TV News LIES

Two civil rights organizations are seeking a federal review of public school education in Texas, accusing state school administrators of violating federal civil rights laws after curriculum changes approved earlier this year by the Texas Board of Education.

The request to the U.S. Department of Education made by the Texas NAACP and Texas League of United Latin American Citizens on Monday contended that the curriculum changes passed in May "were made with the intention to discriminate" and would have a "stigmatizing impact" on African-American and Latino students.

Meanwhile, Israel's campaign is unfolding with such breath-taking speed that it is almost impossible to keep up. Today, 20 December, Israeli forces destroyed five shops in the southern West Bank city of Hebron. Further north, they ordered the residents of Khirbet Tana, a tiny Palestinian village to the east of Nablus, to evacuate their homes within 24 hours. Khirbet Tana is located just two kilometres from the illegal Israeli settlement of Mekhora, and this explains in part the ultimatum. The security and comfort of the illegal Jewish settlers must be guaranteed, by any means, regardless of international laws and conventions.

To keep U.S. warplanes flying over Afghanistan, the Pentagon allowed a "secrecy obsessed" business group to supply jet fuel to a U.S. air base in Kyrgyzstan, turning a blind eye to an elaborate fraud involving fuel deliveries from Russia, according to congressional investigators.

In a report due to be released Tuesday, the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs hammers the Pentagon and also State Department diplomats for ignoring red flags raised by jet fuel contracts worth nearly $2 billion for the Manas Transit Center, a U.S. base used for in-flight refueling over Afghanistan.

If you've been led to believe that the key to preventing osteoporosis is increasing your calcium intake and starting on a regimen of pharmaceutical drugs, you're not alone.

I'm here to lead you past all of the confusing and conflicting information about osteoporosis and down a safer, more effective road to preventing bone loss and osteoporosis.

Enthusiasm for the death penalty continued to ebb in the United States during 2010. As Christmas approaches — a season of quiet in America's execution chambers, as death takes a holiday — there have been 46 inmates executed, down from 52 in 2009.

That's fewer than half the number put to death in the peak year of 1999, when 98 prisoners walked the last mile. Meanwhile, the number of new death sentences imposed in 2010 remained near the lowest level in 35 years.

Military officials were instructed not to publicly discuss a decision made in January 2002 to presumptively treat all Guantanamo detainees with a high dosage of a controversial antimalarial drug that has been directly linked to suicide, hallucinations, seizures and other severe neuropsychological side effects, according to a retired Navy captain who signed the policy directive.

Capt. Albert J. Shimkus, the former commanding officer and chief surgeon for both of the Naval Hospital at Guantanamo Bay and Joint Task Force 160, which administered health care to detainees, defended the unprecedented practice, first reported by Truthout earlier this month, to administer 1250 mg of the drug mefloquine to all "war on terror" prisoners transferred to Guantanamo within the first 24 hours after their arrival, regardless of whether they had malaria or not.

Pope Benedict XVI said on Monday that the continuing sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church had reached a “degree we could not have imagined” this year, and that the Church must reflect on its failures, help the victims, and prevent abusers from becoming priests.

“We must ask ourselves what we can do to repair as much as possible the injustice that has occurred,” the pope told the Vatican hierarchy in a pointed Christmas message. “We must ask ourselves what was wrong in our proclamation, in our whole way of living the Christian life, to allow such a thing to happen.”

Nine years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators.

The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation's history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing.