TV News LIES

Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank rose "alarmingly" in the first half of 2011, in some cases threatening entire communities, a United Nations agency said on Tuesday.

The UN Relief and Works Agency, which looks after Palestinian refugees, said 356 structures had been demolished in the first six months of this year, compared with 431 for the whole of 2010.

The debt ceiling deal hammered out by President Barack Obama and congressional leaders and passed in the House on Monday afternoon makes deep, painful, and lasting cuts throughout the federal government's budget. What's on the chopping block? The numbers tell the tale.

The Obama-GOP plan cuts $917 billion in government spending over the next decade. Nearly $570 billion of that would come from what's called "nondefense discretionary spending." That's budget-speak for the pile of money the government invests in the nation's safety and future—education and job training, air traffic control, health research, border security, physical infrastructure, environmental and consumer protection, child care, nutrition, law enforcement, and more.

We've discovered evidence of just about every gas imaginable out in space, but one we'd never seen was molecular oxygen, the stuff we breathe everyday. Now, thanks to powerful infrared telescopes, we've found the very first traces of space oxygen.

While individual oxygen atoms are found throughout space, that's not what we breathe. Instead, we inhale O2, which is a molecule composed of two oxygen atoms bonded together. This particular gas is very common on Earth - it accounts for about 20% of the air around us - but we had never found molecular oxygen in space... until now.

What flies with the Kansas Legislature doesn’t always fly in federal court. For the second time in a month, a federal judge has temporarily halted a law aimed at abortion clinics.

U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten issued a preliminary injunction Monday that blocks Kansas from stripping federal family-planning funds from Planned Parenthood. He ordered the state to start distributing the money to the agency.

On Monday, the House finally passed a deal to raise the debt limit after weeks of wrangling with a cadre of reactionary, Tea Party-endorsed lawmakers. The measure, which will force some serious cuts to public spending, is expected to easily pass in the Senate. When it does, a painful second "dip" into recession becomes far more likely -- all the conditions are there.

Last week, a depressing report on economic growth caught many observers by surprise. The take-away was that gross domestic product (GDP) – the measure of economic activity within our borders – has been growing at a snail's pace in the first half of this year -- far slower than analysts had predicted. Researchers at the Federal Reserve tell us that since 1947, about half of the times we've had six months of growth as weak as we've seen in 2011, the economy sank into recession in the following year.

Deunionization is worsening the income inequality gap, accounting for nearly a third and a fifth of wage inequality among men and women, respectively. According to a study by Bruce Western of Harvard University, data proves “the role of unions as an equalizing force in the labor market“:

“From 1973 to 2007, wage inequality in the private sector increased by more than 40 percent among men, and by about 50 percent among women. [...] deunionization—the decline in the percentage of the labor force that is unionized—and educational stratification each explain about 33 percent of the rise in within-group wage inequality among men. Among women, deunionization explains about 20 percent of the increase in wage inequality, whereas education explains more than 40 percent.

The raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan was a mission to kill him, and there was “never any question” he would be captured alive, one of those directly involved has claimed.

The most detailed account so far of the assassination of the world’s most wanted man describes the May 1 operation in Abbottabad as a “covert mission into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden”.

Clive Stafford Smith, a human-rights advocate, is trying to get a former CIA lawyer charged with murder, and he is turning to Pakistani officials for help. Smith says he read about the lawyer, John Rizzo, in a Newsweek article, “Inside the Killing Machine,” that described his role in a government program to kill terrorists with unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones.

In a telephone interview from his home in Dorset, England, Smith said he had been surprised at Rizzo’s cavalier manner during the interview, as Rizzo discussed CIA-directed killings with me over wine and steak in a Washington restaurant. “The Côtes du Rhône—that’s what really offends people,” says Smith.