TV News LIES

The governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, said it was “embarrassing” that Republican voters from his state laughed and applauded when Donald Trump mocked E Jean Carroll during a CNN town hall this week.

Sununu may yet have to court such voters in a presidential run of his own.

Nonetheless, the governor said, the town hall audience’s behavior “doesn’t shine a positive light on New Hampshire”.

In New York on Tuesday, a jury in a civil case found Trump liable for sexual battery and defamation regarding a 1996 assault in a New York department store changing room which Carroll described in a book in 2019. The former president was ordered to pay about $5m in damages.

Regardless, at Wednesday’s CNN event in Manchester, New Hampshire, Trump said he had “no idea who the hell” Carroll was and called her a “whack job”.

More...

An FDA advisory panel on Wednesday recommended the agency allow a birth control pill to be available over the counter in the U.S. for the first time.

The panel came to the decision after a two-day public meeting.

The advisors' vote is not binding, and the FDA is expected to make a final decision this summer.

If the application is approved, Opill will be the first contraceptive pill to be sold over the counter in the United States. It would join emergency contraceptives like Plan B on pharmacy shelves.

"For a product that has been available for the last 50 years, that has been used safely by millions of women, we thought it was time to make it more available," Frederique Welgryn, chief strategy officer of HRA Pharma, a French drugmaker owned by the pharmaceutical company Perrigo, when the company announced the application for over-the-counter use.

More...

President Joe Biden announced on Friday that Neera Tanden will serve as the next head of his domestic policy council.

Tanden, a longtime prominent Democratic operative, will replace Susan Rice, who plans to leave the administration later this month. Tanden has spent the last year-and-a-half as senior adviser and staff secretary in the White House, after her initial nomination to run the Office of Management and Budget faltered in the face of Senate opposition.

“While growing up, Neera relied on some of the critical programs that she will oversee as Domestic Policy Advisor,” Biden said in a statement announcing the move. “I know those insights will serve my Administration and the American people well.”

In addition, the White House announced that Stef Feldman, a longtime Biden aide dating back to the Obama administration, will replace Tanden in the role of staff secretary.

More...

Dr. Rochelle Walensky is stepping down as director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, President Joe Biden announced Friday.

Her departure comes as the federal government is winding down its response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The public health emergency that was declared in January 2020 is ending May 11. The World Health Organization said Friday that COVID-19 no longer qualifies as a global emergency.

In announcing Walensky's departure, Biden said she led a complex organization that was on the frontlines of a once-in-a-generation pandemic — and she did it with honesty and integrity.

More...

The World Health Organization said Friday that COVID-19 no longer qualifies as a global emergency, marking a symbolic end to the devastating coronavirus pandemic that triggered once-unthinkable lockdowns, upended economies worldwide and killed at least 7 million people worldwide.

Dominion executives hope all of the text messages between Fox News hosts including Tucker Carlson that they discovered as part of their defamation lawsuit will one day become public.

Dominion, the company behind voting machines that Donald Trump's camp claimed were rigged in the 2020 election, sued Fox for airing the former president's claims.

As part of the lawsuit discovery, Dominion's lawyers uncovered texts in which Fox hosts and journalists seemed to acknowledge that the fraud claims were not true or farfetched, but gave them airtime anyway.

n their first interview since the lawsuit was settled unexpectedly, Dominion's CEO John Poulos and Stephen Shackelford, a lawyer who was involved in the case, told Axios they now want the full record to become unredacted.

More...

 

A Southern California man who assaulted police with pepper spray during the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was sentenced to 4 1/2 years in prison, federal authorities announced.

Abortion bans in deeply conservative Nebraska and South Carolina each fell a single vote short of passing in their legislatures amid heated debates among Republicans, yet another sign that abortion is becoming a difficult issue for the GOP.

As the last vote was cast in Nebraska, where abortion is currently banned after 20 weeks of pregnancy, cheers erupted outside the legislative chamber, with opponents of the bill waving signs and chanting, "Whose house? Our house!"

In South Carolina, Republican Sen. Sandy Senn criticized Majority Leader Shane Massey for repeatedly "taking us off a cliff on abortion."

"The only thing that we can do when you all, you men in the chamber, metaphorically keep slapping women by raising abortion again and again and again, is for us to slap you back with our words," she said.

More...