TV News LIES

Soot ranks as the second-largest human contributor to climate change, according to a new analysis released Tuesday, exerting twice as much of an impact as previously  thought.

The four-year, 232-page study of black carbon, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, shows that short-lived pollution known as soot, such as emissions from diesel engines and wood-fired stoves, has about two-thirds the climate impact of carbon dioxide. The analysis has pushed methane, which comes from landfills and other forces, to third place as a human contributor to global warming.

The White House and the Pentagon -- with a helping hand from the State Department -- ensure that the U.S. remains by far the leading purveyor of the “right to bear arms” globally.

Given these last weeks, who doesn’t know what an AR-15 is?  Who hasn’t seen the mind-boggling stats on the way assault rifles have  flooded this country, or tabulations of accumulating Newtown-style  mass killings, or noted that there are  barely more gas stations nationwide than federally licensed firearms dealers, or heard the renewed debates over the Second Amendment, or been struck by the  rapid shifts in public opinion on gun control, or checked out the disputes over how  effective an assault-rifle ban was  the last time around?

While continuing to identify as a Republican, former Secretary of State Colin Powell on Sunday criticized the GOP for a series of racist attacks against President Barack Obama.

"There's also a dark vein of intolerance in some parts of the party," Powell said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "What do I mean by that?  What I mean by that is they still sort of look down on minorities."

Powell, who endorsed Obama, pointed to a number of statements that were directed at Obama as evidence that there is still racism within the party.

A Harvard academic has put the blame squarely for America's failure to act on climate change on environmental groups. She also argues that there is little prospect Barack Obama will put climate change on the top of his agenda in his second term.

In a research paper, due to be presented at a Harvard forum next month, scholar Theda Skocpol in effect accuses the DC-based environmental groups of political malpractice, saying they were blind to extreme Republican opposition to their efforts.

One of South Florida’s most notorious priests — accused by several men of sexually abusing them in their youth — will go to prison for 12 to 15 years under the terms of a plea bargain he accepted Monday in Broward Circuit Court.

The Rev. Neil Doherty, 69, pleaded no contest to six charges of lewd and lascivious acts upon a child for alleged repeated sexual assaults committed in the mid- to late-1990s on a man who is now 26-years-old and living out of state.

A Rhode Island Roman Catholic priest has resigned from his parish and has been placed on administrative leave because of a "credible" allegation of sexual misconduct from more than 25 years ago, the Diocese of Providence said Sunday.

The diocese said the Rev. Barry Meehan has resigned as pastor of St. Timothy's Church in Warwick, and church officials have reported the allegation to state police. Details of the allegations weren't released.

The US military aircraft carrying the cargo is only used for missions like this.

Muhammed Farhan Latif and other members of his family waited at a gatehouse at Al-Dailami Air Base in Sana'a, Yemen's capital, for the plane to arrive from Ramstein Air Base in Germany. It touched down at around 9 PM on Saturday, December 15.

The special security detail assigned to the mission unloaded the cargo - a plain aluminum box - from the aircraft. A man and a woman from the US Embassy entered the gatehouse. They had papers they wanted Muhammed to sign, but they were written in English and Muhammed doesn't speak the language.

In 1750, British astronomer Thomas Wright published a book An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe with a diagram showing the stars of our Milky Way, each surrounded by orbiting planets.

But there was no evidence to support his view. "At that point in history," Samuel Arbesman writes in his book The Half-Life of Facts, "this notion was nothing more than a hope, and a somewhat sacrilegious one at that. It was no more than a logical deduction derived from the Copernican notion that our place in the universe need not be a particularly privileged one."