TV News LIES

Opposites attract, it is said.  These days, I suspect opposites attract all right, and bunched up around their opposite poles, are two groups:  the totally apathetic and the absolutely certain.

The majority of us are less extreme, lumped in the middle somewhere, fence-sitters, undecided, waiting for more information to drift in and for the clouds of our doubt to clear -- waiting for something like clarity and confidence to bloom somewhere close to our decision-making abilities, our opinions, our beliefs.

Ignorance and apathy make mischievous, self-chasing twins that raise only dust clouds and smokescreens, when they can be persuaded to move at all.  Their opposite forces, ego and conviction, sweat buckets to ensure knowledge and action both corner the market and are locked all the way down.

During nine fruitless months of U.S.-mediated talks between Palestinians and Israelis, a record-setting Israeli settlement campaign in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem unfolded, according to a report published Tuesday by Israeli monitoring group Peace Now.

The report, released as the deadline passed for the two sides to reach a framework agreement and extend talks, said the Israeli government promoted plans or approved tenders for nearly 14,000 new settler homes on occupied Palestinian land in the West Bank. The scale of plans for East Jerusalem and the West Bank was “unprecedented,” with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government approving the equivalent of about 50 new homes a day, the group said.

Subsiding land is a bigger immediate problem for the world's coastal cities than sea level rise, say scientists.  In some parts of the globe, the ground is going down 10 times faster than the water is rising, with the causes very often being driven by human activity.

Decades of ground water extraction saw Tokyo descend two metres before the practice was stopped.

Speaking at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly, researchers said other cities must following suit.

Over 4 percent of people sentenced to death are innocent, according to what authors of a report published Monday say was a “conservative,” statistics-based estimate.

Advocates against the death penalty told Al Jazeera that number is astoundingly high. But for one exonerated death row inmate, the figure seems incredibly low — and he believes he’s more qualified to estimate the number of innocents on death row than professors and analysts.

The province's offshore regulator sent a short tweet to signal some big movements at sea on Sunday.

The C-NLOPB, or Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board, said two large oil rigs were taking evasive action against some equally massive structures off the east coast of Newfoundland.

From a plane landing in Vancouver, the city shimmers below. Skyscrapers sheathed in glass reflect water that lies on three sides of downtown. Forested mountains serve as a backdrop that has made it easy for politicians to brand Vancouver the world’s “greenest city.”

There is more to that reputation than just PR. Vancouver’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are among the lowest of any urban center in North America. The city council has made bicycling infrastructure a priority. And in 2008, the government of British Columbia enacted a relatively steep carbon tax that has earned international praise for lowering the province’s per capita consumption of fossil fuels to well below Canada’s average.

For northern Texans who live near gas wells, fracking'€™s promise of cleaner energy is overshadowed by drilling, pollution and fears for their health. Some residents have started to fight back.

Alyse and Lance Ogletree moved to the Meadows at Hickory Creek, a subdivision of modest houses in this fast-growing city 40 miles north of Dallas, in the fall of 2011. They found the home prices attractive and thought the well-regarded school district would be a good fit for their son, Kyle, who had suffered brain damage after contracting encephalitis when he was 8 months old.

"I did not really realize I was getting life until the date of sentencing. When my attorney told me, I told him that I wanted to take back my guilty plea... they denied me."

Timothy Tyler says his life ended when he was 23-years-old. That was two decades ago, when he was arrested and later sentenced to a mandatory double-life term in prison without the possibility of parole for conspiracy to possess LSD with intent to distribute. A self-described "Deadhead," Tyler was busted after mailing five grams of the hallucinogenic drug to a friend who was working as an informant for the federal government.