TV News LIES

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.

When the electoral system is so fixed that both political parties are obviously two sides of the very same coin. And both candidates are beholden to the very same master. And when both platforms guarantee a war posture throughout the world that will always come at the expense of economic justice, social equity and environmental concerns … … …

As US citizens who have grown up within the confines of American society, we have been so conditioned to believe that America can do no wrong … when in fact the US Federal Government has evolved into a global bully which can do very little right outside of its own borders. What can be said about a juggernaut that just rolls its well oiled military machine across the planet, anytime it wants to?!

Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown lambasted Rupert Murdoch before Britain's media ethics inquiry on Monday, claiming the media mogul had lied under oath to the inquiry and saying that a Murdoch tabloid had undermined the British war effort in Afghanistan.

In an often bitter attack, Brown directly contradicted Murdoch's claim that Brown had vowed to "make war on your company" during an abusive phone call after Murdoch's The Sun tabloid switched its support from Brown's Labour Party to the rival Conservatives.