TV News LIES

The Texas attorney general on Friday sued the Obama administration to challenge its decision to shut down a women's health program over a dispute centered on the state's withholding of funds to clinics that provide abortions.

The filing of the lawsuit comes as both Republican officials in Texas and the Obama administration have expressed regret that poor women in the state who depend on the health services could be hurt by the escalating political fight.

For more than two years, a handful of Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee have warned that the government is secretly interpreting its surveillance powers under the Patriot Act in a way that would be alarming if the public — or even others in Congress — knew about it.

On Thursday, two of those senators — Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado — went further. They said a top-secret intelligence operation that is based on that secret legal theory is not as crucial to national security as executive branch officials have maintained.

Researchers at the University of Michigan have reported that it took them only a short time to break through the security functions of a pilot project for online voting in Washington, D.C. "Within 48 hours of the system going live, we had gained near complete control of the election server", the researchers wrote in a paperPDF that has now been released. "We successfully changed every vote and revealed almost every secret ballot." The hack was only discovered after about two business days – and most likely only because the intruders left a visible trail on purpose.

Monsanto’s ‘biopesticide’ known as Bt is not only developing mutated insects and requiring excessive pesticide use, but new findings show that it is also killing human kidney cells — even in low doses. Amazingly, Monsanto’s superweed-breeding Roundup also has the same effect. Scientists have demonstrated in new research that the Bt pesticide, in addition to Monsanto’s best-selling herbicide Roundup, exhibit direct toxicity to human cells. The findings add to the long list of hazardous effects presented by Monsanto’s genetically modified creations.

A few weeks ago Dylan Byers of Politico reported that NBC News was the only media organization that still had a reporter covering Ron Paul full-time.

Now Byers has filed an update revealing that Anthony Terrell of NBC News has also been reassigned.

“Ron Paul is officially embedless.” writes Byers, adding that NBC has refused to comment on the decision.

Can being an atheist in America get you killed? If police in the small Texas town of Petrolia are to be believed, the answer to that question is yes.

It is also not yet clear if Ramirez really was an atheist, or if that was the real reason for the killing. The two nameless tipsters told police that’s what Green said to them to justify him actions, and claimed that Ramirez had reached for a gun as well. It is possible that the two had a separate disagreement leading up to the alleged murder.

Shell chief executive Peter Voser earned more than £10m last year in pay and bonuses at a time of near-record oil prices and in a year when the firm was responsible for 207 oil spills – considerably more than the year before.

The remuneration, made up of salary, bonuses and long-term incentive schemes, was more than double the figure for 2010 but the company said it was justified by Shell's strong operating and share-price performance. The oil firm reported global annual earnings of $28.6bn (£18bn) in 2011 – or more than £2m an hour – a 54% increase on the previous year.

Every time I look up from what I'm doing, another Republican is charging off into some self-made fray, seated backwards, on a mechanical pony -- the kind bolted to the floor, requiring a quarter to rock back and forth -- shouting incoherently, trying to make the metal animal charge faster, trying to make it back up, all the way.

The screeching and screeds are usually about mandating religion in the schools and some neo-creationist harangue, or else revising the history books to show how wonderful and not-at-all demented they themselves are, or about GOP men's rights to dictating vaginal probes into women's vaginas and their God-given rights in specifying women's health care, or else it's some frothy meringue regarding how the non-job-creating but-still-so-called "job creators," corporations and the rich, should be spared paying any taxes as their forbears once gladly did.