TV News LIES

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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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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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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Helen McCrory, famed for her roles in the "Harry Potter" franchise and the BBC series "Peaky Blinders," died at age 52, her husband Damian Lewis announced Friday.

"I'm heartbroken to announce that after a heroic battle with cancer, the beauty and mighty woman that is Helen McCrory has died peacefully at home, surrounded by a wave of love from friends and family," the fellow actor wrote on Twitter.

"She died as she lived. Fearlessly. God we love her and know how lucky we are to have had her in our lives. She blazed so brightly. Go now, Little One, into the air, and thank you."

Lewis' rep Annett Wolf confirmed the news to USA TODAY. She and Lewis have been married since 2007 and share two children together, a daughter Manon, 14, and son Gulliver, 13.

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A gunman opened fire outside and inside a FedEx Ground facility near Indianapolis' main airport Thursday night, killing eight people, wounding several others and sending witnesses running before taking his own life, police said.