TV News LIES

As celestial bodies go, Pluto is far more surprising than anyone could have expected.

“Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we’ve seen in the solar system,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, in the official Nasa announcement that also claimed scientists were ‘reeling’ from seeing the new pictures.

A Florida man has been arrested and accused of plotting to detonate a pressure-cooker bomb at a memorial in Kansas City, Missouri, to commemorate the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, the U.S. Justice Department said on Thursday.

Joshua Ryne Goldberg, 20, was arrested on charges of distributing information relating to explosives, destructive devices and weapons of mass destruction, the department said. His arrest was announced a day before the 14th anniversary of the attacks.

In Israel's Negev desert, ethnic cleansing is once again rearing its ugly head.

The unrecognised Bedouin village of Umm Al Hiran faces demolition and replacement with a Jewish town, Hiran. Seven hundred villagers face displacement, and only because they are of the wrong ethnicity.

Umm Al Hiran is one of tens of unrecognised villages in the Negev, inhabited by descendants of the Abu al-Qian tribe. Located in the area of Wadi Attir, the village is divided into two areas: Umm Al Hiran and Attir.

The charter school movement has been expelled from Washington state’s public education system, with a Supreme Court ruling late Friday that the privately run schools are not public schools under the state’s constitution.

Meanwhile, the quick fix for that sizeable hurdle sought by the state’s charter school proponents—a special legislative session—does not appear likely because Washington’s public education sector is embroiled in more controversial and larger battles.

More than 50 intelligence analysts working out of the U.S. military's Central Command have formally complained that their reports on ISIS and al Qaeda’s branch in Syria were being inappropriately altered by senior officials, The Daily Beast has learned.

The complaints spurred the Pentagon’s inspector general to open an investigation into the alleged manipulation of intelligence. The fact that so many people complained suggests there are deep-rooted, systemic problems in how the U.S. military command charged with the war against the self-proclaimed Islamic State assesses intelligence.

“The cancer was within the senior level of the intelligence command,” one defense official said.

Al Qaeda has never operated in Afghanistan, the country's former President Hamid Karzai said in a recent interview, dismissing the notion that the terror group plotted the Sept. 11 terror attacks inside the country as "a myth," and blaming Pakistani militias for the rise of the Islamic State inside Afghan borders.

“I don’t know if Al Qaeda existed and I don’t know if they exist [in Afghanistan],” Karzai said in an excerpt of an interview with Al Jazeera English's "UpFront which will air on Friday, the 14th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania that claimed the lives of nearly 3,000.

Scientists say they've discovered a new member of the human family tree, revealed by a huge trove of bones in a barely accessible, pitch-dark chamber of a cave in South Africa.

The creature shows a surprising mix of human-like and more primitive characteristics — some experts called it "bizarre" and "weird."

And the discovery presents some key mysteries: How old are the bones? And how did they get into that chamber, reachable only by a complicated pathway that includes squeezing through passages as narrow as about 7½ inches (17.8 centimeters)?

The National Geographic magazine has been a nonprofit publication since inception in 1888, but that ends today. The long-running American publication becomes very much for-profit under a $725 million dollar deal announced today with 21st Century Fox, the entertainment company controlled by the family of Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch is a notorious climate change denier, and his family's Fox media empire is the world's primary source of global warming misinformation. Which would be no big deal here, I guess, were it not for the fact that the National Geographic Society's mission includes giving grants to scientists.

Or had you forgotten? Here's a refresh for you, a fun little interview with Murdoch on his climate change views.