TV News LIES

Peru’s main indigenous group said on Wednesday it will ask the courts to halt an expansion of the country’s largest natural gas field over concerns that new drilling will harm isolated tribes.

Aidesep (the National Association of Amazon Indians in Peru), wants to overturn the regulatory approval issued in April for a $70-million project by the Camisea gas consortium in an oil block that overlaps an indigenous reserve.

Penn State University faculty member Jonathan H. Marks wants interrogation documents that the Pentagon insists on locking up.

The resulting struggle over sensitive information, now entering its seventh year, has become an unexpected master class in government secrecy for the Oxford-educated Marks. Hoping to shed light on harsh U.S. interrogation techniques, he has simultaneously undertaken a long and instructive legal journey.

Keep an American soldier locked up naked in a cage and driven half mad while deprived of all basic rights, and you will be instantly condemned as a barbaric terrorist. Unless the jailer is an authorized agent of the U.S. government, in which case even treatment approaching torture will go largely unnoticed. Certainly if a likable constitutional law professor happens to be president, all such assaults on human dignity will easily pass muster.

After being interned like some wild animal in that cage in Kuwait, Pfc. Bradley Manning was transferred to the Quantico, Va., Marine base and further subjected to conditions that his lawyer termed "criminal."

One of the problems with any sort of a year-end wrap-up is knowing where to start.  One other problem is knowing when to stop.

Look at it this way:  When faced with a category called Most Objectionable Republican, you know you've got a really long slog ahead of you.  In all fairness, in a case like this, the possibilities really start opening up and the skies are not just the limit, they're the jumping-off point.

It took LaToysha Brown 13 years to realize how little interaction she had with white peers in her Mississippi Delta town: not at church, not at school, not at anywhere.

The realization dawned when she was in the seventh grade, studying the civil rights movement at an after-school program called the Sunflower County Freedom Project. It didn't bother her at first. By high school, however, Brown had started to wonder if separate could ever be equal.

A European court issued a landmark ruling Thursday that condemned the CIA's so-called extraordinary renditions programs and bolstered those who say they were illegally kidnapped and tortured as part of an overzealous war on terrorism.

The European Court of Human Rights ruled that a German car salesman was a victim of torture and abuse, in a long-awaited victory for a man who had failed for years to get courts in the United States and Europe to recognize him as a victim.

Rabbi George Finklestein's case has been well-known to those of us who cover child sexual abuse for many years. Finkelstein was the principal of YU's high school in the 1970s and early 1980s.

The reason I didn't do an exposé on him was that I require at least one victim who comes forward using his real name and allows his real name to be published, and corroborating evidence of some kind – usually court documents or other victims who will sign affidavits that they, too, were abused. And that wasn't possible as recently as two years ago in this case.

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman will be indicted for fraud and breach of trust, the Justice Ministry said on Thursday, less severe charges than were originally considered.

The announcement comes ahead of a January 22 election which the right-wing party of Lieberman and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is predicted to win.
Lieberman has denied all wrongdoing but had said he would resign if indicted. He is expected to speak later on Thursday.