Wednesday's Top 8 includes coverage of U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland's visit to Capitol Hill, Fox News telling Smartmatic it won't settle a $2.7 billion lawsuit, a black hole making quick work of its stellar dinner (cosmically speaking), and more.
House spars over bill to relax marijuana use restrictions for federal employees
Under the bipartisan legislation, federal agencies would no longer disqualify job applicants or refuse security clearance to individuals who have used cannabis.
Attorney General Garland under the GOP knife in House
Attorney General Merrick Garland appears before a House Judiciary Committee hearing, Wednesday, Sept. 20, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Courts & the law
Fox News signals it’s unlikely to settle Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion suit
“Smartmatic is not Dominion, and as much as they’d hope, they’re never going to be Dominion,” a Fox News lawyer said Wednesday, steeling the company from defamation claims over its amplification of 2020 election lies.
Iowa defends ‘ag-gag’ laws before federal appeals court
A lawyer for the state told the appellate court that “those who style themselves journalists are not exempt from the law.”
Ukraine gets widespread support in genocide case at UN’s top court
Svitlana Sushko, 62, sobs on Aug. 3, 2023, while visiting the grave in Kyiv of her youngest son, a Ukrainian soldier who was killed last year in the war against Russia. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
Manslaughter trial begins for two police officers involved in death of an unarmed Colorado man
Oldest prehistoric wooden structure discovered in Zambia
The wooden pieces predate even the human species and indicate that people were settling and building for hundreds of thousands of years earlier than believed.
Black holes are faster eaters than previously believed, study says
The new study posits that the immense gravitational pull from a black hole engulfs surrounding matter at a rate of months, instead of hundreds of years.
Rendering of whirlpool of debris in space being split into two pieces by the dragging of space-time by a supermassive black hole, leaving an inner and outer subdisk (Nick Kaaz/Northwestern University)
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Closing Arguments and Breaking Stories November 17, 2023