TV News LIES

Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters. But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning.

Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects adults too, is particularly powerful for young people. The risk, they say, is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.

Because children and adolescents are particularly vulnerable to radiation, doctors three years ago mounted a national campaign to protect them by reducing diagnostic radiation to only those levels seen as absolutely necessary.

It is a message that has resonated in many clinics and hospitals. Yet there is one busy place where it has not: the dental office.

Britain will impose a tough annual limit on the number of non-Europeans allowed to work in the U.K. and slash visas for overseas students as it seeks to dramatically reduce immigration, the government said Tuesday.

Home Secretary Theresa May told the House of Commons that the number of non-EU nationals permitted to work in the U.K. from April 2011 will be capped at about 22,000 - a reduction of about one-fifth from 2009.

After 23-year-old Nigerian terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded a flight from the Netherlands to Detroit last Christmas with enough explosives to bring down the plane, officials at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport decided to build a better mousetrap.

So they installed more than a dozen full-body scanners capable of detecting metallic and non-metallic materials, including explosives, gels, powders and liquids. In the 11 months that the devices have operated, Schiphol largely has avoided the privacy and safety uproar that surrounds passenger screening at U.S. airports on the eve of the holiday travel season.

Johnson & Johnson, the world’s biggest health-products maker, recalled about 4 million packages of Children’s Benadryl allergy tablets and about 800,000 bottles of junior-strength Motrin caplets, citing manufacturing lapses.

“When the manufacturing process was developed, it was not done as thoroughly as it should have been,” Bonnie Jacobs, a J&J spokeswoman, said in a telephone interview today. “There is no indication that the product does not meet quality standards.”

A man purporting to be one of the Taliban's most senior commanders convinced both Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the NATO officials who flew him to Afghanistan's capital for meetings, but two senior Afghan officials now believe the man was a lowly shopkeeper from the Pakistani city of Quetta.

His daring ruse has flummoxed those attempting to start a peace process with a determined Taliban adversary. "He was a very clever man," one of the officials said.

A majority of Americans want the Congress to keep the new health care law or actually expand it, despite Republican claims that they have a mandate from the people to kill it, according to a new McClatchy-Marist poll.

The post-election survey showed that 51 percent of registered voters want to keep the law or change it to do more, while 44 percent want to change it to do less or repeal it altogether.

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told TPM in an exclusive interview that he was aware of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques used against suspected terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

"What I can say is that, yes I was aware of the techniques, I did have knowledge, and I know that a number of lawyers worked to look to see whether it could be administered in a way that was consistent with the anti-torture statute and guidance was given by the Department of Justice while I was in the White House about how these techniques could be implemented to gather important information, in a dangerous period for our nation, to gather information from the enemy that would be in America's favor," Gonzales told me.