TV News LIES

Investment banking is about to become a riskier business, again.

The Federal Reserve board is meeting today, Wednesday, to discuss overhauling the Volcker rule, which prevents banks from using their customers' tax-payer insured deposits to finance speculative trades. Named after former Fed chair Paul Volcker, the rule was enacted four years ago as part of the Dodd-Frank legislation passed after the 2007 global financial crisis.

Led by chairman Jerome Powell, a Fed revision of the Volcker rule would fulfill President Trump's campaign promise to "dismantle" Obama-era regulations on Wall Street. However, "Volcker 2.0" will stop short of giving banks the flexibility to use customer's funds they enjoyed before the recession.

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House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy said Tuesday he is now "more convinced" that the FBI acted appropriately in its handling of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible connections to Donald Trump's campaign.

Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, who had been reported shot and killed in the Ukrainian capital Tuesday, has shown up at a news conference alive.

Vasily Gritsak, head of the Ukrainian Security Service, told a news conference on Wednesday the agency faked Babchenko's death to catch those who were trying to kill him.

He added that the staged death was part of a "special operation" to pre-empt a real plot to kill him.

Kiev and national police had said Babchenko, a strong critic of the Kremlin, was shot multiple times in the back at his apartment building and found bleeding by his wife.

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President Trump reportedly told Attorney General Jeff Sessions last year that he should reverse his decision to recuse himself from the investigation into Russian election interference.

Trump made the unusual ask of Sessions during a dinner at the president’s Mar-a-Lago estate in March 2017, the New York Times reported Tuesday. The meeting reportedly came shortly after Sessions announced his recusal.

Purdue Pharma, the company that planted the seeds of the opioid epidemic through its aggressive marketing of OxyContin, has long claimed it was unaware of the powerful opioid painkiller’s growing abuse until years after it went on the market.

But a copy of a confidential Justice Department report shows that federal prosecutors investigating the company found that Purdue Pharma knew about “significant” abuse of OxyContin in the first years after the drug’s introduction in 1996 and concealed that information.

The White House has taken aggressive new steps in its effort to reduce a $337bn trade deficit with China, announcing that it will impose a 25% tariff on $50bn of Chinese goods containing “industrially significant technology”

The White House has taken aggressive new steps in its effort to reduce a $337bn trade deficit with China, announcing that it will impose a 25% tariff on $50bn of Chinese goods containing “industrially significant technology”.

“From now on, we expect trading relationships to be fair and to be reciprocal,” Donald Trump said in statement.

A Russian journalist critical of Vladimir Putin's government who fled the country amid threats was shot to death in Ukraine's capital of Kiev on Tuesday.

The Associated Press reports that Arkady Babchenko was found by his wife suffering from several gunshot wounds and died on the way to the hospital. Babchenko fled Russia in 2017 after stating that he was receiving threats to his life over his reporting.

He relocated to Kiev, where he began working for a Crimean television station where he produced coverage critical of Russia's military actions in the region. Police told The Moscow Times that Babchenko's work was the likely motive for the murder.

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Hurricane Maria likely killed thousands of people across Puerto Rico last year, more than 70 times the official estimate, a Harvard study released Tuesday says.

Authorities in Puerto Rico placed the death toll at 64 after Maria roared through the island Sept. 20, destroying buildings and knocking out power to virtually the entire U.S. territory of more than 3 million people.

Researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, however, surveyed more than 3,000 households on the battered island. By extrapolating those findings, researchers determined that at least 4,645 "excess deaths" occurred during the storm and the weeks that followed.

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