TV News LIES

Discouraged by a lack of action from Congress, leaders from America’s largest pharmacy associations marched with dozens of demonstrators Friday outside the St. Louis-based headquarters of Express Scripts, a major prescription drug middleman whose practices the group accuses of harming everyday Americans.

Protestors waved signs, shouted slogans and gave speeches at a makeshift podium across the street from the glass-and-brick building of the nation's second largest pharmacy benefits manager, or PBM.

As third-party administrators of health insurers’ prescription drug programs, PBMs negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies, determine which drugs will be covered by insurance plans and set reimbursement rates for the pharmacies that buy and sell the drugs.

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The man who broke into former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's home in 2022 and assaulted her husband with a hammer was sentenced on Friday to 30 years in prison, federal prosecutors said.

In a politically motivated attack, David DePape forcibly entered Pelosi's home in San Francisco early in the morning on Oct. 28, 2022, just a week before that year's congressional elections. At the time, Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives, was in Washington.

Daniel Perry, a former Army sergeant convicted of killing a Black Lives Matter protester in downtown Austin in 2020, was freed from prison Thursday within an hour of Gov. Greg Abbott signing a pardon proclamation.

In a series of rapid-fire developments in a less than two-hour span, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles recommended that Perry be pardoned on the murder conviction. Abbott then granted the full pardon to Perry, leading to his release from the Mac Stringfellow Unit in Rosharon, about 20 miles south of downtown Houston.

Perry, 36 at the time of his April 2023 conviction, may also be able to apply to have his record expunged, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

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The Supreme Court on Thursday batted away a challenge to how the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is funded, keeping the Obama-era agency in place and sustaining a regulation from 2017 that cracked down on payday lenders.

Instead of subjecting the bureau to annual budget fights on Capitol Hill like most of the government, the CFPB is funded through the Federal Reserve − an effort to shield it from political pressure. Critics said the arrangement violated the Constitution and the principle that Congress alone wields the power of the purse.

The 7-2 decision was a victory for the Biden administration which had asked the court to overturn a conservative appeals court decision invalidating the funding mechanism.

Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas said funding doesn’t have to come through the congressional appropriation process. An appropriation, he wrote, “is simply a law that authorizes expenditures from a specified source of public money for designated purposes.”

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Because of a 50-hour filibuster by Democrats, the Missouri Senate didn’t vote Wednesday on a measure to make it harder to amend the state constitution and instead is asking the House for a last-ditch compromise.

The move, which came after the record-setting filibuster, leaves the future of the resolution in doubt. Members of the Freedom Caucus said sending Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman’s resolution to conference is a death knell for the GOP priority.

Coleman’s resolution would, if approved by voters, require any constitutional amendment to pass in five out of eight congressional districts. Currently, only a simple majority is needed.

But Democrats engaged in a round-the-clock filibuster because the version that was sent back from the House included other provisions, including an item barring noncitizens from voting — which already is illegal. Democrats said that those provisions were aimed at deceiving voters into gutting the initiative petition process and that they wouldn’t sit down unless those items were taken out.

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he UCLA protest, which gathered thousands in opposition to Israel’s ongoing bombing of Gaza, began in April and grew to a dangerous crescendo this month when counterprotesters and police clashed with the activists and their supporters.

In interviews with KFF Health News, Chan and three other volunteer medics described treating protesters with bleeding wounds, head injuries, and suspected broken bones in a makeshift clinic cobbled together in tents with no electricity or running water. The medical tents were staffed day and night by a rotating team of doctors, nurses, medical students, EMTs, and volunteers with no formal medical training.

At times, the escalating violence outside the tent isolated injured protesters from access to ambulances, the medics said, so the wounded walked to a nearby hospital or were carried beyond the borders of the protest so they could be driven to the emergency room.

“I’ve never been in a setting where we’re blocked from getting higher level of care,” Chan said. “That was terrifying to me.”

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