TV News LIES

At the center of this otherwise idyllic Palestinian village, soot still blackens the entryway of a house where an arson attack this past summer by extremist Israelis took the lives of Saed and Reham Dawabshe and one of their two sons, Ali, an infant.

Months have gone by without any indictments by Israel for the murders, and emotions in Duma continue to smoulder.

State health officials announced Monday that five Florida nurseries have been chosen to cultivate and distribute the first legal marijuana in the state, opening the door to the sale and distribution of the non-euphoric strains next year.

Costa Nursery Farms, of the Redland, won the bid for the Southeast Region. Knox Nursery, will grow it for the Central Region, including Tampa Bay. Hackney Nursery Company will grow it for the Northeast Region. Chestnut Hill Tree Farm will be the grower for the Northeast Region and Alpha Foliage will grow it for the Southwest Region.

A Los Angeles judge was expected Monday to exonerate a man convicted of three rapes after DNA evidence linked the crimes to a serial rapist wanted for assaults dating back two decades.

Luis Vargas has been in prison for 16 years for crimes he didn’t commit, according to the California Innocence Project at California Western School of Law, which took up his case in 2012.

White Christians now make up less than half of the U.S. population, largely receding from the majorities of most demographic groups, with one notable exception: the Republican Party.

According to the latest results from Pew Research Center's Religious Landscape survey published Monday by National Journal's Next America project, just 46 percent of American adults are white Christians, down from 55 percent in 2007.

One Middle East catastrophe apparently wasn't enough for some supporters of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. So they've continued to try to shape policy relating to the region, offering punditry in the wake of each fresh crisis.

It wasn't a surprise, then, that they seized on last week's tragic attacks in Paris to argue that the Islamic State group could only be eliminated by their preferred mode of U.S. intervention: large-scale troop deployment.

"If it takes 50,000 troops going in there and cleaning out Raqqa, the capital of the Islamic State, do it," Bill Kristol said on ABC two days after the attack.

- Belgium raised its terror alert in Brussels to the highest level Saturday after a "serious and imminent threat," closing the city's metro until Sunday and encouraging people to avoid concerts, shopping centers and other crowded areas.

Prime Minister Charles Michel said the threat of attacks against the Belgian capital are similar to those that happened in Paris last week. Football games have been canceled and armed soldiers and police were deployed outside many hotels.

It is perhaps not surprising that an event like last Friday’s Paris attack would raise questions about why government surveillance didn’t spot such a sweeping and apparently coordinated assault in advance. But the speed with which intelligence and law enforcement professionals worked to play down their own possible shortcomings — and in some cases invoke the attacks in a play for broader powers — has caught the attention of security experts, privacy rights advocates and editorial boards.

Editors at The New York Times called this turn of events “a wretched yet predictable ritual,” singling out statements made Monday by CIA Director John Brennan as “a new and disgraceful low.” Brennan went to the press with complaints that recent “policy and legal” moves have made it harder to spot and disrupt potential terror plots.

A Palestinian poet and leading member of Saudi Arabia’s nascent contemporary art scene has been sentenced to death for renouncing Islam.

A Saudi court on Tuesday ordered the execution of Ashraf Fayadh, who has curated art shows in Jeddah and at the Venice Biennale. The poet, who said he did not have legal representation, was given 30 days to appeal against the ruling.

Fayadh, 35, a key member of the British-Saudi art organisation Edge of Arabia, was originally sentenced to four years in prison and 800 lashes by the general court in Abha, a city in the south-west of the ultraconservative kingdom, in May 2014.