TV News LIES

A U.S. government official says former Sen. Ted Stevens is believed to have been aboard the airplane that has crashed in Alaska. The official tells The Associated Press Alaska authorities have been told the former longtime Republican senator is among several passengers on the plane.

The official, who spoke on grounds of anonymity, says Stevens' condition is unknown.

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Researchers led by Frank Biro, director of adolescent medicine at Cincinnati Children's, found that the number of 7- and 8-year-old girls with breast development was higher than found in studies conducted 10 to 30 years earlier.

Other health risks, including endometrial cancer, eating disorders and depression, are associated with earlier puberty and maturation. Behavioral issues, including earlier sexual activity, have also been noted.

It is the time of the year when school is out for Israel's ultraorthodox students. But this year, a Jewish morality police is patrolling in force to make sure they do not have too much fun.

Leading rabbis and heads of religious colleges, or the yeshivas, have warned students to continue their studies of the Torah, dress appropriately and avoid "the great danger, spiritually and concretely, of hitchhiking". The ultraorthodox, who make up roughly 10 per cent of all Israelis, live a closeted life. They voluntarily choose not to own a television or radio, and are barred from using the internet.

According to two research scientists the mystery of vanished ships and airplanes in the region dubbed "The Bermuda Triangle" has been solved.

The methane—normally frozen at great pressure as gas hydrates embedded within subterranean rock—can become dislodged and transform into gaseous bubbles expanding geometrically as they explode upwards. When these bubbles reach the surface of the water they soar into the air, still expanding upwards and outwards.

You have to have a key to play in the tiger cage. And if you're not Jewish, you can’t have a key. Though it looks like one, bars and chain-link and a padlock, this is not, strictly speaking, a cage at all. It is an enclosed playground for the toddlers and smaller children of the makeshift urban settlement which surrounds it.

And the beast in question is not in the cage, but in the tension that weights the faces of the settlers, their children, the Israeli police and border guards and riot officers who keep the Arab residents of the neighborhood at a distance.

Thanks to Naomi Campbell's clueless testimony before the U.N. Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague, the manufactured non-scandal of "blood diamonds" is once again being trundled before the collected gullibility of the world.

The parallel occurrences of diamonds and internecine mayhem in Africa are in no way causative—certainly no more than by any other commercial commodity found in the continent. When was the last time we heard of "blood manganese," or "blood copper," or, for that matter, "blood bananas" or "blood cut flowers"?

In conjunction with a national program known as "FreeWays to Fuel" ( freewaystofuel.org), researchers at N.C. State University are working to grow canola and sunflower crops along the wasted edges of highways and other marginal areas.

The national program, which began in Utah and has spread across the United States, originally used municipal zones to plant crops for biofuels. Utah's first harvests are now being used to power Department of Transportation vehicles in Salt Lake County.

Anyone who thinks the United States is really going to withdraw from Afghanistan in July 2011 needs to come to this giant air base an hour away from Kabul. There’s construction everywhere. It’s exactly what you wouldn’t expect from a transient presence.

Step off a C-17 cargo plane, as I did very early Friday morning, and you see a flight line packed with planes. When I was last here two years ago, helicopters crowded the runways and fixed-wing aircraft were –- well, if not rare, still a notable sight. Today you’ve got C-17s, Predators, F-16s, F-15s, MC-12 passenger planes … I didn’t see any of the C-130 cargo craft, but they’re here somewhere.