TV News LIES

One evening in 2019, Janice Blanock was scrolling through Facebook when she heard a stranger mention her son in a video on her feed. Luke, an outgoing high school athlete, had died three years earlier at age 19 from Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare bone cancer.

Blanock had come across a live stream of a community meeting to discuss rare cancers that were occurring with alarming frequency in south-western Pennsylvania, where she lives.

Between 2009 and 2019, five other students in Blanock’s school district were also diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma. (The region saw about 30 overall cases of the cancer during that time.) In the video, health experts and residents were talking about whether the uptick in illnesses was related to fracking. Blanock was riveted.

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After facing decades of legal and bureaucratic hurdles, the Makah Tribe in Washington has won approval from the US to resume whale hunting for the first time in 25 years.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) Fisheries announced on Wednesday that it would grant the tribe a waiver, allowing the Makah “a limited subsistence and ceremonial hunt” under an 1855 treaty. The Makah will be permitted to hunt up to 25 Eastern North Pacific gray whales over 10 years.

The tribe of 1,500 people on the north-western tip of the Olympic Peninsula is the only Native American tribe with a treaty that specifically mentions a right to hunt whales. But it has faced more than two decades of court challenges, bureaucratic hearings and scientific review as it seeks to resume hunting for gray whales.

The Supreme Court sided with Starbucks on Thursday in a high-profile labor dispute, issuing a ruling that could set back the Biden administration's push to strengthen unions.

The decision is a disappointment for the labor movement at a time when it is winning significant union fights and is benefitting from the Biden administration’s aggressive National Labor Relations Board.

"It underscores how the economy is rigged against working people all the way up to the Supreme Court," said Lynne Fox, president of Workers United, the union negotiating with Starbucks.

The decision could make it harder to force companies to reinstate workers who were fired for union organizing. The court ruled that judges have to consider more factors before ordering employers to reinstate fired workers.

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Two years after erasing the constitutional right to an abortion, the Supreme Court went the other direction Thursday and tossed out a challenge to the widely used abortion drug mifepristone that would have curbed access to the drug and jeopardized the independence of the Food and Drug Administration.

The unanimous court said the anti-abortion doctors who challenged the FDA’s loosening of rules for how mifepristone can be prescribed and dispensed lacked a legitimate basis to bring their suit.

The challengers’ “sincere legal, moral, ideological and policy objections” to mifepristone don't give them standing to sue, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the majority opinion.

Instead, he said, the anti-abortion doctors can raise objections through the FDA’s regulatory process, or to Congress. And they can express their views through he political and electoral processes.

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U.S. President Joe Biden will sign a new security agreement with Ukraine on Thursday to pledge America's long-term support to the country, during his meeting with leaders of the Group of Seven democracies in Italy, a top U.S. official said.

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