TV News LIES

Americans will celebrate Juneteenth for the fourth year since it was recognized as a federal holiday in 2021. But for many families in Galveston, Texas, where the holiday originated, celebrations have been a mainstay for generations.

June 19th commemorates the fall of slavery in Galveston in 1865 — two years after the Emancipation Proclamation ordered the liberation of Black people held in the Confederacy.

“I have newspaper records of my great-grandfather — who was by this time, in 1885, he would have been 25 years old — and he was given the role of reading the Emancipation Proclamation at that celebration,” said 67-year-old Roy Collins.

The Los Angeles unified school district board passed a resolution on Tuesday banning cellphones from district classrooms. As the second-largest school district in the US, the vote makes it the largest school district in the US to approve such a ban.

As more educators across the US explore similar policies, California governor Gavin Newsom on Tuesday called for a statewide ban on phones in class.

The measure in Los Angeles was introduced by board member Nick Melvoin and will be implemented starting in January 2025 after passing in a 5-2 vote. Melvoin said in a statement the measure is meant to support “students’ academic success and wellbeing”, adding that studies have shown smartphones and social media distract kids from learning and stifle their in-person social connections.

“Kids no longer have the opportunity to just be kids,” Melvoin said. “I’m hoping this resolution will help students not only focus in class, but also give them a chance to interact and engage more with each other – and just be kids.”

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sWillie Mays, the "Say Hey Kid" of 1950s and 1960s Giants fame, a home run slugger and center field star for most of his 23-year Major League Baseball career, died Tuesday at 93 after a short illness, the San Francisco Giants announced.

Mays, almost inarguably the greatest living Hall of Famer, was to be honored Thursday evening when Major League Baseball stages a Giants-St. Louis Cardinals game at Birmingham's Rickwood Field, Mays' hometown and site of his Negro League career before making his major league debut in 1948, one year after Jackie Robinson broke the league's color barrier. But Monday, he indicated he would not be able to make it and would enjoy the game from home.

Mays got 95% of the vote when he was elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame on the first ballot in 1979, after a career with 660 home runs (third all-time when he retired), 3,283 hits, two National League MVP awards and a record-tying 24 All-Star Game appearances (two games played each year from 1959-62). Mays' All-Star Game records include most at-bats (75), most hits (23), most runs (20) and most stolen bases (six).

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The final three defendants charged in connection with a plan to subvert Joe Biden’s win of Arizona in 2020 entered not guilty pleas in court Tuesday, advancing the criminal case tied to Donald Trump's false claims from the last White House race to a stage that could include plea deals.

Nick Klingerman, the state prosecutor handling the case, said after the brief arraignment hearing that plea offers had not yet been made, but the possibility had been discussed with defense lawyers.

“We anticipate, I think like in any other case, that we’ll make plea offers,” said Klingerman, the criminal division chief in the Arizona Attorney General’s Office. He declined to comment on whether any defendant was cooperating with investigators.

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A federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked a Biden administration rule expanding federal nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ students.

The decision by U.S. District Judge Danny C. Reeves halts enforcement of changes to Title IX — the federal civil rights law preventing sex discrimination in schools and education programs that receive government funding — that were finalized in April by the Education Department in Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia

The new rule, which covers discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity for the first time, had been set to take effect later this summer.

Louis Scarcella was your classic 70s New York City detective, a hard-charging renegade who lived for locking up bad guys. In 26 years on the beat, most of that time overlapping with New York’s crack era, he was famous for his ability to close cases and seal murder convictions. There was just one problem with his carefully crafted reputation: he was crooked.

It took a group of wrongfully convicted people who were imprisoned based on Scarcella’s overzealous policing to reveal the lie. “We pledged that whoever got out of prison first would spread the word that there were many men in jail for crimes they didn’t commit,” says the 58-year-old Derrick Hamilton, now a paralegal teaching at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law.