TV News LIES

The United States is flaring so much natural gas into the atmosphere - burning it as oil-field waste rather than extracting energy from it in power plants - that it now leads the world in the growth rate at which it is trashing that energy source.

Evidence of the trend can be seen flickering in the night across western North Dakota, where new oil drilling in the Bakken shale formation there has helped propel a surge in US flaring since 2007. As is often the case, many companies find it cheaper to burn off gas that emerges in new oil fields, rather than build pipelines and facilities to collect it.

A death row prisoner in Georgia who has been officially deemed by the courts to be "mentally retarded" is scheduled to be executed next week despite a supreme court ruling that bans the death sentence for people with learning difficulties.

The Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles was due to hear a clemency appeal on behalf of the prisoner, Warren Hill, on Friday and has the power to commute his death penalty to life without parole.

It seems we've only seen the tip of the iceberg with the Barclays Bank prosecution for rigging the LIBOR (London Interbank Offer Rate). It seems that they are cooperating to avoid jail time. Bob Diamond who headed the bank until recently said "he was sickened when he saw the emails."

What he means is that he was sickened that his underlings were stupid enough to leave a paper trail. His nausea will be somewhat soothed by the $3.5 million he gets as a golden parachute. This, however, is about a tenth of what he expected to get. How will he make the payments on his Rolls?

Frankly, the statement pissed me off because it sounded to me, not like a beautiful vision for the world in stark contrast to the CON vision of greed, hierarchy and intellectual incuriosity - but the death knell of a once promising movement.

"Our process is our message?!"  WHAT?  Really?  I know that was probably meant to be a radical, bold, daring attempt at a fundamental shift in consciousness about how we organize our society, but it sounded more like a gift to the elites who are giggling with delight by the way Occupy just solidified itself as a fringe movement.

After the first World Trade Center bombing, Whitehurst testified that supervisors pressured him to concoct misleading scientific reports.

Months after the Washington Post revealed that lab technicians at the FBI mishandled evidence, resulting in at least three wrongful convictions, the Department of Justice has announced it will review of thousands of old cases.

A reporter at the Post had been working on a story about Donald Gates, a D.C. man released after DNA evidence proved his innocence, when he learned about Frederic Whitehurst (pictured), an FBI lab chemist who blew the whistle on the FBI Laboratory in the mid-1990s. Whitehurst said he watched colleagues contaminate evidence and, in court, overstate the significance of their matches.

After the first World Trade Center bombing, Whitehurst testified that supervisors pressured him to concoct misleading scientific reports. When he refused to testify that a urea nitrate bomb had been the source of the explosion, the FBI found another lab technician to testify.

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Vaccines aren't supposed to cause disease. But that appears to be what's happening on Australian farms.

Scientists have found that two virus strains used to vaccinate chickens there may have recombined to form a virus that is sickening and killing the animals.

But when the researchers sequenced the genomes of the two new strains and the three vaccine strains, they found that the new viruses were actually stitched together from the European and Australian vaccines. Although it was not clear what mutations kept the vaccine strains from causing disease in the first place, they were probably lost when the viruses recombined, said Browning, whose team reports its findings online in Science.

Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. has become the first major insurance company to say it won't cover damage related to a gas drilling process that blasts chemical-laden water deep into the ground.

The Columbus, Ohio-based company's personal and commercial policies "were not designed to cover" risk from the drilling process, called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, Nationwide spokeswoman Nancy Smeltzer said Thursday.

The Town of Highland on July 11 passed a local law to ban hydraulic fracturing, joining other Delaware River towns to form a bulwark against the controversial gas drilling method.

Highland joins the towns of Tusten and Bethel to the north, and Lumberland to the south, to ban fracking within their borders. In February, two State Supreme Court judges, in separate decisions, upheld the rule that allows towns to pass fracking bans.