TV News LIES

Emotions were running high at Newtown high school in Connecticut on Wednesday, more than 11 years after a former student entered Sandy Hook elementary school in 2012 with guns and killed small children, teachers and staff in a massacre that shook the nation.

On Wednesday, 20 seats at the high school graduation ceremony were being left empty in honor of the children who didn’t grow up to see this day because they did not survive one of the deadliest mass shootings in US history and the deadliest at an educational establishment below college level. Six adults who worked as teachers or staff at the school were also killed that day, including the head teacher, and the children who died were all six or seven.

A firearms dealer in Arizona sold weapons to an undercover federal agent he believed would help him carry out his plan for a mass shooting targeting minorities, an attack that he hoped would “incite a race war”, according to a federal grand jury indictment.

Mark Adams Prieto was indicted Tuesday by the grand jury in Arizona on charges of firearms trafficking, transferring a firearm for use in a hate crime, and possession of an unregistered firearm.

Court records didn’t list an attorney who could comment on Prieto’s behalf. A lawyer who briefly represented Prieto after he was arrested last month in neighboring New Mexico didn’t respond Wednesday to a request for comment.

The indictment says the 58-year-old from Prescott, Arizona, recruited the undercover FBI agent and an informant at a gun show where Prieto was a vendor.

More...

A teenager who tried to return a malfunctioning replica gun that shoots plastic projectiles to a sporting goods store in Washington state was shot to death by an off-duty security guard who believed the boy was holding a real gun and planned to rob the business, according to authorities.

The man arrested in the killing, 51-year-old Aaron Myers, told police that he was not working at the time he shot and killed Hazrat Ali Rohani, who was returning a malfunctioning airsoft gun to the Big 5 store in Renton. But he had offered to keep watch due to alleged rising crime in the area.

Nearly 55lb (25kg) of what appears to be cocaine recently washed up on the shores of Alabama, local police said.

The police department in the community of Dauphin Island made the discovery, saying the recovered amount was worth about $450,000. Officers then contacted the Mobile county sheriff’s office, which also has jurisdiction in the area and is investigating the situation.

Images released by police show 25 packages of what they said appeared to be cocaine, with a picture of a percentage sign on the front.

The apparent cocaine washed up just one day after scuba divers trying to remove trash found the same quantity of the drug 100ft under water in Key West, Florida.

In that case, the local sheriff’s office in Monroe county turned over the suspected narcotics to US border agents.

More...

California law enforcement officials have worked for seven years to keep secret a death in police custody, labeling the case an “accident” and refusing to disclose basic information to journalists and the family of the victim, an investigation published on Monday reveals.

Darryl Mefferd, 49, died on 8 December 2016 while he was detained by police in Vallejo, a city of 125,000 in the San Francisco Bay Area. The case was uncovered by Open Vallejo, a local non-profit news organization, which shared its records with the Guardian.

The afternoon before he died, Mefferd had seemed disoriented and dehydrated and was making paranoid remarks, so his niece, Courtney Mefferd, took him to a local hospital. He was treated with vitamins and a sedative and declared “stable”, medical records show. By around 11pm, he was anxious to be discharged and left the hospital against doctors’ recommendations.

An appellate court has ruled that Texas cannot ban books from libraries simply because they mention “butt and fart” and other content which some state officials may dislike.

The fifth US circuit court of appeals issued its decision on Thursday in a 76-page majority opinion, which was written by Judge Jacques Wiener Jr and opened with a quote from American poet Walt Whitman: “The dirtiest book in all the world is the expurgated book.”

In its decision, the appellate court declared that “government actors may not remove books from a public library with the intent to deprive patrons of access to ideas with which they disagree”.

It added: “This court has declared that officials may not ‘remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the idea contained in those books and seek by their removal to prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion.’”

More...