TV News LIES

A Mississippi man has been sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison after he burned a cross in his front yard to intimidate his Black neighbors, according to the Justice Department.

Axel Cox, 24, was sentenced on Thursday after he pleaded guilty to a federal hate crime and violating the Fair Housing Act in December.

According to the Justice Department, Cox burned a cross in his front yard on Dec. 3, 2020, and used "threatening and racially derogatory remarks" toward his Black neighbors.

The 24-year-old built the cross from supplies in his home — as he put together the wooden cross and placed it in his front yard, propping it up so his Black neighbors could see it. He then doused it with motor oil and lit it on fire.

More...

Ukrainian forces continue to defend against Russian attacks in the battered city of Bakhmut, according to the military's General Staff.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned Russian troops will have an "open road" to capture other key cities in eastern Ukraine if they seize control of Bakhmut. He defended his decision to keep Ukrainian forces in the besieged city and in his nightly address, announced the death of Dmytro Kotsiubaylo, a celebrated Ukrainian fighter who was killed in Bakhmut.

As of Tuesday, nearly 4,000 civilians remain inside Bakhmut, according to the country's Vice Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk. She said Ukrainian workers were still working to evacuate the remainder of the population, but the current situation makes their jobs even more difficult.

More...

Five women denied abortions in Texas, along with two doctors, have sued the state after they were refused abortion care despite suffering severe complications with their pregnancies.

None of the plaintiffs’ fetuses had a chance of survival. The state’s abortion bans are supposed to allow for the procedure in cases where there is a fatal diagnosis for the fetus, as well as when the pregnancy poses substantial harms to the pregnant person’s health.

And yet, under the overlapping abortion bans in effect in Texas – which threaten doctors with losing their medical licenses, hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and up to 99 years in jail for providing abortion care – the plaintiffs claim they were not given the healthcare they needed and were entitled to.

More...

Exxon Mobil Corp (XOM.N) was sued for racial discrimination by a U.S. federal agency on Thursday, with charges alleging that the oil major failed to protect workers from harassment after nooses were found at one of its facilities in 2020.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) said in a statement that a Black employee at Exxon's chemical plant in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, found a hangman's noose at his work site in January 2020.

The EEOC said that at the time of this report, Exxon was already aware of three other such instances of nooses being displayed at the complex and a nearby refinery, and that a fifth noose was reported later in 2020.

According to the EEOC, Exxon investigated some of these incidents, but not all, and "failed to take measures reasonably calculated to end the harassment."

More...

FBI agent Peter Strzok on Wednesday said former President Trump and others “successfully chilled the FBI’s willingness to investigate anything” Trump-related, complicating later inquiries into the former president’s handling of classified document.

Strzok took to Twitter to comment on new reporting from The Washington Post indicating that FBI agents and Justice Department prosecutors squabbled over how aggressively to criminally investigate Trump’s handling of classified documents, including whether to conduct a surprise search of his Florida residence.

“Trump, [Attorney General William] Barr, [special counsel John] Durham, and others successfully chilled the FBI’s willingness to investigate anything related to Trump. The FBI handled Trump with unprecedented kid gloves, afraid to follow the facts for fear of political blowback, delaying the investigation for months,” Strzok wrote in one tweet.

More...

Drones that the Kremlin said were launched by Ukraine flew deep inside Russian territory, including one that got within 100 kilometers (60 miles) of Moscow, signaling breaches in Russian defenses as President Vladimir Putin ordered stepped-up protection at the border.

Officials said the drones caused no injuries and did not inflict any significant damage, but the attacks on Monday night and Tuesday morning raised questions about Russian defense capabilities more than a year after the country’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor.