TV News LIES

Apple. Inc. on Tuesday released its first report on the numbers of requests it received in the first half of this year from governments seeking customer account and data information, and - no surprise here - the United States outpaced the rest of the world combined.

But the company couldn't disclose precisely how many U.S. government requests it received and the extent to which it complied. That's because U.S. restrictions required Apple to combine national security orders with account-based law enforcement requests - subpoenas, court orders and warrants - and report only the combined amounts in increments of 1,000.

Voters in Portland, Me., made their city the first on the East Coast to legalize marijuana on Tuesday.

Shortly after the polls closed, the Portland Press Herald said the measure would pass easily, and supporters had already claimed victory.

The Portland law will allow residents to possess up to 2.5 ounces of marijuana. Proponents spent $2,500 to buy pro-pot billboards on city buses and in bus shelters to get it passed.

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After months of efforts by marriage equality advocates, the Illinois House has passed marriage equality. The vote passed the Illinois House by a margin of 61-54. It had previously passed the Illinois Senate in February, so the law will go to Governor Pat Quinn, who has urged its passage and said he will sign it.

The marriage equality law was supported by businesses such as Groupon, religious leaders such as United Methodist Bishop Sally Dyck, elected leaders such as Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and President Obama, and even the former chair of the Illinois Republican Party, Pat Brady. Last month, thousands rallied in Springfield, calling for marriage equality to be passed.

The general counsel of the National Security Agency on Monday compared the agency’s telephone metadata collection program to the highly controversial “stop-and-frisk” practice used by law enforcement officers, saying the agency uses that same standard to choose which phone numbers to query in its database.

“It’s effectively the same standard as stop-and-frisk,” Rajesh De said in an attempt to explain the evidentiary use of “reasonable and articulable suspicion” to identify which phone numbers to target from the agency’s huge database of stored cellphone records.

A D.C. government agency paid a Chicago consulting firm $89,995 for one day of work at a recent city education conference, a fee that included a half-hour keynote speech, three 45-minute parent workshops and hundreds of copies of parenting books.

The Office of the State Superintendent of Education hired the firm without soliciting or considering other bids, according to an agency spokeswoman. The agency sponsored the Sept. 7 conference in an effort to reach out to parents, using D.C. tax dollars to pay the Chicago firm even as many speakers that day — as well as the keynote speaker at the same conference in 2012 — volunteered.

The Supreme Court won't consider Oklahoma's appeal seeking to reinstate its law banning medical abortions, such as those performed with the drug RU-486. The decision comes after the state's Supreme Court said the law, which would restrict the use of several abortion-inducing drugs to their labels, effectively bans all medical abortions.

That apparently was enough for the justices to leave alone the lower court decision striking down the law. But similar controversies in other states, including neighboring Texas, make it possible another case will reach the high court eventually.