TV News LIES

Comcast isn't simply becoming the nation's most powerful media and entertainment giant, with assets in broadcast and cable TV, movies, the Internet and theme parks.
The company is becoming television's dominant newscaster, with enormous influence on civic life.

Comcast will control the No. 1 evening newscast (The NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams), morning newscast (The Today Show), and Sunday talk show (Meet the Press). On cable, CNBC is the leading source of business news, while MSNBC focuses on politics.

The discovery of an ancient stone tool kit in the United Arab Emirates, reported in today's edition of the journal Science, now is raising the possibility that today's modern humans first started leaving Africa earlier than paleontologists previously thought.

The question of when modern humans first started leaving the African continent has been debated since the 1980s. African fossils of modern-looking humans date to about 200,000 years ago, but gene studies of non-Africans suggest that people only left the mother continent by 60,000 years ago.

Wall Street's plunge into the U.S. housing market reached such a level of madness that three giant banks kept buying billions of dollars in risky mortgage securities when most investors were shunning them, a congressional commission said Thursday in its long-awaited report on the causes of the U.S. financial crisis.

An offshore market for the securities became "self fueling," the politically divided Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission wrote in its 533-page report, including lengthy dissents from Republican commissioners.

American students scored poorly on a national test of science proficiency, a new report said, suggesting a tough road ahead for President Barack Obama's goal of educating a workforce to compete in the global economy.

The results of the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress, or the Nation's Report Card, showed that only 21 percent of high school seniors were performing at or above the proficient level in science. About a third of fourth and eighth graders were found to perform at the same level.

UK-based Cella Energy has developed a synthetic fuel that could lead to US$1.50 per gallon gasoline. Apart from promising a future transportation fuel with a stable price regardless of oil prices, the fuel is hydrogen based and produces no carbon emissions when burned. The technology is based on complex hydrides, and has been developed over a four year top secret program at the prestigious Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford. Early indications are that the fuel can be used in existing internal combustion engined vehicles without engine modification.

A car bomb ripped through a funeral tent in a mainly Shiite area of Baghdad on Thursday, the deadliest in a series of attacks that killed at least 40 people.

The blasts were the latest in more than a week of bombings that have killed more than 200 people, raising concerns about an uptick in violence as the U.S. military prepares to withdraw from the country.

On October 2, 2009, the UN Human Rights Council was widely expected to pass a resolution supporting the Goldstone Report, the UN’s probe of war crimes committed during Israel’s war in Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009.

The Council instead agreed to delay a vote on the report until March 2010, following major reservations expressed by the Palestinian Authority, the United States and Israel. A UNHRC endorsement of the report would have brought Israeli officials one step closer to prosecution before a war crimes tribunal, an event many Palestinians were anxious to see.

The Palestine Papers give the world an unprecedented look inside the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, but they also provide a fly-on-the-wall view of how key senior American officials view their role as negotiators which, as the paprs show, apparently means never taking any position to which an Israeli government might object.

The series of six documents that provide a core element to understanding the debates that raged over Israeli settlements show just how willing the U.S. is to acquiesce to Israeli demands – and how willing they are to pressing the PA leadership to move forward on the negotiations despite Israel’s flaunting of international agreements, including freezing all settlement activity.