TV News LIES

More than 500 senior non-commissioned officers will be involuntary discharged this year as the U.S. Army moves to reduce its ranks, a Pentagon official says.

That's more than triple the 160 active duty and reserve NCOs released last fiscal year, Stars and Stripes reported Wednesday.

The 506 soldiers were being released because "the Army can no longer retain soldiers in over-strength skills as we improve grade and [Military Occupational Specialty], Lt. Gen. Howard Bromberg, deputy chief of staff for personnel, said in an email.

The lynching and disbarring of civil rights lawyer Lynne Stewart, who because she has terminal cancer was recently released from prison after serving four years of a 10-year sentence, is a window into the collapse of the American legal system.

Stewart—who has stood up to state power for more than three decades in order to give a voice to those whom authorities seek to crush, who has spent her life defending the poor and the marginalized, who wept in court when one of her clients was barred from presenting a credible defense—is everything a lawyer should be in an open society. But we no longer live in an open society. The persecution of Stewart is the persecution of us all.

Donald Trump has lost a legal action against a major experimental windfarm being built close to his golf resort in Aberdeenshire.

The billionaire property developer had alleged that Alex Salmond, Scotland's first minister, had secretly interfered in the decision to approve the 11-turbine European offshore wind deployment centre site (EOWDC) in Aberdeen Bay – a claim rejected on Tuesday by a Scottish civil court judge, Lord Doherty.

Voters in a small Nebraska city will decide Tuesday whether to repeal a law designed to bar immigrants from renting homes if they don't have legal permission to be in the U.S.

Critics of the 2010 ordinance in Fremont say it is less effective and more costly than anyone expected and is damaging the city's image. Supporters say Fremont needs to take a stand against illegal immigration.

The conservative agricultural hub near Omaha, population 26,000, is one of a handful of cities that have acted on their own over the last decade to curb illegal immigration. Most of those efforts have become mired in costly court battles.

An American citizen who is a member of al-Qaida is actively planning attacks against Americans overseas, U.S. officials say, and the Obama administration is wrestling with whether to kill him with a drone strike and how to do so legally under its new stricter targeting policy issued last year.

The CIA drones watching him cannot strike because he's a U.S. citizen and the Justice Department must build a case against him, a task it hasn't completed.

Missouri football All-American Michael Sam says he is gay, and because he is projected to be a mid-round NFL draft pick, the defensive end could become the league's first openly homosexual player.

In interviews published Sunday with ESPN, The New York Times and Outsports, Sam says he came out to his teammates and coaches at Missouri in August.

"I am an openly, proud gay man," he said.

A pioneer in cleaning up toxic messes, Thomas Schruben long suspected major oil companies of being paid twice for dealing with leaks from underground fuel storage tanks - once from government funds and again, secretly, from insurance companies.

Schruben, a detail-oriented Maryland environmental engineer who helped draft government pollution rules going back 30 years, looked for a lawyer to help ferret out what he believed could in some cases be fraud. He found a partner in Dennis Pantazis, a buoyant, mustachioed son of Greek immigrants in Alabama known for bringing environmental and civil rights cases.

"Together we started unraveling the mystery," Schruben said.

Climate change is likely to be a factor in the extreme weather that has hit much of the UK in recent months, the Met Office's chief scientist has said.

Dame Julia Slingo said the variable UK climate meant there was "no definitive answer" to what caused the storms. "But all the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change," she added.

"There is no evidence to counter the basic premise that a warmer world will lead to more intense daily and hourly rain events."