TV News LIES

Florida state prosecutor Jeffrey Ashton says he had qualms about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s handling of the Ibragim Todashev affair, but still found justifiable the interrogation shooting of the Chechen street fighter in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings.

Others, including civil rights groups, remain unconvinced that the federal agency has told the whole story of how a valuable witness in a major terror probe ended up dead while being questioned.

Suleiman Abu Ghaith, a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden, was found guilty of terrorism-related charges on Wednesday following a three-week trial that offered an unusually intimate portrait of al Qaeda's former leader in the days after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Abu Ghaith, 48, a Kuwait-born teacher, faces life in prison after a federal court jury in New York convicted him of conspiring to kill Americans, conspiring to provide material support for terrorists, and providing such support.

The Secret Service sent three agents home from the Netherlands just before President Barack Obama’s arrival after one agent was found inebriated in an Amsterdam hotel.

The three agents were benched Sunday for “disciplinary reasons,” said Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan, declining to elaborate. Donovan said the incident was prior to Obama’s arrival Monday in the country and did not compromise the president’s security in any way.

Still, the incident represents a fresh blemish for an elite agency struggling to rehabilitate its reputation following a high-profile prostitution scandal and other allegations of misconduct. An inspector general’s report in December concluded there was no evidence of widespread misconduct, in line with the service’s longstanding assertion that it has no tolerance for inappropriate behavior.

Rescue crews searched into the night for survivors from a massive mudslide in Washington state that killed at least three people, after hearing voices from the debris field pleading for help.

The slide of mud, trees and rocks happened about 11 a.m. Saturday morning. Several people — including an infant — were critically injured and at least six houses were destroyed.  Snohomish County Fire District 21 Chief Travis Hots said at a news briefing late Saturday that searchers weren't giving up on finding more people.

"We have people who are yelling for our help, and we are going to take extreme risks," Hots said.

The senior lawyer for the National Security Agency stated unequivocally on Wednesday that US technology companies were fully aware of the surveillance agency’s widespread collection of data, contradicting months of angry denials from the firms.

Rajesh De, the NSA general counsel, said all communications content and associated metadata harvested by the NSA under a 2008 surveillance law occurred with the knowledge of the companies – both for the internet collection program known as Prism and for the so-called “upstream” collection of communications moving across the internet.

A pre-dawn earthquake rolled across the Los Angeles basin on Monday, rattling residents from the San Fernando Valley to Long Beach.

The quake's magnitude was 4.4 and it was centered 15 miles west-northwest of the downtown civic center, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.  Los Angeles police and fire officials said there were no immediate reports of damage.

"It rocked and rolled for about 10 or 12 seconds. I'm surprised nothing fell off the walls or broke — and nothing did — but it was quite a shaker," said Brian Bland, a retired AP Radio correspondent who lives in suburban Santa Monica.