TV News LIES

Every June a few US supreme court cases get a reputation for being blockbusters, and this year has been no different. We're still awaiting decisions on cases concerning gay marriage and the Voting Rights Act. But the blockbusters can obscure smaller cases with profound effects. On Monday, the court quietly delivered a destructive, toxic decision on workplace harassment that is as significant as anything else this year.

Vance v Ball State University, which concerned the interpretation of a section of the Civil Rights Act, shouldn't have even reached America's highest court – but it did, and the court's right wing grabbed ahold and used it to further gut workplace protections.

Still angry about the idea of an Islamic cultural center opening near Ground Zero, a group of Idaho gun enthusiasts decided to fight back with a new line of pork-laced bullets.

South Fork Industries, based in Dalton Gardens, Idaho, claims its ammunition, called Jihawg Ammo, is a “defensive deterrent to those who violently act in the name of Islam.”

If you tweet a picture from your living room using your smartphone, you’re sharing far more than your new hairdo or the color of the wallpaper. You’re potentially revealing the exact coordinates of your house to anyone on the Internet.

The GPS location information embedded in a digital photo is an example of so-called metadata, a once-obscure technical term that’s become one of Washington’s hottest new buzzwords.

The average American family of four wastes between $1,350 and $2,275 a year in food. Much of that ends up in the kitchen trash can: uneaten leftovers, milk past the expiration date and vegetables that go bad.

In the U.S., all that waste adds up to 90 billion pounds of food a year, and the planet is paying a staggeringly high price for it.

"It's not something many people think about, but it takes a huge amount of resources to get food to our plates," says Dana Gunders, a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Facing threats of national boycotts from Latino groups and a slew of online petitions, Whole Foods announced Friday that the organic grocery chain has revised its employee language policy following the suspension of two Spanish-speaking Albuquerque employees.

Whole Foods Market Inc. Co-CEO Walter Robb said in a blog post Friday that the recent "unfortunate incident" in Albuquerque prompted the Austin, Texas-based company to revise a policy that "does not reflect and is not in alignment with the spirit of this company."

Silicon Valley sparks the imagination. Its wealth of tech jobs, flashy startups and new media goliaths seems to point toward a better future, beyond post-industrial doldrums and slack labor markets. Work on Google’s idyllic Mountain View campus hardly looks like work at all.  

But some Google employees are less equal than others. (Not everyone gets to ride the clown bikes.) Many of Silicon Valley’s blue-collar jobs are outsourced to subcontractors, a practice common with Google, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and other big tech firms. Usually the lowest bidder gets the contract, and in labor intensive industries such as security, food service, janitorial and landscaping the lower bids tend to come from firms with lower labor standards.