TV News LIES

The Republican-controlled Arizona state Senate voted along party lines Wednesday to pass Senate Bill 1062, a measure that would allow businesses to reject service to any customer based on the owners’ religious beliefs.

The bill reads:  "Exercise of religion" means the PRACTICE OR OBSERVANCE OF RELIGION, INCLUDING THE ability to act or refusal to act in a manner substantially motivated by a religious belief whether or not the exercise is compulsory or central to a larger system of religious belief.

Arizona Democrats, who argue the legislation is a way to legalize discrimination against LGBT individuals, sponsored eight amendments in an attempt to thwart the legislation -- all of which were rejected by Senate Republicans.

Four days after a radiation alert shut the nation’s only underground nuclear waste facility, an independent monitoring center said Wednesday it found radioactive isotopes in an air sensor about a half mile from the southeastern New Mexico plant.

A filter from a monitor northwest of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad had trace amounts of plutonium and americium, said Russell Hardy, director of the Carlsbad Environmental Monitoring and Research Center.

The controversial Keystone XL pipeline hit another obstacle Wednesday when a judge struck down a Nebraska law that allowed the oil pipeline to cross the state.

Lancaster County Judge Stephanie Stacy issued a ruling that invalidated Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman's approval of the route. Stacy said the law unconstitutionally gave the governor authority to approve the route and to allow the oil pipeline company to seize land via eminent domain from Nebraska landowners.

Stacy, siding with three landowner plaintiffs, said authority rests with the Nebraska Public Service Commission, which regulates pipelines and other utilities. His ruling bars Heineman from using the law to advance the pipeline.

Calling it an “unconditional surrender” to what he labeled the anti-gay wing of the conservative movement, a co-founder of GOProud has resigned from the organization’s board after the gay Republican group announced it would attend the CPAC gathering next month while facing certain restrictions on its participation.

The American Conservative Union, which runs the conference, announced on Wednesday that the group will attend as guests, ending several years when GOPround was not invited. GOProud members will be included in all events, but the group will not be given a sponsorship or a booth, under the arrangement.

Gunfire in Kiev's Independence Square Thursday shattered a truce declared hours earlier between the Ukrainian government and anti-government protesters.

According to the chief of the National Resistance Headquarters' medical service Sviatoslav Khanenko, more than 60 people were killed on Thursday with the number of casualties expected to rise.

Speaking through the Svoboda party faction's press service, the medical service chief described the attack by government forces:

Two American security officers have been found dead on the Maersk Alabama container ship, police in the Seychelles said Wednesday.

Seychelles police identified them on Thursday as Jeffrey Reynolds and Mark Kennedy. The men, both 44, were found dead on Tuesday.

"A postmortem will be carried out this week in order to establish the cause of their sudden deaths," police said, adding that the police investigation is ongoing.

The gap between the wealthy and the poor is most extreme in several of the United States' most prosperous and largest cities.

The economic divides in Atlanta, San Francisco, Washington, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles are significantly greater than in the rest of the country, according to a study released Thursday by the Brookings Institution, the Washington-based think tank. It suggests that many sources of both economic growth and income inequality have co-existed near each other for the past 35 years .

These cities may struggle in the future to provide adequate public schooling, basic municipal services because of a narrow tax base and "may fail to produce housing and neighborhoods accessible to middle-class workers and families," the study said.

The Supreme Court’s hottest environmental case of the year pits Texas against California on Monday, and that’s just for starters.

More than half of the nation’s states have taken sides in a dispute over federal authority to regulate stationary greenhouse gas emissions. Conservative lawmakers such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., hold one position. Southern California air pollution managers defend another.

Miners and frozen food industry leaders serve up their arguments; respiratory health care experts counter them.