TV News LIES

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.”

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.