TV News LIES

2020 marks the 50th anniversary of the Pride March, but the coronavirus pandemic forced people to celebrate from inside their own homes due to social distancing guidelines.

The show featured performers including Janelle Monáe, Deborah Cox and Billy Porter, and appearances from a number of other celebrities.

With the city's massive Pride parade canceled, Sunday's performances were virtual, the flags flew in emptier than normal spaces and the protesters wore masks.

"It's a great thing to see because the original Pride started with the civil rights movement," Matthew Fischer said as he passed out hand sanitizer Sunday at Foley Square. "So we're really going back to the roots of that and making sure we encompass everything that empowers people to be who they are."

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Mississippi is on the verge of changing its state flag to erase a Confederate battle emblem condemned as racist.

The flag’s supporters have resisted efforts to change it for decades, but rapid developments in recent weeks have changed dynamics on this issue in the state, which has a long history of systemic racism and saw more lynchings of African Americans than any other state in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

As protests against racial injustice recently spread across the US, including Mississippi, leaders from business, religion, education and sports have spoken forcefully against the state flag. They have urged legislators to ditch the 126-year-old banner for one that better reflects the diversity of a state with a 38% Black population.

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Up to three planets - potentially rocky like Earth - have been spotted around a star located relatively near our solar system - a planetary system offering astronomers intriguing possibilities in the search for signs of extraterrestrial life.

The planets orbit Gliese 887, a so-called red dwarf star half the sun’s mass located 11 light years from Earth - right in our backyard in cosmic terms, researchers said on Friday. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).

Only 12 other stars are closer to our solar system.

A federal judge on Friday ordered the release of children held with their parents in U.S. immigration jails and denounced the Trump administration’s prolonged detention of families during the coronavirus pandemic.

U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee’s order applies to children held for more than 20 days at three family detention centers in Texas and Pennsylvania operated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Some have been detained since last year.

Citing the recent spread of the virus in two of the three facilities, Gee set a deadline of July 17 for children to either be released with their parents or sent to family sponsors.

The family detention centers “are ‘on fire’ and there is no more time for half measures,” she wrote.

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US intelligence officials assessed that Russia's military intelligence agency paid bounties to Taliban-linked militants to kill NATO troops in Afghanistan — which include American forces, according to a New York Times report on Friday.

US officials discovered information about the bounties earlier this year. Some of the bounty money was collected by either Islamist militants or those associated with them, The Times reported.

In 2019, 17 US troops were killed in combat in Afghanistan, according to the Defense Department.

Interrogations of Afghan militants and criminals yielded the information indicating that Taliban-linked militants were offered bounties from Russian forces, The Times reported. The intelligence officials believe the bounties involve Unit 29155, a branch of Russia's GRU military intelligence agency.

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Macy’s Inc (M.N) said on Thursday it would lay off about 3,900 employees in corporate and management positions as U.S. businesses try to save cash in the face of dwindling demand caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Macy’s had in May warned of nearly $1 billion in operating losses in its first quarter and said it would turn into a “smaller company”.

The job cuts come at a time when unemployment figures in the United States are already high. Rising coronavirus infections in many U.S. states including California, Texas and Florida are likely to hurt employment further as some people stay away from consumer-facing establishments.

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The Supreme Court handed a green light Thursday to the Trump administration in its effort to speed up the removal of those seeking asylum.

The court ruled that asylum-seekers claiming fear of persecution abroad do not have to be given a federal court hearing before quick removal from the United States if they initially fail to prove that claim.

The decision was written by Associate Justice Samuel Alito. Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan dissented.

The case, one of many to come before the high court involving the Trump administration's crackdown on immigration, concerned Sri Lanka native Vijayakumar Thuraissigiam. He was arrested 25 yards north of the Mexican border and immediately placed in expedited removal proceedings.

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Shortly before 7 p.m. PT, a man dressed in yellow rain gear, a black hood pulled over his head and black gloves on his hands, walked into the gas station, sprayed a flammable liquid around the store and on the likable clerk behind the counter, lit the fluid on fire, and rode off into the night on a black bicycle.

The deadly exchange — only 15 seconds long — was caught on videotape. "He literally walked in and walked back out, in a hurried motion," Lt. Troy Clegg of the Shasta County Sheriff's Office said Thursday.

When authorities arrived shortly after calls came in about the gas station in Highway 299 being on fire, they found 54-year-old David Wicks badly burned.

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