TV News LIES

Reversing its oft-repeated position that it was acting only on behalf of its clients in its exotic dealings with the American International Group, Goldman Sachs now says that it also used its own money to make secret wagers against the U.S. housing market.

A senior Goldman executive disclosed the "bilateral" wagers on subprime mortgages in an interview with McClatchy, marking the first time that the Wall Street titan has conceded that its dealings with troubled insurer AIG went far beyond acting as an "intermediary" responding to its clients' demands.

The smugglers had bought the DC-9 with laundered funds they transferred through two of the biggest banks in the U.S.: Wachovia Corp. and Bank of America Corp., Bloomberg Markets reports in its August 2010 issue.

San Francisco, a city that banned the plastic bag, now has waded into the muddy territory of cellphone radiation, setting off a call to arms in the $153 billion wireless industry. Last week, the Board of Supervisors passed a law -- the first in the nation -- requiring retailers to inform their customers how much radiation the cellphones on their shelves emit, so shoppers can figure out how close the devices come to the upper limits on radiation set by the Federal Communications Commission.

The law, which goes into effect early next year, didn't mention the word, but it was all about one thing: cancer, and whether cellphones cause it.

I thought I'd seen everything when I read David Brooks saying out loud in a New York Times column that reporters should sit on damaging comments to save their sources from their own idiocy. But now we get CBS News Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan slamming our own Michael Hastings on CNN's "Reliable Sources" program, agreeing that the Rolling Stone reporter violated an "unspoken agreement" that journalists are not supposed to "embarrass [the troops] by reporting insults and banter."

Traffickers who subject women and children to prostitution and forced labor are engaged in one of Europe's most lucrative crimes — a euro2.5 billion a year, modern-day slave trade whose victims are growing by 50 percent annually, a United Nations agency said Tuesday.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that more than 140,000 people are currently controlled by organized gangs. Many victims are tricked into leaving lives of poverty in eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America with bogus promises of work.

An independent Palestinian State is not a possibility in the next two years, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said following a meeting with Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in Jerusalem on Tuesday.

An apparent disagreement broke out between Lieberman and Lavrov  during their meeting in Jerusalem over Moscow's increased efforts to include Hamas in Mideast peace talks.

According to a new report from the President's Cancer Panel, environmental toxins play a significant and under-recognized role in cancer, causing "grievous harm" to untold numbers of people. EWG's own research has found that children are born "pre-polluted" with nearly 300 industrial chemicals, pesticides and contaminants that have been found to cause cancer in lab studies or in people.

A retired U.S. Air Force colonel charged in the 1980s in an Iran-contra related weapons smuggling case has been indicted in a U.S. federal court in Miami with conspiring with an Israeli aeronautics engineer to illegally export 2,000 AK-47s to Somalia.