TV News LIES

A former Labour defence minister was forced to admit yesterday that he misled MPs when he denied that British soldiers had hooded Iraqi detainees during interrogations.

Adam Ingram, the ex-armed forces minister, denied in a Parliamentary answer that UK forces hooded detainees as an interrogation technique despite seeing a document suggesting they did, a public inquiry in London heard.

A bomb-detector long exposed as useless continues to be used by the Iraqi army and police at hundreds of checkpoints in Baghdad as their chief method of finding out if vehicles contain explosives and weapons.

The continuing reliance of the Iraqi security forces on the instrument may explain how al-Qa'ida has succeeded in sending vehicles packed with explosives undetected into Baghdad, where they have killed and wounded several thousand people over the last year.

No U.S. Catholic leader has been prosecuted for the church’s child sex scandals. But officials are weighing obstruction and perjury charges against Cardinal Roger Mahony—and studying emails showing Mahony discussing with his lawyers ways to avoid giving law enforcement the names of abusive priests. Philip Shenon reports.

Obama said he had directed government agencies to offer a number of new benefits to the families of gay and lesbian federal employees, including family assistance services, hardship transfers and relocation expenses.

His directive builds on a move he made last year to offer healthcare benefits, sick leave and medical evacuation for same-sex partners of federal employees.

Tony Hayward, the chief executive of BP, claimed recently that his company’s testing has shown “no evidence” that any of the oil in the Gulf of Mexico is lurking beneath the ocean surface.

Oil is lighter than water, Mr. Hayward explained, and will rise to the top.

Apparently, Mr. Hayward is not familiar with the results of a test conducted in Norway, in which his company took part, that suggested exactly the opposite would happen when oil was released in very deep water. A demand has come from Congress that Mr. Hayward explain himself.

Cigarette-smoking Americans receive higher doses of the most potent carcinogens than do smokers in many foreign countries because of variations in the way tobacco is processed for cigarettes, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Monday.

American cigarettes are typically made from "American blend" tobacco, a specific blend that, because of growing and curing practices, contains higher levels of cancer-causing tobacco-specific nitrosamines. The most popular Canadian, Australian and British brands, in contrast, are made from "bright" tobacco, which is lighter in color and cured differently.

The Israeli military operation against the humanitarian Gaza convoy has provoked an outcry around the world and within Israel itself. Five leading headlines from this morning's edition of the daily newspaper Haaretz illustrate the frustration.

Ari Shavit's 'Fiasco on the high seas', Reuven Pedatzur's 'A failure any way you slice it', Yossi Sarid's 'Seven idiots in the cabinet', and Gideon Levy's 'Operation Mini Cast Lead' - Israel's code name for its bloody war on Gaza, considered a war crime by the UN Goldstone commission - and last but not least the paper's editorial, 'The price of flawed policy'.

Municipalities all across America are currently dripping fluoride chemicals into their public water supply, dosing over a hundred million Americans with a chemical that they claim "prevents cavities."

What's interesting here is that this biological effect of "preventing cavities" is a medical claim, according to the FDA. And as such, making this claim instantly and automatically transforms fluoride into a "drug" under currently FDA regulations.