TV News LIES

Most important thought: I'm sick and tired of this thing called "patriotism".

The Japanese pilots who bombed Pearl Harbor were being patriotic. The German people who supported Hitler and his conquests were being patriotic, fighting for the Fatherland. All the Latin American military dictators who overthrew democratically-elected governments and routinely tortured people were being patriotic — saving their beloved country from "communism".

As President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meet, a report reveals 42 per cent of territory is controlled by settlers.

The jurisdiction of some 200 settlements, illegal under international law, cover much more of the occupied Palestinian territory than previously thought. And a large section of the land has been seized from private Palestinian landowners in defiance even of an Israeli supreme court ruling, the report said, a finding which sits uncomfortably with Israeli claims that it builds only on state land.

The Catholic Church child abuse scandal in Belgium just got a whole lot worse. Belgian newspaper Het Laaste Niews is reporting that when authorities searched the home of the former archbishop of Brussels, Cardinal Godfried Danneels, they discovered a hidden cache of documents and photographs on notorious child sex killer Marc Dutroux — documents that Danneels was not supposed to have. Here’s a Google translation of one of their reports:

Philip Weiss, who runs a blog called Mondoweiss (War of Ideas in the Middle East) has just posted a remarkable piece entitled “Petraeus Emails Show General Scheming with Journalist to Get out pro-Israel storyline.”

Time and again, the scientists, doctors, drug makers and regulators who gathered Tuesday in Kansas City to talk about new cancer drugs spoke of the "valley of death." It's the long-cursed chasm between jaw-dropping breakthroughs in basic science — often unearthed at universities — and the manufacture of drugs that can battle your tumor.

In an effort to rein in the sexual abuse crisis threatening the church, the Vatican is inching toward introducing changes to canon law to make it easier to discipline pedophile priests, Vatican officials say.

The changes are not expected to include adoption of the “zero tolerance” policy used by bishops in the United States and elsewhere, which remove a priest from ministry at the first credible accusation of abuse, as some victims’ groups and critics had hoped.

Brigadier General Mohammed Asid Jabarkhel tells Der Spiegel "Of course I know what's going on here." He is referring to the huge amounts of money regularly being secreted out of Afghanistan by plane in boxes and suitcases. According to some estimates, since 2007, at least $3 billion (€2.4 billion) in cash has left the country in this way.

The preferred destination for these funds is Dubai, the tax haven in the Persian Gulf. And, given the fact that Afghanistan's total GDP amounts to the equivalent of $13.5 billion, there is no way that the funds involved in this exodus are merely the proceeds of legal business transactions.

The follow-up investigation of a botched Special Operations Forces (SOF) raid in Gardez Feb. 12 that killed two government officials and three women, ordered by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal Apr. 5, was ostensibly aimed at reconciling divergent Afghan and U.S. accounts of what happened during and after the raid.

That implied that the U.S. investigators would finally do what they had failed to do in the original investigation - interview the eyewitnesses. But three eyewitnesses who had claimed to see U.S. troops digging bullets of the bodies of three women told IPS they were never contacted by U.S. investigators.