TV News LIES

Election officials are on edge after what appears to be another round of physical threats — this time involving envelopes of fentanyl — heading into next year’s presidential election.

Offices across the country received suspicious letters this week, some of which the FBI said may have contained fentanyl. Election officials in at least five states — California, Georgia, Oregon, Nevada and Washington — received similar letters, according to a briefing document from the FBI and the United States Postal Inspection Service shared with election officials across the country.

The FBI seized electronic devices from Mayor Eric Adams earlier this week, according to his campaign, as scrutiny of Adams’ fundraising intensifies while a federal public corruption probe into donations to his campaign is underway.

FBI agents approached Adams on Monday night after an event and requested his electronic devices, said Adams’ campaign attorney Boyd Johnson in a written statement Friday. Evan Thies, a campaign spokesman, said the mayor had been served a search warrant.

To obtain a search warrant, investigators would have had to prove to a judge that there is probable cause to believe that the devices sought would reveal evidence that a crime had been committed.

Adams’ attorney did not specify where the mayor was Monday night but his schedule showed that he was slated to deliver remarks at NYU downtown for an event on autism.

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• A former top prosecutor for the city of Baltimore was convicted on Thursday of charges that she lied about the finances of a side business to improperly access retirement funds during the Covid pandemic, using the money to buy two Florida homes.

A federal jury convicted former Baltimore state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby of two counts of perjury after a trial that started on Monday.

Mosby served two terms as state’s attorney for Baltimore. A federal grand jury indicted her on perjury charges before a Democratic primary challenger defeated her last year.

James Wyda, a lawyer for Mosby, declined to comment, citing a gag order. The US attorney’s office did not have a comment on the verdict, said spokeswoman Marcia Lubin.

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A 5.2 magnitude earthquake shook western Texas early Wednesday morning, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, one of a growing number of quakes to shake the state as oil and gas drilling increases.

The earthquake happened around 4:27 a.m. local time nearly 24 miles southwest of Mentone, Texas, a town near the Texas-New Mexico border, about 57 miles southwest of Carlsbad, New Mexico, and 200 miles east of El Paso, Texas. The area known as the Delaware Basin is center of oil extraction in Texas, and it has seen hundreds of small quakes since 2017 according to Texas state records.

No damage or injuries have been immediately reported. Last November, a 5.4 magnitude earthquake shook the same area. Experts say the quakes are connected to fracking, but not necessarily caused directly by it.

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The exonerated “Central Park Five” member Yusef Salaam has won a seat on the New York City council, marking a stunning reversal of fortune for a political newcomer who was wrongly imprisoned as a teenager in the infamous rape case.

Salaam, a Democrat, will represent a central Harlem district on the city council, having run unopposed for the seat in one of many local elections playing out across New York state on Tuesday. He won his primary election in a landslide.

The victory comes more than two decades after DNA evidence was used to overturn the convictions of Salaam and four other Black and Latino men in the 1989 rape and beating of a white jogger in Central Park. Salaam was imprisoned for almost seven years.

“For me, this means that we can really become our ancestors’ wildest dreams,” Salaam said in an interview before the election.

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A chemical plant explosion and fire sparked a large shelter-in-place order in Texas.

Smoke and flames engulfed the chemical plant on FM 1127 in Shepherd on Wednesday morning, San Jacinto County Office of Emergency Management announced. The immediate cause of the fire was not immediately clear.

One individual was sent to the hospital this morning after suffering from “minor burns”; this person is in stable condition, an emergency management office official said. The explosion occurred at 8.17am at Sound Resource Solutions. Officials did not explain how they plan to extinguish the flames.