TV News LIES

Embattled Port Authority Chairman David Samson lacks the moral authority to be in charge, Gov. Cuomo’s top appointee to the bistate agency told the Daily News on Monday.

Executive director Patrick Foye made the blunt assessment during a wide-ranging discussion with the Editorial Board that touched on everything from Bridgegate to pay for airport workers.

The legal battle over same-sex marriage moves Tuesday to a federal courtroom in Michigan where, for the first time since California’s famed Prop 8 case, a judge is expected to allow gay parenthood itself to be put on trial.

Federal Judge Bernard Friedman is weighing whether Michigan’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage is constitutional. The case started out with a lesbian couple suing the state to permit both women to adopt the other’s children; Friedman widened it and in doing so has given court watchers a sense he’s sympathetic to the couple’s argument.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture will spend millions of dollars to help farmers and ranchers improve pastures in five Midwestern states to provide food for the nation's struggling honeybees under a program to be announced Tuesday.

Commercial honeybees pollinate an estimated $15 billion worth of produce each year. Many beekeepers bring hives to the Upper Midwest in the summer for bees to gather nectar and pollen for food, then truck them in the spring to California and other states to pollinate everything from almonds to apples to avocadoes.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to wade into the politically volatile issue of gun control by leaving intact three court rulings rejecting challenges to federal and state laws.

The court's decision not to hear the cases represented a loss for gun rights advocates, including the National Rifle Association, which was behind two of the challenges.

The first case involved a challenge by the NRA to a Texas law that prevents 18-20 year olds from carrying handguns in public. It also raised the broader question of whether there is a broad right under the Second Amendment to bear arms in public.

Deborah Parker said it happened one night not far from the reservation.

A white man coaxed a Tulalip Indian woman into his vehicle. He drove until he thought he had entered tribal land. And then he beat her. He raped her. He left her for dead. While he assaulted her, the victim later told Parker how he blustered about how he’d get away with his crimes. He knew tribal police couldn’t legally arrest him, she said. And so he drove away thinking he was a free man.

It was sometime in the late 1990’s when Parker first heard this story. She was a domestic violence counselor for the Tulalip Tribe in northern Washington State. Raised on the reservation, an early victim of abuse herself, she said listening to the often-daily survival stories of other tribal members led to a moment of awareness. “There was a sense of lawlessness,” Parker said. “We had no way of handling justice.”

The federal government shutdown last year delayed more than 37,000 immigration hearings by months or years for immigrants already waiting in lengthy lines to plead for asylum or green cards.

While the country's immigration courts are now running as usual, immigrants who had hoped to have their cases resolved in October so they could travel abroad to see family or get a job have instead had their lives put on hold. Many had already waited years to get a hearing date in the notoriously backlogged courts, which determine whether immigrants should be deported or allowed to stay in the country.