TV News LIES

Eric Smith calls himself one of the lucky ones, returning home from the war in Iraq in 2008 with two arms and two legs.

But his luck has yet to produce a full-time job. In the past year, the 26-year-old Baltimore veteran has found part-time work as a bartender — which paid $4 an hour, plus tips — and as a mail sorter, which paid $8 an hour. And when he was desperate enough for income, he volunteered to be a test patient in a drug study, which earned him $1,200 for a four-night hospital stay.

It's not exactly what Smith had in mind.

Exposure to the hormone-disrupting chemical Bisphenol A (BPA) has been underestimated, because prior lab tests have looked at single exposures rather than daily diets, the University of Missouri reports.

The study, released online Monday, is billed as the first to examine BPA concentrations in any animal after exposure through a steady diet, which mirrors the chronic exposure that humans receive through food packaging. The chemical, linked to breast cancer, heart disease, diabetes, male infertility and other health problems, is widely used in bottles and cups and in the linings of metal cans, including infant formula.

Scores of Bahraini doctors and nurses who treated injured anti-government protesters have been charged with attempting to topple the kingdom's monarchy.

The 23 doctors and 24 nurses were formally charged on Monday during a closed door hearing in a special security court. The 47 accused have been in detention since March, when the country declared martial law in order to clamp down on a wave of demonstrations that swept the tiny kingdom earlier this year.

This particular e.coli variation is a member of the O104 strain, and O104 strains are almost never (normally) resistant to antibiotics. In order for them to acquire this resistance, they must be repeatedly exposed to antibiotics in order to provide the "mutation pressure" that nudges them toward complete drug immunity.

So if you're curious about the origins of such a strain, you can essentially reverse engineer the genetic code of the e.coli and determine fairly accurately which antibiotics it was exposed to during its development. This step has now been done (see below), and when you look at the genetic decoding of this O104 strain now threatening food consumers across the EU, a fascinating picture emerges of how it must have come into existence.

So how, exactly, does a bacterial strain come into existence that's resistant to over a dozen antibiotics in eight different drug classes and features two deadly gene mutations plus ESBL enzyme capabilities?

MILLIONS of women facing an elevated risk for breast cancer could slash their chances of getting the widely feared malignancy by taking a hormone-blocking pill used to treat the disease or prevent a recurrence, researchers say.

A compound known as an aromatase inhibitor cuts the breast cancer risk by 65 per cent for women prone to the disease for any reason, such as having risky genes, a relative who had the disease or being older than age 60, a long-awaited international study of more than 4500 women has concluded.

Both President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came away from their fracas in Washington last month with wounds that are not soon to heal. For Obama, paradoxically, the lasting fallout will not come primarily from American Jews. They are divided. Significant numbers of them disparage Netanyahu and agree with the president.

Americans for Peace Now, the U.S. branch of a leftist Israeli group, issued a statement expressing "deep disappointment" with Netanyahu's hard-line address to a joint session of Congress. It said he had been expected to offer a "formula for a breakthrough" in negotiations with the Palestinians but instead had laid down preconditions that infuriated them.

As a part of the deal struck that year, Haiti would join the Venezuelan-led oil alliance known as PetroCaribe and it would purchase oil “only 60 percent up front with the remainder payable over twenty-five years at 1 percent interest” — a remarkably good deal for the Western hemisphere’s poorest country.

The U.S. embassy at the time noted that Haiti would save a hundred million U.S. dollars a year under the terms of the PetroCaribe deal; the saved dollars would then earmarked for development in schools, health care, and infrastructure. Yet, under the charge of ambassador Janet Sanderson, the embassy immediately set out to sabotage the deal.

The latest quarterly reports from the big Wall Street banks revealed a startling fact: None of the big four banks had a single day in the quarter in which they lost money trading.

For the 63 straight trading days in Q1, in other words, Goldman Sachs (GS), JP Morgan (JPM), Bank of America (BAC), and Citigroup (C) made money trading for their own accounts.

Trading, of course, is supposed to be a risky business: You win some, you lose some. That's how traders justify their gargantuan bonuses--their jobs are so risky that they deserve to be paid millions for protecting their firms' precious capital. (Of course, the only thing that happens if traders fail to protect that capital is that taxpayers bail out the bank and the traders are paid huge "retention" bonuses to prevent them from leaving to trade somewhere else, but that's a different story).

But these days, trading isn't risky at all. In fact, it's safer than walking down the street.

Why?