TV News LIES

A Houston-based natural gas and oil drilling contractor pleaded guilty Tuesday to a negligent violation of the Clean Water Act in federal court in Muskogee, Oklahoma.

In entering the plea, Integrated Production Services has agreed to pay a $140,000 criminal fine and to make a community service payment of $22,000 to the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation for ecological studies and remediation of Boggy Creek, located in eastern Oklahoma.

Severe seasonal melting has reduced ice floes, floating chunk of ice, in the Arctic Ocean to the thinnest on record, according to researchers.

Scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany said the proportion of old, thick sea ice in the central arctic has declined significantly. The ice cover now "largely consists of thin, 1-year-old floes," they said, revealing measurements obtained from the "TransArc" project that aimed to track changes in water, air and ice across the polar sea.

More than 250 doctors across New York state wrote to Gov. Andrew Cuomo Wednesday, expressing their concern that there is no study on the long-term effects of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, on human health included in the DEC's environmental impact statement.

"The SGEIS certainly mentions many of the toxic chemicals employed in hydraulic fracking," said Adam Law, a physician specializing in endocrinology and a clinical assistant professor of medicine at Weill-Cornell Medical College. "But there is no attempt to evaluate the kinds of health consequences that have already been observed in affected communities in those states where hydraulic fracturing is taking place."

The debate over natural gas development and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking -- the process of injecting huge volumes of water, sand and chemicals deep underground to break up rock formations and release gas for harvesting -- appeared to enter a new phase last week.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar hinted at the formation of new federal guidelines to govern the practice on public lands -- including rules requiring gas companies to disclose the chemicals they use for fracking.

The climate activism community is now firmly in the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) fight. 350.org joined in the tens of thousands on the streets of New York last week; and now environmental activist Bill McKibben has starkly laid out the links between climate change, the corporations blocking climate action, and the rank effect of the oil industry corrupting the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline approval process.

Saturday afternoon in Manhattan's Washington Square Park, McKibben addressed the crowd, gathered earlier in the afternoon for a special session of the Occupy Wall Street general assembly.

Clean water advocates worry that pollutants could stream into the Great Lakes if a proposal to treat chemical wastewater at a New York state sewage plant is approved.

The Niagara Falls Water Board (NFWB) is reviewing a plan to treat ‘fracking' water -- fluid waste from a gas extraction procedure -- at a facility sitting on the Niagara River, which joins up with Lake Erie and Lake Ontario.