TV News LIES

Federal safeguards meant to keep guns out of the hands of potentially violent individuals have a huge shortcoming: the database used for background checks may be missing millions of records about people with mental illnesses who are forbidden to own firearms.

Despite improvements in recent years, state governments are failing to submit records to the Federal Bureau of Investigations of people with mental illnesses who have been institutionalized or otherwise deemed by authorities to be dangerous to themselves or others, The New York Times reported Friday. The Times cited a 2011 study by Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a coalition of more than 700 city officials that is co-chaired by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I), an outspoken proponent of stricter gun control laws.

A federal crackdown on illicit foreign supplies of human growth hormone has failed to stop rampant misuse, and instead has driven record sales of the drug by some of the world's biggest pharmaceutical companies, an Associated Press investigation shows.

The crackdown, which began in 2006, reduced the illegal flow of unregulated supplies from China, India and Mexico.

This is another one of those pieces attempting to reconcile what we know of our culture and country, and still have it make some sense after another round of innocents have been slaughtered.

Just one more voice in the trying-to-be-OK choir and chorale, here, wondering how it is we had another place of learning and laughter turn into a one-sided OK Corral.

Many people are doing the same, to greater and lesser degrees of futility or utility.  Some people are so far past the deep end, they're wheeling out all the things they already hate, plugging in their old lists as legitimate new causes.

Did the Washington Post and others underplay the story through fear of the News Corp chairman, or simply tin-eared judgment?

So now we have it: what appears to be hard, irrefutable evidence of Rupert Murdoch's ultimate and most audacious attempt – thwarted, thankfully, by circumstance – to hijack America's democratic institutions on a scale equal to his success in kidnapping and corrupting the essential democratic institutions of Great Britain through money, influence and wholesale abuse of the privileges of a free press.

The Obama administration’s high-level gun-control task force, established Wednesday, will be navigating tricky legal terrain reshaped by Supreme Court conservatives.

Some state and local gun-control measures already have died over the past four and a half years, done in by the high court’s 2008 ruling that recognized expansive constitutional protections for firearm ownership. Similar Second Amendment restraints will limit the ambitions of the Obama gun task force and its Capitol Hill counterparts.

The most important number in history is now the annual measure of carbon emissions. That number reveals humanity's steady billion-tonne by billion-tonne march to the edge of the carbon cliff, beyond which scientists warn lies a fateful fall to catastrophic climate change.

With the global total of climate-disrupting emissions likely to come in at around 52 gigatonnes (billion metric tonnes) this year, we're already at the edge, according to new research.

Global outrage over the Newtown massacre, including at the role played by a gun that no civilian should possess, has forced the National Rifle Association to speak publicly, instead of privately in the halls of Congress.

America’s mighty proponent of deadly weaponry here, there and everywhere, including in bars and kindergartens, announced that on Friday, “The NRA is prepared to offer meaningful contributions to help make sure this never happens again.”

Don’t get your hopes up.

Proposed regulations meant to govern fracking in California would do little to protect the state's environment, wildlife, climate and public health, according to an analysis by the Center for Biological Diversity. Fracking — currently unmonitored in California — uses huge volumes of water mixed with dangerous chemicals to blast open rock formations and extract oil and gas.

Hundreds of wells have been fracked in California in recent years. Today's draft proposal by California's Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources was supposed to be the first step in explicitly regulating this controversial practice.