TV News LIES

At a time when states are struggling to reduce bloated prison populations and tight budgets, a private prison management company is offering to buy prisons in exchange for various considerations, including a controversial guarantee that the governments maintain a 90% occupancy rate for at least 20 years.

The $250 million proposal, circulated by the Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America to prison officials in 48 states, has been blasted by some state officials who suggest such a program could pressure criminal justice officials to seek harsher sentences to maintain the contractually required occupancy rates.

The Hubble Space Telescope has detected light from a small galaxy emitted about 500 million years after the big bang, an early era of the universe about which scientists know relatively little.

Last year, astronomers used Hubble to find another galaxy at a redshift of about 10, suggesting it was formed 480 million years after the big bang. But the help from gravity's magnifying glass allowed the CLASH team to learn more detail about MACS 1149-JD, Zheng said.

In the first ever study to examine the long-term effects of Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide and the NK603 Roundup-resistant GM maize also developed by Monsanto, the CRIIGEN scientists found that rats exposed to even the smallest amounts, developed mammary tumors and severe liver and kidney damage as early as four months in males, and seven months for females, compared with 23 and 14 months respectively for a control group.

Organic rice baby cereal, rice breakfast cereals, brown rice, white rice—new tests by Consumer Reports have found that those and other types of rice products on grocery shelves contain arsenic, many at worrisome levels.

Arsenic not only is a potent human carcinogen but also can set up children for other health problems in later life.

Following our January investigation, "Arsenic in Your Juice," which found arsenic in apple and grape juices, we recently tested more than 200 samples of a host of rice products. They included iconic labels and store brands, organic products and conventional ones; some were aimed at the booming gluten-free market.

Italy's highest appeals court has upheld guilty verdicts on 23 Americans, all but one of them CIA agents, accused of kidnapping a terror suspect. Their case related to the abduction of an Egyptian cleric in Milan in 2003.The man, known as Abu Omar, was allegedly flown to Egypt and tortured.

The Americans were tried in absentia, in the first trial involving extraordinary rendition, the CIA's practice of transferring suspects to countries where torture is permitted.

Deepening the mystery surrounding the health effects of bisphenol A, a large new study has linked high levels of childhood and adolescent exposure to the industrial chemical to higher rates of obesity — in white children only.

The latest research, published in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., measured bisphenol A, or BPA, levels in the urine of a diverse group of 2,838 Americans ages 6 to 19. Researchers from New York University also reviewed data on the participants' weight, dietary intake, physical activity and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Ask someone like Jon Entine, a science writer for Ethical Corporation, to describe the sort of person who claims hydraulic fracturing presents a pollution nightmare in waiting, and you quickly find yourself pummeled with talk radio invective: "ideological blowhard," "leftist loony," and "upper-middle-class lefties."  But none apply to Fred Mayer.

When a reporter arrives at his 200-year-old farmhouse on a cloudy June day, one of the first things Mayer asks is: "Do you know who Glenn Beck is? You should really listen to him. Now that man knows what he's talking about."

It's an old story, one that keeps poking back into view this election cycle:  How to reach people with your particular message?  Most of the time, we're stuck in our own channels and ruts, either stuck preaching to the choir or unable to usher new people into the tent.

This trend of stuck messaging, to pick a phrase, is clearly present in politics today,  with each so-called "side" aghast at the clearly observable insanity of their opposites, everyone's listening skills turned off at the source.

Two camps have been routinely described by the Occupy movement:  the elite 1%, and all the rest of us rabble in the remaining 99%.  As it turns out in real life, 1% of the population are also likely psychopaths.