TV News LIES

Security concerns have prompted a federal prosecutor in Houston to withdraw from a big racketeering case involving the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, which has been a focus of the investigations into the slayings of the Kaufman County district attorney and an assistant.

Assistant U.S. attorney Jay Hileman on Tuesday notified attorneys representing 34 defendants, The Dallas Morning News and TPM reported. A Justice Department prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who is already involved in the case will take over.

James Hansen, an outspoken advocate for action on climate change, announced Monday that he is retiring after nearly 50 years as a climate scientist for NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Hansen, 72, wrote in an email that he was stepping down from the organization in order to spend more time on his campaign to cut carbon emissions. He first testified about the impending threat of climate change before Congress in 1988.

PBS NewsHour interviewed Hansen in August about how the extreme heat events of 2012 were connected to human activity and climate change.

America’s post-9/11 conflicts have been wars of corruption, a point surprisingly seldom made in the mainstream media. Keep in mind that George W. Bush’s administration was a monster of privatization. It had its own set of crony corporations, including Halliburton, KBR, Bechtel, and various oil companies, as well as a set of mercenary rent-a

-gun outfits like Blackwater, DynCorp, and Triple Canopy that came into their own in this period.  It took the plunge into Iraq in March 2003, sweeping those corporations and an increasingly privatized military in with it.  In the process, Iraq would become an example not of the free market system, but of a particularly venal form of crony capitalism (or, as Naomi Klein has labeled it, “disaster capitalism”).

The United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to create the first international treaty regulating the global arms trade, a landmark decision that imposes new constraints on the sale of conventional arms to governments and armed groups that commit war crimes, genocide and other mass atrocities.

The U.N. vote was hailed by arms control advocates and scores of governments, including the United States, as a major step in the international effort to enforce basic controls on the $70 billion international arms trade. But it was denounced by Iran, North Korea and Syria, for imposing new restrictions that prevent smaller states from buying and selling weapons to ensure their self-defense.

Connecticut lawmakers announced a deal Monday on what they called some of the toughest gun laws in the country that were proposed after the December mass shooting in the state, including a ban on new high-capacity ammunition magazines like the ones used in the massacre that left 20 children and six educators dead.

The proposal also called for background checks for private gun sales and a new registry for existing magazines that carry 10 or more bullets, something of a compromise for parents of Newtown victims who had wanted an outright ban on them, while legislators had proposed grandfathering them into the law.

It is a routine Nathan Blanc knows well. At 9am on Tuesday morning, the 19-year-old will report, as instructed in his draft papers, to a military base near Tel Aviv. There he will state his objection to serving in the Israeli army. Following his refusal to enlist, Blanc expects to be arrested and sentenced to between 10 and 20 days in jail.

He will then be taken to Military Prison Number 6 to serve his time. And then, following his release, the cycle will begin over again.

British soldiers and air personnel who helped to operate a secretive US detention facility in Baghdad that was at the centre of some of the most serious human-rights abuses to occur in Iraq after the invasion have, for the first time, spoken about abuses they witnessed there.

Members of two RAF squadrons and one Army Air Corps squadron were given guard and transport duties at the secret prison, the Guardian has established. Many of the detainees were brought to the facility by snatch squads formed from Special Air Service and Special Boat Service squadrons. The abuses the soldiers and airmen say they saw included:

Climate change is expanding Antarctica's sea ice, according to a scientific study in the journal Nature Geoscience. The paradoxical phenomenon is thought to be caused by relatively cold plumes of fresh water derived from melting beneath the Antarctic ice shelves.

This melt water has a relatively low density, so it accumulates in the top layer of the ocean. The cool surface waters then re-freeze more easily during Autumn and Winter.