TV News LIES

The Obama administration on Friday announced the most wide-ranging liberalization of travel and money-sending regulations to Cuba in over a decade, making it easier for American students and religious and cultural groups to visit the Communist-ruled island.

It will still not be possible for ordinary American tourists to vacation legally in Cuba, which has been under a U.S. economic embargo for 48 years. But members of educational, cultural and religious groups will be able to get licenses for travel more readily.

A high-level military commission is set to recommend that the Pentagon reverse its long-standing policy that bars women from being in combat. Hundreds of thousands of women are currently serving in the U.S. military, and many of them are in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the Pentagon's policy, women are, and always have been, barred from taking part in any ground combat operations.

But in reality, women are already in the thick of the fight — and an upcoming report will recommend that the Pentagon acknowledge the reality on the ground and allow women to be assigned to combat units.

More than a quarter of children and teens in the United States are taking a medication on a regular basis. Close to seven percent are on two or more prescription drugs.

Prescribing medications to children can cause problems; many of them have not had their effects on children researched.

Even in ones that have, the consequences of using them over the course of a lifetime is usually unknown.

U.S. health regulators are requesting a limit on the amount of acetaminophen in prescription pain medicines in an effort to curb the risk of liver damage.

The move announced on on Thursday aims to limit combination drugs such as the opioids Percocet and Vicodin to 325 milligrams of acetaminophen per pill and calls for them to carry a "black box" warning about potential liver failure.

2010 will go down as the year the diet pill Meridia and pain pill Darvon were withdrawn from the market and the heart-attack associated diabetes drug Avandia was severely restricted.

But it was also the year the Justice Department filed the first criminal, not civil, charges against a drug company executive. Lauren Stevens, a former VP and assistant general counsel at GlaxoSmithKline, hid some 1,000 instances of GSK-paid doctors illegally promoting Wellbutrin to other doctors, say authorities.

The Environmental Protection Agency took the unusual step of revoking a permit Thursday for the country's largest surface mine, a setback for the controversial practice of "mountaintop removal" that helps produce 10 percent of the nation's coal.

The 2,300-acre operation at the Mingo Logan Coal Co.'s Spruce No. 1 coal mine in West Virginia has been mired in litigation since 1998.

Banks repossessed a record one million US homes in 2010, and could surpass that number this year, figures show. Foreclosure tracker RealtyTrac said about five million homeowners were at least two months behind on their mortgage payments.

Foreclosures are likely to remain numerous while unemployment remains stubbornly high, the group said. Among the worst hit states were Nevada, Arizona, Florida and California, once at the heart of the housing boom.

British scientists have developed genetically modified (GM) chickens that cannot transmit bird flu infections -- a step that in future could reduce the risk of avian flu spreading and causing deadly epidemics in humans.

Scientists from Cambridge and Edinburgh universities said that while the transgenic chickens still got sick and died when they were exposed to H5N1 bird flu, they didn't transmit the virus to other chickens they came into contact with.