TV News LIES

A NASA report on the last minutes of Space Shuttle Columbia cited problems with the crew's helmets, spacesuits and restraints, which resulted in "lethal trauma" to the seven astronauts aboard.

But the report also acknowledged that "the breakup of the crew module ... was not survivable by any currently existing capability."

The spacecraft broke up while re-entering Earth's atmosphere near the end of its mission on February 1, 2003.

The NASA report found the astronauts knew for about 40 seconds that they did not have control of the shuttle before they likely were knocked unconscious as Columbia broke apart around them.

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Toyota Motor Corp. is secretly developing a vehicle that will be powered solely by solar energy in an effort to turn around its struggling business with a futuristic ecological car, a top business daily reported Thursday.

The Nikkei newspaper, however, said it will be years before the planned vehicle will be available on the market.

According to The Nikkei, Toyota is working on an electric vehicle that will get some of its power from solar cells equipped on the vehicle, and that can be recharged with electricity generated from solar panels on the roofs of homes. The automaker later hopes to develop a model totally powered by solar cells on the vehicle, the newspaper said without citing sources.

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Chief Justice John Roberts said Wednesday that Congress should be as generous to judges as it already has been to itself, by approving an inflation-related increase in their pay.

Alone among federal employees, judges will not receive a cost-of-living allowance in 2009. Members of Congress are getting a 2.8 percent boost, worth $4,700. But they refused before Christmas to give an identical increase to judges.

Federal trial judges are paid $169,300 a year. Appellate judges make more, ranging up to Roberts' salary of $217,400. The salaries pale in comparison to what top lawyers earn in private practice.

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Despite keeping Defense Secretary Robert Gates in the Pentagon, President-elect Obama’s transition team informed 90 Bush appointees their services will not be needed after Inauguration Day.

Scott Gration, a senior official on Obama’s transition team, called and emailed several of President Bush’s Pentagon appointees about 10 days ago to inform them they were being dismissed.

Out of roughly 250 political appointees, 90 were dismissed.

Traditionally political appointees resign at the end of a president’s term, leaving the new commander in chief to put his own team in place but with Gates staying in the top Pentagon job there was reason to believe many of his staff would also stay.

The Obama team noted that a majority of the political appointees will remain in place.

TVNL Comment: "The Obama team noted that a majority of the political appointees will remain in place." How is that for "change?"

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Former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney has called upon President-Elect Barack Obama to "please, say something about the humanitarian crisis that is being experienced by the Palestinian people, by the people of Gaza." McKinney spoke to CNN news from the Lebanese city of Tyre, where she had debarked from the relief vessel Dignity after it was rammed on the high seas by an Israeli patrol boat, early Tuesday morning. Passengers also report the Israelis fired machine guns into the water near their ship.

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The Associated Press Lies and Deceives While Defaming Islam and Christianity, in Its Latest Apologia for Israel’s Massacre on Gaza.

AP’s selective, sensationalistic, and obviously agenda-inspired use of the “translation” — suicide bombing — is no better than referring to the Israeli Army’s practice of putting Druze and Christian soldiers on the frontlines as blood libel. In the very least, it shows  a lack of professionalism, honesty, and objectivity on AP’s part; at most, it is a disgusting, politically-motivated, collectivist attack on several billion humans of the world and their faith.

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Four leading Israeli rabbis have sanctioned the murder of civilian population in the Gaza Strip amid the Israeli onslaught on the region.

"When a population living near a Jewish town sends bombs at the Jewish town with the purpose of killing and destroying Jewish lives there, it is permitted, according to Jewish Law, to fire shells and bombs at the firing sites, even if they are populated by civilians," read a ruling issued by Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, Rabbi Dov Lior, Rabbi Shalom Dov Wolpe and Rabbi Meir Mazuz.

The president may assert executive privilege to withhold from Congress records of an FBI interview with Vice President Dick Cheney regarding the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity, the attorney general concludes in a legal opinion released Monday.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee subpoenaed the records as part of its long-running investigation into what roles, if any, President George W. Bush, Cheney and their aides may have played in the leak.