TV News LIES

Brilliant splashes of green, purple and pink will streak the night sky for many stargazers in North America on Saturday and Sunday night, as energized particles from space collide with the Earth's atmosphere to create the dazzling effect, known as the Northern Lights or aurora borealis.

The northern United States and much of Canada will have the best view of the natural aurora phenomenon, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The best sightings will come from where the aurora is directly overhead, but hopefuls can catch sight of the light show from up to 1000 km away.

The best time to catch the streaks of light will be just after sunset or just before sunrise; the aurora is not visible during the day.

The beautiful display of lights results from a form of space weather, according to NASA, when high-energy space particles violently collide with atoms of gas in a planet's atmosphere, close to its magnetic pole.

The geomagnetic storm causing this latest aurora is expected to be at its strongest on Saturday night, and will provide onlookers with their best chance to see the show, according to the NOAA.

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Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert suggested that Donald Trump blocked funds for a clean drinking water project in her state over the prosecution of election denier Tina Peters.

Colorado’s governor, Jared Polis, commuted Peters’ nearly nine-year prison sentence on Friday, ordering her release on 1 June. The former Colorado county clerk had allowed unauthorized people to access voting records amid efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, in which Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

Boebert welcomed the commutation the same day, taking some credit, but giving even more to Trump.

“I’m proud of the relentless pressure my office and I applied, working hand-in-hand with President Donald Trump, to highlight Tina’s case and demand fairness,” the congresswoman wrote. “This outcome would not have been possible without the continued pressure and advocacy from President Trump who always knew Tina deserved fairness under the law.”

In comments to 9News Denver on Friday, Boebert also said that she hoped the release of Peters would convince Trump to stop blocking funds for a federal project to bring clean drinking water to Colorado. “We were told that Tina was the reason we couldn’t get water,” Boebert said, an apparent reference to Trump exerting on Colorado’s governor the same kind of pressure he put on Ukraine’s president in 2019, when he withheld congressionally mandated military aid to try to force Ukraine to open a sham investigation into Joe Biden. Trump was impeached for that scheme in 2019.

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Donald Trump may agree to drop his massive $10bn lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service in exchange for the launch of a $1.7bn fund to compensate people he says were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration, according to reports.

The case is the latest example of how Trump has taken over the justice department – which typically operates at arm’s length from the White House – and deployed it for his own ends.

Among other people, more than 1,500 January 6 rioters would be eligible to receive compensation from the fund, ABC said. The treasury department’s Judgment Fund, a pool of taxpayer funds reserved to pay out court judgments and settlements, would allegedly become the vehicle for Trump’s self-styled victim compensation fund.

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Thousands of people from across the country descended on Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, on Saturday. They arrived by bus, by car and by plane to gather for the All Roads Lead to the South rally, following the supreme court’s Louisiana v Callais decision last month, which essentially gutted the Voting Rights Act and severely limited protections against voting discrimination.

Organized by a coalition of national and local civic engagement groups, the rally took place outside the Alabama state capitol building, in the same plaza where the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches – three nonviolent demonstrations in support of Black voting rights – are enshrined.

“We’re here, Montgomery, not at a stopping point, but at a starting point,” Steven L Reed, mayor of Montgomery and the first Black person to hold the position, told the crowd. “We’re here in this city because of the spirit, because of the courage and because of the commitment of our forefathers and foremothers who got us to this point.”

Following the supreme court decision, Republican-led states rushed to redraw their voting maps in ways that weaken Black political power. Tennessee and Florida have already passed new maps, while Alabama, Louisiana and Georgia seem poised to follow. Mississippi temporarily paused redistricting efforts, with the state’s governor promising to revisit the issue soon.

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Maldivian authorities on Saturday suspended the search for the bodies of four Italian divers believed to be deep inside an underwater cave, after a military diver died during a perilous mission to try to reach them.

The group of five Italian divers is believed to have died while exploring a cave at a depth of about 50 meters (160 feet) in Vaavu Atoll on Thursday, according to Italy’s Foreign Ministry. The recreational diving limit in the Maldives is 30 meters (98 feet).

Maldives presidential spokesman Mohamed Hussain Shareef said the search was suspended after Mohamed Mahudhee, a member of the Maldivian National Defense Force, died of underwater decompression sickness after being transferred to a hospital in the capital.

Mahudhee will be buried with military honors in a funeral attended by President Mohamed Muzzu on Saturday night. The diver was part of the group that had briefed Muizzu on the rescue plan when he visited the search site on Friday.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on a two-day trip to Beijing next week, the Kremlin said Saturday.

The announcement comes less than 24 hours after U.S. President Donald Trump finished his own state visit to China, where he also met Xi to discuss trade and the U.S. and Israel’s war in Iran.

In a statement, the Kremlin said that Putin’s trip, planned for May 19-20, had been scheduled to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the 2001 Sino-Russian Treathttps://thehill.com/homenews/ap/ap-international/ap-putin-to-visit-chinese-leader-xi-jinping-days-after-trumps-trip-to-beijing/?tbref=hpy of Friendship.

It said that the two leaders would discuss bilateral relations as well as “key international and regional issues” and economic cooperation.

Relations between China and Russia have deepened in recent years, particularly since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 left Moscow shunned on the global stage and heavily reliant on Beijing for trade due to Western sanctions.

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CNN anchor Jake Tapper ripped President Trump’s attacks on the media as “deranged” on Friday after the president lashed out against what he views as “treasonous” coverage of the conflict with Iran.

“Reporting these facts isn’t treason, and it’s deranged for any president to say such a thing and potentially dangerous for the reporters he’s accusing of treason,” Tapper said during a segment on “The Lead.”

Trump scolded New York Times (NYT) reporter David Sanger earlier Friday as the longtime correspondent was pressing him about the U.S. military’s 38-day bombing campaign inside Iran.

Sanger wrote in a NYT report earlier this month that the U.S.’s core objectives in the war “clearly have not” been achieved, despite the Trump administration’s repeated assertions that they had. He noted that Tehran’s nuclear stockpile remained untouched, and the sides appeared no closer to a deal on constraining the program.

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The federal hantavirus response has laid bare the impact of the Trump administration’s cuts to U.S. and global health, renewing concerns among public health experts that the U.S. is not prepared for a bigger health crisis.

Career scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have been fired or left the agency, and there are far fewer people available to respond to outbreaks and to communicate with the public.

That has largely left political appointees in charge of updating the public.

As the administration scales its response, several top health officials who were previously some of the most publicly critical of the COVID-19 response must now communicate the accurate level of risk posed by the hantavirus.

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