank.

He's Palestinian-American, and his family splits their time between the Tampa area and a sprawling stone house surrounded by olive trees in this West Bank village.

"Around 3:30 in the morning, they blindfolded him, handcuffed him — they just took him," his mother, Muna Ibrahim, 46, recalls. "Since that day I didn't see my son. I didn't hear his voice."

Mohammed, a U.S. citizen, has been in Israeli prison since then, without family visits or phone calls. In March, he turned 16 behind bars, and faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.

He's one of more than 9,000 Palestinians, including hundreds of children, detained in the West Bank since the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, and the Gaza war that followed, according to official Palestinian figures.

On Sunday, the Florida teen has a hearing in an Israeli military court. It's his tenth court appointment, according to his father, Zaher Ibrahim, who plans to attend. All of the previous hearings have adjourned without a plea bargain or trial date.

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Sam Rasoul, the Virginia Democrat who is currently the longest-serving Muslim state lawmaker in the US and who faced accusations of antisemitism over language condemning Israel’s assault on Gaza as genocide, scored a resounding victory in Tuesday’s election that he believes shows voters are craving honesty from politicians.

Rasoul, an American Palestinian state legislator since 2014, strengthened his majority as he was re-elected to an area of Virginia where the city of Roanoke leans Democrat and the surrounding areas are deeply conservative. In an election seen as a referendum on Trump’s policies, which have disproportionately affected Virginia, Rasoul increased his vote share from four years ago by more than 5% as Democrats trounced Republicans from the legislature to the governor’s mansion.

“A 70% victory in the Bible belt of Virginia for a Palestinian Muslim is really a validation, beyond just Democrats winning, that you can be bold on the Gaza genocide and still be victorious,” Rasoul told the Guardian.

His win came despite months of attack ads and rebukes from other party leaders in the state. He was accused of hate speech and antisemitism by his opponent, a Jewish Republican party member who ran as an independent, pro-Israel groups and senior members of his own party after he called the killing of at least 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023 “the most evil cleansing in human history” and blamed Zionism, which he labelled “a supremacist ideology created to destroy and coronquer everything and everyone in its way”.

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