TV News LIES

A September 23, 2010 article in the New England Journal of Medicine announced that, finally, the FDA has stepped forward and decided on regulatory action for Avandia, a diabetes drug that last year claimed 1,354 lives as a result of cardiac-associated problems.

Under the ruling, the drug will be available to patients not already taking it only if they are unable to achieve glycemic control using other medications and, in consultation with their health care professional, decide not to take a different drug for medical reasons.

Yesterday's New York Times featured a heartwarming ending to the years-long murder mystery of what was causing Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) among honeybees. Experts suspected pesticides or genetically modified foods, but the article reported that the University of Montana's Bee Alert Team, working alongside the Army, found the cause: the combined effects of a virus and fungus. Data sharing! Chance discoveries! Honeybees live on to sting another day! But according to Fortune, there were a couple of details left out of the front-page story. The team's lead investigator, Dr. Jerry Bromenshenk, may have previously dropped out of testifying in a class-action lawsuit after he received a significant research grant from the pharmaceutical giant Bayer. For years, beekeepers have tried to pursue legal action against Bayer Crop Science over their pesticides, in particular a type of neurotoxin that gets rids of insects by attacking their nervous systems. The beekeepers allege that the pesticides disoriented and killed their hives. One of the markers of CCD is a bee's tendency to fly off in a random direction before it dies.

It is billed as a symbol of the future Palestine: a modern, middle-class city of orderly streets, parks and shopping plazas rising in the hills of the West Bank, ready for independence, affluence and peace. But the $800-million project has hit a snag: Palestinians say construction of the city of Rawabi depends on getting an access road, which can't go ahead without Israeli permission.

At a time when the latest U.S.-brokered peace effort is in crisis, the tussle over road-building is a test of Israel's willingness to give up much of the West Bank and allow Palestinian statehood to move forward.

In parts of eastern Kentucky, the pictures coming out of Hungary of the red sludge that roared from a factory's reservoir, downstream into the Danube River, are all too reminiscent of what happened a decade ago this week.

A layer of dark goo still sits under a creekbed on Glenn Cornette's land, the leftovers from when a coal company's sprawling slurry pond burst, blackening 100 miles of waterways and polluting the water supply of more than a dozen communities before the stuff reached the Ohio River.

Master Sgt. Toni Jaffe was known as "the M&M lady" because she decorated her office cubicle with keepsakes of the confection's advertising characters. However, the treats she dispensed were sweeter than candy and are now the subject of a criminal investigation.

From 1986 until her retirement last year, Jaffe's job with the California Army National Guard was to give away money — the federally subsidized student-loan repayments and cash bonuses — paid for by federal taxpayers nationwide — that the Guard is supposed to use to attract new recruits and encourage Guard members to reenlist.

The arrest by the FBI of Elliot Doxer, a financial employee of the Cambridge-based Akamai Technologies, Inc. for trying to sell company secrets to officials of the Israeli Consulate in Boston has once again raised the profile of the firm that was also at the center of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

As is usually the case with Israeli espionage cases, the Justice Department documents filed in the case merely refer to Israel as “Country X.” The Justice Department reportedly said “Country X,” cooperated in the investigation of Doxer. However, the Justice Department does not indicate when “Country X’s” cooperation began. The US Attorney’s Office in Boston claims that Israeli consular officials cooperated with U.S. officials before accepting Doxer’s offer, but it does not indicate when the cooperation actually began — upon initital contact by Doxer or after a period of time subsequent to initial contact.

Many Americans view their country and its soldiers as the "good guys" spreading "democracy" and "liberty" around the world. It just ain't so.

This military tradition has explicitly defended the selective use of terror, whether in suppressing Native American resistance on the frontiers in the 19th Century or in protecting U.S. interests abroad in the 20th Century or fighting the "war on terror" over the last decade.

The American people are largely oblivious to this hidden tradition because most of the literature advocating state-sponsored terror is carefully confined to national security circles and rarely spills out into the public debate, which is instead dominated by feel-good messages about well-intentioned U.S. interventions abroad.

In a first for a former Guantánamo captive freed by a federal judge, a Syrian man now living in Europe is suing the U.S. government for damages from what he calls a ``Kafkaesque nightmare.''

The 44-page lawsuit by Abdul Razak al Janko, 32, described a decade-long odyssey of detention -- first in Taliban-era Afghanistan, where he was tortured as an alleged pro-American Israeli spy, and later in U.S. military prisons that ignored or misdiagnosed his history as a torture victim.