TV News LIES

A gay former Army lieutenant arrested for handcuffing himself to a White House fence during a protest is being treated differently because he is a prominent voice for gay rights, his lawyer said Monday.

Dan Choi, a West Point graduate and Iraq War veteran, is charged with disobeying police orders to leave an area in front of the White House during a November 2010 protest of the military's "don't ask, don't tell policy." During the protest, 13 people handcuffed themselves to the fence, some in uniform, chanting slogans including "let us serve."

Thousands of fishermen and business owners in a multi-billion-dollar legal battle with BP over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill have won the right to sue for punitive damages, in a fresh defeat for the oil major.

More than 100,000 individuals, companies and authorities have filed cases claiming they suffered economic loss as a result of the leak last year. A judge, Carl Barbier, is considering 500 cases, many of them class actions, against BP and its main co-defendants, including Transocean, the rig owner.

Shortly before midnight Mountain Time on August 23, the largest earthquake in Colorado in more than a century, with a magnitude of 5.3, sent tremors as far away as Kansas.

Some twelve hours later, a magnitude 5.8 earthquake centered in Northern Virginia sent shock waves as far away as Toronto. The local damage in each event did not appear extensive, though structural effects, on bridges, tunnels, nuclear power plants and more are yet to be determined.

Government nuclear experts, however, said the World War II bomb blast and the accidental reactor meltdowns at Fukushima, which has seen ongoing radiation leaks but no deaths so far, were beyond comparison. The amount of caesium-137 released since the three reactors were crippled by the March 11 quake and tsunami has been estimated at 15,000 tera becquerels, the Tokyo Shimbun reported, quoting a government calculation. That compares with the 89 tera becquerels released by "Little Boy", the uranium bomb the United States dropped on the western Japanese city in the final days of World War II, the report said.

On Wednesday, September 7th from 12 noon to 2 pm, on Arch Street between Broad and 13th Streets, a major rally called "Shale Gas Outrage" will take place in Philadelphia. The rest of this article underlines why you might want to be there.

My inbox is full of these personal stories about fracking (high-volume gas drilling) impacts, which never seem to get out to the rest of the public. Who knows why the larger newspapers seem to be asleep at the wheel? It’s hard to understand, but you, privileged readers, can say you found out first.

Critics of shale drilling have claimed it’s the cause of recent earthquakes in Great Britain and Arkansas.

A drilling company in Great Britian stopped fracking operations in July after two small earthquakes of 1.5 and 2.3 magnitude were registered within 500 meters of the site.

“It is well-established that fluid injection can induce small earthquakes,” the British Geological Survey noted in its report of the incident. “Typically, the earthquakes are too small to be felt, however, there are a number of examples of larger earthquakes occurring.”

Traces of toxic chemicals harmful to the environment and to human health have been detected in products made by 14 top clothing manufacturers, Greenpeace said Tuesday.

Samples of clothing from top brands including Adidas, Uniqlo, Calvin Klein, H&M, Abercrombie & Fitch, Lacoste, Converse and Ralph Lauren were found to be tainted with the chemicals, known as nonylphenol ethoxylates, the watchdog said at the launch of its report "Dirty Laundry 2".

An investigation by the National Science Foundation has found no evidence of wrongdoing or misconduct by Penn State climate-change researcher Michael Mann.

Mann, Penn State professor of meteorology, was the target of accusations from climate-change skeptics after thousands of e-mails exchanged between climate-change researchers were hacked from the University of East Anglia and made public.