TV News LIES

The Treasury Department watchdog ordered JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) to work with U.S. regulators seeking documents in connection with a probe into the bank's relationship with convicted Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff, in a warning letter dated December 21.

The letter from Treasury Inspector General Eric Thorson to JPMorgan's general counsel, Stephen Cutler, which was reviewed by Reuters on Friday, revealed that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has been unable to get documents it requested.

The New York Times got its ink-stained hands on a report from the New York Health Department assessing the risks associated with fracking, the primary issue at play as the state considers whether or not to lift a ban on the practice. While the report suggests that fracking doesn’t pose risks, there are at least two gigantic caveats. From the Times:

The state’s Health Department found in an analysis it prepared early last year that the much-debated drilling technology known as hydrofracking could be conducted safely in New York, according to a copy obtained by The New York Times from an expert who did not believe it should be kept secret. …

British energy company BP accused oil services company Halliburton of skirting its responsibilities in the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Transocean Deepwater Inc., owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig, leased to BP, agreed to pay more than $1 billion in fines and penalties for the BP oil spill, the U.S. Justice Department said Thursday. The company agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges, paying $400 million in fines, as well as another $1 billion in civil penalties for violations of the Clean Water Act.

The financial crisis had many causes—too much borrowing, foolish investments, misguided regulation—but at its core, the panic resulted from a lack of transparency. The reason no one wanted to lend to or trade with the banks during the fall of 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed, was that no one could understand the banks’ risks. It was impossible to tell, from looking at a particular bank’s disclosures, whether it might suddenly implode.

For the past four years, the nation’s political leaders and bankers have made enormous—in some cases unprecedented—efforts to save the financial industry, clean up the banks, and reform regulation in order to restore trust and confidence in the American financial system. This hasn’t worked. Banks today are bigger and more opaque than ever, and they continue to behave in many of the same ways they did before the crash.

Our Milky Way galaxy is home to at least 100 billion alien planets, and possibly many more, a new study suggests. "It's a staggering number, if you think about it," lead author Jonathan Swift, of Caltech in Pasadena, said in a statement. "Basically there's one of these planets per star."

Swift and his colleagues arrived at their estimate after studying a five-planet system called Kepler-32, which lies about 915 light-years from Earth. The five worlds were detected by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, which flags the tiny brightness dips caused when exoplanets cross their star's face from the instrument's perspective.

New Hampshire’s senior senator Jeanne Shaheen, who introduced the amendment repealing the ban that had been in effect since 1981 (PDF) called the bills passage an “important step” toward ending a policy that was “blatantly unfair to women putting their lives on the line.”

Currently, military insurance only covers abortions performed to save the life of the mother, and military health care facilities will only perform them to save the life of the mother or in cases of rape and incest. Shaheen’s amendment will let insurance pick up the cost of the procedure in such cases, rather than forcing the woman to pay out of pocket.

For years, petroleum companies have practiced hydraulic fracturing (better known as “fracking”) in California, with virtually no government regulation or oversight. A 2011 investigation by Environmental Working Group revealed that fracking has been widely used in California for decades, contrary to assurances by officials that its use was uncommon in the state—even though they had never attempted to track the use of the controversial extraction method.

Now the Department of Conservation/Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR), the state agency nominally in charge of drilling, is considering new rules. Its “Pre-Rulemaking Discussion Draft” reveals few substantive changes and scant protection for the public.

Researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have reconfirmed earlier findings of high rates of methane leakage from natural gas fields. If these findings are replicated elsewhere, they would utterly vitiate the climate benefit of natural gas, even when used to switch off coal.

Indeed, if the previous findings — of 4% methane leakage over a Colorado gas field — were a bombshell, then the new measurements reported by the journal Nature are thermonuclear: