TV News LIES

Water is the enemy of fire, except in Jason Kline's house. When a flame gets near his faucet, a fireball erupts.  Around Christmas, the family noticed their water started fizzing.  When Jason's wife, Debby, lit a candle near the sink, they learned something was very wrong.

"Oh, I was so scared. It just was a huge explosion, the entire sink went up to the ceiling," Debby says. The Kline's water is full of methane gas and they're not sure why.

Teasing out a thought sometimes means pulling along any number of odds and ends you didn't know were attached, like tugging a thread on your sweater.  Such is the case with plain ol', unpretentious Patience.  I had no idea it was hooked to so much until I started messing around with the concept.

I thought about Patience and gave it a short jerk -- like a test-yank, to see what was attached to what -- and all sorts of things fell off my mental shelf onto the floor of my skull.

A persistent drought held its grip on America's bread basket on Thursday, with no sign of relief for the four main wheat-growing states.
The poor outlook for winter wheat, which accounts for about 70% of the US crop, has raised fears about further food prices shocks, after widespread failure of last year's corn and soybean crops.

Conditions in Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Texas, which produce about a third of the country's wheat crop, remained unchanged – virtually the worst on record, according to the US Drought Monitor.

For decades, scientists have assumed the central portion of California's San Andreas fault acts as a barrier that prevents a big quake in the southern part of the state from spreading to the north, and vice versa. As a result, a mega-quake that could be felt from San Diego to San Francisco was widely considered impossible.

But that key fault segment might not serve as a barrier in all cases, researchers wrote Wednesday in the online edition of the journal Nature.

American Civil Liberties Union officials say Republican Gov. Rick Scott and the GOP-led Florida Legislature have mounted an unprecedented attack on civil liberties over the past two years.

The ACLU of Florida issued a report Thursday on actions by the group and others in the courts of law and public opinion and at the ballot box to protect voting, free speech and other rights.

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A bomb targeting paramilitary soldiers killed 12 people in southwest Pakistan on Thursday, while five suspected militants died in a U.S. drone strike in the country's northwest, officials said.

Separately, an explosion ripped through a crowded mosque in the northwest city of Mingora, killing 21 people and injuring more than 70 others, said hospital official Mian Gul Aleem. The blast was caused by a gas cylinder that exploded, said senior police official Gul Afzal Khan.

The White House is working with its allies on a well-financed campaign in Washington and around the country to shift public opinion toward stricter gun laws and provide political cover to lawmakers who end up voting for an assault-weapons ban or other restrictions on firearms.

With President Obama preparing to push a legislative agenda aimed at curbing the nation’s gun violence, pillars of his political network, along with independent groups, are raising millions of dollars and mapping out strategies in an attempt to shepherd new regulations through Congress.

An ongoing U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study on natural gas drilling and its potential for groundwater contamination has gotten tentative praise so far from both industry and environmental groups.

Glenn Paulson, the EPA's science adviser, describes the project as "one of the most aggressive public outreach programs in EPA history."

The final report won't come out until late 2014. But a 275-page progress report was released in December and, for all its details, shows that the EPA doesn't plan to address one contentious issue — how often drinking water contamination might occur.