TV News LIES

In a hypothetical Venn diagram, one circle representing extremist Christians and the other fundamentalist capitalists, the lens-shaped overlap contains Sam Brownback, the newly reelected governor of Kansas.

It also includes a broad spectrum of citizens who have supported him: working class members of the Tea party, wealthy members of C Street, a middle class college student who once handed me an essay on zero-sum economics while wearing a T-shirt that read “pro-life, pro-God, pro-gun.”

Paris is suing Fox News after the "image" of the city was "insulted" and "prejudiced," CNN's Christiane Amanpour reported Tuesday, citing a conversation with Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo.

Amanpour's post was retweeted from Hidalgo's Twitter account.  The mayor's account also wrote that Hidalgo was "of course shocked by Fox's stigmatizing error."

Lawmaking officially began last week in most states, and it should surprise no one that abortion is again high on the list of priorities for a number of legislatures going into 2015.

Since the 2010 election tipped statehouses Republican, states adopted 231 new abortion restrictions. Last year alone, 15 states enacted 26 new abortion controls, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

A male cardiac surgeon was critically wounded in a shooting at Brigham And Women’s Hospital on Tuesday morning, a source told WBZ-TV.

A source told WBZ-TV’s Ken MacLeod that the shooter was a male patient who shot the surgeon, then walked to a second-floor bathroom in the Shapiro Center and shot and killed himself. Police could not immediately confirm that the suspect was dead.

- The Los Angeles subway will soon catch up with rail systems in other major cities by offering Wi-Fi and cell phone service.

The program is just beginning, and it will take two years to complete at a cost of roughly $800,000. The Red Line will receive the equipment first, which is a railway from Downtown Los Angeles to Hollywood. The project was approved two years ago but security concerns slowed progress.

Kim Upton, a Metropolitan Transportation Authority spokesperson, said passengers will no longer have to check for missed calls and texts once the project is complete.

More...

A moderate earthquake on California's San Andreas fault shook the central coastal area of the state early Tuesday.

The quake measured 4.4 on the Richter scale, the U.S. Geological Survey reported. It was centered about 150 miles south of Sacramento and 120 miles southeast of San Francisco.

The San Andreas Fault, stretching across hundreds of miles in western California, is the boundary between two plates that are moving past each other. The fault was responsible for the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which killed about 3,000 people in the city, and the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, which has been blamed for 64 deaths, most of them when a section of highway in Oakland collapsed.

More...

Scientists have succeeded in reading parts of an ancient scroll that was buried in a volcanic eruption almost 2,000 years ago, holding out the promise that the world's oldest surviving library may one day reveal all of its secrets.

The scroll is among hundreds retrieved from the remains of a lavish villa at Herculaneum, which along with Pompeii was one of several Roman towns that were destroyed when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79.

The Islamic State group threatened to kill two Japanese hostages unless they receive $200 million in 72 hours, directly demanding the ransom Tuesday from Japan's premier during his visit to the Middle East. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe vowed to save the men, saying: "Their lives are the top priority."

Abe and other Japanese officials declined to discuss whether they'd pay the ransom for captives Kenji Goto and Haruna Yukawa, though their armed forces generally only operate in a self-defense capacity at home. Their kidnapping also immediately recalled the 2004 beheading of a Japanese backpacker in Iraq, carried out by the Islamic State group's predecessor over Japan's involvement in the U.S.-led war there.