TV News LIES

All over the world, people skeptical of religion face profound mistreatment.

Aan was arrested in a small town in West Sumatra on January 18 after a number of local residents assaulted him at work in an act of self-styled vigilantism. They were reacting to some of his postings on a Facebook page devoted to atheism: a note entitled “the Prophet Muhammad was attracted to his own daughter-in-law”; a comic suggesting the Prophet slept with his wife’s maid; and a status update reading, “If you believe in god, then please show him to me.”

A study published last weekend on Nature Climate Change claims to give the lie to the notion that if the world is warming, it’s not our fault.

With the kind of certainty that will send the Heartland Institute reaching for Plan C (“the world should focus on mitigation”), the study, The study, Human-induced global ocean warming on multidecadal timescales, ends with the bald factual statement: “We have identified a human-induced fingerprint in observed estimates of upper-ocean warming on multidecadal timescales”.

Climate change will make wildfires in the West, like those now raging in parts of Colorado and New Mexico, more frequent over the next 30 years, researchers reported on Tuesday.

More broadly, almost all of North America and most of Europe will see an increase in wildfires by the year 2100, the scientists wrote in the journal Ecosphere, a publication of the Ecological Society of America.

A report from a new institute at the State University at Buffalo asserting that state oversight has made natural gas drilling safer is causing tumult on campus and beyond, with critics arguing that the institute is biased toward industry and could undercut the university’s reputation.

The study, issued on May 15, said that state regulation in Pennsylvania had made drilling there far safer and that New York rules were even more likely to ensure safety once drilling gets under way in the state.

For nearly a decade, Beth Jacobson lived inside the vast machinery of subprime mortgages that shook the nation’s economy.

In sworn court testimony, she describes watching loan officers comb through heavily black areas such as Baltimore and Prince George’s County, forging relationships with churches and community groups to sell them shoddy loans. She says she processed homeowners with sterling credit ratings for higher interest rates than they needed to pay. And she says she pumped out millions of dollars in mortgages to people with no paperwork and low incomes to become Wells Fargo’s top-producing loan officer.

Diesel fumes cause cancer, the World Health Organization's cancer agency declared Tuesday, a ruling it said could make exhaust as important a public health threat as secondhand smoke.

The risk of getting cancer from diesel fumes is small, but since so many people breathe in the fumes in some way, the science panel said raising the status of diesel exhaust to carcinogen from "probable carcinogen" was an important shift.

What's with all the zombies?

There was the horrific recent tale of the Miami face-chewer's assault on a homeless man, of course, the attacker high on a line of mind-whacking, over-the-counter drugs nicknamed "bath salts," the packet sporting a label proclaiming "Cloud 9," despite inducing the zombie-like behavior.

It's like a bad Saturday Night Live spoof:  Zombie Salts -- for stupes who think methamphetamine use and production isn't quite poisonous, vicious, or destructive enough for users, innocent bystanders, the country and countryside, or for the people who get to clean up in their wake -- from hazmat crews to social services and medical workers!

Dateline Capital City: Word has reached us of the passing of the state’s rural icon Samuel Drucker at age 96. Sam, as he was known so fondly by the people of many small communities here abouts, was a civic leader and proprietor of the Hooterville General Store for many decades until its closing in 2001.

He is reported to have died at his post greeting patrons at the Super Walmart in Pixley, which opened shortly before his own store closed.