TV News LIES

Incidents of sexual assault at U.S. military academies spiked nearly 50 percent during the last school year despite years of focus on the issue and declarations of zero-tolerance, according to results of a survey conducted by the Pentagon.

The number of students reporting unwanted sexual contact totaled 747 during the 2017-18 academic year compared with 507 in 2015-16, according to anonymous surveys of cadets and midshipmen. Unwanted sexual contact ranges from groping to rape.

"We’re disheartened and disappointed that the things and the strategies that we’ve employed just really aren’t getting the results that we want," Nathan Galbreath, deputy director of the Pentagon's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, told USA TODAY on Thursday.

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Hundreds of people are feared dead after a dam operated by the mining company Vale collapsed in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, releasing a wave of red iron ore waste and causing the worst environmental catastrophe in the country’s recent history.

Ten bodies have already been found and more than 300 people remain missing, according to the company. The disaster comes only three years after a similar failure of the Fundão tailings dam near Mariana – co-owned by Vale – which killed 19 people.

Speaking after the latest disaster, the local fire chief Col Edgar Estevão said 100 people had been rescued from the sea of mud released by the dam. However, Vale later released a list of 412 employees and contractors whom it had still been unable to contact, and the state governor, Romeu Zema, said he did not expect many more survivors.

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A federal judge ruled Tuesday that the Trump administration cannot add to the 2020 U.S. Census a question about respondents’ citizenship.

Critics had decried Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’ move to include the question, arguing that it would dissuade immigrants of all kinds from responding to the decennial survey, which helps allocate congressional seats and approximately $675 billion in federal funding.

Congressional Democratic leadership ripped President Trump on Tuesday night, accusing him of trying to "stoke fear" with his calls for a wall on the Mexican border, which have led to a partial government shutdown. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (N.Y.), standing side by side in front of six American flags, offered a rebuttal to Trump immediately after his Oval Office address to the nation.

Paul Manafort shared polling data on Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign with a Ukrainian associate who has ties to Russian intelligence, and he also met with the colleague in Madrid while working on the presidential campaign, according to a court filing from Manafort’s lawyers published on Tuesday.

Manafort, the convicted former Trump campaign chairman, is accused of lying to special counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutors about both of those interactions with the associate, Konstantin Kilimnik, and also of not telling the truth about his meetings with Kilimnik “on more than one occasion” to discuss a Ukrainian peace plan.

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New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Tuesday that he plans to spend $100 million on health care for New Yorkers who do not have health insurance, including undocumented immigrants.

The move inserts city policy into two contentious national debates, once again placing the mayor as a bulwark against the policies of President Trump. The announcement comes on the same day that Trump has scheduled a nationally televised Oval Office address on the partial government shutdown and border wall debate.

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