TV News LIES

China canceled 12,000 metric tons of United States pork shipments amid a high-stakes trade standoff between the superpowers, according to data released Thursday.

China, one of the biggest U.S. trading partners, axed 12,000 metric tons of U.S. pork orders, the data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) shows.

The move represents the biggest cancellation of pork orders since the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted supply chains and stalled economies around the world, Bloomberg News reported.

At least 25 people have been killed in Israeli airstrikes across Gaza, including 11 in the bombing of a school turned shelter, the strip’s civil defence agency said, as Israel’s war against Hamas in the besieged Palestinian territory grinds on despite a new ceasefire proposal from Arab mediators.

Intense Israeli bombings hit several areas of Gaza on Wednesday, killing 11 in a school sheltering displaced people in al-Tuffah, a neighbourhood of Gaza City. The strike ignited a huge fire that claimed most of the casualties, said a civil defence spokesperson, Mahmoud Bassal.

The Qatari network Al Jazeera and Palestinian media broadcast footage of several bodies wrapped in white shrouds at al-Shifa hospital’s morgue, and women weeping over the body of a child.

Donald Trump has hit out at Volodymyr Zelensky for saying Ukraine would not recognise Russia's occupation of Crimea.

"This statement is very harmful to the peace negotiations with Russia," the US president said in a social media post, adding that a US brokered peace deal is on the horizon.

“He has nothing to boast about! The situation for Ukraine is dire — He can have Peace or, he can fight for another three years before losing the whole Country,” Mr Trump wrote.

It comes as high-level peace summit in London to discuss the terms of a Ukraine peace deal on Wednesday was abruptly downgraded after Mr Trump’s most senior diplomat snubbed the meeting.

Foreign ministers from France and Germany abandoned plans to travel to the UK for the talks after US secretary of state Marco Rubio announced he would not attend, citing “scheduling issues”.

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Everything on Earth, in our solar system, our galaxy, and beyond is contained within the universe. So how much does  science tell us about the all-encompassing, four-dimensional cradle that holds all of space time? A lot.

Philosophers, mathematicians, and astronomers across cultures and centuries have long debated and theorized about the night sky. But in the early 1920’s, building on the work of Henrietta Swan Leavitt and others, astronomer Edwin Hubble produced the first clear evidence that the swirling clusters visible through telescopes were actually distant galaxies, comparable to our own Milky Way. By capturing  detailed, long-exposure images of space features like pulsing, Cepheid variable stars, Hubble confirmed the true nature of the Andromeda Nebula and others. These weren’t just nearby gas clouds, but far away islands of worlds and stars.

Air in the U.S. has gotten cleaner for decades, adding years to people's lives and preventing millions of asthma attacks, but nearly half of Americans still live with unhealthy air pollution, a new report finds.

The report comes as the Trump administration is considering rolling back some key air quality regulations.

Air quality across the country has improved dramatically since regulations like the Clean Air Act were put in place in the 1970s to govern sources of pollution like coal-fired power plants and emissions from diesel trucks. Despite that progress, the air is still unhealthy and polluted in many parts of the country. In 2023, nearly half of the country's inhabitants — 156 million people — lived in places heavy in smog or soot pollution that harms their lungs, hearts, and brains, according to the newest edition of the American Lung Association's State of the Air report.

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The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS ) has terminated two grants for Black history and culture that were awarded to the Whitney Plantation, a former plantation in Louisiana that focuses on the truths of slavery and the experiences of people who were enslaved. IMLS provides resources and support to libraries, archives and museums in all 50 states and territories.

The termination comes as the Trump administration has both gutted federal funding aimed at arts and cultural institutions and has pushed to end state and federal initiatives in support of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Recently, federal webpages that included references to thousands of figures, including Harriet Tubman, Indigenous codetalkers, the US army Maj Gen Charles Calvin Rogers, were either removed outright or scrubbed to exclude references to the aforementioned people. After public outcry, some of these pages were restored.

The Whitney Plantation already received one of the grants this year, but the other, which was to help fund an exhibit about how enslaved people resisted on plantations, was set to be completed in June this year. Without the funding, the Whitney stands to lose about $55,000. The exhibit on resistance to slavery, on which the museum had worked for three years, was due to open in January 2026.

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Donald Trump signed executive orders on Wednesday targeting universities as his administration seeks to reshape higher-education institutions and continues to crack down on diversity and inclusion efforts.

The actions address foreign gifts to universities, directing the federal government to “enforce laws on the books” related to the disclosure of large donations, and college accreditation, which the president has referred to as his “secret weapon” to upend US universities. While reading the orders to Trump, the White House staff secretary Will Scharf said that the third-party groups that accredit universities have relied on “woke ideology” rather than merit.

Linda McMahon, the education secretary, added during the signing in the Oval Office: “We should be looking at those who have real merit to get in, and we have to look harder at those universities that aren’t enforcing that.”

TVNL Comment:  This is how Trusmp hopes to keep people of color in 'their own' colleges, and keep them out of prestigious ivy league schools.  Clever? You bet.

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