TV News LIES

For the second time in four days, Florida picked up people seeking asylum and took them by private jet to Sacramento at taxpayer expense, California officials said on Monday after another flight arrived at a local airport.

California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, on Monday branded his rightwing Republican Florida counterpart, Ron DeSantis, a “small, pathetic man”, and appeared to threaten kidnapping charges after the first incident in which a group of migrants was dumped at a Sacramento church.

Rob Bonta, California’s attorney general, said in a statement that 16 South Americans abandoned outside the Roman Catholic Diocese of Sacramento on Friday were “in possession of documentation purporting to be from the state of Florida”, and may have been duped into boarding charter flights via New Mexico after entering the US in Texas. On Monday morning, a second flight of 20 migrants arrived in the state’s capital.

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A rights group has said 16 migrants had been “lied to” and deceived after being transported from Texas to California and dropped off outside a church in Sacramento.

The migrants from Venezuela and Colombia entered the US through Texas, reported the Associated Press. They were flown to California from New Mexico via a private chartered plane, but it’s unclear who paid for the travel.

The California department of justice and the California governor’s office is currently investigating who paid for the travel and “whether the individuals orchestrating this trip misled anyone with false promises or have violated any criminal laws, including kidnapping”.

In a significant win for LGBTQ advocates, a federal judge has tossed out Tennessee's controversial law restricting drag performances, after hearings in which the law's necessity and broad language were questioned.

Judge Thomas Parker issued his ruling just after midnight Friday, writing that, "the Court finds that — despite Tennessee’s compelling interest in protecting the psychological and physical wellbeing of children — the Adult Entertainment Act (“AEA”) is an UNCONSTITUTIONAL (sic) restriction on the freedom of speech."

The bill restricting "male and female impersonators" from performing in public spaces was signed into law by Gov. Bill Lee at the start of March. The bill was one of several to come out of the 2023 legislative session that was said to target LGBTQ Tennesseans.

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About 9 percent of adults from around the world identify themselves as LGBTQ, according to a global survey released Thursday.

The survey conducted by Ipsos found that 3 percent of those around the world identify themselves as lesbian or gay, 4 percent as bisexual, 0.9 percent as pansexual and 0.9 percent as asexual. The survey noted that those in Generation Z — people born after 1997 — were more than twice as likely to identify as bisexual, pansexual or asexual than millennials and more than four times as likely than those in Generation X and baby boomers.

Across 30 different countries surveyed, those identifying as LGBTQ range from 4 percent in Peru to 15 percent in Brazil. About 9 percent of survey respondents in the United States identified as LGBTQ, a 1 percent drop since 2021.

Spain is the country with the highest share of those saying they are gay or lesbian at 6 percent, and Brazil and the Netherlands were most likely to say they are bisexual at 7 percent, according to the survey. The survey noted that Japan was the least likely country to have respondents identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual.

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A Guantánamo Bay prisoner tortured by the CIA has accused British intelligence agencies of complicity in his mistreatment in a new case before one of UK’s most secretive courts.

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is alleged by the US to have plotted al-Qaida’s bombing of an American naval ship, is seeking to persuade the court to consider his complaint against MI5, MI6 and GCHQ.

Lawyers for al-Nashiri, 58, argued this week there was an “unavoidable inference” that the intelligence agencies were complicit in his torture, rendition and mistreatment by the CIA.

Al-Nashiri, a Saudi Arabian citizen, was first detained in 2002 as part of the CIA’s post-9/11 secret detention and interrogation programme. He is currently facing the death penalty before a US military commission over his alleged role in the 2000 bombing.

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