TV News LIES

In its final act of the year, the Senate sped to pass a $1.8 trillion bill that funds the government until October and extends sweeping tax breaks, many permanently.

After months of tense negotiating, lawmakers on Friday passed the omnibus spending bill and tax extenders package in a 65-33 vote, sending it to the White House for the president's signature. The House passed the omnibus earlier Friday.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Friday seemed unconcerned that Russian President Vladimir Putin kills journalists who disagree with him.

Trump was pressed on his support for Putin by MSNBC host Joe Scarborough on "Morning Joe" Friday. The comments came a day after the Republican presidential hopeful and the Russian president publicly praised each other.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday she’s unsure whether the $1.1 trillion year-end government spending bill will pass the House — despite support from President Obama and congressional leaders in both parties and chambers.

Asked if she's “confident” the package will win enough Democratic votes to move through the lower chamber, Pelosi didn't pause for a second.

“No,” she told reporters in the Capitol. “We're talking it through.”

- The world's lakes are heating up at an average rate of 0.61 degrees Fahrenheit per decade, outpacing the rise in ocean and atmosphere temperatures.

The new findings are the result of a first-of-its-kind international survey, combining satellite and ground-based temperature data on 235 lakes, comprising more than half the planet's freshwater supply.

An Israeli rights group on Wednesday accused Israeli security forces of using "excessive and unwarranted" force in the killing of some Palestinians who attacked or were suspected of attacking Israelis during the current wave of violence.

Israeli officials rejected the charges by the B'Tselem group. The watchdog's statement said Israeli officers had used excessive lethal force against Palestinians in at least 12 cases in Jerusalem and the West Bank over the past two months.

James Schnurr, just two months into his job as chief accountant at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, stood before a packed ballroom in Washington last December and upbraided a little-known regulator.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, or PCAOB, oversees the big firms that sign off on the books of America’s listed companies. And the board was “moving too slowly,” Schnurr said, to address auditing failures that in recent years had shaken public confidence in those firms.

Two unpublished investigations show that the United States has consistently overlooked killings and torture by Iraqi government-sponsored Shi'ite militias.

It was one of the most shocking events in one of the most brutal periods in Iraq’s history. In late 2005, two years after the U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein, U.S. soldiers raided a police building in Baghdad and found 168 prisoners in horrific conditions.

Many were malnourished. Some had been beaten.

The discovery of the secret prison exposed a world of kidnappings and assassinations. Behind these operations was an unofficial Interior Ministry organisation called the Special Investigations Directorate, according to U.S. and Iraqi security officials at the time.

Fifty-five journalists have been killed across the world so far this year. In purely statistical terms, it signifies an improvement. It is six fewer than were killed last year and 17 fewer than in 2013.

Yet it is further evidence of the incredibly hostile condtions under which many journalists work, conditions that have seen a total of 597 killed over the past decade because of their journalistic activities.