TV News LIES

Books by Margaret Atwood, Judy Blume, Rupi Kaur and Sarah J Maas are among 13 titles that the state of Utah has ordered to be removed from all public school classrooms and libraries.

This marks the first time a state has outlawed a list of books statewide, according to PEN America’s Jonathan Friedman, who oversees the organisation’s free expression programs.

The books on the list were prohibited under a new law requiring all of Utah’s public school districts to remove books if they are banned in either three districts, or two school districts and five charter schools. Utah has 41 public school districts in total.

The 13 books could be banned under House bill 29, which became effective from 1 July, because they were considered to contain “pornographic or indecent” material. The list “will likely be updated as more books begin to meet the law’s criteria”, according to PEN America.

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Several packages of cocaine with a street value exceeding $1m have washed up on a Florida beach after Hurricane Debby crashed ashore in the state on Monday and progressed up the eastern seaboard.

The acting chief patrol agent of the US border patrol’s division in Miami, Samuel Briggs, shared a picture of the confiscated drugs on X, showing the 25 packages – or 70lb – of cocaine washed up on a Florida Keys beach.

Briggs said a passerby “discovered the drugs [and] contacted authorities”.

“US border patrol seized the drugs, which have a street value of over $1m dollars,” he added.

The unusual confiscation provided a humorous postscript to Florida’s encounter with Debby after the storm made landfall north of Steinhatchee, about 80 miles west of Gainesville. The storm has since been downgraded to a tropical storm. But, still packing heavy rainfall and gusty winds of 40 to 50mph, Debby on Tuesday remained a threat to neighboring states and even those farther north.

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Customers lined up at dispensaries across Ohio on Tuesday for the first day of recreational marijuana sales in the state.

Nearly 100 medical marijuana dispensaries were authorized to begin selling recreational marijuana to adults after receiving operating certificates this week from the state’s division of cannabis control.

Jeffrey Reide camped out in his car so he could make the first purchase at a Cincinnati dispensary just after sunrise.

“I’m pumped, I’m excited, finally it’s legal for recreational. I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time,” he said shortly after making the first purchase, which drew applause from store employees.

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Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York City mayor, announced on Tuesday that his charitable organization is donating $600m million to four historically Black medical schools.

The landmark gifts, made by his Bloomberg Philanthropies group, will give $175m each to Howard University College of Medicine in Washington DC, Meharry Medical College in Tennessee and Morehouse School of Medicine in Georgia. Another $75m is headed to Charles R Drew University of Medicine & Science in California, according to a news release from Bloomberg.

Class sizes and anticipated growth determined the funding levels, the organization said, adding that an extra $5m will be given to support a new medical school in New Orleans being created by Xavier University of Louisiana – another historically Black institution – and Ochsner Health, a prominent hospital network in that region.

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The conservative supreme court justice Clarence Thomas failed to disclose more private travel on a jet owned by the rightwing mega-donor Harlan Crow, a Democratic senator said on Monday, amid a swirling ethics scandal and demands for judiciary reform.

“I am deeply concerned that Mr Crow may have been showering a public official with extravagant gifts, then writing off those gifts to lower his tax bill,” Ron Wyden of Oregon, the Senate finance committee chair, told a lawyer for Crow in a letter.

“This concern is only heightened by the committee’s recent discovery of additional undisclosed international travel on Mr Crow’s private jet by Justice Thomas.”

The committee, Wyden said, had “obtained international flight records showing that on 19 November 2010, Justice Thomas and his wife [the rightwing activist Ginni Thomas] flew from Hawaii to New Zealand on Mr Crow’s private jet, before flying back from New Zealand to Hawaii on the jet a week later on 27 November 2010. Mr Crow was also a passenger on these flights.

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A judge on Monday ruled that Google’s ubiquitous search engine has been illegally exploiting its dominance to squash competition and stifle innovation in a seismic decision that could shake up the internet and hobble one of the world’s best-known companies.