TV News LIES

A blustery winter storm dumped snow and ice across the American west on Wednesday, making driving treacherous in the mountains from California to the Rockies and forcing residents and party-goers in some usually sun-soaked cities to bundle up for a frosty New Year’s.

Giddy residents in Southern California foothills snapped photos of snow-covered lawns as kids tossed snowballs. In suburban Phoenix, swimming pools and cactus-lined backyards were dusted with the white stuff.

Every day, strings of black tank cars filled with crude oil roll slowly across a long wooden railroad bridge over the Black Warrior River.

The 116-year-old span is a landmark in this city of 95,000 people, home to the University of Alabama. Residents have proposed and gotten married next to the bridge. Children play under it. During Alabama football season, die-hard Crimson Tide fans set up camp in its shadow.

But with some timber pilings so badly rotted that you can stick your hand right through them, and a “MacGyver”-esque combination of plywood, concrete and plastic pipe employed to patch up others, the bridge demonstrates the limited ability of government and industry to manage the hidden risks of a sudden shift in energy production.

And it shows why communities nationwide are in danger.

When a magnitude-6.0 earthquake hit California's wine country this summer, scientists rushed to California Highway Patrol helicopters to survey the scene. The results were surprising.

The earthquake tore up to the surface, producing a 9-mile-long scar that sliced through vineyards, asphalt and even homes. A buried earthquake fault had awoken along a trail never before documented or mapped by scientists, stunning homeowners who found houses spun off their foundations and broken, with one side of the home higher than the other.

A freight train carrying coal waste and lentils derailed in Alberta Friday, sending seven rail cars into a creek near Banff National Park.

Fifteen Canadian Pacific cars derailed in total, six of which were carrying fly ash — a product created during coal combustion and which, when combined with the bottom ash that tends to gather on the floor of a coal furnace is generally referred to as coal ash — and nine of which were carrying lentils.

He has been called the “superman pope”, and it would be hard to deny that Pope Francis has had a good December. Cited by President Barack Obama as a key player in the thawing relations between the US and Cuba, the Argentinian pontiff followed that by lecturing his cardinals on the need to clean up Vatican politics. But can Francis achieve a feat that has so far eluded secular powers and inspire decisive action on climate change?

It looks as if he will give it a go. In 2015, the pope will issue a lengthy message on the subject to the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, give an address to the UN general assembly and call a summit of the world’s main religions.

The children using their hands and utensils to clean up a massive oil spill in the world’s largest unbroken stand of mangrove forests are getting some backup. U.S. oil spill experts joined a U.N. team to respond to this ecologically devastating and hazardous oil spill in the lush, carbon-rich mangrove forests of Bangladesh’s renowned Sundarbans region, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Sundarbans means “beautiful forest.”

In the early morning of December 9, foggy weather in the estuarine waters of the Sela River caused a cargo ship to ram the Southern Star 7, a tanker ship laden with between 66,000 and 92,000 of thick furnace oil bound for one of the nation’s oil-burning power plants. The tanker had dropped anchor because of the fog, and when the cargo ship ran into it, the collision was strong enough to kill the tanker’s captain and spill most of the thick, black, sludgy liquid cargo.