Here’s What’s Wrong With Donald Trump’s Campaign Ad

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s first TV ad shows dozens of people attempting to jump a border fence as a narrator talks about illegal immigration from Mexico. But fact-checkers pointed out that the ad actually shows Moroccans.

PolitiFact traced the footage shown right as a narrator says “he’ll stop illegal immigration by building a wall on our southern border that Mexico will pay for” back to a video posted by Italian television network RepubblicaTV.

On May 1, 2014, about 800 Moroccan migrants tried to cross the border into Melilla, a territory of Spain. They rushed the wall that separates Melilla from the rest of the African continent, according to PolitiFact. The video later surfaced on YouTube in a July 2015 post titled, “1,000s of immigrants try to cross the border at once.”

PolitiFact rated the campaign ad as Pants on Fire, meaning “the statement is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim.”

To which the Trump campaign responded that they knew exactly what they were doing, writing in a statement that the video was selected “to demonstrate the severe impact of an open border and the very real threat Americans face if we do not immediately build a wall and stop illegal immigration.”

Campaign manager Corey Lewandowski added some color, telling NBC News, “No sh– it’s not the Mexican border, but that’s what our country is going to look like. This was 1,000 percent on purpose.”

As with most things Trump, Twitter users had some fun.

Hoverboard fire destroys Australia family's home

Fire crews said the popular electrical product was charging in a girl's bedroom in the Melbourne suburb of Strathmore when the blaze started.

Local media said the girl saw sparks coming out of the hoverboard. 

Metropolitan Fire Brigade Acting Commander Phil Smith said the family was lucky to escape unhurt, but the home was severely damaged.

"It overheated for some reason and caught fire and no one saw it till it was too late," Acting Commander Smit

"In this case the family was fortunate to be able to get out of the house."

He said it served as a warning not to leave charging items unattended.

Last year UK consumer protection agency National Trading Standards found that 88% of the self-balancing boards they examined could explode or catch fire.

Southern States Braced For Mississippi Floods

Days of torrential downpours saw more than 10 inches of rain pushed into the Mississippi and tributary rivers starting on Christmas Day.

Levels in the river were expected to begin receding in Illinois and Missouri on Monday, with hundreds of families choosing to remain in their homes despite warnings.

Water is pumped over a levee in Valley Park, Missouri

Record or near-record river levels have threatened levees in southern Illinois, where nine people died and a dozen counties were declared disaster areas, according to Illinois Emergency Management Agency spokeswoman Patti Thompson.

The other victims were killed in flooding in Missouri, Oklahoma and Arkansas.

Significant flooding is expected later this week further downstream in Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana.

The river is expected to peak on Thursday in Memphis, Tennessee, according to the National Weather Service.

It is predicted to reach major flood stage between Arkansas City, Arkansas, and Natchez, Mississippi.

Further heavy rain is also expected later in the week, which could spark fresh flooding.

On Saturday, President Barack Obama signed a federal emergency declaration for Missouri, allowing federal aid to be used to bolster state and local efforts.

In St Louis, two sewage treatment plants were so badly damaged by the floodwaters that raw sewage was forced into the river.

Hundreds of people were evacuated in the Missouri towns of Pacific, Eureka, Valley Park and Arnold.

The Amtrak train service between St Louis and Kansas City was restored on Sunday, four days after high waters reached the tracks in some locations.

Barack Obama takes action over US gun laws

The plans will be announced on Tuesday by the president, despite opposition from Congress to new gun laws.

All sellers who operate online or at gun shows will be forced to conduct background checks on potential buyers.

Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul said he would fight the executive actions "tooth and nail".

And several of his Republican rivals said they would erase the measures "on day one" if they win the White House.

But Mr Obama says his new measures will be within his legal authority and consistent with the Second Amendment, which grants Americans the right to bear arms. 

And while they will not solve every violent crime in the US, he said they will potentially "save lives and spare families the pain" of loss.

Under the plan announced on Monday evening by the White House: 

• All sellers must be licensed and conduct background checks, overturning current exemptions to some online and gun show sellers
• States must provide information on people disqualified due to mental illness or domestic violence
• FBI will increase workforce processing background checks by 50%, hiring more than 230 new examiners
• Congress will be asked to invest $500m (£339m) to improve access to mental healthcare
• The departments of defence, justice and homeland security will explore "smart gun technology" to improve gun safety

Earlier on Monday, the president heard recommendations from Attorney General Loretta Lynch, FBI Director James Comey and other top law enforcement officials.

At a gun show - North America editor Jon Sopel

One charming man I spoke to had a stall of fine old pieces, including a Remington rifle from the 1970s. Because he wasn't registered, all I had to do was show him a driver's licence - and answer this question: am I a felon or mad?

Say no to that, and all I had to do was hand over the cash and the gun was mine with as much ammunition as I could carry. And as he pointed out to me, if I lied, how would he know?

There were also individuals walking around the show carrying rifles and revolvers, with flags coming out of the muzzle saying "for sale" - again no restrictions at all for people who just wanted to flog their old firearm.

These are some of the issues that the president wants to address with his executive action.

The Hidden Danger of Making a Murderer and Other True Crime Entertainment

Just before Christmas, Netflix launched their docuseries Making a Murderer. Since then, some 180,000 viewers have signed online petitions pleading for the release of Steven Avery, the Wisconsin man who appears to have been the victim of a prejudiced trial.

I use “appeared” here judiciously, but I’m part of a shrinking tribe. The true crime genre, which has long drawn pleasure from ambiguities, has become a prompt for punditry. Making a Murdereris a show designed to raise questions about Steven Avery’s guilt—as well as the effectiveness of the American justice system. In its wake, many viewers have taken the opportunity provided by the social web to compete over who is most certain of Avery’s innocence. HBO’s recent miniseries The Jinx, the show that ended with a bizarre confession, elicited the opposite reaction. (That its subject, Robert Durst, was arrested on murder charges just before the finale aired was the best thing that could have happened for HBO.) And though the first season of podcast phenomenon Serial disappointed its fans by declining to provide a neatly packaged point-of-view as to Adnan Syed’s culpability (or lack thereof), journalist Sarah Koenig’s dramatization of her own process led listeners to believe that they were doing the work of a detective. Koenig may not have been certain, but her format emboldened listeners to indulge in certitude in a way she herself wouldn’t.

There’s something about the sheer volume of a serialized show that makes the viewer feel as though he or she is becoming an expert. Serial was a particularly troubling example of this. In the gaps between episodes, fans had increasing amounts of fun trading theories about the Best Buy phone booth. That the show was occasioned by the death of a teenage girl seemed almost incidental to the fans for whom it was a parlor game that compounded weekly; the quest for truth grew more important than the case’s most salient fact. Similarly, Making a Murderer’s structure, with reversals (Avery is exonerated for an earlier crime in the series’ early going) and a torrent of grisly information lends itself to a certain public performance on the part of the viewer. The show’s capaciousness makes the viewer feel both accomplished simply for having watched and like the lucky recipient of all the information there possibly could be to know about Steven Avery.

True crime is nothing new, of course. The genre’s been around in its current form since the publication of In Cold Blood. But Truman Capote’s “nonfiction novel” was written with a chilly, aesthetic distance; its enigmas are those of human nature. (And its alleged deviations from strictest fact are proof that Capote was trying to do many things, but actually solving a mystery wasn’t one of them.) Today’s highbrow true crime is full of visceral, passionate emotionality; it has the you-be-the-judge rhythms of Dateline and the jazzy verve of Nancy Grace trying to convince her viewers that one or another chosen target should fry. Few people take Dateline or Nancy Grace’s show as serious-minded, but those programs were years ahead of The Jinx and Making a Murderer in their awareness that there’s more than just drama to be wrung out of the legal process: There’s melodrama.

And that melodrama is as easily obtained by leaving things out of a story as by putting them in. Making a Murderer leaves its viewers with the impression they’re experts on Avery; prosecutor Ken Kratz, however, has alleged that key evidence reflecting poorly on Avery was left out of the show. What evidence does make it in, too, appears as though by the hand of God. While Koenig, through explaining her exhaustive journalistic process, made a claim for her show as close to objective truth, the Making a Murderer documentarians get there by eliding themselves from the story entirely. These are just the facts.

By the very nature of television, though, they’re not all the facts. Ten hours is long (in the case of the slightly repetitive Making a Murderer, it’s too long), but it’s less than two days’ worth of business for a jury trial. Whatever they left out, they left out something. As Avery’s own lawyer, the onscreen hero Dean Strang, has put it, both the anti-Avery sentiments from the pre-Making a Murderer period and the current era of good feelings are reflections of something other than the truth: “A lot of it is literate and thoughtful and all that, but both of those experiences are artificial and distorting.”

I mean it as no slight to reality TV to say that true crime programming reminds me of Survivor or Top Chef; those shows’ editors know that the firefighter from Boston or the sous-chef from Detroit will end up winning the game, and structure revelations over the course of the season to make that outcome satisfying. Everything you see onscreen happened. But it might not be something you want to sign a petition over. Or maybe it might! Either way—in an era of greater-than-ever one-upsmanship on social media and less-than-ever meaningful mixing of ideological opponents—ambiguity is the thing that’s falling out of fashion.

Craig Strickland’s Widow Shares Details of His Final Hours

Brian Armas—APCraig Strickland, lead singer of Arkansas-based country-rock band Backroad Anthem.

Hours after Craig Strickland’s body was found at Bear Creek Cove near Kaw Lake in Kay County, Oklahoma, his wife, Helen Strickland, is shedding some light on his last moments.

“Craig was found today. We can finally rest knowing that he is at home in heaven with his father,” Helen posted on Instagram.

“The night of the accident he had fought his way out of the water and up a hill before the stages of hypothermia set in. He experienced no pain in his final moments and simply felt like he was falling asleep. They found him lying in the shape of a cross looking up to his father.”

“Thank you to every single person who prayed for him and our family during this time,” she wrote. “There was not a more peaceful way for him to go into the arms of our Lord, and I know your prayers had a role in making that happen. I know he saw Jesus at that moment when he laid down and walked arm in arm with Him into a better Everlasting Life. I love you with all my heart Craig Michael. #craigstrickland”

The former Miss Arkansas confirmed the death of her husband earlier on Twitter.

Friends and family were clinging to hope that he might be found alive after his beloved dog Sam, who was hunting with him at the time, was found safe and sound after the Backroad Anthem singer, 29, and his friend Chase Morlandwent missing during winter storm Goliath on Dec. 27. Morland’s body was found Dec. 28.

Morland had tweeted an ominous message foreshadowing the tragic turn of events.

“In case we don’t come back, @BackroadCRAIG and I are going right through Winter Storm Goliath to kill ducks in Oklahoma. #IntoTheStorm,” Morland, 22, wrote in the early morning hours on Sunday. Strickland also retweeted the message the same day.

“We are hanging in there,” Strickland’s bandmate Toby Freeman told PEOPLE exclusivelyMonday. “We are still in shock. It’s still hard to believe and I know the family is struggling.”

Britain denounces ISIL video showing five ‘spies’ shot

An Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) video showing a young boy in military fatigues and an older masked man who both spoke with British accents should be viewed as a propaganda tool, Prime Minister David Cameron said on Monday.

The video, which could not be independently verified, also shows the killing of five men accused of spying for the West.

The masked man threatens Cameron and vows that ISIL will one day occupy Britain before shooting one of the alleged spies in the head.

The footage revived memories of “Jihadi John,” a British ISIL member who appeared in several videos in which hostages were killed before his own death was reported in an airstrike late last year.

“We are examining the content of the video and the prime minister is being kept updated on that,” Cameron's spokeswoman said of the latest footage. She was not aware whether Cameron himself had watched it.

“It serves as a reminder of the barbarity of Daesh and what the world faces with these terrorists,” the spokeswoman said, referring to ISIL by one of its Arabic acronyms. “It is also clearly a propaganda tool and should be treated as such.”

When asked whether the men shown had been spies, the spokeswoman declined to comment on intelligence matters but said the group's past propaganda had not all been true.

After the killings of the five men, a young English-speaking boy, who is wearing a black bandana and appears to be about four or five years old, is shown saying: “So go kill the kuffar [unbelievers] right over there.”

The United States government said in November it had killed Mohammed Emwazi, a British citizen dubbed “Jihadi John” who became a symbol of ISIL brutality after appearing in several hostage execution videos.

The masked man shown in the new video was different from Emwazi but spoke in a clear English accent, waving a gun at the camera while criticizing Cameron.

“This is a message to David Cameron, O slave of the White House, O mule of the Jews,” the man said in the 10-minute video released on Sunday.

“How strange it is that a leader of a small island threatens us with a handful of planes. One would have thought you'd have learned the lessons of your pathetic master in Washington and his failed campaign against the Islamic State,” the man said.

In November, British officials said that up to 800 Britons had traveled to Iraq and Syria, some to join ISIL. About 50 percent had returned home while about 70 were believed to have been killed.