TV News LIES

The tragedy that played out in an Aurora movie theater Friday was ironically paralleled as a classroom learning experience in a medical school in Parker the same day.

Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine is in the middle of holding specialized classes in disaster life support for 150 second-year medical students. Along with response to natural disasters like hurricanes and floods and terrorist attacks, one of the scenarios being used to train the students is how to respond if a shooter fires at people in a movie theater and also uses a bomb in the attack.

American religious organisations are expanding their operations across the continent, lobbying for conservative policies and laws and fanning homophobia, argues the Boston-based Political Research Associates (PRA).

The groups include the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), founded by the televangelist Pat Robertson, which has established bases in Kenya and Zimbabwe.

What you do and how you live doesn't matter. You have inhaled them, you've eaten them, you've absorbed them through your skin. You're doing it right now.

If you are an average American, your personal chemical inventory -- embedded in your blood, your breath and your bones -- will include an alphabet soup of phthalates, mercury, perfluorinated compounds, bisphenol A, and assorted chemical flame retardant  If you are a new mother, you are passing these chemicals to your child through your breast milk. If you are pregnant, you are delivering them through your umbilical cord.

The bulldozer was clearing land outside a day care center in Hapeville, Ga., when it broke open a buried 1-inch pipeline. The escaping gas ignited into a fireball that killed nine people, including seven children settling down for their afternoon naps.

That was 1968. Since then, there have been at least 270 similar accidents across the country that could have been prevented or made less dangerous by a valve that cuts off leaking gas and costs as little as $10-$15 for homes and small businesses and $200-$300 for larger buildings, an Associated Press investigation found.

Migrants who are denied residency in Israel would be forced to leave the country before appealing the government's decision to deport them, according to an Interior Ministry-sponsored bill put out yesterday.

In an explanatory note, the ministry acknowledged it was seeking to reduce the number of appeals.

Rich individuals and their families have as much as $32 trillion of hidden financial assets in offshore tax havens, representing up to $280 billion in lost income tax revenues, according to research published on Sunday.

The study estimating the extent of global private financial wealth held in offshore accounts - excluding non-financial assets such as real estate, gold, yachts and racehorses - puts the sum at between $21 and $32 trillion.

As much of America's heartland turns to desert, at least for this crop year and Texas perhaps permanently, the availability of food comes into question. You might expect that conservative global warming deniers would have a bounty of words to eat.

Sadly, stupidity knows no bounds. They still cling to the weasel words, "you can't link a weather event to global warming". When extreme and formerly rare weather events become the new normal, the bones of that reasoning are just bleaching in the sun.

In times of crisis, Republicans always rush in, providing their own special brand of comic relief, if nothing else. And, it always is nothing else.

House Republicans, for example, recently demonstrated a new way to flush 50 million tax dollars down the toilet -- the cost to taxpayers for taking 33 repeated, knowingly futile, politically-staged attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the helpful, but anemic, new healthcare law.