News of the World

"Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." George Orwell's Animal Farm

  Welcome to the Independent News of the World broadcast – the news you can trust because it is fact checked and corrected during the broadcast. I’m Frank Fantasia and I’m Tina Truepointe. Our lead story comes from the dictatorship of North Korea, Frank. Tina, it seems that North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un has declared the act of recording the activities of the communist state’s police force a felony offense punishable by prison time. Are there no lengths this depraved country will sink to in order to subjugate their people, Frank? First inviting Dennis Rodman in to watch a basketball game and now preventing their own citizens from protecting themselves by recording the abuses of their own police. Tina, North Korea is worlds away from the U.S. of A where our rights are guaranteed by the First, Second,and all the other amendments. No dictator is going to tell us that we can’t record our own police department! In fact the television show COPS has been on the air for 27 years and solely consists of recording police activities! The world is asking: WHAT ARE THE NORTH KOREANS TRYING TO HIDE? Tina, our fact checking department is breaking in to say --- the criminalization of recording police activities is occurring not in North Korea but in the United States where Illinois has passed a law designed to discourage the recording of police activities, New York police are accused of arresting people for recording police actions and reporters in Ferguson, Missouri were assaulted and arrested in a McDonalds when trying to report on the protests there last month.

  Well I suppose that the authorities have their reasons Frank! After all, it is a very dangerous world we live in. Our next story comes from Russia where the pariah of the free world Vladimir Putin is back to his saber rattling ways. The Russian ‘leader’ has bullied his parliament to draft a law allowing the seizure of foreign assets. Putin has to go after foreign assets since there likely isn’t any Russian money that their crooked government hasn’t already taken away, Tina. In 2003 billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky was jailed and his Yukos oil company appropriated by the government. Since then the other Russian oligarchs have been storing their money away from their mother country. We also received news the Russian authorities confiscated over $100,000 from two Americans traveling through the country on their way to a poker tournament. The public outcry convinced the Russians to return 90% of their ill-gotten gains. Tina, I didn’t know that there were Mexican restaurants in Russia but the Russian authorities sure do. A restaurant loosely translated as the ‘Mrs. Lady Mexican Food’ in a small Russian town known as ‘Lake of Sprit’ had their entire bank account seized by the Russian authorities under the trumped up charge of making small deposits in order to avoid detection of criminal activity. This was done even though no criminal activity was proven or criminal charges filed and the money was not returned. I imagine it went for some wall art in President Putin’s dacha, Frank. Nothing the Russians do would surprise me Tina. Luckily this story had a happy ending. The restaurant owner somehow managed to get the story published in the New York Times and the worldwide public pressure became even too much even for the Russians who agreed to drop the case and return the illegally seized monies although they did not admit to any problems in their so called ‘justice system’. Frank, our fact checkers are breaking in- it seems that the two Americans were traveling through Iowa in the United States on their way to a poker tournament and their $100,000 was seized by local police on a traffic stop and the ‘Mrs. Lady Mexican Restaurant’ is in Spirit Lake, Iowa and their bank account was seized by the I.R.S. Are you sure, Tina? I’m wondering if our fact checking department has been infiltrated by foreign spies like those North Korean hackers that are trying to stop me from seeing the Seth Rogan/James Franco comedy movie ‘The Interview’ on Christmas Day. These things just don’t happen in America. You better take the next story Tina…I have to make a call to management…

  Of course Frank. Our next story comes from Hong Kong where the citizens and police are at war. Protests have erupted over the decision of the ruling Communist Party to limit candidates to the Hong Kong Legislative Council to handpicked nominees from a secret council have met with a fierce push back from the authorities. We have reports from all over Hong Kong of police killing citizens. Grand jury probes in the Chinese administrative region have so far failed to indict any of the police officers in question. In one incident an officer put 8 bullets in a citizen after a dispute over said citizen walking down the middle of the street. In another situation, the police subdued a man using a choke hold and the man later died from ‘compression of the neck’. And in another incident, a 12 year old was shot dead in a city park by police while brandishing an 'Airsoft' gun that shoots plastic pellets. The possibility of a civil war seemed to intensify this past weekend when a Hong Kong citizen murdered two policemen that were sitting in their patrol car.

  Frank isn’t back yet but our next story comes from….wait I have another update from our fact checking department. It seems that even though there are protests in Hong Kong, the stories of police killing unarmed citizens did not originate from Hong Kong, but instead from Ferguson Missouri, New York City, and Cleveland Ohio with the police ambush also occurring in New York City…can we break for a commercial? – I’m feeling a bit dizzy and disorientated…Oh, Frank is back.

  Tina, I have a special announcement for our viewers. The ‘Independent News of The World’ show has been cancelled effective immediately but Tina and I will be back tomorrow with our new show ‘The New News Hour’ which will feature the same hard-hitting journalism you’ve come to expect but without any fact-checking getting in the way. Its news you can trust because our announcers are good looking well-dressed people with deep voices! Tune in tomorrow when we kick off a five part expose called ‘Tracked’ where we outline how the Iranians, Chinese, and Russian governments track every internet message and phone call of their own citizens. It sounds fascinating Frank – I‘m sure our viewers can’t wait – I know I can’t. Until tomorrow this is Tina TruePointe and Frank Fantasia wishing you a good night and urging you to stay informed!