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Anchored by Jake Tapper, The Lead airs at 4 p.m. ET on CNN.
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national lead
Sexual assault survivor's advice to Cleveland women
Survivor Michelle Knight was the only one of Ariel Castro's three captives to confront him in court Thursday, but her testimony spoke for the brutality three women suffered at his hands.
"I cried every night. I was so alone. I worried about what would happen to me and the other girls every day. Days never got shorter. Days turned into nights, nights turned into days. Years turned into eternity," Knight said.
Giving that testimony was a powerful step, says victims' rights advocate Angela Rose, herself a survivor of sexual assault.
"Any time you can shatter the silence of sexual violence, [survivors] get to reclaim that sense of power," said Rose.
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world lead
Reporter: Snowden getting job offers in Russia
Russia granted National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden temporary asylum. Snowden has legal status in Russia for one year, his Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena said earlier Thursday, adding that his client left the Moscow airport.
Russian expert and editor of The New Republic Julia Ioffe spoke with Snowden's attorney, who said the former NSA contractor is "not wanting for job offers, that they've just been pouring in."
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pop lead
Oprah's reign returns
Oprah was once regarded as the Midas of media. For two decades, if she touched a product, it usually saw gold.
After she put Anna Karenina on her Book Club list in 2004, sales increased 5,421%.
When Ciao Bella Blood Orange Sorbet made it onto her 2007 "Oprah's Favorites" list, the company's website went from 175,000 hits a week, to 3 million.
In 2008, two University of Maryland economists concluded that the endorsement of then-Senator Barack Obama by Oprah – whom they called a "celebrity of nearly unparalleled popularity" – produced 1,015,559 additional votes for him.
So when Oprah bid a tearful goodbye to her 42 million American talk show viewers two years later, it seemed likely that a good many would follow her, and her favorite things, to her new cable TV network, OWN.
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money lead
Motorola, under Google, unveils Moto X smartphone
More than half of Americans already own smartphones, and are pretty loyal to their brands. Apple and Samsung dominate the market, but Google hopes to change that with the Moto X. The phone is assembled in the U.S., and Google hopes to lure customers with the relatively low $200 price. But a cheaper Apple iPhone is scheduled to hit the market later this fall.
"Consumers are smart now, and they're pretty sophisticated as to what they want, so you've got to show them everything they currently have with their product, and then something that's better that's worth switching," Google CEO Eric Schmidt told CNN.
Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside said he is confident the Moto X is a better product than what is already out there, and compared it to Google's recent forays into the self-driving car.
"We think of this as the self-driving phone, it actually responds to you when you speak to it, you don't have to touch the phone to get it to do things," said Woodside. "That's a huge advantage if you're in the car and you want to make a phone call, or you want to navigate."
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world lead
Exclusive: Dozens of CIA operatives on the ground during Benghazi attack
CNN has uncovered exclusive new information about what is allegedly happening at the CIA, in the wake of the deadly Benghazi terror attack.
Four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were killed in the assault by armed militants last September 11 in eastern Libya.
Programming note: Was there a political cover up surrounding the Benghazi attack that killed four Americans? Watch a CNN special investigation — The Truth About Benghazi, Tuesday at 10 p.m. ET.
Sources now tell CNN dozens of people working for the CIA were on the ground that night, and that the agency is going to great lengths to make sure whatever it was doing, remains a secret.
CNN has learned the CIA is involved in what one source calls an unprecedented attempt to keep the spy agency's Benghazi secrets from ever leaking out.
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