TV News LIES

Every 74 seconds, someone in the US is sexually assaulted. And every nine minutes that ‘someone’ is a child, according to statistics collated by the anti-sexual violence non-profit Rainn.

Instead of sending alleged sex offenders to court, the Trump administration seems more interested in putting them in positions of power. Less than 4% of reported rapes, sexual assaults and child sexual abuse allegations in certain cities across the country ever lead to a sex crime conviction, an NBC News investigation from earlier this year found. To reiterate: that’s reported assaults. By some counts, nearly 80% of rapes and sexual assaults go unreported.

Don’t be too hard on the justice system, though. After all, police and prosecutors have got far more important things to think about than rapists. Namely: locking up pregnant women. According to new research by Pregnancy Justice, prosecutors in 16 states charged 412 people with pregnancy-related crimes in the first two years after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade.

What, you may be wondering, is a pregnancy-related crime? Good question! Most of the cases included in the new report involved low-income women and allegations of substance use during pregnancy. In one case described to the Guardian, a woman was arrested for felony child neglect after giving birth when a drug test came back positive for marijuana. The woman in that case had a medical marijuana card. While substance use during pregnancy is obviously a serious issue that can result in long-term harm to the baby, research suggests that criminalization actually worsens health outcomes.

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he's suing President Donald Trump, claiming the commander in chief deployed 300 California National Guard troops to Oregon. 

“After a federal court blocked his attempt to federalize the Oregon National Guard, Donald Trump is deploying 300 California National Guard personnel into Oregon. They are on their way there now,” Newsom said in a post on X on Oct. 5, adding “We are taking this fight back to court.”

Newsom’s comments come after a federal judge temporarily blocked Trump from deploying 200 Oregon National Guard troops to Portland on Oct. 4. The decision was made in response to a Sept. 28 lawsuit from Democratic Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield’s office. 

The lawsuit was filed a day after Trump said he would send troops to Portland to protect federal immigration facilities from “domestic terrorists” amid protests outside an ICE field office in the area.

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A federal judge ruled Tuesday that the Trump administration’s effort to deport pro-Palestinian academics is a deliberate attack on free speech meant to “strike fear” into non-citizen students and chill campus protests.

“The effect of these targeted deportation proceedings continues unconstitutionally to chill freedom of speech to this day,” U.S. District Judge William Young concluded, in a scathing, 161-page opinion that he described as tYoung, a Reagan appointee based in Boston, did not immediately order changes to administration policies, but said he will hold further proceedings on how to rein in the practices he found to violate First Amendment free-speech rights.

The ruling is the long-awaited result of a lawsuit brought by university professors who say the Trump administration is illegally chilling free speech by targeting prominent pro-Palestinian campus activists — like Mahmoud Khalil — and others who have expressed pro-Palestinian views. It followed a two week trial that featured testimony from top Trump administration officials, who described orchestrating the arrests of these activists and taking cues from an anonymously run website.

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New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ Sept. 28 announcement that he is dropping his bid for reelection raised hopes among conservatives that Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, a socialist state Assembly member, can be stopped by former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent after losing the Democratic primary to Mamdani.

Adams, a centrist Democrat like Cuomo, was also making an independent bid after a federal indictment on corruption charges that were dropped by the Justice Department after Trump took office.

But it remains unlikely that Cuomo can surmount Mamdani's commanding lead in recent polls if Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa remains in the race.

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A loan estimate for an Atlanta home purchased by Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve governor accused of mortgage fraud by the Trump administration, shows that Cook had declared the property as a “vacation home,” according to a document reviewed by Reuters.

The document, dated May 28, 2021, was issued to Cook by her credit union in the weeks before she completed the purchase and shows that she had told the lender that the Atlanta property wouldn’t be her primary residence. The document appears to counter other documentation that Cook’s critics have cited in support of their claims that she committed mortgage fraud by reporting two different homes as her primary residence, two independent real-estate experts said.

Reuters was unable to reach Cook for comment. She has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing regarding her properties, which also include a home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and an investment property in Massachusetts.

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Since the White House press office selected reporters from five pro-Trump, partisan news outlets to ask the president questions during his televised cabinet meeting on Tuesday, readers will not be shocked to learn that they largely avoided subjects he would prefer not to talk about.

In fact, two of them went even further than that, using the opportunity to help Trump make his point about crime in Washington DC by sharing their own stories of being assaulted or harassed.

The first to speak, in what was obviously a pre-planned moment, was Iris Tao of the conspiratorial Epoch Times.

Tao’s outlet, which was founded by Chinese exiles affiliated with the Falun Gong spiritual movement that is repressed as a cult in China, has heavily promoted Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him and that China was responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic.

“I want to mention, you know about crime… we have a young lady here, Iris of Epoch Times,” Trump said, looked down at his briefing notes, where her name was written in large letters. “I heard you were very savagely mugged. Would you like to mention what happened?” he asked.

Tao then described the harrowing experience of being mugged at gunpoint outside her apartment building in January 2023, and struck in the face with a pistol by her attacker when she refused to hand over her phone.

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