TV News LIES

"I was born a poor black child." So begins Steve Martin's character (who is white) in the 1979 film The Jerk. Adopted by an African American family, he only later comes to realise he is white.

I was born a privileged, white, middle-class American. But since 9/11, I have slowly been made to realise that I am a brown person.

Nokia plans to cut one in five jobs at its global cellphone business as it loses market share to rivals Apple and Samsung and burns through cash, raising new fears over its future.

In a second profit warning in nine weeks, Nokia said on Thursday that its phone business would post a deeper-than-expected loss in the second quarter due to tougher competition.

Docks, boats and other debris from Japan's tsunami drifting onto West Coast beaches represent a trash cleanup challenge that may last for years to come.

Biologists are equally worried about the threat from invasive species attached to the debris. How big a threat remains to be seen. They fear that foreign species that arrive on our shores — crabs, barnacles, starfish, snails and plants — could establish a foothold and crowd out native creatures and plants.

Governor Mitch Daniels, a Republican, has authorized changes to a 2006 legislation that legalizes the use of deadly force on a public servant — including an officer of the law — in cases of “unlawful intrusion.” Proponents of both the Second and Fourth Amendments — those that allow for the ownership of firearms and the security against unlawful searches, respectively — are celebrating the update by saying it ensures that residents are protected from authorities that abuse the powers of the badge.

It all began when separate radiation monitoring stations -- a privately-owned Radiation Network station near South Bend, Ind., and a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) RadNet station near Fort Wayne, Ind. -- detected extremely high levels of nuclear radiation around the same time between June 6 and June 7. Both stations reportedly began to give radiation readings ranging as high as 7,139 counts per minute (CPM), when a normal reading is typically between five and 60 CPM.

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.