TV News LIES

Just hours after Netflix ceded the fight for Warner Bros. to Paramount, CNN‘s CEO Mark Thompson tried to alleviate anxieties over the pending new owners in a staff memo: “Despite all the speculation you’ve read during this process, I’d suggest that you don’t jump to conclusions about the future until we know more.”

Newsrooms, though, are notoriously made up of skeptics, for good reason in an environment of layoffs and buyouts, and, more recently, corporate efforts to woo President Donald Trump. Despite Thompson’s message, the mood among many at the cable news network on Friday was “beyond bleak,” per one source.

Paramount has yet to comment on its specific plans for the network after emerging as the winner for WBD, but in the months since Warner Bros Discovery put itself up for sale, there has been rampant speculation about what life will look like if the David Ellison-led company owned CNN.

Fears only accelerated after the Wall Street Journal reported in December that Ellison made assurances to Trump that he would make major changes to the network, long a target of the president’s. Ellison’s appearance at Trump’s State of the Union address, as a guest of one of his most stalwart congressional supporters, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), probably didn’t help soothe fears of the network’s future editorial direction.

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Neil Sedaka, the legendary singer-songwriter behind tracks like "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do" and "Oh! Carol," has died at 86, his representative Victoria Varela confirmed to USA TODAY.

"Our family is devastated by the sudden passing of our beloved husband, father and grandfather, Neil Sedaka," the family said in a statement to USA TODAY. "A true rock and roll legend, an inspiration to millions, but most importantly, at least to those of us who were lucky enough to know him, an incredible human being who will be deeply missed."

Varela said no additional details could be shared at this time.

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The Brooklyn native grew up to become a beloved pop and rock musician with long-lasting, recognizable hits, including "Laughter in the Rain" and “Calendar Girl."

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Legal experts have documented almost 1,000 incidents in which pro-Palestine voices have been allegedly targeted in the United Kingdom, data that they say represents a “systematic effort” to repress the country’s solidarity movement.

The European Legal Support Center (ELSC) said on Wednesday that it has verified 964 cases of “anti-Palestinian repression” from January 2019 until August 2025, including students being investigated over their solidarity, activists being arrested, employees facing disciplinary procedures and artists having their events cancelled.

The findings of the study, carried out in collaboration with researchers at Forensic Architecture, are a “sample indicative of a far wider and deeper pattern”, said the group comprising lawyers and legal officers.

The ELSC pitched the report as an Index of Repression, a database that is open to the public.

“We’re launching this database to show that repression of the Palestine solidarity movement in Britain is pervasive,” Amira Abdelhamid, ELSC’s director of research and monitoring, told Al Jazeera.

One documented case involves a University of Warwick student who was reported to police by their university for carrying a sign that drew parallels between Israel and Nazi Germany during a campus rally in November 2023.

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Four years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the war is still being fought far away from the frontlines – behind locked doors, in windowless cells, and in silence.

Thousands of Ukrainians remain in Russian captivity. Others have returned carrying memories they struggle to put into words.

One of them is Oleksii, a Ukrainian serviceman of the 13th Brigade of Ukraine’s National Guard, Khartiia, who spent nearly two years in Russian detention.

Speaking exclusively to Kyiv Post, he described torture, psychological pressure, and what he says was a systematic attempt to erase prisoners as individuals – while clinging to a single reason to survive: his newborn daughter.

“I’m not hiding,” Oleksii said. “You can use my name.”

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One glossy insert stuck out from the orientation packet handed to hundreds of Ohio State University freshmen last August. It advertised a tempting offer: students could earn a $4,000 scholarship – close to a third off in-state tuition – if they enrolled in one civics-oriented course and attended three events each semester outside of class.

It seemed straightforward, but missing in the fine print was the controversial nature of the center giving the scholarships, sponsoring the lectures and crafting the new courses. It was the Salmon P Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society, created by Ohio’s Republican-dominated legislature with the explicit goal of enticing students to take courses taught by a newly hired group of conservative philosophers, political scientists and historians.

Housed in one of Ohio State’s sturdy brick buildings, the center has 20 faculty members teaching nine credit-bearing courses this academic year. Most of its lectures and other events have a decidedly right-leaning bent. In 2023, Ohio state legislators allocated $24m in tax dollars to create the Chase Center and four others like it on Ohio campuses and to influence the details of university operations in a manner that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

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On February 26, 2025, a NASA probe called Lunar Trailblazer lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Its mission was to map the water on the moon. But a day after launch, mission managers lost contact with the spacecraft, and it was never heard from again.

One year later, NPR has learned exactly why the $72 million dollar mission failed.

A report by a review panel convened by NASA to explore what went wrong contains the explanation. Software that was supposed to point the spacecraft solar panels toward the sun instead pointed them 180 degrees away from the sun.

In addition, the panel found "many erroneous on-board fault management actions" that, taken together with the solar panel pointing error, "caused the Lunar Trailblazer failure."

NASA provided the report in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

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The Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee plans to look into NPR's investigation revealing Epstein files related to President Trump are missing from the public record.

Asked if he is concerned about a possible Justice Department cover-up after NPR discovered documents related to an accusation of sexual abuse against President Trump weren't included in the database, Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., said Oversight Republicans plan to investigate.

"We're looking into the accusation made by the NPR," Comer told reporters during a Thursday press conference ahead of the committee's deposition of former first lady Hillary Clinton. "We don't know the answer to that. We know what the administration says. We're still looking to get a definitive answer on that."

NPR's previous reporting found internal FBI and Justice Department outline documents related to allegations from a woman who, according to documents within the database, claimed that around 1983, when she was around 13 years old, Jeffrey Epstein introduced her to Trump, "who subsequently forced her head down to his exposed penis which she subsequently bit. In response, Trump punched her in the head and kicked her out."

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Zohran Mamdani met with Donald Trump in Washington on Thursday, during an unannounced trip to the nation’s capital.

On social media, the New York mayor said he had a “productive” meeting with the US president and he was “looking forward to building more housing in New York City”.

Mamdani also said he spoke to the president on the phone after the meeting to discuss the arrest of Elmina Aghayeva, a Columbia University student who was detained by federal immigration agents on Thursday.

“He has just informed me that she will be released imminently,” Mamdani said. The White House did not reply to the Guardian’s request for comment.

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