TV News LIES

The Black Lives Matter movement got a favorable ruling Monday from the Supreme Court.

The justices tossed out a federal appeals court decision that allowed a Black Lives Matter protest organizer to be sued by a police officer injured by an unknown assailant.

The 2016 incident in Baton Rouge, La., followed the shooting death of Alton Sterling by a white police officer, which triggered weeks of protests across the U.S.

North Carolina police pepper sprayed and arrested attendees at a get-out-the vote rally because participants blocked the roadway without authorization, authorities said on Saturday.

The “I Am Change” march to the polls was organized by the Reverend Greg Drumwright and began as a march from a local church to the courthouse. Drumwright said the group was permitted to stand in the square outside the Alamance county courthouse and was escorted through the streets by the police. He also said that the group had “no intention” of having the rally in the street.

“We are fed up with this kind of treatment in Alamance county and in Graham city,” Drumwright said in a Facebook live video following the altercation. “Both of those law entities … colluded to suppress peaceful organizers, who were here not only to vote today, but to call an end to system oppression and racial disparages.”

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Gray wolves, one of the first animals shielded by the Endangered Species Act after Americans all but exterminated them in the lower 48 states, will no longer receive federal protection, officials announced Thursday.

“After more than 45 years as a listed species, the gray wolf has exceeded all conservation goals for recovery,” Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said in a statement.

Environmentalists condemned the decision as dangerously premature and vowed to take the Fish and Wildlife Service back to court, where they have successfully blocked previous attempts to strip wolves of federal protections. “Wolves just occupy a fraction of their former range,” said Jamie Rappaport Clark, president and chief executive of Defenders of Wildlife, an environmental group. “There’s so much work that needs to be done.”

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The United States on Thursday hit a new record for a single-day increase in coronavirus infections with nearly 90,000 new cases reported, according to data collected from Johns Hopkins University.

On Thursday, the U.S. had 88,521 new coronavirus cases, an increase of 9,540 from the number of new infections recorded Wednesday.

The Johns Hopkins University data shows that since the pandemic first hit the U.S., there have been a total of 8,948,099 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the country and at least 228,696 deaths.

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Federal agencies warned that cybercriminals are unleashing a wave of data-scrambling extortion attempts against the U.S. healthcare system designed to lock up hospital information systems, which could hurt patient care just as nationwide cases of COVID-19 are spiking.

In a joint alert Wednesday, the FBI and two federal agencies warned that they had “credible information of an increased and imminent cybercrime threat to U.S. hospitals and healthcare providers.” The alert said malicious groups are targeting the sector with attacks that produce “data theft and disruption of healthcare services.”

The cyberattacks involve ransomware, which scrambles data into gibberish that can only be unlocked with software keys provided once targets pay up. Independent security experts say it has already hobbled at least five U.S. hospitals this week, and could potentially impact hundreds more.

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A federal judge Tuesday blocked the Justice Department's effort to intervene in a defamation case against President Donald Trump brought by E. Jean Carroll who claimed the president disparaged her when he denied her claim that Trump raped her in the mid-1990s.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan rejected the government's central argument that Trump was acting in his official duties as president last year when he denied magazine writer Carroll's allegation that he had raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in New York City.

The Justice Department's intervention was seen as an effort to shield the president from the potentially damaging legal action in the midst of a re-election campaign. The judge's ruling effectively keeps Carroll's claim alive.

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In its 38 years of existence, the USA TODAY Editorial Board has never endorsed a candidate for president. The nonpartisan board hasn’t recommended a nominee. Until now.

Today, the USA TODAY Editorial Board, which is separate from the news department, endorsed Joe Biden for president.

"We don't do this eagerly," said editorial page editor Bill Sternberg. "We hope we don't have to do it again, but it seems like one of those break-glass moments where there's a clear and present danger and there's a clear choice."

Endorsements, all editorials, aren't meant to lecture. They're meant to put forth a well-considered viewpoint, grounded in the facts, to spur conversation. The closest the board ever came to an endorsement was in 2016, when it urged voters to reject Donald Trump, but did not endorse any other candidate.

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Former CIA Director John Brennan isn’t worried about the Trump administration trying to prosecute him. Nor is he all that concerned about a peaceful transfer of power if President Donald Trump loses the election – particularly if it’s a resounding defeat, as Brennan hopes.

What really has the ex-CIA chief on edge? The social and political havoc Trump may unleash between Election Day and the possible inauguration of his Democratic rival, Joe Biden.

Trump could provoke civil unrest. He could try to declare martial law. He could pardon himself and a rogue’s gallery of his supporters, Brennan said.

He’s so nervous about some of the possibilities – given the president’s powers – that he didn’t even want to say them out loud.

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