TV News LIES

A Jerusalem rabbinical court condemned to death by stoning a dog it suspects is the reincarnation of a secular lawyer who insulted the court's judges 20 years ago, Ynet website reported Friday.

One of the sitting judges then recalled a curse the court had passed down upon a secular lawyer who had insulted the judges two decades previously.

Removing a potential political distraction ahead of next year's elections, the Obama administration Friday announced an early end to a health care waiver program that has come under fire from congressional Republicans.

Political considerations were "absolutely not" part of the decision, said Steve Larsen, head of a section of the Health and Human Services department that oversees President Barack Obama's health care law.

The United Nations has endorsed the rights of gay, lesbian and transgender people for the first time ever. The U.N. Human Rights Council passed the cautiously worded resolution by a narrow margin. It espresses "grave concern" about abuses suffered by people because of their sexual orientation and commissions a global report on discrimination against gays.

The U.S. and other backers, including the European Union and Brazil, are hailing the document put forward by South Africa as "historic." One gay rights advocate says the resolution "breaks the silence that has been maintained for far too long."

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"Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind," Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al Jazeera.

Gundersen, a licensed reactor operator with 39 years of nuclear power engineering experience, managing and coordinating projects at 70 nuclear power plants around the US, says the Fukushima nuclear plant likely has more exposed reactor cores than commonly believed.

A veteran cop killed by cancer after working amid the deadly toxins of Ground Zero was hailed at his low-key funeral Wednesday as one of the unsung heroes of 9/11. The sendoff for veteran NYPD Officer Martin Tom was intentionally done with little fanfare over fears the city might seize his corpse - as it did with another cop killed by "9/11 toxic exposure."

Tom, 49, the father of a 4-year-old daughter, died last week after a 14-month fight with liver cancer that eventually spread to his brain.

American drilling companies stand to make tens of billions of dollars from the new petroleum activity in Iraq long before any of the oil producers start seeing any returns on their investments.

Lukoil and many of the other international oil companies that won fields in the auction are now subcontracting mostly with the four largely American oil services companies that are global leaders in their field: Halliburton, Baker Hughes, Weatherford International and Schlumberger. Those four have won the largest portion of the subcontracts to drill for oil, build wells and refurbish old equipment.

Citigroup released more details about the May attack that compromised some personal information of about 1 percent of its credit card customers.

According to a statement from the company, 360,083 accounts were breached in total. Of those accounts, 142,426 were not current — they had been closed or new cards had been automatically issued. The company said it has reissued 217,657 new cards to affected customers.

The Spitzer space telescope has snapped a striking false-colour image of the RCW 120 nebula, a vast cloud of gas and dust where stars have recently formed.

RCW 120 lies about 4,300 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius, just above the plane of the galaxy. It emits a broad range of colours in the infrared region, with wavelengths far beyond those we can see.