TV News LIES

The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday disputed a drug company’s claim that pharmacies can no longer produce less expensive versions of a drug long used to reduce the risk that women will give birth prematurely.

The statement was aimed at defusing a controversy that erupted after the agency approved the drug Makena to prevent preterm births. Makena’s owner, KV Pharmaceutical of St. Louis, is charging $1,500 a dose for the drug. The same compound had been available for years for about $10 to $20 a dose.

Smokers face an increased risk of certain types of throat and stomach cancers, even years after they quit, a new study finds.

Combining the results of 33 past studies, Italian researchers found that current smokers were more than twice as likely as nonsmokers to develop cancer, either in their esophagus or in a part of the stomach called the gastric cardia.

In some of the studies, the risk of esophagus cancer remained high even when people had quit smoking three decades earlier.

An ideologically divided Supreme Court on Tuesday stripped a $14 million award from a wrongfully convicted man who had spent 14 years on death row and successfully sued New Orleans prosecutors for misconduct.

Conservative justices prevailed in the 5 to 4 ruling, which shielded the district attorney’s office from liability for not turning over evidence that showed John Thompson’s innocence. Justice Clarence Thomas said Thompson could not show a pattern of “deliberate indifference” on the part of former district attorney Harry Connick Sr. in training his staff to turn over evidence to the defense team.

Clarence Brandley spent 10 years on Death Row for the slaying of a 16-year-old girl, a crime he didn't commit. Now, more than two decades after being cleared, the former custodian hopes to convince Texas lawmakers that it's time to abolish the death penalty in Texas -- or least impose a moratorium on executions.

"To me, it's just a tool that prosecutors use to enhance their political careers," he said.

Maura Irby of Houston embodies the opposite side of the debate. Her husband, Houston motorcycle officer James B. Irby, was killed in June 1990 while making a routine traffic stop. A passenger, a paroled convict, shot him.

The UN secretary general called on Israel Wednesday to halt settlement building in occupied territory, and put a stop to all forms of violence and incitement, the UN News Center reported.

Secretary General Ban Ki-moon spoke at the UN Latin American and Caribbean Meeting in Support of Israeli-Palestinian Peace, convened by the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People that opened in Uruguay Wednesday. According to the report, Ban saying said it was a "crucial time" for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

The bodies surface quietly, like corks bobbing up in the dark. They come in twos and threes, a few times a week, dumped on desolate mountains or empty city roads, bearing the scars of great cruelty. Arms and legs are snapped; faces are bruised and swollen.

Flesh is sliced with knives or punctured with drills; genitals are singed with electric prods. In some cases the bodies are unrecognisable, sprinkled with lime or chewed by wild animals. All have a gunshot wound in the head.

This gruesome parade of corpses has been surfacing in Balochistan, Pakistan's largest province, since last July. Several human rights groups, including Amnesty International, have accounted for more than 100 bodies – lawyers, students, taxi drivers, farm workers. Most have been tortured. The last three were discovered on Sunday.

Two priests, a nun and two women in their 60s who cut through fences at Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor to protest submarine nuclear weapons were sentenced Monday to prison terms ranging from two to 15 months.

U.S. District Judge Benjamin H. Settle sentenced Jesuit priest Stephen Kelly, 62, of Oakland, Calif., and retired teacher Susan Crane, 67, of Baltimore, to 15 months in prison, U.S. Attorney's Office spokeswoman Emily Langlie said.

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