TV News LIES

The Times on Tuesday released about 1,200 previously unpublished files kept by the Boy Scouts of America on volunteers and employees expelled for suspected sexual abuse.

The files, which have been redacted of victims' names and other identifying information, were opened from 1985 through 1991. They can be found in a database along with two decades of files released by order of the Oregon Supreme Court in October. The database also contains summary information on about 3,200 additional files opened from 1947 to 2005 that have not been released publicly.

A pan-Arab TV station says the general who heads Syria's military police has defected and joined the uprising against president Bashar Assad.
Major General Abdul-Aziz Jassem al-Shallal has appeared in a video aired on Al Arabiya TV saying he is joining "the people's revolution".

In the video aired late on Tuesday, al-Shallal said the army deviated from its mission of protecting the nation and became "a gang for killing and destruction".

The battle over allowing hydrofracking in New York has become an increasingly embittered one, as the state Department of Environmental Conservation's missteps in managing the regulatory review of fracking. Its seeming disregard of the mass of substantive comments filed on DEC's proposals has convinced most opponents that state government is pro-fracking and is unwilling to seriously address the reality of their powerful arguments for a ban.

Then, for a moment this autumn, reality seemed to have a chance. For more than a year, health experts had pummeled state government over its refusal to do a health assessment of fracking prior to authorizing it.

A rickety Toyota truck packed with 14 people rumbled down a desert road from the town of Radda, which al-Qaeda militants once controlled. Suddenly a missile hurtled from the sky and flipped the vehicle over.

Chaos. Flames. Corpses. Then, a second missile struck.

Within seconds, 11 of the passengers were dead, including a woman and her 7-year-old daughter. A 12-year-old boy also perished that day, and another man later died from his wounds.

Well, let's see how far we've come in the national discussion on guns, so far:  You've got NRA cheerleader and CEO Wayne LaPierre shooting off his mouth on talking head shows, saying a ban on high capacity weapons magazines will be done, basically, over his dead body.

If I were an unkind sort, I'd be sorely tempted to say, "Works for me."

Good thing I'm not -- I'm not even one of the grinches "making war" on Christmas, as religious believers usually phrase their accusations.

Ever hear of Presidential Policy Directive (PPD) 20? Bet not. The more you’ve never heard of something, the more worried you should be.
In mid-November , The Washington Post, the first media outlet to report on the directive, noted that it “enables the military to act more aggressively to thwart cyberattacks on the nation’s web of government and private computer networks.”

The Post’s revelation came at the same time that other stories broke pointing to deepening problems with electronic privacy rights in America.  The most sensational story involved the FBI’s snooping the private e-mails of two of the nation’s leading security officers, CIA Director David Petraeus and Gen. John Allen, head of the U.S. Afghanistan war effort.

Surgical errors have attracted widespread attention over the past several years, leading to new laws and policies. In 2007, California started requiring hospitals to report certain errors and fining them if the mistakes killed or seriously injured patients.

The next year, Medicare stopped paying hospitals for the costs associated with certain errors. In 2011, Medicaid announced that it also would stop paying to fix certain preventable mistakes.

Global temperatures are forecast to be 0.57C above the long-term average next year, making 2013 one of the warmest years on record, the Met Office said on Thursday.

"It is very likely that 2013 will be one of the warmest 10 years in the record which goes back to 1850, and it is likely to be warmer than 2012," it said in its annual forecast for the coming year. Next year was expected to be between 0.43 and 0.71C warmer than the long-term global average of 14 degrees (1961-1990), with a best estimate of around 0.57C, it said.