TV News LIES

Russian President Vladimir Putin declared a unilateral Easter ceasefire in Ukraine, ordering his forces to end hostilities at 6 p.m. Moscow time on Saturday until the end of Sunday.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukrainian air defense units were repelling an attack by Russian drones on Saturday, saying that showed true Moscow's attitude to Easter and the lives of people.

"Based on humanitarian considerations ... the Russian side announces an Easter truce. I order a stop to all military activities for this period," Putin told his military chief, Valery Gerasimov, at a meeting in the Kremlin.

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All three people on board a small plane were killed when it crashed into a river in Nebraska the evening of April 18, authorities said.

The plane was traveling along the Platte River south of the city of Fremont in Dodge County, Nebraska, when it crashed, the sheriff's office there said.

The plane was a Cessna 180, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. It crashed into the river at about 8:45 p.m. The cause of the crash was not immediately clear.

"The three occupants of the plane have been recovered and are confirmed deceased. Those identities will not be released at this time pending next of kin notification," the Dodge County Sheriff's Office said in a statement.

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US president Donald Trump has said the White House would “take a pass” on brokering a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine if there are no signs of immediate progress.

“Now if for some reason one of the two parties makes it very difficult, we’re just going to say, ‘you’re foolish, you’re fools, you’re horrible people, and we’re going to just take a pass,” Mr Trump told reporters at the White House.

“But hopefully we won’t have to do that,” he added.

The president’s comment came hours after US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said the White House may move on unless there are signs of progress.

Meanwhile, Ukraine said it had signed a preliminary agreement on a minerals deal with the US, and that a final accord could be reached by the end of next week.

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U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson on Friday halted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's attempt to lay off the vast majority of its employees and gut the agency.

Her order comes after the CFPB had sent reduction-in-force notices to more than 1,400 staffers across the agency on Thursday.

The CFPB had proceeded with layoffs after a three-judge panel last week had ruled the agency could conduct a reduction in force if it made "a particularized assessment" to determine which employees were "unnecessary" for the bureau's performance of its statutory duties.

But the CFPB's union immediately took legal action seeking to halt the mass layoffs, saying the agency had not in fact conducted the thorough assessment required by that three-judge panel.

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The justice department’s civil rights division is shifting its focus away from its longstanding work protecting the rights of marginalized groups and will instead pivot towards Donald Trump’s priorities including hunting for noncitizen voters and protecting white people from discrimination, according to new internal mission statements seen by the Guardian.

The new priorities were sent to several sections of the civil rights division this week by Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump ally who was confirmed a little more than two weeks ago to lead the division. Several of them only give glancing mention to the statutes and kinds of discrimination that have long been the focus of the division, which dates back to the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Several of the mission statements point to Trump’s executive orders as priorities for the section.

A federal judge on Friday ordered that a Turkish Tufts University student detained by immigration authorities in Louisiana to be brought to Vermont by 1 May for a hearing over what her lawyers say was apparent retaliation for an op-ed piece she co-wrote in the student newspaper.

US district judge William Sessions said he would hear Rumeysa Ozturk’s request to be released from detention. Her lawyers had requestthat she be released immediately, or at least brought back to Vermont.

The 30-year-old doctoral student was taken by immigration officials as she walked along a street in the Boston suburb of Somerville on 25 March. After being taken to New Hampshire and then Vermont, she was put on a plane the next day and moved to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Basile, Louisiana. An immigration judge denied her request for bond Wednesday.

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The American Civil Liberties Union asked the US supreme court to block what the group called the imminent deportation of a new group of Venezuelan men detained in Texas without the judicial review previously ordered by the court.

In an emergency Friday court filing, ACLU lawyers said dozens of Venezuelan men held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Bluebonnet detention center in Texas were given notices indicating they were classified as members of the Tren de Aragua gang and would be deported under the Alien Enemies Act, and were told “that the removals are imminent and will happen tonight or tomorrow”.

The ACLU has already sued to block deportations under the Alien Enemies Act of two Venezuelans held in the Texas detention center and is asking a judge to issue an order barring removals of any immigrants in the region under the law.