TV News LIES

Fatman Scoop, the hip-hop artist who topped charts in Europe with “Be Faithful” in the early 2000s and later lent his distinctive voice and ebullient vibe to hits by artists including Missy Elliott and Ciara, died after collapsing on stage at a show in Connecticut, according to officials and his family. He was 53.

The cause of his death wasn't immediately clear.

He was performing at Hamden Town Center Park when he collapsed Friday evening, town chief of staff Sean Grace said Saturday. Mayor Lauren Garrett posted on Facebook that he had a medical emergency. Concertgoers and paramedics tried to aid the artist, who was taken to a hospital, she said.

His family said in an Instagram post that “the world lost a radiant soul, a beacon on stage and in life.”

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Oregon’s first-in-the-nation experiment with decriminalizing drugs will expire on Sunday as a new law taking effect will once again make it a crime to possess small amounts of hard drugs.

The new recriminalization law, HB4002, will give those caught with illicit drugs – including fentanyl, heroin and meth – the choice to either be charged with possession or treatment, which includes completing a behavioral health program and participating in a “deflection program” to avoid fines.

Personal-use possession would be a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail. It aims to make it easier for police to crack down on drug use in public and introduced harsher penalties for selling drugs near places such as parks.

The recriminalization law encourages, but does not mandate, counties to create treatment alternatives to divert people from the criminal justice system and toward addiction and mental health services.

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Seven people were killed and dozens more were injured when a commercial bus overturned early Saturday morning in Warren County, Mississippi, officials said.

The crash happened at about 12:40 a.m. on Interstate 20 near Bovina when the bus left the roadway and overturned. Six people were pronounced dead at the scene and another person died later at a hospital, according to Master Sergeant Kervin K. Stewart with the Mississippi Highway Patrol.

Another 36 people were transported to area hospitals. The extent of their injuries wasn't immediately known, Stewart said. The bus was carrying a total of 41 passengers, plus two drivers and was traveling from Atlanta to Dallas.

The bus was a 2018 Volvo commercial passenger bus, Stewart said. No other vehicles were involved in the crash.

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The Justice Department’s internal watchdog has found continued shortfalls in the FBI’s handling of tips about child sexual abuse despite a series of changes put in place following the bureau’s bungled handling of the Larry Nassar scandal.

Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s office examined 327 cases between October 2021 and late February 2023. It says it found no evidence that FBI employees complied with mandatory reporting requirements to local or state law enforcement in nearly half the cases.

“It’s critically important that the FBI appropriately handle all allegations of hands-on sex offenses against children,” Horowitz said. “Because failure to do so can result in children continuing to be abused and perpetrators abusing more children.”

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A group of major book publishers sued the state of Florida over what they called an “unconstitutional” book ban law that allows challenges to books in school libraries.

Six publishers, Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishers, Simon & Schuster, and Sourcebooks, along with Authors Guild and some prominent book authors, filed the 94-page lawsuit on Thursday in federal court in Orlando.

In the suit, they argued that book bans have surged in violation of the First Amendment because of the passage of Florida’s 2023 education bill, HB 1069. HB 1069 allows parents to try to remove materials from schools if they are seen as pornographic by the school boards.

Police in the US use force on at least 300,000 people each year, injuring an estimated 100,000 of them, according to a groundbreaking data analysis on law enforcement encounters.

Mapping Police Violence, a non-profit research group that tracks killings by US police, launched a new database, policedata.org, on Wednesday cataloging non-fatal incidents of police use of force, including stun guns, chemical sprays, K9 dog attacks, neck restraints, beanbags and baton strikes.

The database features incidents from 2017 through 2022, compiled from public records requests in every state. The findings, the group says, suggest that despite widespread protests against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, overall use of force has remained steady since then – and in many jurisdictions, has increased.

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