TV News LIES

The Harvard Humanist Community was shocked Thursday when their members were, in the carefully-chosen words of New York Times best-selling author Greg M. Epstein, “blown off” and excluded from an inter-faith memorial ceremony for the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing.

“We have friends and family who are in the hospital in critical condition, who nearly died,” he told Raw Story. “It wouldn’t have been so difficult for those who organized the vigil today to make some kind of nod to us, and that’s all we would have wanted.”

A Washington florist is being sued by both the American Civil Liberties Union and the state attorney general for refusing to provide service to a gay couple planning their wedding, a legal tangle that has pitted antidiscrimination policy against religious freedom.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Washington filed a lawsuit Thursday, claiming that Barronelle Stutzman, owner of Arlene's Flowers and Gifts in Richland, Wash., discriminated against Robert Ingersoll and Curt Freed, who are longtime patrons of the shop.

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback signed sweeping anti-abortion legislation Friday, giving his state a new law to block tax breaks for abortion providers, ban sex-selection abortions and declare that life begins "at fertilization."

Many provisions take effect in July, though the tax changes will be effective for 2014. The measure cleared the Republican-dominated Legislature by wide margins earlier this month.

The Texas plant that was the scene of a deadly explosion this week was last inspected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1985. The risk plan it filed with regulators listed no flammable chemicals. And it was cleared to hold many times the ammonium nitrate that was used in the Oklahoma City bombing.

For worker- and chemical-safety advocates who have been pushing the U.S. government to crack down on facilities that make or store large quantities of hazardous chemicals, the blast in West, Texas, was a grim reminder of the risks these plants pose. And they say regulators haven’t done enough to tackle the problem.

Police said they had taken the second suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings into custody here Friday night, after a day of intense searching that shut down daily life across a large swath of greater Boston.

Shortly after 8 p.m., police surrounded a boat stored behind a home in East Watertown, a short distance away from where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, had been last seen. Authorities said they believed Tsarnaev was inside the boat, which had been covered in a tarp. He was thought to be wounded but alive: television crews reported that they could hear police calling his name, attempting to induce his surrender.

The Boy Scouts of America is proposing to get rid of its national ban on openly gay youth, while continuing to bar gay adults from serving as troop leaders.

The decision, announced Friday by the organization's Executive Committee, must be approved by the roughly 1,400 volunteer voting members of the Scouts' National Council at their meeting in Texas in late May.