TV News LIES

The United States has now lost over 600,000 mothers, fathers, children, siblings and friends to COVID-19, a painful reminder that death, sickness and grief continue even as the country begins to return to something resembling pre-pandemic normal.

A bride forced by the pandemic to have a Zoom wedding is planning a lavish in-person anniversary celebration this summer, but all of the guests must attest they are vaccinated.

A Houston artist, still deep in grief, is working on a collage of images of people who died in her community. Others crowd theaters and bars, saying it is time to move on.

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Although new COVID-19 cases are declining across most of the nation, eight states are seeing increases – and seven of those have below-average vaccination rates, new data reveals.

Alabama, Arkansas, Hawaii, Missouri, Nevada, Texas, Utah and Wyoming have seen their seven-day rolling averages for infection rates rise from two weeks earlier, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. All of them except Hawaii have recorded vaccination rates that are lower than the U.S. average of 43% fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Some states are seeing increased immunity after high rates of natural spread of the disease, which has so far killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.

“We certainly are getting some population benefit from our previous cases, but we paid for it,” said Mississippi State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs. “We paid for it with deaths.”

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North Atlantic right whales now grow smaller than they did 40 years ago, and new research suggests a leading cause is the damage human activity inflicts on the critically endangered mammals.

The findings, published today in the journal Current Biology, reveal that when fully grown, a North Atlantic right whale born today would be expected to be about one meter shorter than a whale born in 1980. Currently, full-grown members of the species average 13 to 14 meters in length (43 to 46 feet).

"The first inkling that we had came from the folks who were collecting the data in the field, where, as the story goes, they saw what looked to be a really young whale, a calf, or maybe one- or two-year-old," said Joshua Stewart, a postdoctoral researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Marine Mammal and Turtle Division and lead author of the new study. "But it turns out that they were actually 5-year-old or 10-year-old whales that were smaller than a typical 2-year-old."

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The reward for information leading to an arrest in an apparent road rage shooting of a 6-year-old boy in Southern California last month has increased to $450,000.

Aiden Leos was sitting in the backseat of his mother's car as she drove him to kindergarten when another driver shot him on May 21, authorities said. Aiden was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.

According to accounts from the mother and witnesses who stopped to help her, another car cut her off, she responded with a hand gesture and the car slipped in behind her and someone inside fired a shot through the rear of her car.

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Lessie Benningfield Randle, 106, can still remember a house engulfed in flames and bodies stacked in truckbeds - horrors that 100 years later led to a pledge by President Joe Biden to work for racial justice.

"I was quite a little kid but I remember running and the soldiers were coming in," Randle said in an interview with Reuters as her hometown of Tulsa prepared to mark one of the darkest chapters in its history.

Monday was the centenary of a massacre targeting Tulsa's prosperous African-American community in the district of Greenwood that bore the nickname Black Wall Street.

After a Black man was accused of assaulting a white woman, an allegation that was never proven, white rioters gunned down Blacks, looted homes and set fire to buildings block by block. More than 1,000 buildings were destroyed.

TVNL Comment: ...the land of the free and the home of the brave.  Right?

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A Florida politician who emerged as a central figure in the federal investigation into Rep. Matt Gaetz has agreed to cooperate with federal investigators and admits paying an underage girl to have sex with him and other men, according to court documents filed Friday.

Joel Greenberg is expected to plead guilty to six federal charges — including sex trafficking of a child — during a court appearance in Orlando on Monday. His cooperation as a close associate of Gaetz signals a significant escalation in the Justice Department’s investigation and potentially raises the legal and political jeopardy the Florida congressman is facing.

Federal prosecutors have been examining whether Gaetz and Greenberg paid underage girls or offered them gifts in exchange for sex, according to people familiar with the matter. The plea agreement makes no mention of Gaetz, who has vehemently denied the allegations and any wrongdoing and has insisted he will not resign his seat in Congress.

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Local health departments across Michigan started sounding the alarm months ago.

A deadlier coronavirus variant that had first ravaged Britain was now here — in metro Detroit, at the University of Michigan, a state prison in Ionia and rural counties in the Thumb region — with doctors, nurses and public health officials fully aware.

And yet Michiganders — from state prison employees to small business owners and local officials to parents of high school athletes — ignored medical experts' repeated warnings about the highly infectious variant. They rebuffed stay-in-place recommendations, allowed crowded events to occur and turned a blind eye to defiant behavior, according to thousands of internal health department emails and contact tracing notes from across the state and interviews with those in charge.

Authorities in Texas will serve electric car manufacturer Tesla with a search warrant to secure and investigate data related to a deadly crash over the weekend, according to Reuters.

A Tesla vehicle went off the road and hit a tree in the Houston area on Saturday, causing the car to burst into flames and leaving two men dead. Firefighters spent hours trying to put out the flames as the vehicle’s lithium ion batteries kept reigniting the blaze.

Police in Harris County said the position of the bodies in the wreck appeared to indicate that no one was in the driver’s seat of the Model S at the time of the accident as one man was sitting in the passenger seat and the other in the back seat.

Authorities are investigating whether the car’s advanced Autopilot driver assistance system was activated at the time.

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