TV News LIES

Gregory Rodriguez, a former California women’s prison correctional officer, who was at the center of one of the state’s largest prison abuse scandals, was convicted of 64 sexual abuse charges on Tuesday.

The jury’s guilty verdict includes convictions for rape and sexual battery on behalf of 13 incarcerated women.

Rodriguez, 56, was facing 97 counts and was found not guilty on some while the jury was hung on others, the Fresno Bee reported. His convictions include 57 felonies and seven misdemeanors, prosecutors said.

Rodriguez is one of the few California prison guards to face criminal charges for on-duty sexual misconduct, which data suggests is rampant in the state’s women’s prisons and across the US, but infrequently punished.

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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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Each year on December 7, Pearl Harbor Survivors, veterans, and visitors from all over the world come together to honor and remember the 2,403 service members and civilians who were killed during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. A further 1,178 people were injured in the attack, which permanently sank two U.S. Navy battleships (the USS Arizona and the USS Utah) and destroyed 188 aircraft.

On August 23, 1994, the United States Congress designated December 7 as National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day. Every year, remembrance events are held at the Pearl Harbor National Memorial, culminating in a commemoration ceremony on December 7. To see videos of these events, please see the links below.

TVNL Comment:  As a child in school on Dec. 7th commemorations during the war years, I still recall the song we sang :

A US federal judge on Thursday rejected plane giant Boeing’s agreement to plead guilty to fraud after two fatal crashes of its 737 Max passenger jets, faulting a diversity and inclusion provision in the deal regarding the selection of an independent monitor to audit the company’s compliance practices.

Boeing and the US justice department now have 30 days to update the court on how they plan to proceed in the case, Judge Reed C O’Connor of the northern district of Texas ordered.

Spokespeople for Boeing and the DoJ did not respond immediately to requests for comment.

Relatives of the victims of the two 737 Max crashes, which occurred in 2018 and 2019 and killed 346 people, have called the agreement a “sweetheart” deal that failed to adequately hold Boeing accountable for the deaths of their loved ones.

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The Illinois Supreme Court has overturned actor Jussie Smollett's conviction for staging a fake hate crime against himself.

In a decision issued Thursday, the court said the "Empire" actor, 42, should not have been charged for the same incident a second time after the original charges brought against him were dropped in 2019. Smollett was alleged to have falsely reported to police that he was the victim of a hate crime. He was found guilty in 2021 on five counts of disorderly conduct.

"Because the initial charges were dismissed as part of an agreement" with Smollett and he "performed his part of the agreement, the second prosecution was barred," the ruling said.

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