TV News LIES

Take away the predators at the top of the food chain — the lions, tigers, wolves and cougars — and entire ecosystems start to change. A paper in today's edition of the journal Science suggests that humans' destruction of these top predators is causing reverberations worldwide in ways not apparent even a decade ago, including changes in the landscape and even increases in wildfires.

Although the idea that there are serious ecosystem consequences to the removal of top predators isn't new, with this paper, "it's come of age," says Aaron Wirsing, a professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Washington in Seattle.

The Forward, the leading national Jewish weekly, has just reported that four Jewish summer camps in Pennsylvania have signed leases with gas exploration companies to allow “fracking” –-  the hydro-fracturing method of pouring tons of highly chemicalized water to smash shale rocks into releasing natural gas.

The four are Starlight’s Perlman Camp, which is owned and operated by B’nai B’rith; Camps Nesher and Shoshanim, which share a property in Lakewood and are owned and operated by the New Jersey Federation of YMHA and YWHA; and Camp Morasha, an independent camp in Lakewood.

Missouri's governor said on Thursday he will let a measure passed by state lawmakers this spring restricting abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy take effect -- though he will not sign it.

Under the state's constitution, bills sent to the governor but not signed become law. The Missouri legislation, similar to that in several other states, prohibits abortions on viable fetuses after 20 weeks unless continuing the pregnancy would threaten the mother's life or cause substantial injury to her major bodily functions.

Michele Bachmann is practically synonymous with political controversy, and if the 2008 presidential election is any guide, the conservative Lutheran church she belonged to for many years is likely to add another chapter due to the nature of its beliefs--such as its assertion, explained and footnoted on this website, that the Roman Catholic Pope is the Antichrist.

Bachmann was a longtime member of the Salem Evangelical Lutheran Church in Stillwater, Minn., which belongs to the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), a council of churches founded in 1850 that today comprises about 400,000 people.

Cisco Systems, the largest networking-equipment company, may cut as many as 10,000 jobs, or about 14%of its workforce, to revive profit growth, according to two people familiar with the plans.

The cuts include as many as 7,000 jobs that would be eliminated by the end of August, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren't final.

A new investigation into the Catholic Church's chronic cover-up of child abuse found Wednesday that a rural diocese and its bishop ignored Irish church rules requiring all suspected molestation cases to be reported to police - and the Vatican encouraged this concealment.

The government, which ordered the probe into 1996-2009 cover-ups in the County Cork diocese of Cloyne, warned its findings suggest that parishes across Ireland could pose a continuing danger to children's welfare today.

John Kurtz, the Orlando Copwatch founder who was facing six years in prison for battery on a law enforcement officer, was acquitted of that felony charge last week.

But he was convicted of resisting arrest without violence – even though the officer testified he was not resisting – proving once again that Florida has an unethical and unconstitutional habit of dishing out resisting arrest convictions without underlying charges to justify the arrest in the first place.

Heightened security concerns in the United States have stalled the immigration process for tens of thousands of Iraqis who worked for the U.S. government or American firms in Iraq and hope to move to the United States, according to U.S. officials and refugee advocates.

A special program meant to distribute 25,000 visas to Iraqis who worked for the U.S. government has admitted just 7,000 since it started in 2008, officials said this week. In addition, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, a global program that also admits Iraqis, will admit about 6,000 Iraqis this year, down from 18,000 in fiscal 2010.