TV News LIES

Health care fraud used to be a faceless crime - until now. Medicare and Medicaid scams cost taxpayers more than $60 billion a year, but the average bank holdup is likely to get more attention. Seeking the public's help to catch more than 170 fugitive fraudsters, the government has launched a new health care most-wanted list, with its own website.

Among those featured is Leonard Nwafor, convicted a couple of years ago in Los Angeles of billing Medicare more than $1 million for motorized wheelchairs that beneficiaries didn't need. One of those who got a wheelchair was a blind man who later testified he couldn't see to operate it.

More than half a billion men and women - nearly one in nine of all adults around the world - are clinically obese, a report backed by the World Health organisation (WHO), says.

The figures, released on Friday, are nearly double those of 1980, leading doctors to warn that a "tsunami of obesity" is unfurling across the world. In 2008, the latest year for which statistics were available, nearly one woman in seven and one man in 10 were obese, the study by Imperial College of London and Harvard University found.

Sarah Palin is honoring one Reagan and offending another with the same speech. The former Alaska governor is scheduled to speak in Santa Barbara, Calif., on Friday at a tribute to former President Ronald Reagan - just one of the celebrations marking the centennial of the 40th president's birth on Feb. 6.

But his son, Ron Reagan, tells The Associated Press he doesn't see anything in common between his dad and the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate, who was invited to speak by the event's sponsor, the conservative Young America's Foundation.

A widespread drought in the Amazon rainforest last year caused the "lungs of the world" to produce more carbon dioxide than they absorbed, potentially leading to a dangerous acceleration of global warming. Scientists have calculated that the 2010 drought was more intense than the "one-in-100-year" drought of 2005.

They are predicting it will result in some eight billion tonnes of carbon dioxide being expelled from the Amazon rainforest, which is more than the total annual carbon emissions of the United States. For the second time in less than a decade, the earth's greatest rainforest released more carbon dioxide than it absorbed because many of its trees dried out and died.

A father-and-son team of Miami-based property developers was sentenced to 10 years in jail on Friday for failing to report more than $49 million of income in a case that marked the first trial since the start of an intensified U.S. crackdown on offshore tax evasion.

Mauricio Cohen and his son, Leon Cohen Levy, both clients of HSBC Holdings Plc, Europe's largest bank, were convicted in October of using shell entities and offshore tax havens to hide tens of millions of dollars from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.

The Pentagon paid hundreds of billions of dollars to defense contractors engaged in criminal or civil fraud -- in some cases paying the companies after they were convicted, according to a new Defense Department report.

At least 91 contractors holding contracts worth $270 billion were the subjects of civil fraud judgments -- and in some cases criminal fraud convictions as well, many of which resulted in fines, suspensions or debarments. Even so, Defense Department contracting officers still assigned $4.9 billion worth of work with these companies after the fraud was uncovered, the report said.

A 48-year-old ex-Taliban commander dropped dead of an apparent heart attack after exercising on an elliptical machine inside Guantánamo's most populous prison camp, the military said Thursday.

The dead man, Awal Gul, had been in U.S. custody since Christmas 2001 and at the prison camps in southeast Cuba for more than eight years. He was designated by the Obama administration as one of 48 ``indefinite detainees,'' meaning the U.S. would neither repatriate him nor put him on trial.

Hundreds of people, mostly Arab-Americans, are expected to gather Saturday in downtown San Francisco to support anti-government protests in Egypt, and a large contingent of Jews representing a Bay Area peace-advocacy group will join them, one of its leaders says.

“We are deeply inspired by their push for democracy and freedom,” said Cecilie Surasky, deputy director of Jewish Voice for Peace, based in Oakland.