TV News LIES

The US military build-up in Kandahar is likely to further strengthen the hold of the Taliban over the vital southern Afghanistan city, a highly respected security organisation said today in a bleak report warning of record Taliban violence and rising civilian deaths across the country.

The report by the Afghanistan NGO Security Office, which monitors trends in violence on behalf of aid organisations, said Nato's counter-insurgency strategy was not showing any signs of succeeding amid rising violence, the unchecked establishment of local militias and a huge increase in attacks on private development workers across the country.

Which is crueler? Expelling an urban family from its home in Jerusalem's Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, or bulldozing a meager tent encampment of shepherds living on private Jordan Valley land they leased, destroying their water tanks, their tents and their sheep pens, and expelling families with many children from the land on which they live?

It's hard to say. But while the Sheikh Jarrah expulsions are attracting interest in Israel and elsewhere, hardly anyone notices or protests what's going on in the Jordan Valley.

In the absence of a vaccine against the AIDS virus, the most effective treatment method is aggressive treatment of HIV infections with cocktails of antiretroviral drugs, an approach known as highly active antiretroviral therapy or HAART.

A new study conducted in British Columbia has found that the infection rate in the province has been halved since 1996 by the widespread adoption of HAART, researchers reported online Sunday in the journal Lancet and at the International AIDS Conference in Vienna.

In shocking testimonies that reveal abductions, beatings and torture, Israeli soldiers confess the horror they have visited on Hebron.

In a confessional interview with the Israeli Channel Two investigative programme Uvda, Gigi, who had previously been in many ways a model soldier, talked of "losing the human condition" in Hebron. Asked what he meant, he replied: "To lose the human condition is to become an animal."

In George Orwell's chilling novel, 1984, the author depicts a future society in which citizens are controlled by an all-seeing, all-knowing big government, referred to as 'big brother.'  Orwell's nightmare is here, now.

Senior commanders have reached a turning point. After nine years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, they are beginning to recognize age-old legacies of the battlefield - once known as shellshock or battle fatigue - as combat wounds, not signs of weakness. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, Amos's Army counterpart, has been especially outspoken. "PTSD is not a figment of someone's imagination," Chiarelli lectured an auditorium of skeptical sergeants last fall. "It is a cruel physiological thing."

Two suicide bombers killed at least 35 people at gatherings of government-backed Sunni militia members Sunday,security officials saiid. The two morning attacks come in the midst of a continued political impasse more than four months after Iraq's national election.

The bloodiest bombing occurred southwest of Baghdad in the district of Radwaniyah. As dozens of "Sahwa" militiamen lined up outside an Iraqi Army office to collect paychecks, a suicide bomber killed at least 32 and wounded scores of others.

An eight-year-old policy forbidding govenment contractors and employees from engaging in sex trafficking in war zones has proven almost impossible to enforce, despite indications that such activities are occurring in Iraq and Afghanistan

The policy, instituted eight years ago by President George W. Bush and still in effect today, calls for prosecutions of government employees and contractors and suspensions or disqualifications of companies whose workers engage in trafficking. Bush's get-tough language also threatened criminal prosecutions for solicitation of prostitutes because many of the women are forced into the work.