TV News LIES

When James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, lied to the Senate Intelligence Committee in June about the National Security Agency’s top-secret program to spy on U.S. citizens, he did Americans a favor. He reminded us that government officials habitually lie, then hide behind the shield of national security. They get away with their deception for years, if not decades.

One of the biggest U.S. whoppers began in May 1945, just three days after Germany surrendered to the Allied Forces. It lay buried in classified documents until the mid-1980s.

A divided Supreme Court ruled Friday that California must proceed with the release of nearly 10,000 prisoners from its overcrowded prison system.

In a ruling by Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court's lone Californian, the justices refused to grant the state a reprieve based on progress on prison overcrowding. The high court had ruled in May 2011 that conditions in the state's prisons violated the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

A U.S. Army officer was convicted of murder Thursday for ordering soldiers under his command in Afghanistan to shoot all Afghans they saw on motorcycles.

First Lt. Clint Lorance, 28, was found guilty of a lengthy list of related charges after a court-martial at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, The Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer reported. Lorance could receive a life sentence with the sentencing phase beginning immediately.

Top-secret documents leaked to The Guardian newspaper have set off a new round of debate over National Security Agency surveillance of electronic communications, with some cyber experts saying the trove reveals new and more dangerous means of digital snooping, while some members of Congress suggested that interpretation was incorrect.

The NSA's collection of "metadata" – basic call logs of phone numbers, time of the call, and duration of calls – is now well-known, with the Senate holding a hearing on the subject this week. But the tools discussed in the new Guardian documents apparently go beyond mere collection, allowing the agency to sift the through the haystack of digital global communications to find the needle of terrorist activity.

In education circles, Tony Bennett is widely known as a hard-charging Republican reformer associated with Jeb Bush's prescriptions for fixing public schools: charter schools, private school vouchers, tying teacher pay to student test scores and grading schools on a A through F scale.

Bennett resigned from his post as Florida's education chief this morning when a controversy over the last of those things — the school grades — caught up with him.

In therapy sessions, the priest confessed to shocking details he'd kept hidden for years: he had molested more than 100 boys, including his 5-year-old brother, had sex with male prostitutes, and frequented gay strip clubs.

The admissions of Reverend Ruben Martinez are among nearly 2,000 pages of secret files, unsealed Wednesday, which regard priests, brothers and nuns accused of child molestation while working in the Los Angeles archdiocese.

CNN has uncovered exclusive new information about what is allegedly happening at the CIA, in the wake of the deadly Benghazi terror attack.
Four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were killed in the assault by armed militants last September 11 in eastern Libya.

Sources now tell CNN dozens of people working for the CIA were on the ground that night, and that the agency is going to great lengths to make sure whatever it was doing, remains a secret.

They dreamed of following in the firefighter footsteps of their fathers who died of 9/11-related illnesses. But then government bureaucrats declared their dads’ deaths weren’t heroic enough to be fully considered “in the line of duty.”

At least 13 men who banked on a longstanding FDNY policy granting children of firefighters who died on the job preferential status are devastated because their dreams have gone up in smoke.