TV News LIES

President Donald Trump on Friday pardoned former Dick Cheney chief of staff Scooter Libby, the White House said.

US House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan will not run for re-election this year, in a big blow to Republicans with mid-term elections looming.

Congress' most powerful lawmaker said he would not stand for another term in his Wisconsin district this November. Republicans already face a tough challenge from Democrats to keep control of the lower chamber.

Mr Ryan joins nearly 30 House Republicans who have announced this year they are retiring outright. Democrats need 23 seats to take over the House.

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The Marine Corps on Tuesday suspended a general who publicly ridiculed as “fake news” allegations of sexual harassment at his command and also joked about a chaplain recently fired for having sex in public, USA TODAY has learned.

Brig. Gen. Kurt Stein, director of Marine and Family Programs, made the remarks April 6 before an audience estimated at hundreds of civilian employees and Marines at their base in Quantico, Va., according to three people who attended the all-hands meeting last week. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they said they feared retaliation.

At least 257 people have been killed after a military plane crashed near the Boufarik airbase outside the Algerian capital, Algiers, according to Algerian state television.

The plane, an Ilyushin Il-76, mostly carried soldiers when it went down shortly after takeoff on Wednesday morning, state TV reported.

Algeria's defence ministry was quoted as saying that 247 passengers and 10 crew members were among the dead following the crash.

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Chinese President Xi Jinping promised on Tuesday to open the country’s economy further and lower import tariffs on products like cars, in a speech seen as an attempt to defuse an escalating trade dispute with the United States.

While much of his pledges were reiterations of previously announced reforms that foreign businesses say are long overdue, Xi’s comments sent stock markets and the U.S. dollar higher on hopes of a compromise that could avert a trade war.

Xi said China will widen market access for foreign investors, addressing a chief complaint of its trading partners and a point of contention for U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, which has threatened billions of dollars in tariffs on Chinese goods.

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- Facebook Inc Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg started testifying before Congress on Tuesday as he looks to fend off the possibility of new regulations as a result of the privacy scandal engulfing his social network.

The 33-year-old internet mogul faces tough questioning from a joint hearing of the U.S. Senate’s Commerce and Judiciary committees.

John Thune, chairman of the U.S. Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation committee, struck an adversarial tone in his opening remarks here.

“In the past, many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle have been willing to defer to tech companies’ efforts to regulate themselves. But this may be changing,” he said.

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A major national teachers union is threatening to cut ties with Wells Fargo over the bank’s deals with the National Rifle Association (NRA).

In a press release Saturday, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) said that it would ditch a Wells Fargo mortgage program unless the company drops its connection to the NRA.

AFT President Randi Weingarten has been in talks with Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan about the partnerships, according to the release.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak told USA TODAY he's leaving Facebook out of growing concern for the carelessness with which Facebook and other Internet companies treat the private information of users.

"Users provide every detail of their life to Facebook and ... Facebook makes a lot of advertising money off this," he said in an email to USA TODAY. "The profits are all based on the user’s info, but the users get none of the profits back."

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