TV News LIES

A Turkish official says the Saudi ambassador to Turkey has been summoned to the ministry for discussions over a Saudi journalist who disappeared after a visit to the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.

The Foreign Ministry official says the ambassador was "invited" to the ministry on Thursday but did not provide further detail. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in line with government rules.

Jamal Khashoggi, who has written Washington Post columns critical of the kingdom's assertive crown prince, went missing on Tuesday.

Liz Swisher, a former Yale classmate of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, has said she believes he lied under oath when testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday.

Speaking to CNN’s Chris Cuomo late Friday, Swisher said Kavanaugh’s claims of never engaging in out-of-control drinking were not accurate. “He drank heavily,” she said, calling him a “sloppy drunk.”

While Swisher said she had never witnessed any behavior that would lend credence to Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault allegation against him, she said the image he is presenting of himself as an avid church-goer and athlete who simply liked to have beer from time to time is not true. “I don’t buy it. That’s not the Brett I knew, as soon as I met him in college. It’s not the Brett I saw during four years at Yale.

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Marty Balin, founder and lead singer of the 1960s pioneering rock band Jefferson Airplane, has died at age 76, his spokesman announced.

Balin died Thursday in Tampa, Florida while en route to a hospital, spokesman Ryan Romenesko said Friday. No details were available on the cause of death. Balin was a driving force behind San Francisco’s psychedelic rock scene in the 1960s and a fixture of the city’s counterculture community at the time.

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The editors of America Magazine, a weekly Jesuit publication, initially endorsed Kavanaugh. The publication noted his stance on abortion and his lengthy career on the bench. But that all changed Thursday after hearing from Christine Blasey Ford, who detailed accusations that Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed and tried to remove her clothes at a party when they were both teens.

Kavanaugh has vehemently denied the allegations.

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A British-based investigative group claims that one of two men charged with attempted murder in the nerve-agent poisoning of Sergei Skripal earlier this year is a highly decorated officer in Russia's military intelligence service.

Bellingcat, an open-source investigation website that has reported on the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria, says that one of the two men — whose passport name is Ruslan Boshirov — is actually Anatoly Chepiga, who was deployed to Chechnya three times and in 2014 was given a "Hero of the Russian Federation" citation, the country's highest award.

Boshirov and another man whose passport name is Alexander Petrov, have been charged in the U.K. in the March attack in Salisbury on the Russian ex-double agent Skripal and his daughter Yulia using the Novichok, a type of nerve agent developed in the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

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A House panel passed four GOP-backed bills Thursday to amend the Endangered Species Act (ESA), making compliance easier for industries, states and landowners.

The Natural Resources Committee’s bills would give priority to science submitted by state and local governments when federal officials decide whether to protect species, require the Interior Department to consider conservation actions that could happen in the future when making ESA decisions and let Interior prioritize or discharge petitions for species protections under some circumstances.

Taken as a whole, the bills would represent the biggest changes to the ESA in decades.

Republicans on the panel, led by Chairman Rob Bishop (R-Utah), said the changes would make the ESA work better for industry and landowners, as well as the imperiled species themselves.

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A California man who admitted to unwittingly facilitating Russian interference in the 2016 election and later cooperated with special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into the subject now fears for his safety, the man's attorney said in a court filing Wednesday.

Richard Pinedo, 28, is set to be sentenced next month for selling bank account numbers to Russian internet trolls who used the numbers to buy web ads aimed at advancing President Donald Trump's campaign and fomenting strife among Americans during the contentious election.

A "terrified" and visibly emotional Christine Blasey Ford described in vivid detail on Thursday her allegation that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a party in Maryland in 1982.

In front of rapt senators from the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ford explained how Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge took her into a room at the party and how the alleged assault changed the course of her life.

"I believed he was going to rape me,” Ford said. “I believed Brett was going to accidentally kill me."

Subtly addressing questions from some Kavanaugh supporters about why she didn't come forward earlier, Ford recalled that she had told herself she "should just move on" because she was not raped. And questioned by Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Ford said that she was “100 percent” certain that it was Kavanaugh that assaulted her and nobody else.

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