TV News LIES

Reporters Without Borders has named “crackdown” the word of 2011 in an assessment of global media freedom during a year in which journalists covering sweeping protests were tested as never before.

The Paris-based press freedom watchdog said Wednesday that the wave of uprisings in the Middle East, the Occupy movement in the West and continued protests in China gave journalists an unprecedented role in advancing democracy. But they also were often targeted by governments trying to quash dissent.

Twenty years ago, soon after my ordination as a clergyman in the United Church of Canada, I first began to hear stories of what my church had done to innocent children in its Indian residential schools. Like most people, I didn’t believe the accounts of murder and torture I was hearing. And if I had have kept my ears and heart closed to these tales, I would have been spared an enormous personal loss and liberation.

But the ones you won’t hear from are the more than 50,000 children who died from beatings, starvation, rape and torture, or being deliberately exposed to tuberculosis and left to cough their lives away in squalor and terror: all at the hands of Christian men and women who have never been prosecuted for their crimes.

A new study has discovered that those who fry their food in sunflower or olive oil, aren’t increasing their risks of heart disease, contrary to popular belief.

"In a Mediterranean country where olive and sunflower oils are the most commonly used fats for frying, and where large amounts of fried foods are consumed both at and away from home, no association was observed between fried food consumption and the risk of coronary heart disease or death,” the study wrote in the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

Despite what antigovernment conservatives say, non-defense discretionary spending on areas like foreign aid, education and food safety was not a driving factor in creating the deficits. In fact, such spending, accounting for only 15 percent of the budget, has been basically flat as a share of the economy for decades. Cutting it simply will not fill the deficit hole.

You’ve read his leaks. Now watch his show.

International secret-buster Julian Assange says he’s launching his very own television series. The guests haven’t been disclosed, but the 40-year-old Australian has promised to give viewers more of what he’s been supplying for years: Controversy.

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Government watchdogs are crying "bullshit" and calling the U.S. Navy a "bully" in response to a redacted federal report on the drinking water supply at the Marine Corps' Camp Lejeune, the site of an ongoing pollution scandal.

The report released on Friday is a prerequisite for studies to come out in the next couple of years exploring links between chemical exposures in the late-1950s to mid-1980s and what appears to be increased levels of cancer and other diseases among former Camp Lejeune residents. Watchdog groups say that redacting information pertinent to these studies could impede justice.

The U.S. government has informed Israel that it will recommend that Congress approve a three-year extension of loan guarantees to Israel, worth $3.8 billion.

The announcement came after several months of worry in Israel that the loan guarantees would not be extended, despite Israel's request.

Prosecutors and defense attorneys in the court-martial of Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, accused in the killing of 24 unarmed Iraqis in 2005, announced an agreement Monday to settle the case.

Wuterich will plead guilty to a single count of negligent dereliction of duty. Other charges were dropped. No announcement was made on what kind of discharge Wuterich would receive. The maximum sentence is three months in the brig. That decision will be made by the judge.