TV News LIES

Meat from whales killed as part of Japan's "scientific" hunt was served last year in upscale sushi restaurants in Los Angeles and Seoul, according to a DNA analysis published Wednesday.

A global ban on whaling was imposed 14 years ago, but Japan has courted controversy for years by invoking an exception in the ban for scientific research and by dispatching a whaling fleet that harpoons several hundred whales a year.

There was no scientific malpractice at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, which was at the centre of the "Climategate" affair. This is according to an independent panel chaired by Lord Oxburgh, which was convened to examine the research published by the unit.

Overuse of this seductively simple approach to weed control is starting to backfire. Use of Roundup, or its generic equivalent, glyphosate, has skyrocketed to the point that weeds are rapidly becoming resistant to the chemical. That is rendering the technology less useful, requiring farmers to start using additional herbicides, some of them more toxic than glyphosate.

“Farmer practices may be reducing the utility of some G.E. traits as pest-management tools and increasing the likelihood of a return to more environmentally damaging practices,” the report concluded. It said the problem required national attention.

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Washington state filed suit Tuesday to stop the federal government from permanently abandoning the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, marking the latest clash in a long-standing dispute over where the nation's nastiest radioactive waste should be stored.

Waste and spent nuclear fuel from south-central Washington's Tri-Cities, site of the highly contaminated Hanford nuclear reservation and the Northwest's only commercial nuclear plant, had long been intended to go to Yucca Mountain.

Director James Cameron and actress Sigourney Weaver are in Brazil to protest against a proposed dam in the Amazon that would be the world's third-largest hydroelectric project. The Hollywood celebrities will join about 1,000 demonstrators in Brasilia's streets Monday as they urge the government to halt the planned Belo Monte project.

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Glacier National Park has lost two more of its namesake moving icefields to climate change, which is shrinking the rivers of ice until they grind to a halt, a government researcher said Wednesday.

Warmer temperatures have reduced the number of named glaciers in the northwestern Montana park to 25, said Dan Fagre said, an ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. He warned many of the rest of the glaciers may be gone by the end of the decade.

"It's continual," Fagre said. "When we're measuring glacier margins, by the time we go home the glacier is already smaller than what we've measured." The meltoff shows the climate is changing, but does not show exactly what is causing temperatures to go up, Fagre said.

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The federal government issued final rules establishing the first greenhouse gas emissions standards for automobiles and light trucks on Thursday, ending a 30-year battle between regulators and automakers.

The new rules, jointly written by the Transportation Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, set emissions and mileage standards that will translate to a fleet average of 35.5 miles a gallon by 2016, nearly a 40 percent improvement over today’s fuel economy.

Officials said the program would save the owner of an average 2016 car $3,000 in fuel costs over the life of the vehicle and eliminate emissions of nearly a billion tons of climate-altering gases over the lives of the regulated vehicles. Reaching the new efficiency level will add about $1,000 to the cost of the average new car by 2016, according to industry and government estimates.

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The first of several British investigations into the e-mails leaked from one of the world's leading climate research centers has largely vindicated the scientists involved.

The House of Commons' Science and Technology Committee said they had seen no evidence to support charges that the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit or its director, Phil Jones, had tampered with data or perverted the peer review process to exaggerate the threat of global warming — two of the most serious criticisms levied against the climatologist and his colleagues.

In their report released Wednesday, the committee said that, as far as it was able to ascertain, "the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact," adding that nothing in the more than 1,000 stolen e-mails, or the controversy kicked up by their publication, challenged scientific consensus that "global warming is happening and that it is induced by human activity."

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