TV News LIES

An Egyptian lawmaker and TV talk show host has been expelled from parliament over a meeting he had with the Israeli ambassador to Egypt, which in 1979 became the first Arab nation to sign a peace treaty with Israel.

The controversy over the meeting began when the ambassador, Haim Koren, posted a picture last week on the embassy's Facebook page of himself and Tawfiq Okasha.

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Important invertebrate pollinator species, like the honeybee and butterfly, are under a threat of extinction due to a number of environmental pressures, many of them man-made, a new study found.

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services released a detailed assessment regarding pollinators Friday during its fourth plenary in Malaysia. Results come from a two-year, United Nations-sponsored study conducted by the panel.

The federal government said its preliminary report of the May 2015 oil spill at Refugio Beach in southern California found pipeline corrosion to be the culprit.

A pipeline system operated by Plains All American, which has headquarters in Houston, leaked up to 3,400 barrels of oil in Santa Barbara County in mid-May. The company in November indicated the spill volume was around 2,960 barrels and was still working to reconcile the difference. About 30 percent was recovered during remediation efforts.

Cleaning up Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, which suffered catastrophic meltdowns after an earthquake and tsunami hit in 2011, may take up to 40 years.

The crippled nuclear reactor is now stable but the decommissioning process is making slow progress, says the plant's operator Tokyo Electric Power Co, better known as TEPCO.

"Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind," Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Truthout shortly after a 9.0 earthquake in Japan caused a tsunami that destroyed the cooling system of Tokyo Electric Power Company's (TEPCO) nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan.

While this statement might sound overdramatic, Gundersen may be right.

Several nuclear reactor meltdowns in the plant, which at the time forced the mandatory evacuations of thousands of people living within a 15-mile radius of the damaged power plant, persist, and experts like Gundersen continue to warn that this problem is not going to go away.

A few days after Thanksgiving, Oklahoma City residents huddled in their homes watching a thick layer of ice snap power lines and split stubby trees. Only a few days later, as the ice started to thaw and power was restored in most neighborhoods, a 4.7-magnitude earthquake shook the state a couple hours before dawn.

The epicenter was 100 miles north, in a region where oil and gas have for decades driven the state economy. Scientists suspect the practice of injecting deep into the earth the salty wastewater from the drilling process may be causing the earthquakes, or at least increasing the frequency.

- The world's lakes are heating up at an average rate of 0.61 degrees Fahrenheit per decade, outpacing the rise in ocean and atmosphere temperatures.

The new findings are the result of a first-of-its-kind international survey, combining satellite and ground-based temperature data on 235 lakes, comprising more than half the planet's freshwater supply.

Mere mention of the Paris climate talks is enough to make James Hansen grumpy. The former Nasa scientist, considered the father of global awareness of climate change, is a soft-spoken, almost diffident Iowan. But when he talks about the gathering of nearly 200 nations, his demeanor changes.

“It’s a fraud really, a fake,” he says, rubbing his head. “It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.”