TV News LIES

A photograph of a boy sitting dazed and bloodied in the back of an ambulance after surviving a regime airstrike in Aleppo has highlighted the desperation of the Syrian civil war and the struggle for control of the city.

The child has been identified as five-year-old Omran Daqneesh, who was injured late on Wednesday in a military strike on the rebel-held Qaterji neighbourhood.

Donald Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort helped a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine secretly funnel more than $2 million to two lobbying organizations in Washington, The Associated Press reported Wednesday.

Citing unidentified sources with knowledge of the effort, the AP reported that the $2.2 million in payments was concealed in order to mask the party’s efforts to influence U.S. lawmakers.

For the first time, researchers have confirmed the astronomical accuracy of Britain's earliest stone structures. According to scientists at the University of Adelaide, the great circles traced the paths of the moon and sun at the time of their construction, 5,000 years ago.

"Nobody before this has ever statistically determined that a single stone circle was constructed with astronomical phenomena in mind -- it was all supposition," Gail Higginbottom, visiting research fellow at Adelaide and leader of the recent research effort, said in a news release.

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Former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, who resigned from the company in July after mounting allegations of sexual harassment, will advise Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump for the upcoming presidential debates, The New York Times reports.

According to the Times, Ailes is helping Trump prepare for the first presidential debate against Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, which is scheduled for Sept. 26.

Welcome to the weekend, fellow shell-shock victims:

Thank you for choosing Doctor Dogooder's Philanthropic Trauma Hospital and No-Host, Hospitality Fern Bar.

We'll be triaging everyone according to depth of political dismay and by visible, physical symptoms -- such as foaming at the mouth, inability to control reflexes, sudden bursts of cursing, throbbing temple veins, fur-coated tongue, repeated yelling-while-pointing, and so on.

For the past year, Donald Trump has been selling himself to Republican voters and party leaders as a master developer, casino mogul, airline executive and all-around brilliant businessman.

What they didn’t hear much about, though, was his single greatest talent: master self-promoter.

Now, with the general election just three months away, they are learning they may have been sold a bill of goods. That Trump was actually a so-so developer. That his casinos failed and pushed him to the edge of personal bankruptcy. That his airline was a money-losing vanity project that he eventually lost when he missed loan payments. That his business acumen, far from brilliant, is now fodder for millions of dollars’ worth of negative TV ads.

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The Nigerian government has said it is in contact with Boko Haram after the armed group released a new video purporting to show the schoolgirls it kidnapped more than two years ago, and offering to trade the captives in return for the release of its jailed fighters.

Boko Haram released the video on Sunday showing dozens of the 276 students they seized from the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok on the night of April 14, 2014. Fifty-seven managed to escape in the immediate aftermath of the mass abduction.

We're not even into the tail-end, dog days of August and most of the country is already howling at the moon, scratching like mad at imaginary fleas, twitching and itchy all over, bothered and bewitched.

Oh, and, since exporting Industrial-Strength Gonzo-Crazy seems to be our new role in the global economy, let's add the rest of the world to the ranks of the queasy and squeamish.

I'm looking at some bookmarks and clippings heaped here and there, trying very hard to divine any signs of sanity.  Perhaps sanity no longer makes news, which is why it is not being reported.