TV News LIES

In countless campaign appearances during his futile pursuit of the Republican presidential nomination, Florida’s rightwing governor, Ron DeSantis, celebrated his state as “the place woke goes to die”.

Now, by virtue of a federal appeals court ruling that skewers a centerpiece of his anti-diversity and inclusion agenda, Florida resembles a place where anti-woke legislation goes to die.

In a scathing ruling released late on Monday, a three-judge panel of the 11th circuit appeals court in Atlanta blasted DeSantis’s 2022 Stop Woke Act – which banned employers from providing mandatory workplace diversity training, or from teaching that any person is inherently racist or sexist – as “the greatest first amendment sin”.

More...

An Alabama inmate with "serious mental and psychiatric needs" was placed in a concrete drunk tank known as "the freezer" before he later died from hypothermia in a death now ruled a homicide, state records show.

Anthony Don Mitchell died Jan. 26, 2023, while in the custody of the Walker County Sheriff’s Department after "spending fourteen days incarcerated under horrendous conditions" at the Walker County Jail, according to an amended complaint filed in a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama.

The jail is in the city of Jasper about 40 miles northwest of Birmingham.

According to the 53-page suit filed by his mother, Margaret Mitchell, corrections officers at the jail purposely exposed her 33-year-old son to freezing temperatures in the tank over a 24-period.

More...

After nearly 200 bodies were found stacked and rotting in a Colorado funeral home, lawmakers have proposed bills to overhaul the state’s threadbare funeral home regulations, which failed to prevent a string of gruesome cases – from sold body parts to fake ashes.

The cases have shattered hundreds of families. Many learned that their loved ones’ remains were not in the ashes they ceremonially spread or held tight for years but were instead decaying in a building or, in one case, the back of hearse.

Their devastation pushed state lawmakers to unveil a bipartisan bill on Monday that would implement Colorado’s first licensing requirements to become a funeral home director, bringing licensing rules in line with all other states and even surpassing most. The bill also sets requirements for other industry jobs, including embalmers and cremationists.

More...

The Supreme Court on Monday unanimously restored Donald Trump to 2024 presidential primary ballots, rejecting state attempts to ban the Republican former president over the Capitol riot.

The justices ruled a day before the Super Tuesday primaries that states cannot invoke a post-Civil War constitutional provision to keep presidential candidates from appearing on ballots. That power resides with Congress, the court wrote in an unsigned opinion.

Trump posted on his social media network shortly after the decision was released: “BIG WIN FOR AMERICA!!!”

The outcome ends efforts in Colorado, Illinois, Maine and elsewhere to kick Trump, the front-runner for his party’s nomination, off the ballot because of his attempts to undo his loss in the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden, culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

More...

The largest wildfire in Texas history has burned more than 1.1 million acres in nearly a week as dry winds and high temperatures on Sunday fueled the blaze, destroying hundreds of homes and killing at least two people in the state's Panhandle.

Several wildfires that sparked on Feb. 26 across the Texas Panhandle remained active on Sunday, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service. While a cold front is expected to move across the state's rural Panhandle early Monday, the National Weather Service in Amarillo said critical fire weather conditions will carry through Sunday as temperatures will peak — hitting the 70s to low 80s — in the evening in some areas.

Winds out of the southwest were predicted to gust up to 50 mph with humidity dropping below 15% and grass at very dry levels, according to the weather service. Authorities urged residents to avoid activities that could cause fires and the Texas A&M Forest Service said 65 counties currently have burn bans in place.

More...

Hundreds of miles of California highways remained shut down Sunday as a powerful blizzard pounded parts of the Golden State and Mountain West with snow totals that could reach 12 feet amid howling winds with gusts that hit 190 mph − well above the 157 mph threshold for a Category 5 hurricane.

National Weather Service meteorologist William Churchill warned of “life-threatening concern” for residents near Lake Tahoe, calling the storm, now in its third day, an "extreme blizzard.'' Areas of Nevada, Utah and Colorado were also affected.

"Moderate to heavy snow has persisted overnight across the northern Sierra Nevada," the National Weather Service in Sacramento said in a social media post Sunday. "Wind gusts ... are continuing to result in blizzard conditions."

More...