TV News LIES

The Saudi prisoner awaiting death-penalty trial for the USS Cole bombing was tortured physically, mentally and sexually, an expert in torture treatment testified Thursday in a war court defense effort to get the captive better health care.

Dr. Sondra Crosby offered the diagnosis in open court in carefully choreographed testimony that never once mentioned that the accused Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, 49, got to Guantanamo from four years of CIA captivity during which he was interrogated with waterboarding, threatened by a revving power drill and threats to his mother.

For the first known time since the U.S. government began collecting data about Americans’ phone calls in bulk after the 9/11 attacks, a telecommunications company has questioned those surveillance activities in court, according to a judge’s opinion unsealed on Friday.

That company, whose name was redacted from the opinion, did not directly challenge the government’s right to make companies turn over “telephony metadata” — information about the phone numbers customers dial and the time, data and duration of such calls.

lIn what is being hailed as a landmark victory for opponents of hydraulic fracturing, a Texas family has won a $2.95 million verdict against a Plano oil and gas firm.

Robert and Lisa Parr and their daughter claimed that airborne toxins from the 22 wells run by Aruba Petroleum near their 40-acre Decatur ranch affected their health and poisoned their livestock and drinking water. The process that the firm used, also known as fracking, involves water and chemicals being injected deep underground to release natural gas trapped in rock formations.

There are still plenty of ripping, searing, wrenching, and devastating problems on this singular space ship which we call home, and equally important challenges all among its incredibly motley, and sometimes endearing, crew, too.  I get that.  This stuff is absolutely not news to me.  I learned to read quite a while back, using newspapers that -- dare I say it, even in irony? -- Adam and Eve used to cave-break their pet dinosaurs.

No, I have not slipped away in the night.  I have not yet been allowed to sublease my apartment at the Sanity Arms.  I have not yet checked out of the Human Hotel.  I am, by the way, still dawdling around here at the By-and-By B and B, hoping that someone will present a final statement and then, hang around long enough to help me make some sense out of the thing.

Back in 2008, European Food Safety Authority began pressing the chemical industry to provide safety information on a substance called diphenylamine, or DPA. Widely applied to apples after harvest, DPA prevents "storage scald"—brown spots that "becomes a concern when fruit is stored for several months," according to Washington State University, reporting from the heartland of industrial-scale apple production.

DPA isn't believed to be harmful on its own. But it has the potential to break down into a family of carcinogens called nitrosamines—not something you want to find on your daily apple. And that's why European food safety regulators wanted more information on it.

At least 40 U.S. veterans died waiting for appointments at the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care system, many of whom were placed on a secret waiting list.

The secret list was part of an elaborate scheme designed by Veterans Affairs managers in Phoenix who were trying to hide that 1,400 to 1,600 sick veterans were forced to wait months to see a doctor, according to a recently retired top VA doctor and several high-level sources.

Researchers at the New York University's Dirty Money Project analyzed DNA on $1 bills and found some 3,000 types of bacteria -- many times more than studies using a microscope found.

Jane Carlton, director of genome sequencing at NYU's Center for Genomics and Systems Biology told the Wall Street Journal: "It was quite amazing to us. We actually found that microbes grow on money."

Raw emotions bubbled just below the surface Wednesday as the Supreme Court considered a crucial North Carolina groundwater pollution case.

For experts, the case called CTS Corp. v. Waldburger centers on the relationship between state and federal laws and the ticking of the courthouse clock. Simply put, it’s about how long people have to sue polluters when they’ve been harmed. Being the law, though, it’s rarely that simple.