TV News LIES

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1903 — and I will not quibble. But the problem of the 21st century is the problem of culture, not just the infamous “culture of poverty” but what I would call the culture of smugness. The emblem of this culture is the term “American exceptionalism.”

It has been adopted by the right to mean that America, alone among the nations, is beloved of God. Maybe so, but on some days it’s hard to tell. The term “American exceptionalism” has been invoked by Mitt Romney, Mike Pence, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee and, of course, Sarah Palin. I would throw in Michele Bachmann, since if she has not said it yet, she soon will because she says almost anything. She is no exception to the cult of American exceptionalism.

A security company led by the former head of operations for the Israeli military made such inroads into Latin America a few years ago that U.S. diplomats saw it as a security risk and moved to thwart the company's expansion, U.S. diplomatic cables show.

The diplomats' efforts were made easier when an interpreter for the Israeli firm, Global CST, was caught peddling classified Colombian Defense Ministry documents to Marxist guerrillas seeking to topple the state, one cable said.

Does an Al Qaeda anthrax operative own four pharmacies in New York City? That frightening possibility is raised in one of the 700-plus Guantanamo detainee assessments released recently by WikiLeaks and other sources.

The documents detail the history and threat potential of terrorist suspects detained at Gitmo. Recently, a blogger sent me an email pointing out that one of these assessments contains a particularly chilling section. It says that a detainee captured by the CIA in 2003 possessed a diary that contained contact information for a "possible al-Qaida anthrax operative" who then was living in New York City and who owned several pharmarcies there.

U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan are experiencing some of the greatest psychological stress and lowest morale in five years of fighting, reports a military study.

"We're an Army that's in uncharted territory here," says Gen. Peter Chiarelli, Army vice chief of staff, who has focused on combat stress. "We have never fought for this long with an all-volunteer force that's 1% of the population."

An exhaustive study of autism in one community has found that the disorder is far more common than suggested by earlier research. The study of 55,000 children in Goyang, South Korea, found that 2.64 percent — one in every 38 children — had an autism spectrum disorder.

"That is two and a half times what the estimated prevalence is in the United States," says Roy Richard Grinker, a professor of anthropology at The George Washington University and one of the study's authors.

Brooklyn-based Hasidic newspaper Der Zeitung printed a story this week with a subtly manipulated version of the historic image - all the men in the photograph remain untouched but the two women in the picture have been Photoshopped out.

It is thought the newspaper, which is written in Yiddish and serves a small part of the area's ultra-orthodox Jewish community, removed the women because of religious issues regarding female modesty.

Ministers are facing demands for an official apology to at least 80 Asian women who were subjected to "virginity tests'' by immigration staff when they tried to come to Britain in the late 1970s.

The demands follow the disclosure of confidential Home Office files that show that intimate examinations – used to "check the marital status" of Indian and Pakistani women coming to Britain to marry – were on a far wider scale than was previously known.

In the fall of 2007, workers at the Byron nuclear power plant in Illinois were using a wire brush to clean a badly corroded steel pipe — one in a series that circulate cooling water to essential emergency equipment — when something unexpected happened: the brush poked through.

The resulting leak caused a 12-day shutdown of the two reactors for repairs.

The plant’s owner, the Exelon Corporation, had long known that corrosion was thinning most of these pipes. But rather than fix them, it repeatedly lowered the minimum thickness it deemed safe. By the time the pipe broke, Exelon had declared that pipe walls just three-hundredths of an inch thick — less than one-tenth the original minimum thickness — would be good enough.