TV News LIES

Washington will provide Israel $3.5 billion to spend on U.S. weapons and military equipment, the State Department said on Friday, with the release of the money coming months after the U.S. Congress appropriated it during Israel's war in Gaza.

The Biden administration unleashed a torrent of criticism against Israel’s polarizing finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, on Friday after he referred to cease-fire negotiations with Hamas as a “dangerous trap.”

White House national security communications adviser John Kirby said a lengthy statement posted by Smotrich to the social platform X made “ridiculous charges” regarding his opposition to a cease-fire deal to end the fighting in Gaza.

“Some critics, like Mr. Smotrich, for example, have claimed that the hostage deal is a surrender to Hamas or that hostages should not be exchanged for prisoners. Mr. Smotrich essentially suggests that the war ought to go on indefinitely without pause and with the lives of the hostages of no real concern at all,” Kirby said.

PARIS — The drought is over.

U.S. weightlifter Olivia Reeves won a gold medal in her Olympic debut, bringing the U.S. team its gold medal since before Reeves was born.

Reeves, 21 and a student at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, was widely favored to win the gold medal after a string of impressive performances in international competition. The last time the U.S. brought home a gold medal was in 2000, at the Sydney Games. That was the first Olympic Games that included women’s weightlifting as part of the program.

Cara Heads-Slaughter, who was a member of the U.S. women’s weightlifting Olympic team in 2000, told NPR that Reeves is “on track to be the best U.S. weightlifter in women’s history.”

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Ukrainian forces staged an overnight ambush on a Russian convoy 25 miles inside the international border in Russia’s Kursk province, as the Kremlin declared a federal emergency and said it was transferring extra forces to try to snuff out a four-day incursion that has badly damaged its credibility.

A video circulated by Russian military bloggers showed a destroyed convoy, with bodies just visible inside some trucks, on the E38 east-west highway at Oktyabrskoe, a location far deeper inside Russia than any previously confirmed fighting since Ukraine’s forces crossed the border on Tuesday.

Commentators said the attack, reminiscent of Ukrainian attacks on Russian troops besieging Kyiv in the first weeks of the war, demonstrated an effective hit-and-run strategy, but the incursion appeared likely to draw an escalating response from the Kremlin, and its overall outcome remains profoundly uncertain.

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A plane with 62 people aboard crashed in a fiery wreck in a residential area of a city in Brazil’s Sao Paulo state Friday, the airline said, but it was not immediately clear how many people were injured or killed.

The airline VoePass confirmed in a statement that a plane headed for Sao Paulo’s international airport Guarulhos crashed in the city of Vinhedo with 58 passengers and 4 crew members aboard. The statement didn’t say what caused the accident.

At an event in southern Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva asked the crowd to stand and observe a minute of silence as he shared the news. He said that it appeared that all passengers and crew aboard had died, without elaborating as to how that information had been obtained.

Firefighters, military police and the civil defense authority dispatched teams to the crash site in Vinhedo.

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The Israeli military has ordered another mass evacuation in large areas around Khan Younis in southern Gaza, saying its forces will soon operate there in response to Palestinian rocket fire. Gaza’s second-largest city, Khan Younis suffered widespread destruction during air and ground operations earlier this year.

Israeli forces have repeatedly returned to heavily destroyed areas of Gaza where they had fought earlier battles against Hamas and other militants since the start of the 10-month-old war.

Gaza faces a severe humanitarian crisis with Israeli restrictions on aid and ongoing fighting limiting access to crucial medical, food and other supplies. The Health Ministry in Gaza says the death toll in the territory is nearing 40,000.

Regional tensions have soared since Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed July 31 in Iran by a presumed Israeli strike. Retaliation has been expected.

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