TV News LIES

A high-rise building in Manhattan was deemed unstable on Tuesday after authorities determined that support columns buckled, spurring evacuation of nearby buildings, according to officials and reports.

Officials said they also found “structural issues” on the 21st floor of the former Pfizer pharmaceutical building, which is being converted into residential apartments. “Two structural columns buckled, and there were multiple cracks and sagging floors,” the fire department said on X.

Workers were expected to begin stabilizing the building on Tuesday evening. According to New York mayor Zohran Mamdani’s office, a team went through each floor and did not detect any additional movement of the support columns, allowing the on-site contractors to begin the emergency repair work.

The temporary measures are meant to stabilize the building and are expected to stretch into the coming days, impacting a busy corridor of midtown near the famed Grand Central Terminal, which is a hub for metro area commuters and residents as well as tourists.

Officials said they received reports of a “structural issue at an active construction site” on East 42nd Street, between Second and Third avenues, before 8am.

The fire department also posted a photo of a dramatically bent beam on its X account.

“It’s a very serious situation because the box beams – the steel beams – have started to bend and deflect from the weight,” John Esposito, the fire department chief, said. “We evacuated the building and started evacuations of surrounding buildings.”

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Lake Powell, the US’s second-largest reservoir, threatens to plunge to unprecedentedly low levels this year after a historically bleak snowpack failed to raise its water level, scientists and water experts have said, adding renewed urgency to stalled talks over how to conserve a water source depended on by tens of millions of people in the US south-west.

The 185-mile Colorado River reservoir currently stands at about 22% of its capacity, or roughly 5.6m acre-feet. Lake Powell fell below that level for a few months three years ago. But those 2023 levels were recorded in the winter, when the reservoir, which straddles the Utah-Arizona border, hits its lowest ebb. Spring runoff carried the level back up to 9.6m acre-feet by June, according to data from the US Bureau of Reclamation.

Not this year. After a winter of historically low snowpack in the mountains and a heatwave that broke records across the south-west in March, water levels at Lake Powell barely rose this spring at all. Even after supplemental releases from Flaming Gorge Reservoir upstream, it ended the month of June below the annual low it hit the month before, and could keep dropping. Except for those few months in 2023, Lake Powell’s water level has not been this low since June of 1965 – two years after US authorities first started filling it.

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Just a few weeks after President Donald Trump’s December promise that prescription drug prices would plummet "fast and furious," Patricia Brown checked into a California clinic for an infusion of Merck & Co.'s blockbuster cancer drug, Keytruda. 

When the bill arrived, the clinic's charge for a 400 milligram dose dominated the page: $162,567.74.  

Brown, an accomplished cook battling lung cancer, owed about $2,000.

But the six-figure charges to Brown and her insurance company show how quickly prices for cutting-edge medical treatments can balloon in the U.S. health care system. Someone has to pay: An employer, taxpayers, or regular people whose insurance premiums go up and up.

The price of Keytruda for Americans starts high and often heads higher. Merck lists Brown’s dose at an already steep $24,000. Then, depending on the insurer, the health care provider and any number of middlemen, prices can rise.

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President Trump renewed his call for the United States to have control of Greenland soon after arriving in Turkey for the NATO summit, reopening a fight that badly frayed relations with allies earlier this year.

“Greenland doesn’t help Denmark, Denmark doesn’t spend money to really help Greenland, but it’s an important part for the United States,” Trump said during a bilateral meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Greenland is a self-governing, semiautonomous territory owned by Denmark. Trump has repeatedly argued that U.S. control over Greenland is necessary for global security and countering Russian and Chinese threats in the Arctic.

“That should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark,” he said. “And when they wouldn’t go along with it, and with all the money we spend to help them with Russia — we don’t have to spend any money.”

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In a blow to President Donald Trump's efforts to investigate the 2020 presidential election, a federal judge quashed a grand jury subpoena July 7 seeking information on 2020 election workers from Atlanta's Fulton County.

"The breadth of the Grand Jury Subpoena ... is staggering," targeting personal identifying information for "thousands of employees and volunteers," wrote Judge William M. Ray II, who was appointed by Trump to the federal bench in 2018.

More...A series of audits, recounts and court cases have failed to produce evidence that would support Trump's assertions that Joe Biden beat him through widespread fraud, but Trump has continued to promote his unsubstantiated claims.More...

"The breadth of the Grand Jury Subpoena ... is staggering," targeting personal identifying information for "thousands of employees and volunteers," wrote Judge William M. Ray II, who was appointed by Trump to the federal bench in 2018.

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On 1 May 2024, I met Palestinian paediatrician and director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, in Gaza.

Two years later, he is at imminent risk of being killed in Israel’s notorious Nitzan Prison, after being held captive for more than 550 days. 

On that day in May 2024, our ambulance crew joined a small UN convoy to travel to the north of Gaza. We had been granted a brief window to drop a Norwegian medical team at Al Awda Hospital, and then transfer patients from Kamal Adwan to the south of Gaza where they were to await evacuation.

At Al Awda we saw the signs of Israel’s repeated targeting of the hospital. The walls were pock-marked with high-calibre bullet holes. A gaping cavity remained between the third and fourth floors, caused by an Israeli strike on the hospital in November 2023 that killed three doctors and a patient companion.

We reached Kamal Adwan Hospital well after midday. Israeli soldiers had delayed us at a checkpoint at Netzarim for almost three hours, which meant we had very little time to identify and safely transfer the patients on our list.

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Less than two weeks before his daughter’s wedding, Khalil al-Masri set out with his eldest son to complete what should have been one of the family's happiest final preparations: paying for and confirming the reservation of the wedding dress she had chosen at a shop in Gaza City’s Rimal neighbourhood.

With the reservation confirmed, the two stopped at a nearby sweet shop to celebrate, where they met two friends. As they sat together at a table outside the shop, a live bullet pierced Masri’s head, leaving him unconscious as his son and friends watched in horror.

The 43-year-old father of seven was rushed to the al-Shifa Hospital, but he succumbed to his wounds the following day, on 14 June.

“The wedding was turned into a funeral.”

The incident, captured by a surveillance camera at the entrance to the shop, is not an isolated case.

Russia launched a ballistic missile attack on Kyiv and the region early Monday, July 6, killing at least 26 people and injuring 100 more.

“Once again, Putin ‘vanquished’ ordinary residential buildings,” President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote in a Telegram post announcing the latest casualty numbers Monday evening.

The head of the Kyiv City Military Administration (KMVA), Timur Tkachenko, said emergency crews were responding to more than 20 impact sites across the city.

“The most difficult situation is in the Darnytskyi and Podilskyi districts, where the Russians directly hit residential high-rise buildings,” Tkachenko wrote on Telegram.

In the Podilskyi district, a residential building was partially destroyed between the seventh and ninth floors, leaving people trapped under the rubble. Another 21-story apartment building suffered structural damage between the third and fourth floors after being struck by debris.

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