TV News LIES

Baxter, the affordable, humanoid industrial robot recently unveiled by Rethink Robotics, is so easy to program that I once did it one-handed and drunk. We were at a party at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and he was standing in the corner, looking lonely. No, really—Baxter has expressive eyes projected on a touchscreen where you’d expect it to have a face, virtually guaranteeing that you’ll anthropomorphize it.

Drink in hand, I walked over and, with only the vaguest sense of how to get it to respond to my touch, grabbed it by the wrist. I guided its “hand” over to a box full of small objects. Its caliper-like fingers closed on a widget. Then I moved its hand, which offered almost no resistance at all, to another position on the table. It dropped the object.

On Sunday, an estimated crowd of 35,000 people joined the Forward On Climate rally in Washington, DC, where protesters delivered a clear message to President Obama: Take immediate action on climate change by rejecting the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

Organizers of the rally described as the “largest in U.S. history” also called on the president to issue overdue Clean Air Act standards to limit carbon pollution from power plants.

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February really is the cruelest month because, on top of all this snow, one is forced to start contemplating death, or at least filling out one's taxes. (The distinction was always lost on us.) You might be left scratching your head, and wishing you had a better accountant, when you hear how Facebook is getting hundreds of millions in a tax refund this year.

Thanks to a statement from Citizens for Tax Justice, Bloomberg Businessweek's Peter Coy brought an interesting little nugget of information from Facebook's public filing to our attention. Because of the way Facebook treats stock options distributed to investors and employees instead of cash compensation on its balance sheets, the company is able to claim paying a tax liability worth hundreds of millions of dollars when the reality is they're getting paid:

Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan find little ethical defence in the 'just war'. Each of us struggles to make peace with our actions.

In trying to understand the ongoing suicide epidemic among soldiers and veterans a third factor in addition to physical injuries and PTSD is now being discussed: the moral injuries they bring back.

The trial of Israel's former foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, on charges of fraud and breach of trust has begun in Jerusalem.

The charges relate to his alleged involvement in the promotion of Israel's former ambassador to Belarus. Mr Lieberman, who stepped down after the charges were filed in January, pleaded not guilty on all counts.

He heads the Yisrael Beitenu party, which ran on a list with Likud to win last month's elections narrowly.

Guests at the going-away party for Carlo Maria Viganò couldn’t understand why the archbishop looked so forlorn. Pope Benedict XVI had appointed Viganò ambassador to the United States, a plum post where he would settle into a stately mansion on Massachusetts Avenue, across the street from the vice president’s residence.

“He went through the ordeal making it very clear he was unhappy with it,” said one former ambassador to the Vatican, who attended the Vatican Gardens ceremony in the late summer of 2011. “And we just couldn’t figure out, us outsiders and non-Italians, what was going on.”

A bruised cheek. A broken bone. Verbal battering. A window shattered in an effort to intimidate. The rate of such violence or abuse between husband and wife – or any two intimate partners – has been on the wane in America, falling by a stunning 64 percent between 1994 and 2010.

That finding, from a recent report by the US Department of Justice on intimate partner violence (IPV), parallels the overall drop in violent crime during that period. Many in the field cite a broad shift in attitudes that began in the 1980s and '90s, crediting public awareness campaigns, national legislation protecting victims, and subsequent training of police and prosecutors to recognize intimate partner violence as a crime, rather than as a private matter.

A training document released in response to a civil liberties organization's lawsuit and obtained by The Huffington Post reveals that the government considers an "analyst's wisdom" the ultimate arbiter of whether data on American citizens can be classified as "terrorist information" and retained forever.

"Only a CT (counter-terrorism) analyst can determine whether data constitutes terrorism information," the electronic training course for new National Counterterrorism Center analysts states. "There is no requirement that the analyst's wisdom be rock solid or infallible."