TV News LIES

Ukraine troops were hanging on in battered Soledar on Wednesday as Russian leaders claimed the crucial city in the hotly contested Donetsk region would be overrun by week's end.

Ukraine Deputy Defense Minister Anna Malyar said heavy fighting continued to rage late Wednesday against soldiers mostly from the private Russian mercenary contractor Wagner Group.

"The enemy once again replaced its units ... and tried to break through the defense of our troops and completely capture the city, but was unsuccessful," Malyar said in a Telegram post.

Wagner Chief Yevgeny Prigozhin said the group's troops controlled the city and were clearing out the last of the Ukrainian fighters. The salt mining town of about 10,000 people a year ago is nearly deserted now, most of its buildings damaged or destroyed by the fighting.

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On weekdays, when most kids around the world are at school, 12-year-old Mansour is in the middle of a grueling shift at the coal mines.

Deep inside a tunnel carved into the side of a blackened mountain, the young boy waits under the flickering glow of his headlamp as older boys pry coal out of the earth by pickaxe and hand, while others shovel the piles into sacks strapped onto the backs of donkeys.

From there, it is Mansour's job — from dawn until dusk — to lead the coal-laden donkeys out of a labyrinth of crumbling tunnels down the mountain in this remote part of Baghlan province, 180 miles north of Kabul. Here, the so-called black gold is bagged and loaded onto trucks, mostly bound for neighboring countries.

"My family sent me to work here last year," he says. He's wearing no protective equipment — no mask, no goggles, just a pair of cheap rubber shoes he's sliced open to let his feet breathe, with toes blackened by coal dust peeking out. "What they pay me goes directly to my family."

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Pele, the legendary Brazilian soccer player who rose from barefoot poverty to become one of the greatest and best-known athletes in modern history, died on Thursday at the age of 82.

Sao Paulo's Albert Einstein hospital, where Pele was undergoing treatment, said he died at 3:27 p.m. "due to multiple organ failures resulting from the progression of colon cancer associated with his previous medical condition."

The death of the only man to win the World Cup three times as a player was confirmed on his Instagram account.

"Inspiration and love marked the journey of King Pele, who peacefully passed away today," it read, adding he had "enchanted the world with his genius in sport, stopped a war, carried out social works all over the world and spread what he most believed to be the cure for all our problems: love."

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China is now facing what is likely the world's largest COVID surge of the pandemic. China's public health officials say that possibly 800 million people could be infected with the coronavirus over the next few months. And several models predict that a half million people could die, possibly more.

"Recently, the deputy director of China CDC, Xiaofeng Liang, who' s a good friend of mine, was announcing through the public media that the first COVID wave may, in fact, infect around 60% of the population," says Xi Chen, who's a global health researcher at Yale University and an expert on China's health-care system.

That means about 10% of the planet's population may become infected over the course of the next 90 days.

Epidemiologist Ben Cowling agrees with this prediction. "This surge is going to come very fast, unfortunately. That's the worst thing," says Cowling, who's at the University of Hong Kong. "If it was slower, China would have time to prepare. But this is so fast. In Beijing, there's already a load of cases and [in] other major cities because it's spreading so fast.

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A Qatari photojournalist covering the World Cup in Qatar has died, according to local reports, bringing the number of journalist fatalities at the contest to two, following the death of US sports journalist Grant Wahl last Friday.

English-language Qatari news service Gulf News reported on Saturday the death of Khalid al-Misslam, citing the Qatari TV news outlet he worked for, Al Kass TV.

Few detail, such as when and how al-Misslam died, have been released, and Qatar's Ministry of Health was unavailable for comment when contacted at time of publication.

According to Gulf News, al-Misslam died "suddenly while covering the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022."

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