TV News LIES

For seven years, the Food and Drug Administration has been trying to answer this question: What does it mean to be “gluten-free”? That is roughly the time it took to build a tunnel beneath the English Channel to connect Britain and France.

In the meantime, foodmakers have been deciding for themselves whether they can jump into a lucrative new niche and market their products as free from gluten, a protein found in wheat, rye and barley. As a result, some products labeled gluten-free contain no gluten, others might have a trace and still more could contain a sizable amount.

The nuclear power accidents at Fukushima this spring and at Chernobyl 25 years ago Tuesday show that radiation releases can endanger people and contaminate land many miles beyond evacuation zones.

The advocacy group Physicians for Nuclear Responsibility, which opposes nuclear power, said Tuesday that the U.S. 10-mile evacuation plan was inadequate and should be extended to 50 miles. One-third of the U.S. population lives within 50 miles of nuclear power plants.

The Food and Drug Administration said Monday it plans to regulate smokeless electronic cigarettes as tobacco products and won’t try to regulate them under stricter rules for drug-delivery devices.

The federal agency said in a letter to stakeholders Monday that it intends to propose rule changes to treat e-cigarettes the same traditional cigarettes and other tobacco products. The news is considered a victory for makers and distributors of the devices, which continue to gain popularity worldwide.

Smokers may soon have no safe havens to light up outside their own homes.  That's the hope, at least, among anti-tobacco crusaders at the Center for Disease Control.

The federal health agency estimates that by 2020 every state may have a ban on smoking in public places, restaurants, bars, and the workplace. New York City has already banned butts in public buildings, restaurants, city parks and beaches - and the pedestrian plaza in Times Square.

Babies exposed to pesticides before birth may have significantly lower intelligence scores by age 7 than children who were not exposed, three separate studies published on Thursday said. Results from the studies -- two in New York and one in an agricultural community in California -- suggest prenatal exposure to pesticides can have a lasting effect on intelligence.

In one study, a team at the University of California Berkeley found that every tenfold increase in prenatal exposure to organophosphate pesticides corresponded with a 5.5 point drop in overall IQ scores in children by age 7.

A leading global health fund believes millions of dollars worth of its donated malaria drugs have been stolen in recent years - perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars worth - vastly exceeding levels of theft previously suspected, according to confidential documents obtained by The Associated Press.

The internal investigation by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria comes two months into a new anti-corruption program that the fund launched after an AP report detailing fraud in their grants attracted intense scrutiny from donors.