TV News LIES

An increasingly popular bumper sticker reads, "Guns Don't Kill People -- RELIGION Kills People!" In light of recent events I would add religion kills young people: gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender young people.

Perhaps not directly, though. And religion is certainly not the only source of anti-gay sentiment in the culture. But it's hard to deny that religious voices denouncing LGBT people contribute to the atmosphere in which violence against LGBT people and bullying of LGBT youth can flourish.

There is a yearning by tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement, to destroy the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment. They seek out of ignorance and desperation to create a utopian society based on “biblical law.”

They want to transform America’s secular state into a tyrannical theocracy. These radicals, rather than the terrorists who oppose us, are the gravest threat to our open society. They have, with the backing of hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate money, gained tremendous power. They peddle pseudoscience such as “Intelligent Design” in our schools.

The Environmental Protection Agency's inspector general reported this week that the EPA had improperly used an official website to promote ways of recycling the waste that's left over when power plants burn coal, commonly known as coal ash.

The inspector general's report says the website didn't tell the public that the EPA had decided that coal ash no longer should be dumped in empty pits and that it had concerns about the safety of other uses of the material in loose form, such as fertilizer and road fill.

President Harry S. Truman created the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947 to ensure that the policy community would have access to independent intelligence analysis that was free of the policy advocacy of the Department of State and the Department of Defense.

The CIA's most important analytic mission was the production of national intelligence estimates (NIEs) and assessments that tracked significant political and military developments and provided premonitory intelligence on looming threats and confrontations.

Former Countrywide chief Angelo Mozilo agreed to a settlement of $67.5 million to resolve charges that he duped the home loan company's investors while reaping a personal windfall, but Bank of America will pick up two-thirds of the bill.

Mozilo, poster boy of the subprime mortgage market's boom and bust, reached a last-minute deal with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission before his trial on civil fraud charges was to start on Tuesday.

General Hugh Shelton, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during parts of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, has a new memoir out that contains this significant-seeming story: Back in the late 1990s, Shelton says a member of Clinton's cabinet asked him to allow Saddam Hussein to shoot down an American plane over Iraq as a pretext for starting a war. The way Shelton tells the story, this was a serious request.

Remember, the context here is the Clinton Administration's years of trying to overthrow Saddam -- including in a little-remembered 1996 CIA coup attempt. In December 1998 (most likely after the request was made to Shelton), Clinton bombed Iraq for four days in Operation Desert Fox, which Clinton said was a response to Saddam's lack of cooperation with U.N. weapons inspectors.

Swiss engineers drilling the world's longest tunnel broke through the last section of rock on Friday, crowning over a decade of work.

The 57.1-km (35.5-mile) rail tunnel under the Gotthard massif will enter service in 2017, taking some of the strain of the tens of thousands of tonnes of freight that cross the Alps on heavy goods trucks by road every day.

For the study, the researchers identified five case-control studies involving 13,069 cases and 73,920 controls from major medical databases like Medline, Cochrane, and EMBASE databases, which they believed were eligible for their meta-analysis.

They found those who ever used antibiotics were 17.5 percent more likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer. A meta-regression analysis also showed a borderline dose-response effect of antibiotics on the risk of breast cancer.