TV News LIES

A federal judge on Wednesday ruled in favor of two Georgia election workers who sued Rudy Giuliani for defamation, further ordering the attorney associated with former President Trump to pay sanctions.

Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss sued Giuliani in December 2021 over his baseless statements claiming the duo helped commit election fraud.

U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell in a 57-page opinion ruled in favor of the two election workers by default after Giuliani resisted turning over discovery in the case. Her ruling suggested Giuliani may have done so to reduce his legal exposure in other cases.

The fatal shooting of a University of South Carolina student has been ruled justifiable, authorities confirmed Wednesday.

Nicholas Anthony Donofrio, 20, of Connecticut, was shot and killed Sunday morning while attempting to enter the wrong home. Police said Donofrio lived on the same street where he was shot but that he had attempted to enter another home.

Following an investigation, the Fifth Circuit Solicitor’s Office and the Columbia Police Department now say charges will not be filed against the homeowner and ruled the shooting justifiable.

Police said Donofrio repeatedly banged and kicked the door, then broke the glass window and reached inside for the doorknob. That’s when police said the homeowner shot and killed Donfrio.

Authorities have not released any additional information about the homeowner.

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It’s been a strange, cruel summer in the United States. From the dystopian orange skies above New York to the deadly immolation of a historic coastal town in Hawaii, the waning summer has been a stark demonstration of the escalating climate crisis – with experts warning that worse is to come.

A relentless barrage of extreme weather events, fueled by human-caused global heating, has swept the North American continent this summer, routinely placing a third of the US population under warnings of severe heat and unleashing floods, fire and smoke upon communities, with a record 15 separate disasters causing at least $1bn in damages so far this year.

The heat has been particularly withering in places like Phoenix, Arizona, which had a record 31 consecutive days at temperatures above 110F (43C), while an enormous heatwave across the central swath of the US this week caused schools to be closed in states such as Wisconsin, Colorado and Iowa and food banks to be shut in Nebraska.

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For Pat Bennett, 68, every spoken word is a struggle.

Bennett has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a degenerative disease that has disabled the nerve cells controlling her vocal and facial muscles. As a result, her attempts to speak sound like a series of grunts.

But in a lab at Stanford University, an experimental brain-computer interface is able to transform Bennett's thoughts into easily intelligible sentences, like, "I am thirsty," and "bring my glasses here."

The system is one of two described in the journal Nature that use a direct connection to the brain to restore speech to a person who has lost that ability. One of the systems even simulates the user's own voice and offers a talking avatar on a computer screen.

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The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco filed for bankruptcy on Monday, saying a Chapter 11 reorganization will facilitate a settlement of about 500 lawsuits accusing the church of enabling childhood sexual abuse by priests.

The filing in U.S. bankruptcy court in San Francisco will put the lawsuits on hold and buy time for settlement talks, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone said in a statement.

"We believe the bankruptcy process is the best way to provide a compassionate and equitable solution for survivors of abuse while ensuring that we continue the vital ministries to the faithful and to the communities that rely on our services and charity," Cordileone said.

The "overwhelming majority" of the alleged abuse occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, involving priests who are deceased or no longer in ministry, Cordileone said.

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A record heat wave in the Pacific Northwest has prompted fire managers to bump the national preparedness level up a notch, from three to four on a five point scale. More than two dozen large fires are now burning in the region, many sparked by dry thunderstorms.

At the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, federal fire managers monitor giant screens in a NASA like control room, as they deploy air tankers, hot shot crews and other resources around the West right now.

Meagan Conry, the federal Bureau of Land Management's assistant deputy director for fire and aviation, tracks fires on live cameras in the Northwest. She says the area has become vulnerable to increased fire activity because of, "above average temperatures, dry conditions, and some expectations for gusty winds over the next few days."

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When I'laysia Vital got accepted to Texas Southern University, a historically Black university in Houston, she immediately began daydreaming about the sense of freedom that would come with living on her own, and the sense of belonging she would feel studying in a thriving Black community.

Then, a nurse at her high school's health clinic in Oakland, California explained the legal landscape of her new four-year home in Texas – where abortion is now banned completely.

Vital watched some TikTok videos of protestors harassing women outside clinics in other states. She realized her newfound freedoms would come at the expense of another.

That's when she added one more task to her off-to-college checklist: get a long-acting, reliable form of birth control before leaving California.

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Scientists have reconstructed Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall by eavesdropping on people’s brainwaves – the first time a recognisable song has been decoded from recordings of electrical brain activity.

The hope is that doing so could ultimately help to restore the musicality of natural speech in patients who struggle to communicate because of disabling neurological conditions such as stroke or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – the neurodegenerative disease that Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with.

Although members of the same laboratory had previously managed to decipher speech – and even silently imagined words – from brain recordings, “in general, all of these reconstruction attempts have had a robotic quality”, said Prof Robert Knight, a neurologist at the University of California in Berkeley, US, who conducted the study with the postdoctoral fellow Ludovic Bellier.

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