TV News LIES

Ayaz was 15 when he traveled to Afghanistan, from his native Pakistan, to take a job in a restaurant.

He had been there a few weeks when American soldiers entered, asked for him by name, and took him away. That was in 2004. It was the start of a six-year nightmare. Ayaz was held first at a military base, and then at the notorious Bagram prison. To this day, he does not understand why he was detained, but believes a co-worker falsely accused him of being a terrorist in exchange for a reward.

When I first heard a friend of mine from college was on food stamps, I was shocked. We were both recent graduates of a top liberal arts college, and I could not fathom that someone from my school was in such a "desperate" situation. Not long after, I was on food stamps as well.

The past year since I left graduate school has pretty much been: job application, job application, job application, interview, rejection, another job application, temp work, job application, another temp job, more job applications. For nearly eight months, I was unable to secure opportunities that weren't sporadic or temporary, making it difficult to pay rent and buy food.

In the eastern New Jersey suburbs, a train carrying radiological material is barreling toward a small town, and it is up to Pentagon cyber-operators to derail it. The town is the kind of idyllic whistle-stop hamlet where residents socialize at a cafe with complimentary Wi-Fi while surfing FaceSpace, a social networking site.

But danger lurks all around. Terrorists are using the open Wi-Fi connection to hack into the laptop of a patron who works at the hospital down the street. They plan to find the hospital codes stored in his computer to access the mayor's medical records, in which they will change the dosage of a prescription the mayor refills regularly in an effort to poison him.

Katharina Fabricius plunged from a dive boat into the Pacific Ocean of tomorrow. She kicked through blue water until she spotted a ceramic tile attached to the bottom of a reef.

A year earlier, the ecologist from the Australian Institute of Marine Science had placed this small square near a fissure in the sea floor where gas bubbles up from the earth. She hoped the next generation of baby corals would settle on it and take root.

Halliburton Energy Services and Justice Department prosecutors have urged a federal judge to approve a plea deal that calls for the Houston-based company to pay a $200,000 fine for destroying evidence after BP's 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

In a court filing Thursday, Halliburton and prosecutors said the company's agreement to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge imposes "fair, just, and appropriate corporate punishment" and reflects its "full, truthful and ongoing cooperation" with the government's spill probe.

U.S. District Judge Jane Triche Milazzo will decide whether to accept the deal at a hearing in New Orleans scheduled for Sept. 19.

A new lawsuit filed by the city of San Francisco on behalf of the state of California alleges that over the past five years, the state of Nevada has dumped 1,500 mental patients onto other states by putting them them on Greyhound busses and sending them over state lines with no prior arrangements with families or other mental hospitals once they arrive.

According to the federal class action lawsuit that the city of San Francisco is spearheading, nearly all of the patients bussed to California need continuous medical care—none of which Nevada state arranged, and all of which cost the city of San Francisco at least $500,000.

A secret unit operating under the direction of former Chicago police commander Jon Burge carried out systemic torture of suspects in criminal cases, mainly African-Americans on Chicago's South Side, to produce false confessions between 1972 and 1991.

While the abuse has been widely documented, Mr. Burge was never criminally prosecuted, despite ongoing accounts of almost 200 men sent to prison based on forced confessions on his watch. Meanwhile, the statute of limitations has run out, preventing Burge from ever facing a criminal trial. He is currently serving a 4-1/2-year prison term for perjury and obstruction of justice charges from a 2010 civil case related to the torture cases.

An Arlington, Va.-based conservative group, whose existence until now was unknown to almost everyone in politics, raised and spent $250 million in 2012 to shape political and policy debate nationwide.

The group, Freedom Partners, and its president, Marc Short, serve as an outlet for the ideas and funds of the mysterious Koch brothers, cutting checks as large as $63 million to groups promoting conservative causes, according to an IRS document to be filed shortly.