TV News LIES

A San Francisco Bay area police department mired in scandal over racist and sexist texts implicating dozens of officers has agreed to reforms and five years of outside monitoring, the US Department of Justice announced.

According to the agreement made public on Friday, the Antioch police department and the city of Antioch will select an expert law enforcement consultant approved by the justice department to review and update its practices on nondiscriminatory policing, use of force, hiring and promotions and discipline, among other topics, over a five-year period.

“Law enforcement is only effective when it inspires public confidence,” said Ismail J Ramsey, US attorney for the northern district of California.

The text messages, swapped among members of the Antioch police department between 2019 and 2022, surfaced in 2023 as part of a federal investigation of the department.

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Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI engineer and whistleblower who helped train the artificial intelligence systems behind ChatGPT and later said he believed those practices violated copyright law, has died, according to his parents and San Francisco officials. He was 26.

Balaji worked at OpenAI for nearly four years before quitting in August. He had been well-regarded by colleagues at the San Francisco company, where a co-founder this week called him one of OpenAI’s strongest contributors who was essential to developing some of its products.

Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on 26 November in what police said “appeared to be a suicide. No evidence of foul play was found during the initial investigation.” The city’s chief medical examiner’s office confirmed the manner of death to be suicide.

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A bird strike involving an American Airlines jetliner disabled one of the plane’s two engines shortly after takeoff from New York’s LaGuardia airport, forcing the flight to turn around and land at John F Kennedy international airport, authorities said on Friday.

No one was injured in the incident on Thursday involving flight 1722, which took off from LaGuardia at 7.43pm with a destination of Charlotte, North Carolina, airline officials said.

The Federal Aviation Administration says bird strikes are increasing, with 19,400 strikes at 713 airports across the US last year alone. Rarely do they cause so much damage that commercial jetliners are forced to make emergency landings.

The pilot of the Airbus A321 declared an emergency at 7.52pm and diverted to JFK airport, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the New York area’s major airports, said in a statement.

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The Satanic Temple is increasing its work in schools across the country, trying to combat a rise in religious teachings.

The group, launched in 2013 to battle the “intrusion of Christian values on American politics,” recently began a religious release program in an Ohio school district and plans to expand to a district in Tennessee soon.

It does not seek to convert students toward Satan but wants to be a bulwark against increased religious education.

“A lot of people obviously hear the word Satan, and they tend to lose their minds wherever we go. There tends to be quite a community backlash,” said June Everett, campaign director for the After School Satan Club and Hellion Academy of Independent Learning (HAIL) for The Satanic Temple.

The Connecticut Appellate Court on Friday affirmed a $965 million verdict from 2022 against conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, determining there’s “sufficient evidence” to support the damages awarded to relatives of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre victims and an FBI agent.