TV News LIES

A cold wind whipped through the prairie as they laid Buck Timmins to rest.

Timmins, a longtime coach and referee, was not the first person in Mitchell, S.D., pop. 15,600, to die of the coronavirus. He was not even the first that week.

As the funeral director tucked blankets over the knees of Timmins’s wife, Nanci, Pastor Rhonda Wellsandt-Zell told the small group of masked mourners that just as there had been seasons in the coach’s life — basketball season, football season, volleyball season — Mitchell was now enduring a phase of its own.

Pandemic season.

General Motors says it will no longer support the Trump administration in legal efforts to end California’s right to set its own clean-air standards.

The Black Lives Matter movement got a favorable ruling Monday from the Supreme Court.

The justices tossed out a federal appeals court decision that allowed a Black Lives Matter protest organizer to be sued by a police officer injured by an unknown assailant.

The 2016 incident in Baton Rouge, La., followed the shooting death of Alton Sterling by a white police officer, which triggered weeks of protests across the U.S.

Federal agencies warned that cybercriminals are unleashing a wave of data-scrambling extortion attempts against the U.S. healthcare system designed to lock up hospital information systems, which could hurt patient care just as nationwide cases of COVID-19 are spiking.

In a joint alert Wednesday, the FBI and two federal agencies warned that they had “credible information of an increased and imminent cybercrime threat to U.S. hospitals and healthcare providers.” The alert said malicious groups are targeting the sector with attacks that produce “data theft and disruption of healthcare services.”

The cyberattacks involve ransomware, which scrambles data into gibberish that can only be unlocked with software keys provided once targets pay up. Independent security experts say it has already hobbled at least five U.S. hospitals this week, and could potentially impact hundreds more.

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Twitter has suspended a network of accounts claiming to be owned by Black supporters of Donald Trump and his re-election campaign due to spam and platform manipulation, it said Tuesday.

The company is investigating the activity and may suspend additional similar accounts if they are found to be violating its policies, a spokesperson said.

The Washington Post first reported on the investigation, citing more than a dozen accounts using identical, inauthentic language including the phrase: “YES IM BLACK AND IM VOTING FOR TRUMP!!!”

A review of some of the suspended accounts shows they often used stolen images to appear real. The accounts sometimes claimed to be owned by military veterans or members of law enforcement.

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Elected officials in Massachusetts are demanding an investigation after a Black man was stopped Tuesday by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents while on a run in Boston.

Bena Apreala, 29, told WBUR he was running a few miles from his home when two SUVs with tinted windows approached him. One of the cars blocked the sidewalk in front of him and the other pulled up beside him, Apreala told the station.

“These guys just hopped out in full camouflage uniforms with masks over their face, and stopped me, and told me to immediately identify (myself)," he said. “I was confused as to whether or not they were even legitimate authority.”

At least three men, who Apreala said were white, did not identify themselves as law enforcement, but Apreala noticed an ICE badge, according to WBUR. He told them that he was a U.S. citizen born in Boston and an officer replied that he matched the description of someone they had been investigating.

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