TV News LIES

The State Department said Wednesday it will suspend the processing of immigrant visas for citizens of 75 countries whose nationals are deemed likely to require public assistance while living in the United States.

The State Department, led by Secretary Marco Rubio, said it had instructed consular officers to halt immigrant visa applications from the countries affected in accordance with a broader order issued in November that tightened rules around potential immigrants who might become “public charges” in the U.S.

The suspension, which will begin Jan. 21, will not apply to applicants seeking non-immigrant visas, or temporary tourist or business visas.

“The Trump administration is bringing an end to the abuse of America’s immigration system by those who would extract wealth from the American people,” the department said in a statement. “Immigrant visa processing from these 75 countries will be paused while the State Department reassess immigration processing procedures to prevent the entry of foreign nationals who would take welfare and public benefits.”

More...

The Trump administration has completed its first Venezuelan oil sale, valued at $500 million, an administration official confirmed to The Hill on Wednesday.

The official also said additional sales are expected in the coming days and weeks. 

Semafor first reported the deal, including that revenue from it is being held in bank accounts, including one in Qatar, that are controlled by the U.S. government. 

The announcement comes after President Trump announced last week that Venezuela would turn over between 30 and 50 million barrels of oil to the U.S.

More...

The Supreme Court on Wednesday revived an Illinois Congress member’s lawsuit over a state mail-in ballot law, paving the way for political candidates nationwide to challenge election laws more easily in their states.

The justices ruled 7-2 that Rep. Mike Bost (R-Ill.) has the legal right to sue Illinois over its ability to count mail-in ballots received after Election Day, a practice targeted by President Trump and his allies.Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion over the dissents of two of the court’s liberals: Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

“Candidates, in short, are not ‘mere bystanders’ in their own elections,” Roberts wrote. “They have an obvious personal stake in how the result is determined and regarded.”

The legality of the Illinois mail-in ballot practice was not before the justices. But lower courts ruled Bost did not have standing to bring the case after finding the votes likely would not much impact his own race.

More...

Russian strikes damaged the Polish consulate in the southern Ukrainian city of Odesa overnight, according to Poland’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Maciej Wewiór.

"As a result of the overnight bombardment, the Polish consulate in Odesa was damaged,” Wewiór wrote on X, describing it as “another night of Russian terror.”

He added that no consulate employees had been injured and praised the diplomats’ work, saying: “Great respect for the entire [Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs] team working in Ukraine.”

Russia overnight struck cities across the country in one of its largest attacks of the yr so far.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Moscow had launched almost 300 drones, 18 ballistic missiles and seven cruise missiles in the sweeping attacks which affected eight regions and targeted energy-generation facilities and substations.

Four people were killed in Kharkiv when missiles and drones hit a postal terminal.

At least five people were injured in Odesa as temperatures dropped to –7°C and fires broke out at a residential building, a fitness center and a garage, causing extensive damage.

Emergency psychologists were forced to assist 14 people, including one child.

More...

For years, the Environmental Protection Agency has assigned a dollar value to the lives saved and the health problems avoided through many of its environmental regulations.

Now, that has changed. The EPA will no longer consider the economic cost of harm to human health from fine particles and ozone, two air pollutants that are known to affect human health. The change was written into a new rule recently published by the agency. It weakened air pollution rules on power plant turbines that burn fossil fuels, which are sources of air pollution of many types, including from fine particles, sometimes called soot.

The EPA writes in its regulatory impact analysis for the new rule that, for now, the agency will not consider the dollar value of health benefits from its regulations on fine particles and ozone because there is too much uncertainty in estimates of those economic impacts.

EPA press secretary Brigit Hirsch clarified that the agency is still considering health benefits. But it will not assign a dollar amount to those benefits until further notice, as it reconsiders the way it assesses those numbers.

More...

The Trump administration is terminating temporary protected status (TPS) for Somalis living in the United States, giving hundreds of people two months to leave the country or face deportation.

The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, said in a statement that conditions in the east African country had improved sufficiently and that Somalis no longer qualified for the designation under federal law.

“Temporary means temporary,” Noem wrote, adding that allowing Somali nationals to remain was “contrary to our national interests”.

“We are putting Americans first,” she added.

Then Donald Trump said his administration was going to revoke the US citizenship of any naturalized immigrant from Somalia or any other country who is convicted of defrauding what he referred to as “our citizens”.

More...

Several faculty groups have denounced the Trump administration’s efforts to obtain information about Jewish professors, staff and students at the University of Pennsylvania – including personal emails, phone numbers and home addresses – as government abuse with “ominous historical overtones”.

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is demanding the university turn over names and personal information about Jewish members of the Penn community as part of the administration’s stated goal to combat antisemitism on campuses. But some Jewish faculty and staff have condemned the government’s demand as “a visceral threat to the safety of those who would find themselves identified because compiling and turning over to the government ‘lists of Jews’ conjures a terrifying history”, according to a press release put out by the groups’ lawyers.

The EEOC sued Penn in November over the university’s refusal to fully comply with its demands. On Tuesday, the American Association of University Professors’ national and Penn chapters, the university’s Jewish Law Students Association and its Association of Senior and Emeritus Faculty, and the American Academy of Jewish Research filed a motion in federal court to intervene in the case.

“These requests would require Penn to create and turn over a centralized registry of Jewish students, faculty, and staff – a profoundly invasive and dangerous demand that intrudes deeply into the freedoms of association, religion, speech, and privacy enshrined in the First Amendment,” the groups argued.

More...

A senior Greenland government official said Tuesday it’s “unfathomable” that the United States is discussing taking over a NATO ally and urged the Trump administration to listen to voices from the Arctic island’s people.

Naaja Nathanielsen, Greenland’s minister for business and mineral resources, said people in Greenland are “very, very worried” over the administration’s desire for control of Greenland.

She spoke a day before a key meeting in Washington between foreign ministers of the semi-autonomous Danish territory and Denmark and top U.S. officials, at a time of increased tensions between the allies over the stepped-up U.S. rhetoric.

The official, who was not authorized to comment publicly on the sensitive matter and spoke on the condition of anonymity, declined to provide details about what the support entailed.

“People are not sleeping, children are afraid, and it just fills everything these days. And we can’t really understand it,” Nathanielsen said at a meeting with lawmakers in Britain’s Parliament.

Earlier, a Danish government official confirmed that Denmark provided U.S. forces in the east Atlantic with support last week as they intercepted an oil tanker for alleged violations of U.S. sanctions.

More...