TV News LIES

Journalist Michael Hastings died in a car crash in Los Angeles early Tuesday at the age of 33, according to a statement from his employer, BuzzFeed.

Hastings, who was also a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, was perhaps best known for his candid Rolling Stone interview with General Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, that eventually led to McChrystal being relieved of his command.

He was also the author of two books about America's wars: The Operators, detailing the flaws of the U.S. military operation in Afghanistan, and I Lost My Love In Baghdad, about his experiences as a war correspondent in Iraq during his mid-twenties.

An anti-fracking demonstration attracted more than 2,000 activists to the eastern side of the Capitol at midday Monday. Pop singer Natalie Merchant led members of the crowd in a rewritten rendition of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land."

The chorus: "New York is your land, New York is my land/From the Southern Tier to the Catskill Mountains/From the Susquehanna to the Hudson Valley/New York was made to be frack-free."

The average American family of four wastes between $1,350 and $2,275 a year in food. Much of that ends up in the kitchen trash can: uneaten leftovers, milk past the expiration date and vegetables that go bad.

In the U.S., all that waste adds up to 90 billion pounds of food a year, and the planet is paying a staggeringly high price for it.

"It's not something many people think about, but it takes a huge amount of resources to get food to our plates," says Dana Gunders, a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Expect only seven more captives to be charged at the war court, the chief Pentagon prosecutor said Sunday, offering a much reduced vision of the scope of the special court after a federal court setback.

Six prisoners await death-penalty trials — Khalid Sheik Mohammed, 48, and four other alleged plotters accused of killing 2,976 people in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks plus a Saudi man accused of engineering al-Qaida’s USS Cole bombing that killed 17 U.S. sailors. Seven others have already been convicted of al-Qaida foot-soldier crimes.

Norway's Parliament voted overwhelmingly to install a policy of gender-neutral armed forces conscription, Norway's defense minister announced.

The new measure was adopted in Oslo Friday, making Norway the only European country with a policy of gender-neutral conscription, said Anne-Grete Stroem Erichsen, the defense minister.

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Radioactive waste unearthed by hydraulic fracturing is becoming a serious problem in Ohio, a new report claims.

Released Thursday by the FreshWater Accountability Project Ohio, the report was authored by Marvin Resnikoff, a physicist at the University of Michigan and senior associate at Radioactive Waste Management Associates.

Resnikoff points to what he says is a failure to properly dispose of radioactive waste from fracking, saying that these wastes make their way into municipal landfills in Ohio -- costing the natural gas industry one-hundredth of what the nuclear industry pays to dispose of similar, low-level radioactive waste.

Could your driveway be making you sick?

Mounting research suggests it could. It's prompting more cities, states and businesses to ban a common pavement sealant linked to higher cancer risks and contaminated soil.

These sealants, used mostly in the eastern half of the USA to beautify pavement and extend its life, contain up to 35% coal tar pitch, which the National Toxicology Program considers a human carcinogen.

In moments of political and military crisis, people want to control their media and connect with family and friends. And ruling elites respond by investing in broadcast media and censoring and surveilling digital networks.

So the battles between political elites who use broadcast media and the activists who use digital media are raging in other parts of the world, as well.