TV News LIES

Embers were raining down, the flames were as tall as telephone poles and nearby palm trees were rapidly igniting as Sal Almanza and his firefighting crew arrived at the Los Angeles blazes.

“I’ve never seen anything burn so quick,” said Almanza, 42, recounting the first day of the Eaton fire near Pasadena, California. “Our captains have to make the hard decisions: get yourselves killed or let the house burn.” His eyes welled up recounting the properties devoured as his crew had no choice but to retreat: “I was just so sad and emotional, because there was nothing we could do.”

Almanza is one of thousands of first responders who have put their lives on the line battling the historic windstorm-fueled fires that have ravaged LA.

But he’s not a typical firefighter.

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Authorities in Monterey County, California lifted all evacuations Friday night, one day after a fire broke out at one of the world's largest lithium battery storage facilities.

The Monterey County Sheriff's Office made the announcement shortly after 6 p.m. local time. Health officials still advised residents near the Moss Landing Vistra Power Plant, located about 90 miles south of San Francisco, to limit outdoor exposure and to keep doors and windows closed until further notice.

Friday evening's announcement comes hours after the fire, which began early Thursday evening, flared up again. The fire closed a portion of coastal Highway 1 that remains shut down to traffic as the fire continues to burn.

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If you can read cursive, the National Archives would like a word.

Or a few million. More than 200 years worth of U.S. documents need transcribing (or at least classifying) and the vast majority from the Revolutionary War era are handwritten in cursive – requiring people who know the flowing, looped form of penmanship.

“Reading cursive is a superpower,” said Suzanne Isaacs, a community manager with the National Archives Catalog in Washington, D.C.

She is part of the team that coordinates the more than 5,000 Citizen Archivists helping the Archive read and transcribe some of the more than 300 million digitized objects in its catalog. And they're looking for volunteers with an increasingly rare skill.

Those records range from Revolutionary War pension records to the field notes of Charles Mason of the Mason-Dixon Line to immigration documents from the 1890s to Japanese evacuation records to the 1950 Census.

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Gregory Rodriguez, a former California women’s prison correctional officer, who was at the center of one of the state’s largest prison abuse scandals, was convicted of 64 sexual abuse charges on Tuesday.

The jury’s guilty verdict includes convictions for rape and sexual battery on behalf of 13 incarcerated women.

Rodriguez, 56, was facing 97 counts and was found not guilty on some while the jury was hung on others, the Fresno Bee reported. His convictions include 57 felonies and seven misdemeanors, prosecutors said.

Rodriguez is one of the few California prison guards to face criminal charges for on-duty sexual misconduct, which data suggests is rampant in the state’s women’s prisons and across the US, but infrequently punished.

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The Biden administration announced Monday it was forgiving student loans for more than 150,000 borrowers, bringing the total number of individuals impacted by debt relief in President Biden’s term to over 5 million.

The 150,000 new borrowers are made up of 85,000 individuals who were defrauded by their schools, 61,000 people with permanent or total disabilities and 6,100 public service workers.

The gunman involved in the 2016 “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory attack on a Washington DC pizza restaurant that was mistakenly thought to be at the center of a pedophile ring has died after being shot by police in North Carolina during a traffic stop.

In a news release issued on Thursday, North Carolina’s Kannapolis police department announced that Edgar Maddison Welch died from his wounds caused by two police officers who fired at him after he pulled out a handgun during a traffic stop on Saturday.

In 2016, Welch made headlines when he drove from his North Carolina home and stormed into the Washington DC-based Comet Ping Pong restaurant, where he fired an assault rifle inside. Although no injuries were reported, two weapons were found inside the restaurant and another one was recovered from Welch’s vehicle, police said at the time.

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