TV News LIES

Weeks after winning a school board seat in her deeply red Texas county, Courtney Gore immersed herself in the district’s curriculum, spending her nights and weekends poring over hundreds of pages of lesson plans that she had fanned out on the coffee table in her living room and even across her bed. She was searching for evidence of the sweeping national movement she had warned on the campaign trail was indoctrinating schoolchildren.

Gore, the co-host of a far-right online talk show, had promised that she would be a strong Republican voice on the nonpartisan school board. Citing “small town, conservative Christian values,” she pledged to inspect educational materials for inappropriate messages about sexuality and race and remove them from every campus in the 7,700-student Granbury Independent School District, an hour southwest of Fort Worth.

“Over the years our American Education System has been hijacked by Leftists looking to indoctrinate our kids into the ‘progressive’ way of thinking, and yes, they’ve tried to do this in Granbury ISD,” she wrote in a September 2021 Facebook post, two months before the election. “I cannot sit by and watch their twisted worldview infiltrate Granbury ISD.”

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It’s been just over three weeks since a mob of counter-protesters attacked what had been a peaceful pro-Palestine demonstration at UCLA, beating and injuring several people, shooting fireworks and pepper spray into the crowd and using sticks and other weapons while police officers stood by. With the help of local researchers, media reports have started to identify who the attackers were.

• The assault happened in the early hours of April 30, when dozens of counter-protesters, some wearing pro-Israel paraphernalia, began attacking the protesters using pepper spray, sticks and their fists. The onslaught lasted at least three hours before police officers showed up to separate the groups.

• On Wednesday, CNN published an investigation naming several of the people involved in the attack, some of whom were interviewed by journalists. By analyzing hundreds of videos, CNN tracked down one of the most violent counter-protestors, an 18-year-old Beverly Hills resident, whose parents initially expressed support for him, before changing course and saying he was not present at the incident.

• Late last week The Guardian named three of the attackers in an investigative story analyzing why far-right groups joined forces with the pro-Israel crowd during the attack. One of the men named in The Guardian’s story has a long history of antisemitism. He did not explain to the paper why he was involved in the attack.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday during a visit to China that Moscow’s offensive in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region aims to create a buffer zone but that there are no plans to capture the city.

The remarks were Putin’s first on the offensive launched May 10, which opened a new front and displaced thousands of Ukrainians within days. Earlier Friday, a massive Ukrainian drone attack on the Russia-occupied Crimean Peninsula cut off power in the city of Sevastopol, after an earlier attack damaged aircraft and fuel storage at an airbase.

But, Power added: “The pier that opened today does not replace or substitute for land crossings into Gaza, every one of which needs to operate at maximum capacity and efficiency. Every moment that a crossing is not open, that trucks are not moving, or where aid cannot safely be distributed, increases the terrible human costs of this conflict.

“In the past two weeks, food and fuel entering Gaza has slowed to dangerously low levels – barely 100 trucks of aid a day entered Gaza, far less than the 600 needed every day to address the threat of famine,” Power warned. “Much more must be done to save lives and alleviate the widespread suffering.”

South Dakota voters will decide on abortion rights this fall, getting a chance at direct democracy on the contentious issue in a conservative state where a trigger law banning nearly all abortions went into effect after Roe v Wade was overturned.

The state’s top election official announced on Thursday that about 85% of the more than 55,000 signatures submitted in support of the ballot initiative are valid, exceeding the required 35,017 signatures.

Voters in Colorado will have a say on abortion rights this fall after supporters collected enough valid signatures to put a measure on the ballot, part of a national push to pose abortion rights questions to voters since the US supreme court removed the nationwide right to abortion.

The Colorado measure officially made the ballot on Friday and would enshrine abortion rights into the constitution in a state which already allows abortion at all stages of pregnancy despite the supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade.

Since that 2022 decision, most Republican-controlled states have new abortion restrictions in effect, including 14 that ban it at every stage of pregnancy. Most Democratic-led states have laws or executive orders to protect access.

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A former Boeing manager who raised safety questions about the aircraft maker and was found dead after several days of depositions in South Carolina took his own life, police said Friday after concluding their investigation.

Dabney Coleman, the Emmy-winning TV and film actor who starred in "9 to 5," "Tootsie" and "On Golden Pond," has died.

He was 92 years old.

Coleman "took his last earthly breath peacefully and exquisitely" Thursday afternoon at his home in Santa Monica, California, his daughter, Quincy Coleman, said in a statement on Friday that was provided to USA TODAY by his manager.

"My father crafted his time here on earth with a curious mind, a generous heart, and a soul on fire with passion, desire and humor that tickled the funny bone of humanity," she said. "As he lived, he moved through this final act of his life with elegance, excellence and mastery.

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