TV News LIES

Billions of dollars in top-rated bonds backed by community banks have gone bust, debunking the defense offered by credit-rating agencies that wildly inaccurate ratings were limited to risky mortgage bonds that imploded and then triggered the U.S. financial crisis.

Government regulators and lawyers across the country are examining how credit-rating agencies came to bless as "investment grade" the now-toxic bonds made up of special securities issued by community bank holding companies.

The Federal Reserve Board, chastised for regulatory inaction that contributed to the subprime mortgage meltdown, also missed a chance to prevent much of the financial chaos ravaging hundreds of small- and mid-sized banks.

In early 2005, at a time when the housing market was overheated and economic danger signs were in the air, the Fed had an opportunity to put a damper on risk taking among banks, especially those that had long been bedrocks of smaller cities and towns across the nation.

Continued study of an approximately 40,000 year old finger bone from Siberia has identified a previously unknown type of human — one that may have interbred with the ancestors of modern-day Melanesian people.

The fossil scrap — just the tip of a juvenile female’s finger — was discovered in 2008 during excavations of Denisova cave in Siberia’s Altai Mountains. Anatomically, it looks like it could have belonged to a Neanderthal or a modern human.

The maker of multiple brands of glucose test strips -- Abbott Diabetes Care -- issued a voluntary recall of several hundred product lots of the test strips, due to falsely low readouts of blood glucose which could result in over- or under-treatment of diabetic patients.

The FDA warned that false results from glucose test strips may lead diabetic patients to try to raise their blood glucose unnecessarily, or they may fail to treat elevated blood glucose because of a false, low reading -- both scenarios posing a health threat.

The Senate approved a new strategic nuclear arms treaty with Russia on Wednesday, handing President Barack Obama a major foreign policy victory in his drive to improve ties with Moscow and curb the spread of atomic weapons to other countries.

This is breaking news....

A bill to provide medical care for firefighters and other responders to the September 11, 2001 attacks passed the Senate on Wednesday after backers struck a deal to end a Senate Republican blockade of the measure.

The so-called James Zadroga 9/11 health bill was approved by the Senate by voice vote and the U.S. House of Representatives was set to pass the measure shortly after the Senate action.

Just weeks after several dozen state-employed rabbis ignited a major controversy by issuing a letter calling on Israeli Jews not to rent or sell their homes to non-Jews, and one day after an anti-Arab demonstration in Bat Yam, Tuesday saw two more incidents in the rising tide of hatred and racism that appears to be sweeping the country.

In Jerusalem, police said on Tuesday they had arrested nine members of a suspected youth gang that has been targeting Arab passersby in the center of the city in recent months. Police officials also released information on the arrests, which were carried out over a two-week period.

The New York Times has sued the New York Police Department, saying the department had routinely violated a state law that requires government agencies to provide information to the press and the public.

In a lawsuit filed on Tuesday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, The Times described four requests made by reporters this year for information that it said the police had delayed or denied. The Times said the department’s handling of the requests reflected a pattern and practice by which the police avoided providing material that the State Freedom of Information Law said must be released.