TV News LIES

A pivotal vote Thursday in the Minnesota House positioned that state to become the 12th in the country to allow gay marriages and the first in the Midwest to pass such a law out of its Legislature.

The 75-59 vote was seen as the critical step for the measure, which would allow same-sex weddings beginning Aug. 1. It's a startling shift in the state, where just six months earlier voters surprisingly turned back an effort to ban them in the Minnesota Constitution.

A worldwide gang of criminals stole a total of $45 million in a matter of hours by hacking their way into a database of prepaid debit cards and then draining cash machines around the globe, federal prosecutors said Thursday — and outmoded U.S. card technology may be partly to blame.

Seven people are under arrest in the U.S. in connection with the case, which prosecutors said involved thousands of thefts from ATMs using bogus magnetic swipe cards carrying information from Middle Eastern banks. The fraudsters moved with astounding speed to loot financial institutions around the world, working in cells including one in New York, Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch said.

A Texas college faces tens of thousands of dollars in fines for publishing inaccurate crime statistics and failing to report a sexual assault, officials say.

Inadequacies in several crime reports filed by the University of Texas at Arlington in 2008 were described as "serious" in a letter from the U.S. Department of Education, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported Wednesday.

The Missouri legislature on Wednesday sent the state governor a bill that would expand gun rights and declare all federal gun regulations unenforceable, in a response to President Barack Obama's push for gun-control legislation.

The Republican-led legislature passed the measure in an attempt to shield the state from federal proposals that would ban assault weapons and expand background checks. The US Senate's defeat of a background check expansion three weeks ago did nothing to assuage the fears of Missouri Republicans, who pressed forward with their legislation. The Missouri House voted 118-36 to send the bill to the Democratic governor, Jay Nixon. The Senate passed the measure earlier this month.

An 83-year-old Catholic nun and two of her fellow peace activists were found guilty Wednesday of intending to injure the national defense for intruding last July onto the Y-12 National Security Complex, a nuclear weapons production facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

After hearing two days of testimony and arguments, and then deliberating for nearly 2½ hours, the jury also found the defendants guilty of damaging more than $1,000 of government property at the Y-12 site, where they cut through four chain-link fences and spray-painted biblical messages on a building that warehouses an estimated 400 tons of highly enriched uranium, the radioactive material used to fuel a nuclear bomb.

The watchdog who tracks the billions of taxpayer dollars spent to rebuild Afghanistan says government officials have tried to silence him because they think he's embarrassing the White House and Afghan President Hamid Karzai by pointing out the waste and fraud.

John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, used a speech at the New America Foundation on Wednesday to blast government “bureaucrats”' who have told him to stop publicizing damning audits that detail case after case of waste, corruption and mismanagement of rebuilding efforts in Afghanistan. Some government officials have even complained that they aren't allowed to pre-screen or edit his reports, he said.