TV News LIES

The National Tracing Center is the only place in the nation authorized to trace gun sales. Here, researchers with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives make phone calls and pore over handwritten records from across the country to track down gun owners. I

n contrast with such state-of-the-art, 21st-century crime-fighting techniques as DNA matching and digital fingerprint analysis, gun tracing is an antiquated, laborious process done mostly by hand. The government is prohibited from putting gun ownership records into an easily accessible format, such as a searchable computer database.

It started with a fingerprint of a 25-year-old college professor who opposed the Vietnam War and ended with a search for his remains, 32 years later, in a wooded area near Eveleth, Minn.

The FBI's files on Paul and Sheila Wellstone, many of which are being made public for the first time, shed new light on the extent of the relationship between the FBI and the political activist who would go on to become a U.S. senator from Minnesota.

Scientists searching the Amazon have discovered new species — creatures such as a baldheaded parrot, a blue-fanged tarantula and a bright red catfish — at the rate of about one every three days for the past 10 years, the World Wildlife Fund reported Monday.

"What we say now, and we're very conservative, is one in 10 known species is found in the Amazon," said Meg Symington, a tropical ecologist and the fund's managing director for the Amazon. "We think when all the counting is done, the Amazon could account for up to 30 percent of the species on Earth."

The Tea Party movement is remarkable in two respects. It is one of the biggest exercises in false consciousness the world has seen – and the biggest Astroturf operation in history. These accomplishments are closely related.

An Astroturf campaign is a fake grassroots movement: it purports to be a spontaneous uprising of concerned citizens, but in reality it is founded and funded by elite interests. Some Astroturf campaigns have no grassroots component at all. Others catalyse and direct real mobilisations. The Tea Party belongs in the second category.

The British military has been training interrogators in techniques that include threats, sensory deprivation and enforced nakedness in an apparent breach of the Geneva conventions, the Guardian has discovered.

Training materials drawn up secretly in recent years tell interrogators they should aim to provoke humiliation, insecurity, disorientation, exhaustion, anxiety and fear in the prisoners they are questioning, and suggest ways in which this can be achieved.

Heavy smoking in midlife more than doubles your odds of developing Alzheimer's disease, a Kaiser Permanente study said Monday.

The study is the first to examine the long-term consequences of heavy smoking on Alzheimer's and vascular dementia, says the study's principal investigator, Rachel Whitmer, a research scientist with Kaiser Permanente in Oakland.

"If you're asking, are there al-Qaeda in Iraq, the answer is yes, there are. It's a fact, yes." Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defence, August 2002

It was one of the key American justifications for the Iraq war. But the theory that al-Qaeda was present in Saddam-era Iraq, much cited by the Bush adminsitration in the run-up to the invasion, has been undermined by the content of secret US military documents.

Large trucks in the U.S. must cut emissions as much as 20 percent by 2018 under the first standards proposed for work vehicles, the Obama administration said today.

Tractor-trailer trucks have to meet the 20 percent target, while heavy-duty pickups and vans must reduce emissions 10 percent for gas vehicles and 15 percent for diesel-powered models, the Environmental Protection Agency and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a statement. Buses, motor homes and garbage trucks must cut emissions 10 percent.