TV News LIES

A 41-year-old woman told jurors Tuesday how Ghislaine Maxwell allegedly helped groom and recruit her into the life of financier Jeffrey Epstein decades ago, including watching at times as Epstein forced her into sexual acts.

The woman — testifying under the pseudonym Jane — was the first of four alleged victims who will testify at Maxwell’s sex-trafficking trial in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. She gave a mostly matter-of-fact account of being lured into Epstein’s world of daily erotic massages as a 14-year-old and globe-trotting on private jets.

Maxwell, 59, who was Epstein’s longtime associate and paramour, has pleaded not guilty.

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In the aftermath of Kyle Rittenhouse's acquittal in Kenosha, Wis., last week, advocates are turning back to the case of teenager Chrystul Kizer, who is also arguing it was self-defense when she killed her adult sexual abuser, set his house on fire and stole his car in 2018.

Kizer, who was 17 at the time, is accused of shooting Randall P. Volar III in the head; Volar had previously been arrested on child sexual assault charges.

Kizer was released from jail in June 2020 after groups such as the Chicago Community Bond Fund raised money to pay her $400,000 bond. She is still awaiting trial.

Prosecutors say the killing was premeditated. But what's notable in this case is that Kizer's lawyers are invoking a self-defense argument that has never been used in a homicide case in the state before.

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A U.S. appeals court on Friday upheld its decision to put on hold an order by President Joe Biden for companies with 100 workers or more to require COVID-19 vaccines, rejecting a challenge by his administration.

A three-member panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans affirmed its ruling despite the Biden administration's position that halting implementation of the vaccine mandate could lead to dozens or even hundreds of deaths.

"The mandate is staggeringly overbroad," the opinion said.

"The mandate is a one-size-fits-all sledgehammer that makes hardly any attempt to account for differences in workplaces (and workers)," Circuit Court Judge Kurt Engelhardt wrote for the panel.

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Irmgard Furchner, accused of having contributed as an 18-year-old to the murder of 11,412 people when she was a typist at the Stutthof concentration camp between 1943 and 1945, was taken into the sparse courtroom in a wheelchair.

Her face was barely visible behind a white mask and scarf pulled low over her eyes. Security was heavy as the judge and legal staff made their way into the court.

Between 1939 and 1945 some 65,000 people died of starvation and disease or in the gas chamber at the concentration camp near Gdansk, in today's Poland. They included prisoners of war and Jews caught up in the Nazis' extermination campaign.

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The Biden administration has asked the Supreme Court to take emergency action that would block Texas’ novel abortion ban from being enforced while litigation over its constitutionality goes forward.

The Justice Department’s new filing, submitted Monday, asks the justices to restore a preliminary injunction a federal district court judge in Texas issued earlier this month after concluding that the law violates longstanding legal precedent by seeking to ban abortions after about six weeks gestation.

“Allowing S.B. 8 to remain in force would irreparably harm those interests and perpetuate the ongoing irreparable injury to the thousands of Texas women who are being denied their constitutional rights,” acting Solicitor General Brian Fletcher wrote in the 39-page application. “Texas, in contrast, would suffer no cognizable injury from a preliminary injunction barring enforcement of a plainly unconstitutional law.”

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Abortion providers in Texas had been bracing for the 5th U.S. Court of Appeals to act fast, even as they booked new appointments and reopened their doors during a brief reprieve from the law known as Senate Bill 8, which bans abortions once cardiac activity is detected, usually around six weeks.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman, an appointee of President Barack Obama, suspended the Texas law that he called an “offensive deprivation” of the constitutional right to an abortion. But in a one-page order, the New Orleans-based appeals court temporarily set aside Pitman’s ruling for now while it considers the state’s appeal.

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