TV News LIES

The swarm of earthquakes went on for months in North Central Texas, rattling homes, with reports of broken water pipes and cracked walls and locals blaming the shudders on the fracking boom that’s led to skyrocketing oil and gas production around the nation.

Darlia Hobbs, who lives on Eagle Mountain Lake, about a dozen miles from Fort Worth, said that more than 30 quakes had hit from November to January.

“We have had way too many earthquakes out here because of the fracking and disposal wells,” she said in an interview.

It was after 10 p.m. on July 8, 2009, when Sandra Mansour answered her cellphone to the panicked voice of her daughter-in-law, Nasreen. A week earlier, Nasreen and her husband, Naji Mansour, had been detained in the southern Sudanese city of Juba by agents of the country's internal security bureau. In the days since, Sandra had been desperately trying to find out where the couple was being held.

Now Nasreen was calling to say that she'd been released—driven straight to the airport and booked on a flight to her native Kenya—but Naji remained in custody. He was being held in a dark, squalid basement cell, with a bucket for a bathroom and a dense swarm of mosquitoes that attacked his body as he slept. "You have to get him out of there," Nasreen said. But she was unfamiliar with Juba and could only offer the barest details about where they'd been held. "He's in a blue building. You've seen it. It's not far from your hotel."

Central Texas Gun Works is in a nondescript strip mall in the southern part of Texas’ capital city. It’s a gun store and firearm training center that’s located, somewhat improbably, two doors down from an acupuncture center. Customers can buy handguns and long guns, as well as a miniature pink firearm with “My First Rifle” engraved on the stock. Posters from the National Rifle Association gild the waiting room. T-shirts saying “Buy a Gun. Annoy a Liberal” are also for sale.

It’s into this Texas microcosm that former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has dropped a depth charger.

Using $50 million of his personal fortune, Bloomberg last month launched a coalition to champion issues like mandatory background checks for private firearm sales.

"Fox & Friends" decided to get its revenge on Scientific American editor Michael Moyer after Moyer tweeted that the show's producers had barred him from discussing climate change.

Moyer said he had been explicitly told to "pick something else" when he said he thought climate change was an important "future trend" to talk about. His decision to air this behind-the-scenes chat, as well as his subsequent tweets mocking the politics and some of the staffers on the show, led Steve Doocy, Brian Kilmeade and guest co-host Anna Kooiman to spend nearly 5 minutes of their Thursday show getting back at Moyer.

Dutch police arrested 44 Greenpeace activists attempting to stop a Russian oil tanker from unloading its cargo of arctic oil in Rotterdam.

Armed anti-terrorist police boarded the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior and made the arrests. Although the ship was towed ashore and those arrested were taken to several Rotterdam police stations, the activists were quickly released. Several were members of the “Arctic 30” who were arrested in Russia in 2013 and jailed for over two months on piracy charges.

In 2012, Bonnie Herzog, leading tobacco analyst for Wells Fargo, predicted electronic cigarettes will overtake tobacco cigarettes within ten years. In 2013 she confirmed that projection and said Big Tobacco will take over most of the market.

A competitive free market was not going to determine the winners or losers in the e-cig industry. With this kind of money at stake it was going to take the participation of one of the United States federal executive departments, the FDA, to guarantee the takeover.

Why hasn’t Shepard Smith come out yet? The affable Fox News anchor has a longtime boyfriend, ranks among Fox’s most senior talent, and lives in New York City. It could be, of course, that he’s just a very private person, or—as the Times argued in October—that public attitudes have changed and nobody cares if a famous figure is gay.

Or it could be that, when Smith tried to come out last year, Fox silenced and punished him.

In the summer of 2013, according to multiple sources with knowledge of their exchange, Shepard Smith approached Fox News president Roger Ailes about publicly coming out. The newly attached anchor was eager, at the time, to finally acknowledge his sexuality. “It’s time,” he told Ailes and other colleagues. “It’s time.”

Bacteria resistant to antibiotics have now spread to every part of the world and might lead to a future where minor infections could kill, according to a report published Wednesday by the World Health Organization.

In its first global survey of the problem, the WHO report warned that antibiotic resistance was no longer an abstract threat to deal with in the future, but one that, “is happening right now in every region of the world and has the potential to affect anyone, of any age, in any country.”