TV News LIES

A powerful federal appeals court in the nation's capital sided with the Trump administration Friday on its military transgender ban, but other courts' blockades of the policy remain in effect.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the partial ban announced by the Pentagon, but never implemented, should not have been blocked by a district court while it was being challenged.

The three judges on the panel were appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

More...

A spacecraft has landed on the far side of the moon for the first time, China's National Space Administration announced Thursday.

The rover Chang'e-4, which is named after the moon goddess in Chinese mythology, landed at 10:26 a.m. Beijing time in the South Pole-Aitken Basin, which is an impact crater, state news agency Xinhua reported.

The United States and the Soviet Union have made a "soft landing" on the moon -- China landed a rover there in 2013 -- but no other country has touched down on the dark side of the moon, which always faces away from the Earth.

More...

The developer of the Dakota Access oil pipeline missed a year-end deadline to plant thousands of trees along the pipeline corridor in North Dakota. The company said it was still complying with a settlement of allegations it violated state rules during construction.

Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), which built the $3.8bn pipeline that is now moving North Dakota oil to Illinois, is falling back on a provision of the September 2017 agreement that provides more time should the company run into problems. The company must provide 20,000 trees to county soil conservation districts along the pipeline’s 359-mile route in North Dakota.

It was mid-November, and Donald Trump was once again enveloped in political scandals and legal woes. He and his attorneys were finalizing written answers to Special Counsel Robert Mueller; the administration was trying to defend a lethal-force authorization at a militarized southern border; and the Republican Party was licking its wounds from the 2018 midterm election drubbing.

In the midst of all that drama, however, the president’s mind drifted elsewhere.

News had recently broke that Cliff Sims, a former Trump White House official, had penned a “tell-all” book about life in a backstabbing-filled West Wing. A 2016 campaign veteran, Sims had enjoyed wide access in part due to his personal friendship with Trump. The two men were so close that the president affectionately called him “my Cliff,” according to a source familiar with their relationship.

More...

President Donald Trump “has not risen to the mantle” of his office, and his “words and actions have caused dismay around the world,” Mitt Romney wrote Tuesday in an op-ed for The Washington Post.

The scathing rebuke of Trump’s leadership from the former Massachusetts governor and GOP presidential nominee comes just two days before Romney is set to be sworn in as Utah’s junior senator.

While people around the world were celebrating the arrival of 2019, people at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland were hard at work. Billions of miles away, the New Horizons probe was flying past Ultima Thule, a small object in the Kuiper Belt. By Tuesday morning, the hardware had sent back a status report that indicated the flyby went as planned, and New Horizons now has lots of data from Ultima Thule that it will slowly send back to Earth over the coming months.

While we don't yet have any of the data that will tell us details about this relic of the Solar System's formation, images taken during the approach solved one of the mysteries that had arisen as New Horizons closed in. But one of the key questions—is Ultima Thule one object or two?—remains unanswered.

More...

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office appears to have responded to a foreign company’s bid to get the Supreme Court to step into a fight over a grand jury subpoena served on the firm.

Most details of the case remain under seal at the Supreme Court since the company asked for an emergency stay last week, but an entry in the high court’s docket indicates a response was filed Friday, three days ahead of the Monday deadline set by the court. The filing was accompanied by an application to put the filing under seal, the Supreme Court docket says.

The docket entry doesn’t indicate Mueller’s office is involved in the legal fight. Indeed, there’s not even a mention in the Supreme Court’s public records that the U.S. Government or the Justice Department is involved in the case.

More...

President Trump announced on Thursday that Defense Secretary James Mattis will retire "with distinction" at the end of February, soon after Mr. Trump announced he would order the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria.

"During Jim's tenure, tremendous progress has been made, especially with respect to the purchase of new fighting equipment," Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. "General Mattis was a great help to me in getting allies and other countries to pay their share of military obligations. A new Secretary of Defense will be named shortly. I greatly thank Jim for his service!"

News of Mattis' impending departure comes the day after Mr. Trump's sudden announcement about Syria, a decision he made without consulting security officials in his administration.

TVNL Comment:  The last of the grown-ups in theTrump cabinet is leaving.  This is either the end of Trump or the end of the nation.  Both are probable.

More...