TV News LIES

A member of the grand jury who declined to file criminal charges against former Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown sued St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch Monday for the right to speak publicly about the proceedings.

The plaintiff, identified in court documents only as "Grand Juror Doe," has alleged First Amendment violations in a civil suit filed in federal court in St. Louis. According to the lawsuit, Doe wants to talk publicly about the experience of serving on a grand jury, the evidence and investigation that the plaintiff believes would educate the public and "to advocate for legislative change to the way grand juries are conducted in Missouri."

Larry Wilkins was watching television Friday evening when he heard a faint knock on his front door of his home in Lyon County, Ky., east of Paducah. When he opened the door, he discovered a 7-year-old girl standing in the cold. She was bloodied, covered in scratches and barefoot except for a single sock.

“She told me that her mom and her dad were dead, and she was in a plane crash, and the plane was upside down,” Wilkins told NBC News. “She asked if she could stay here. I said, ‘Honey, what can I do for you?’ I got a washcloth and cleaned her up. And of course called 911.”

No more timely time to consider Time itself than right around the time we all make the consensual, arbitrary, stolid-but-capricious agreement to watch every midnight tick of the clock one night a year and swap out calendars, jumping from one felled tree to another in the roaring river of Time, as we log-drivers all shoot the mandatory rapids, trying to balance, stay upright, not get soaked or knocked in the drink, not get socked in the head by something large, unyielding, and not likely to stop at skull, once it gets up a head of steam, develops a mind of its own, aimed at our own head-meat.

When alive, those de-limbed trees blitzing the white-water once counted time on an arc far longer than the beings who felled them. Time is more relative than we think -- perhaps more than we can think.

A blustery winter storm dumped snow and ice across the American west on Wednesday, making driving treacherous in the mountains from California to the Rockies and forcing residents and party-goers in some usually sun-soaked cities to bundle up for a frosty New Year’s.

Giddy residents in Southern California foothills snapped photos of snow-covered lawns as kids tossed snowballs. In suburban Phoenix, swimming pools and cactus-lined backyards were dusted with the white stuff.

In the 13 years since 9/11, the United States’ “War on Terror” could be considered a failure. ISIS swept aside the US-backed Iraqi army earlier this year, the Taliban still launches deadly attacks, including an assault on a school last month that killed 145 people, and American interventions only seem to worsen sectarian bloodshed in the region.

The geopolitical disaster has come at a tremendous cost to American taxpayers, according to a recently released report by the Congressional Research Service, a non-partisan government organization. The report estimated that since 9/11 American taxpayers have shelled out close to $1.6 trillion on war spending (that’s $14 million an hour), with almost 95 percent of that money going projects related to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Every day, strings of black tank cars filled with crude oil roll slowly across a long wooden railroad bridge over the Black Warrior River.

The 116-year-old span is a landmark in this city of 95,000 people, home to the University of Alabama. Residents have proposed and gotten married next to the bridge. Children play under it. During Alabama football season, die-hard Crimson Tide fans set up camp in its shadow.

But with some timber pilings so badly rotted that you can stick your hand right through them, and a “MacGyver”-esque combination of plywood, concrete and plastic pipe employed to patch up others, the bridge demonstrates the limited ability of government and industry to manage the hidden risks of a sudden shift in energy production.

And it shows why communities nationwide are in danger.

Freelance photographer Lazar Simeonov watched from his Gaza apartment window on the afternoon July 16 as three Israeli shells struck a shack at the edge of a beach where seven young boys played. When the dust settled, four of them — all members of the Bakr extended family — lay dead, apparently victims of a mistake by the Israeli military on the ninth day of its Operation Protective Edge in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

Simeonov and a number of other foreign journalists staying nearby ran to the beach. He was horrified by the scene he found there: Four children lay dead on the sand and nearby dock, their lifeless bodies torn apart by the blasts.

A former employee angry over being fired may have organized the hacking of Sony Pictures' computer network, a security expert says.

The FBI has blamed the government of North Korea, allegedly as reprisal for the movie The Interview. The movie depicts a talk show host and producer who score an interview with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and are then recruited by the CIA to assassinate him.