TV News LIES

Here we go again folks. It’s that time of year when we show our holiday spirit by plunging headlong, eyes wide shut, into personal debt to support China and other countries while our own America slides further into economic chaos. But don’t let that stop you. By all means, go out and spend that last dime on the credit card for a Taiwan trinket. The credit card company will probably be more than willing to increase your limit. Just don’t miss a payment. Can’t pay? Too bad. We’ll simply increase your interest rate and tell all the other credit card companies so that they increase your interest rates also.

Renewable energy is surpassing fossil fuels for the first time in new power-plant investments, shaking off setbacks from the financial crisis and an impasse at the United Nations global warming talks.

Electricity from the wind, sun, waves and biomass drew $187 billion last year compared with $157 billion for natural gas, oil and coal, according to calculations by Bloomberg New Energy Finance using the latest data. Accelerating installations of solar- and wind-power plants led to lower equipment prices, making clean energy more competitive with coal.

Since the Occupy Wall Street movement began in mid-September, protesters and reporters have been learning the hard way how diverse police departments handle large-scale street demonstrations — sometimes with rubber bullets, sometimes, as in Davis, Calif., with pepper spray in the face.

While police departments have deployed tear gas in cities including Denver, Seattle and on more than three separate occasions in Oakland, Calif., in response to Occupy street demonstrations, protesters in New York have been met with the sheer force of numbers, pepper spray, kettling nets to hold in crowds, and batons. Dozens have been hospitalized by a variety of crowd control tactics.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced plans on Wednesday to begin developing rules requiring makers and processors of certain chemical cocktails used in the oil and gas industry to maintain and submit records on those chemicals.

The agency, which said it plans to "initiate a dialogue process to seek public input" on the design and scope of the reporting requirements, would also be ordering the companies to submit health and safety studies related to the various chemical cocktails they produce.

Investigative journalism is hard enough in a country as small as Israel, and an intensifying onslaught against freedom of the press is endangering it even further.

Conducting a journalistic investigation is like climbing a mountain studded with bear traps. When you finally reach the top, you find the glory all too short-lived. En route you pass lawsuits, embarrassed publishers, boycotts by advertisers. You lose your friends and get threatened with prison. Sometimes you die.

Earlier today I asked whether American news outlets would do their due diligence in evaluating the content of the newly-released batch of "Climategate" emails hacked from the University of East Anglia two years ago. It didn't take long for our esteemed print outlets to disappoint.

Writing on the Washington Post's website, Juliet Eilperin quotes an email exchange that she said was about "whether the IPCC has accurately depicted the temperature rise in the lower atmosphere":

The phone hacking scandal roiling the British press has claimed a Murdoch — James Murdoch.

The son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch has resigned as head honcho of New Group Newspaper Ltd., which publishes London-based newspapers The Times and The Sunday Times, and a racy tab called The Sun, British media reported Tuesday.

Former US president George Bush and his former counterpart Tony Blair were found guilty of war crimes by the The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal which held a four day hearing in the Malaysia.

The five panel tribunal unanimously decided that Bush and Blair committed genocide and crimes against peace and humanity when they invaded Iraq in 2003 in blatant violation of international law.