TV News LIES

A South Carolina judge denied Alex Murdaugh's bid for a new double-murder trial on Monday after his defense team accused a clerk of court with tampering with a jury.

Judge Jean Toal ruled that even if Colleton County Clerk Becky Hill did tell jurors to watch Murdaugh's actions and body language on the stand, the defense failed to prove that such comments directly influenced their decision to find him guilty.

Toal said after reviewing the full transcript of the six-week trial, she couldn't overturn the verdict based "on the strength of some fleeting and foolish comments by a publicity-seeking clerk of court."

One member of the jury that convicted Murdaugh of murdering his wife and son testified that Hill made the comments and it indicated to her she thought Murdaugh was guilty. But the 11 other jurors said they based their guilty verdicts only on the testimony, evidence and law presented at trial, and just one of them mentioned hearing anything similar.

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Iain Campbell was gazing out the bus window on his way to work when he first sensed something radical was reshaping how he experienced the world.

The inkling emerged from an altogether ordinary observation: He felt peaceful, maybe even happy as he watched the trees along the road pass by.

"I hadn't experienced that in a really long time, probably since I was a kid," says Campbell, who lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

"I didn't know what was going on at the time, but I thought this might be what it feels like to be normal."

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The Israel-Gaza war has taken a severe toll on journalists since Hamas launched its unprecedented attack against Israel on October 7 and Israel declared war on the militant Palestinian group, launching strikes on the blockaded Gaza Strip.

CPJ is investigating all reports of journalists and media workers killed, injured, or missing in the war, which has led to the deadliest period for journalists since CPJ began gathering data in 1992.

Former President Trump is projected to win the New Hampshire primary, according to Decision Desk HQ.

Trump’s win is a blow to Nikki Haley, who came in second and invested heavily in the Granite State. The rivals were polling closer in New Hampshire ahead of voting, with some showing Haley trailing Trump by just single digits.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) suspended his campaign Sunday and endorsed the former president, adding more pressure for Haley to pull off a strong win in New Hampshire. Haley now faces questions about whether she will continue her campaign heading into the South Carolina primary in February.

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he few Republicans who have not succumbed to the cult of Donald Trump cling to one last hope. They are crossing their fingers that on Tuesday night the ex-president’s march to his party’s nomination will be halted, or at least delayed, by a defeat in the New Hampshire primary at the hands of the former governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley. But it is a thin hope.

Even if Haley wins a famous victory in this snowbound state, the battles ahead are on terrain far more tricky for her and congenial to him. On Monday, Trump won his party’s contest in Iowa by a record-breaking margin, amassing more votes than all his rivals combined – and the primary electorates that come next look more like Iowa’s than New Hampshire’s, which, unusually, includes a big slice of Trump-sceptic independents.

 

“Honeymooners” actress Joyce Randolph, who played Ed Norton’s sarcastic wife Trixie, has died. She was 99.

Randolph died of natural causes Saturday night at her home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, her son Randolph Charles told The Associated Press Sunday.

She was the last surviving main character of the beloved comedy from television’s golden age of the 1950s.

“The Honeymooners” was an affectionate look at Brooklyn tenement life, based in part on star Jackie Gleason’s childhood. Gleason played the blustering bus driver Ralph Kramden. Audrey Meadows was his wisecracking, strong-willed wife Alice, and Art Carney the cheerful sewer worker Ed Norton. Alice and Trixie often found themselves commiserating over their husbands’ various follies and mishaps, whether unknowingly marketing dogfood as a popular snack or trying in vain to resist a rent hike, or freezing in the winter as their heat is shut off.

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Watching lawyers for South Africa and Israel debate whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza was like observing two versions of reality that barely intersect.

Each set of counsel, appearing before the international court of justice at The Hague, largely avoided the most powerful evidence contradicting their case, and the absence of a factual hearing or any questioning left it unclear how the judges will resolve the dispute. Yet I would wager that South Africa’s case was strong enough that the court will impose some provisional measures on Israel in the hope of mitigating the enormous civilian harm caused by Israel’s approach to fighting Hamas.

Genocide, as defined in a widely ratified treaty, has essentially two elements. First, an offender must commit certain acts against a targeted group such as “killing” or “deliberately inflicting … conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part”. Second, these acts must be committed with genocidal intent, meaning an “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”. Both parts of the crime were deeply contested by the lawyers in The Hague.

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A 4.1-magnitude earthquake shook central Oklahoma early Saturday morning following a slightly stronger earthquake the night before and amid a series of smaller quakes.

The earthquake occurred just after 5:30 a.m. local time about 19 miles north of Oklahoma City, near the Northeast Edmond Gas and Oil Field. The quake, which had a depth of about 4.1 miles, was part of a series of several earthquakes clustered together Friday and Saturday, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

On Saturday morning, the Oklahoma Geological Survey said in a statement that there have been reports of strong shaking in the immediate area and across Oklahoma City.

State seismologist Jake Walter told USA TODAY the area has recorded about 18 earthquakes in a 12-hour span. Connecting the dots, Walter added, the quakes follow a fault identified by researchers.

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