Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been ordered to pay $965m (£869m) in damages after falsely claiming the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax. The families of eight victims, and an FBI agent who responded to the attack, had sought at least $550m in the defamation trial in Connecticut. They alleged the right-wing radio host’s misinformation led to a decade of harassment and death threats. Twenty children and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Jones, who founded the conspiracy-laden Infowars website and talk show, argued for years that the massacre was a “staged” government plot to take guns from Americans and that “no-one died”. He called the parents of victims “crisis actors” and argued that some of them never actually existed.(BBC)…[+]