TV News LIES

Cenk Uygur--the progressive online talk show host whose brief tenure as an MSNBC anchor ended on Wednesday--tore into the network in a lengthy monologue on Wednesday night, saying he had turned down a smaller role on MSNBC because he had been told he was too combative towards "those in power."

Uygur had been the 6 PM host the network since January. But that role came to an end on Wednesday, as the network announced that he would not be continuing. Now, every indication is that Al Sharpton will become the new 6 PM host. Sharpton has been guest hosting in the slot for the past few weeks, and his numbers have apparently improved on Uygur's.

London police have proof in smoking-gun emails that former News of the World editor Andy Coulson knew of bribes paid to police officers, Reuters reported Thursday.

The evidence, Reuters said, comes in an email exchange between Coulson – who after leaving the paper became spokesman for a time for now-Prime Minister David Cameron – and Clive Goodman, the paper’s then-royals correspondent.

New Zealand security officials suspect Israeli Mossad agents were trying to obtain sensitive information from the state's databases, reported the local Southland Times newspaper on Tuesday. Authorities suspect that one of the agents was Ofer Mizrahi, one of three Israelis killed in the earthquake in the city of Christchurch last February.

Authorities have launched an investigation into what a senior security official called "suspicious activities of several groups of Israelis during and immediately after the earthquake."

When the former News of the World reporter Sean Hoare was found dead Monday at his home in Watford, north of London, the immediate response of the Hertfordshire police was to issue a public statement declaring his death to be “unexplained but not thought to be suspicious.”

The statement is at the very least extraordinary, and at worst sinister in its implications. Hoare is the man who broke silence on the corrupt practices at the News of the World and, most specifically, alleged that former editor Andy Coulson, who later became Prime Minister David Cameron’s director of communications, was fully aware of phone hacking that took place on an “industrial scale.”

Blood tests designed to detect active TB are inaccurate and should be banned, the World Health Organization has said. More than two million such tests are carried out annually, but the WHO says they are unethical and lead to misdiagnosis and the mistreatment of patients.

The organisation's review of these tuberculosis test kits says they give wrong results in around 50% of cases. The kits are mainly sold in the developing world. However, most of the 18 kits on the market are produced in Europe and North America.

Murdoch isn’t just a sleaze peddler. He’s one of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet — and he has a political agenda that matters more to him, I imagine, than a random billion in cash here or there. The silent virulence of his influence on public events, more than the sensational headlines and lurid scandal-mongering he inflicts on us, is my real concern.

Big as Murdoch is in the U.S., with his 24-7 rightwing propaganda network called Fox News, in Great Britain he’s bigger than the royal family. “He’s often referred to as the country’s permanent Cabinet member,” Beth Fouhy wrote recently for Associated Press. Since the days of Margaret Thatcher, he’s been the godfather of British prime ministers, able to make them offers they can’t refuse.

A video uploaded to YouTube on Wednesday showed an IDF officer pointing a loaded gun at an unarmed Palestinian in the West Bank village of Beit Ummar, near Hebron, last month.

According to B'Tselem, a human rights organization that uploaded the video, on June 18 IDF forces came to arrest a youth from the village for allegedly throwing stones when his cousin stopped the IDF officer to try to prevent the arrest.

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Taking a page straight from David Letterman’s book, a coalition of environmental groups released today a top 10 list of its most pressing concerns with the state Department of Environmental Conservation’s latest proposed regulations for mitigating the environmental impacts of hydraulic fracturing for natural gas.

Five groups—Environmental Advocates of New York, Earthworks, Earthjustice, Citizens Campaign for the Environment, and Riverkeeper—were part of the list, ranking the issues while calling on the DEC to triple the public comment period on the document, which is scheduled to start in August, from 60 days to 180 days.