TV News LIES

A new report from Congress has raised the alarm about children with mental health conditions being held in juvenile detention, rather than getting treatment.

"Prolonged Incarceration of Children Due to Mental Health Care Shortages," released Thursday by the staff of Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff and Republican Rep. Jen Kiggans, is based on a survey sent to administrators of public juvenile detention facilities around the country. About half of those who responded to the survey reported they had, at some point, kept children incarcerated when they could have been released into offsite mental health care.

"This should shock America's conscience," Ossoff says. "Children with special needs, locked up for extended time instead of getting the mental health care that they need."

According to the survey, 75 juvenile detention centers in 25 states reported holding youths for days or even months until space became available at a long-term psychiatric residential treatment facility.

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Nurses have reached tentative deals on new contracts to end their strikes at hospitals run by Mount Sinai and Montefiore after nearly a month on the picketline, the New York State Nurses Association announced Monday.

Nurses must first vote on whether to ratify the tentative agreements before they can go back to work. Voting on the contracts was set to start Monday afternoon at the two hospital systems and continue through Wednesday, according to NYSNA. If the contracts are ratified, nurses will return to work by Saturday, NYSNA said.

Nurses at NewYork-Presbyterian said they were still negotiating Monday morning. A spokesperson for the hospital said there was movement at the bargaining table over the weekend.

“We reached a tentative contact agreement!” announced one email sent by Mount Sinai Hospital’s nurses union executive committee at 4:45 a.m. Monday.

A Montefiore spokesperson confirmed the tentative deal. At Mount Sinai, CEO Brendan Carr wrote in a message to employees, “This process has been difficult for all of us." He added, "I commit to you that we will heal the organization together in the service of continuing to help people to live longer and better lives.”

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The Brentano String Quartet had finished their performance when a special guest dropped in backstage: the US supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “We thanked her for everything she had done for our country,” recalls violinist Mark Steinberg. “It was a nice moment.”

The year was 2016 and the place was the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. Fast forward a decade and old certainties have been shaken: Ginsburg is dead, Donald Trump is president and the Kennedy Center has become a case study in how a seemingly solid American institution can quickly unravel.

The Brentano String Quartet were due to perform there last week but cancelled their show, citing Trump’s hostile takeover of the complex. Steinberg explained: “I would have felt ashamed to walk out on stage there. I can’t quite bring myself to go into the building at this point.

“It would be such a luxury to make art in a vacuum and that’s what I yearn for but that’s not possible right now. Had we appeared there, in my eyes, that would be a way of condoning everything that’s happening and I couldn’t stomach that.”

As the US national capital Washington is first and foremost a politics town, forever in New York’s shadow as a hub of arts and culture. In a 1961 speech Kennedy observed: “Somebody once said that Washington was a city of northern charm and southern efficiency.”

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For years, Maher Tarabishi kept his disabled son alive.

A chronic muscular disease diagnosed when he was a child had confined Wael Tarabishi to his bed and forced him to depend on a feeding tube for survival. His father became his primary caregiver, doing whatever he needed, whenever he needed it.

The disease left Wael unable to eat, drink or walk, so the feeding tube was his lifeline. When it became clogged or dirty, Maher would clean it and could change it in an emergency. When Wael needed medication, Maher crushed the pills up finely, added a little water, and injected them into the feeding tube with a syringe. Several times a day, Maher used a suction device to remove saliva and mucus from Wael’s mouth to keep him from choking.

But when the end finally came, Maher was not at his son’s side. He was in a detention center more than three hours from the family’s home in Arlington, Texas, the same facility where he has been held since he was arrested during a routine check-in with federal immigration officials last October.

His family had pleaded for the government to release him on humanitarian grounds so he could continue his son’s care, but U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement denied the request. When Wael died on Jan. 23, federal officials barred Tarabishi from performing a final paternal act for his son: They refused to let him go to the funeral.

“ICE is responsible for the death of Wael,” said his sister-in-law, Shahd Arnaout, who watched his health rapidly deteriorate in his father’s absence.

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The ex-husband of former first lady Jill Biden has been arrested in connection to the December killing of his wife, police in Delaware said.

William Stevenson, 77, was indicted on Feb. 2, on charges of first-degree murder of 64-year-old Linda Stevenson, the New Castle County Police Department said in a news release.

Police did not say how Stevenson's wife died, but according to the release, he was arrested following "an extensive weeks-long investigation" into the death of his wife after officers responded to a domestic dispute on Dec. 28 at a home in the Wilmington area.

After a grand jury indicted him on the felony, police said officers arrested Stevenson at his home without incident.

Online New Castle County Jail records show Stevenson remained in custody on $500,000 bond on Feb. 3 at the Howard R. Young Correctional Institution.

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An 18-year-old Northern Arizona University student died after an off-campus "rush" event, and three members of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity were arrested on suspicion of hazing, according to Flagstaff police.

The name of the student who died was not released by authorities.

The death stunned the university, which has about 20,000 students on its Flagstaff campus. "This is a devastating loss, and our hearts are with his family, friends and all members of our community who are grieving," the university said in an unsigned statement.

Police were called at 8:44 a.m. Jan. 31 to a house on South Pinegrove Road, where the 18-year-old was found unresponsive. Police and later paramedics tried lifesaving efforts, but he was pronounced dead at the house, Flagstaff police spokesperson Sgt. Jerry Rintala said.

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