TV News LIES

The U.S. Constitution and Ohio state law prohibit courts from jailing people for being too poor to pay their legal fines, but in several Ohio counties, local courts are doing it anyway. The ACLU of Ohio today released The Outskirts of Hope, a report that chronicles a nearly yearlong investigation into Ohio’s debtors’ prisons and tells the stories of six Ohioans whose lives have been damaged by debtors’ prison practices.

“Being poor is not a crime in this country,” said Rachel Goodman, Staff Attorney at the ACLU Racial Justice Program. “Incarcerating people who cannot afford to pay fines is both unconstitutional and cruel—it takes a tremendous toll on precisely those families already struggling the most.”

Security concerns have prompted a federal prosecutor in Houston to withdraw from a big racketeering case involving the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, which has been a focus of the investigations into the slayings of the Kaufman County district attorney and an assistant.

Assistant U.S. attorney Jay Hileman on Tuesday notified attorneys representing 34 defendants, The Dallas Morning News and TPM reported. A Justice Department prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who is already involved in the case will take over.

Connecticut lawmakers announced a deal Monday on what they called some of the toughest gun laws in the country that were proposed after the December mass shooting in the state, including a ban on new high-capacity ammunition magazines like the ones used in the massacre that left 20 children and six educators dead.

The proposal also called for background checks for private gun sales and a new registry for existing magazines that carry 10 or more bullets, something of a compromise for parents of Newtown victims who had wanted an outright ban on them, while legislators had proposed grandfathering them into the law.

In the annals of national security, the Obama administration will long be remembered for its unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers. Since 2009, it has employed the World War I–era Espionage Act a record six times to prosecute government officials suspected of leaking classified information

. The latest example is John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer serving a thirty-month term in federal prison for publicly identifying an intelligence operative involved in torture. It’s a pattern: the whistleblowers are punished, sometimes severely, while the perpetrators of the crimes they expose remain free.

A would-be "underwear bomber" involved in a plot to attack a US-based jet was in fact working as an undercover informer with Saudi intelligence and the CIA, it has emerged.

The revelation is the latest twist in an increasingly bizarre story about the disruption of an apparent attempt by al-Qaida to strike at a high-profile American target using a sophisticated device hidden in the clothing of an attacker.

Shipping company UPS has agreed to pay $40 million to end a federal criminal probe connected to its work for online pharmacies. The U.S. Department of Justice announced Friday that the Atlanta-based company would also "take steps" to block illicit online drug dealers from using their delivery service.

The DOJ says the fine amount is the money UPS collected from suspect online pharmacies.
UPS won't be charged with any crimes. Its biggest rival, FedEx Corp., has also been a target of the federal investigation.