TV News LIES

As autumn descended on a Korean countryside devastated by three years of intense war, a group of anti-communist guerrillas presented U.S. serviceman Merrill Edward Newman with a gold ring. It was September, 1953.

For Newman, the ring became a proud symbol of the role he played as an adviser to a group of battle-hardened partisans who fought deep behind enemy lines in a war that pitted the China- and Soviet-backed North against the U.S.-backed South.

Yesterday was the official day of handing out our thanks to anyone who would listen.  With luck, we not only thought about doing that, but actually did so.  Out loud.  And, with even more luck, we also had some takers, in between thunderclaps of footballer collisions from our Big Scream teevees, and the assorted sonic booms of industry and inventiveness erupting from kitchen and guests.

You might have even been so lucky as to have been heard above the acoustic carnage of the day, and, luckier still, to have received knowing, thoughtful, insightful, and sincere replies along the same lines.

I mean, I can wish that such becalmed seas ferried you along softly and sweetly yesterday, and in the golden photographer's light of dawn or dusk, all the while sipping a profoundly satisfying adult entertainment beverage, but the odds are pretty much against it, I'd imagine -- like hoping Aunt Smelda would please, please forget to bring over her famous Jell-O mold, with odd bits of things suspended in the gelatin (some identifiable and mostly edible, others of a baffling, mysterious origin) like a forgetful, absent-minded cook's version of bugs trapped in amber.

The Syrian civil war is creating a generation of traumatized, isolated and under-educated children who are vulnerable to exploitation and recruitment by armed groups, the United Nations said in a report.

About 1.1 million of 2.2 million refugees registered with the UN’s refugee agency are children, and among those who are school-aged fewer than half are in school, according to the report released today the UN High Commissioner for Refugees based on its July-October 2013 survey of refugee children and their families in Lebanon and Jordan.

New unemployment claims dropped by another 10,000 last week to 316,000, approaching pre Bush Crash numbers. California accounted for almost half of the decline suggesting that Conservative claims that the 7th largest economy in the world is in rapid decline since the Democrats took complete control of the state's government might be 'overstated'.

Wall Street banks are throwing a fit because the Federal Reserve is considering the elimination of the 0.25% interest that they have been paying banks on cash reserves that banks keep on deposit with the Fed. It doesn't sound like much except that these reserves total $2.4t. They only started doing this as part of the bank bailout and Wall Street has become accustomed to this $60b subsidy, it's almost half of their annual bonus pay. Banks didn't used to keep much cash on deposit but were encouraged to start doing this in case of further losses from the Bush crash. The Fed thinks that with the economy actually working again that maybe banks should start making loans with this money instead.

An important new study measures actual methane levels in the U.S. atmosphere.  This is a case where the total is definitely more than the previously imagined sum of its parts. The study, soon to be published in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences (PNAS), found, in particular, that the EPA continues to greatly under-estimate methane emissions from shale gas production, as well as from fossil fuel extraction and processing in general.

Andrew Revkin, who wrote yesterday’s New York Times article, “New study finds U.S. has underestimated methane levels in the atmosphere,” also co-wrote a key analysis four years ago in the New York Times, revealing how serious the EPA’s under-estimation of methane emissions from gas wells was at that time.

In the early stages of the ‘War on Terror,’ CIA agents at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility turned detainees into double agents, helping the US to track and kill terrorists, according to US officials.

For some Gitmo detainees, held prisoner on a US military base in the middle of shark-infested waters, the promise of freedom in return for helping the CIA root out terrorists back home may have proven too much of a temptation.

In addition to winning their freedom, co-conspirators were granted safety guarantees for their families, and millions of dollars from the agency's secret war chest, sources told AP.

Algorithms that predict stock-price movements have transformed Wall Street. Algorithms that chomp through our Web histories have transformed marketing. Until quite recently, however, few people seemed to believe this data-driven approach might apply broadly to the labor market.

But it now does. According to John Hausknecht, a professor at Cornell’s school of industrial and labor relations, in recent years the economy has witnessed a “huge surge in demand for workforce-analytics roles.”

A new slide culled from the trove of documents leaked by Edward Snowden shows where the NSA placed malware on more than 50,000 computer networks worldwide, according to Dutch media outlet NRC.

The NSA management presentation slide from 2012 shows a world map spiderwebbed with "Computer Network Exploitation" access points.

Like all the NSA slides we've seen so far, this one is unlikely to win a Powerpoint beauty pageant anytime soon.