TV News LIES

The times they are a changin'. John Judis has written a piece I'd never thought I'd read at TNR. It's an elegant, factual, calm dismemberment of where the Obama administration has ended up on Israel-Palestine: on AIPAC's extendable leash, wagging its tail for a treat.

On the pure principles of UN recognition of a Palestinian state, John shows exactly how American politics has been slowly but fatally corrupted by the Greater Israel lobby in recent years with respect to Middle East policy. One logical stiletto:

Canada must have known that Libyans had tortured a dual national while he was in custody for eight years on terrorism charges, Human Rights Watch said. Human Rights Watch said it has learned that Mustafa Krer, 46, was likely tortured by Libyan authorities while he was in Libyan custody for suspected terrorist ties from 2002-10.

Krer told the rights group that Canadian interrogators had visited him at the Abu Salim prison near Tripoli. He claims to have been beaten with sticks and cables by Libyan authorities and confined to a "steel box" for up to five days at a time.

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Details of an amazing American military plan for an attack to wipe out a major part of the British Army  are today revealed for the first time.

In 1930, a mere nine years before the outbreak of World War Two, America drew up proposals specifically aimed at eliminating all British land forces in Canada and the North Atlantic, thus destroying Britain's trading ability and bringing the country to its knees.

“You have a policy of ethnic cleansing in vast areas of the West Bank....It’s very open,” she said.

Hass is a reporter and columnist for the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz. She says she is the only Israeli Jewish journalist living and working in the Palestinian territories. Now based in the city of Ramallah, she has lived in the West Bank since 1997 and in Gaza for four years before that. She is giving a lecture on Israel-Palestine relations at the University of B.C. Wednesday.

Complaints of harassment and hostile work environments are on the rise on Capitol Hill, where offices aren’t required to keep personnel records, provide mandatory anti-discrimination training or protect whistleblowers despite forcing other government agencies and private employers to do so, according to a new report.

A majority of the counseling requests came from employees of the Architect of the Capitol and U.S. Capitol Police, with just 19 percent of requests prompted by House staffers and four percent from Senate employees.

Eventually every cast member of Sesame Street sang, “One of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn't belong …” And for the last month or so it’s been my theme song too.

The myriad differences between The United States and Canada, most small, some huge, culminate in an odd sort of “culture shock” that resonates throughout the day. And with each noted difference … a mini-Twilight Zone episode.

While the president of the Palestinian Authority speaks at the United Nations, reporting to government leaders and ambassadors about Palestinian preparedness for an independent state, Yehuda Etzion is working on his own plan for the region.

Etzion, a resident of the settlement Ofra, has a draft master plan for Jerusalem, which he is preparing with a team of Ofra residents and an architectural firm. The plan centers around the Third Temple: where a ring road will pass, where pilgrims will park, where observation points will be located. The Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem will be demolished. They are not part of the plan.

In a stunning conflict of interest, public hearings on federal approval for a proposed tar sands pipeline are being run by a contractor for the pipeline company itself. The U.S. Department of State’s public hearings along the proposed route of the TransCanada Keystone XL tar sands pipeline this week are under the purview of Cardno Entrix, a “professional environmental consulting company” that specializes in “permitting and compliance.”

Cardno is not only running the State Department hearings, but also manages the department’s Keystone XL website and drafted the department’s environmental impact statement. Comments from the public about the pipeline go not to the government, but to a cardno.com email.