Summertime, and the chicanery is easy. The Obama administration’s latest rendering of our invisible but eternal “terrorist threat,” I mean.

After a week of ghost stories about an imminent but vaporous plot on the part of an al–Qaeda “affiliate”—this is the big new word—it is hard to decide which is more disheartening: 1. The White House’s blithe if clumsy deployment of factoids, 2. The supine complicity of the media (and this, frankly, is my choice), or …

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The U.S. Department of Justice will review the case of an unarmed 18-year-old Bronx teen who was fatally shot by a police officer to determine if any civil rights laws were violated, federal officials said Thursday.

The review comes after a Bronx grand jury on Wednesday declined to indict the officer, Richard Haste, 31 years old, in the 2012 killing of Ramarley Graham.

Mr. Haste initially was indicted on a charge of manslaughter by a different grand …

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Remember that proposed US Department of Agriculture plan to speed up kill lines at factory-scale poultry slaughterhouses, and cut way back on the number of USDA inspectors to oversee them?

Part of the proposed plan involves allowing the poultry companies to ramp up the antimicrobial sprays they aim at bird carcasses as they zoom along the kill line—a chemical fix to the problem the various pathogens, antibiotic-resistant, commonly found on chicken, including salmonella and campylobacter. …

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Last week, Professor Anthony Ingraffea published a strong op-ed in The New York Times, in which he noted that “unless [natural gas] leaks can be kept below 2 percent, gas lacks any climate advantage over coal.”

Now, a new study confirms those concerns, finding that, on average, 6 to 12 percent of the methane produced is leaking.

Joe Romm at Climate Progress has the details:

A major new study in Geophysical Research Letters by …

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Pacific Investment Management Co., BlackRock Inc. (BLK) and Bank of New York Mellon Corp. are seeking a court order blocking Richmond, California, and Mortgage Resolution Partners LLC from seizing mortgages through eminent domain, saying the initiative would hurt savers and retirees.

The city’s plan is unconstitutional, according to complaints filed yesterday by mortgage-bond trustees in federal court in San Francisco. The trustees, Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC) and Deutsche Bank AG, were directed to take the …

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new study published in the journal Public Understanding of Science (PDF available here) surveyed a nationally representative sample of over 1,000 Americans in 2008 and 2011 about their media consumption and beliefs about climate change.

The results suggest that conservative media consumption (specifically Fox News and Rush Limbaugh) decreases viewer trust in scientists, which in turn decreases belief that global warming is happening. In contrast, consumption of non-conservative media (specifically ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, …

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A week and a half ago we had an unusually long shooting day on the show I’m currently producing, Jane by Design. The crew call time was at 7 a.m. and we wrapped at 10:46 p.m. — fourteen hours and 45 minutes after subtracting our one-hour lunch break. And some had an even longer day: Our actors, including guest star Teri Hatcher, showed up for hair and makeup at 5 am, which meant that hairstylists …

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(Reuters) – JPMorgan Chase & Co, the biggest U.S. bank by assets, said on Wednesday it is being investigated by criminal and civil divisions of the U.S. Department of Justice over offerings of mortgage-backed securities.

The civil division gave the company a notice in May that it had preliminarily concluded that the firm violated federal securities laws in offerings of subprime and Alt-A residential mortgage securities during 2005 to 2007, JPMorgan said.

JPMorgan said in the filing …

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GENEVA (AP) — Oprah Winfrey says she had a racist encounter while shopping in Switzerland — and the national tourist office and the shop owner have apologized.

The billionaire media mogul told the U.S. program “Entertainment Tonight” that a shop assistant in Zurich refused to show her a black handbag priced at $38,000 because “you will not be able to afford that.”

Forbes magazine estimates that Winfrey earned $77 million in the year ending in June.

Winfrey was …

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(Reuters) – The biggest political protests in Peru’s capital in more than a decade have pressured President Ollanta Humala to clean up government and share the benefits of the country’s decade-long economic boom.

Many of the protesters were left-leaning and middle-class youth who voted for Humala two years ago, but now they say he and other political leaders are dangerously out of touch.

A former military officer and one-time nationalist radical, Humala has pledged to ensure more …

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