TV News LIES

Each year approximately 500 U.S. children die and 7,500 are injured and hospitalized from gunshot wounds, researchers say.

Lead study author Dr. Arin L. Madenci and colleagues reviewed statistics from the Kids' Inpatient Database from 1997, 2000, 2003, 2006 and 2009 for a total of 36 million pediatric hospital admissions and estimated state household gun ownership using the most recent Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System data.

During that period, hospitalizations from gunshot wounds increased from 4,270 to 7,730, and in-hospital deaths from 317 to 503.

Here in Manhattan the other day, you couldn’t miss it — the big bold headline across the front page of the tabloid New York Post, screaming one of those sick, slick lies that are a trademark of Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing media empire. There was Uncle Sam, brandishing a revolver and wearing a burglar’s mask. “UNCLE SCAM,” the headline shouted. “US robs bank of $13 billion.”

Say what? Pure whitewash, and Murdoch’s minions know it. That $13 billion dollars is the settlement JPMorgan Chase, the country’s biggest bank, is negotiating with the government to settle its own rip-off of American homeowners and investors — those shady practices that five years ago helped trigger the financial meltdown, including manipulating mortgages and sending millions of Americans into bankruptcy or foreclosure.

Tea Party members serving in Congress might find themselves headed to the emergency room with symptoms of a heart attack after hearing about the latest development in universal health care in San Francisco.

As conservative Republicans in Washington, D.C., fulminate over President Obama's Affordable Health Care Act, the city's 6-year-old Healthy San Francisco program is on track to provide care predominantly for immigrants who are living here illegally.

And the kicker? Everybody here is fine with it. Only in San Francisco? Indeed.

Enough attempting to suppress homosexuality by banning gay marriage from state to state. Tea Party leader Rick Scarborough is focused on the bigger picture. At a Tea Party Unity gathering on Thursday, Scarborough chatted with Americans for Truth About Homosexuality President Peter LaBarbera about his grand scheme for taking on the homosexuality lobby with a class action lawsuit like the one pursued against the major tobacco companies.

“The whole issue of a class action lawsuit, you and I have talked about this a little bit,” Scarborough said. “Obviously, statistically now even the Centers for Disease Control verifies homosexuality more likely to lead to AIDS than smoking leads to cancer.

The natural gas boom has led to an “unprecedented industrialization” of many Americans’ backyards, an analysis from the Wall Street Journal has found.

The WSJ looked at census and natural gas well data from more than 700 counties in 11 major natural-gas producing states, and found that at least 15.3 million Americans have a natural gas well within one mile of their home that has been drilled since 2000. That’s more than the population of Michigan or New York.

The US government has defended its use of drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and other countries in front of the UN, telling a chamber full of largely critical nations that in President Obama's view the deployment of unmanned aerial attacks against al-Qaida targets was "necessary, legal and just".

Representatives from a slew of nations, including Brazil, China and Venezuela, lined up to berate the Obama administration for its intensive use of drone strikes. But the US delegation told a plenary meeting of the general assembly in the UN building in New York the president had taken steps to introduce new guidance and standards, and to set out the legal rationale for unmanned weapons deployed in the fight against al-Qaida and affiliated threats.

In the 2013 World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Gender Gap Report, which measures women’s economic, political, educational, and health equality, the United States ranks at number 23 out of 136 countries around the world. The country falls behind many Nordic countries as well as Nicaragua, Cuba, and Burundi, among others.

The country also falls at number 17 out of the 49 high-income countries measured. Its ranking has dropped over the years, down from number 22 in 2012 and 17 in 2011, although not all countries are counted each year. While its overall scored improved over last year, its ranking dropped thanks to faster improvements in other countries.

North Dakota, which ranks second in the US in terms of oil production, endured almost 300 oil spills in under two years and yet managed to avoid reporting a single one of them to the public, according to a new report.

Documents viewed by the Associated Press indicate that, since January 2012, as many as 750 “oil field incidents” were recorded in North Dakota. The distinction between spills and incidents was not immediately clear but presumably was related to the magnitude of the accident.