TV News LIES

The pilot who posted a cell phone video on YouTube revealing potential loopholes in airport security identified himself Monday and said he is "pretty shocked" by the national uproar he has caused.

Chris Liu, a 50-year-old Colfax resident and 27-year veteran pilot, said in an interview with a Sacramento television station that he never imagined his "little video" of what he felt were lax procedures at San Francisco International Airport would get much attention.

Four activists were forced to leave an art gallery in New York this month for wearing T-shirts promoting an effort to include an American boat in the next blockade-challenging Gaza flotilla.

The incident came on the final day of an exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery called “Next Year in Jerusalem,” featuring pieces by the German artist Anselm Kiefer on the subject of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the U.S. government to pay more than $2.5 million in attorney fees and damages after he concluded investigators wiretapped the phones of a suspected terrorist organization without a warrant.

U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker said the attorneys for the Ashland, Ore., chapter of the now-defunct Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation should receive $2.5 million for waging its nearly five-year legal challenge to the Bush administration's so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program.

One of Bernard Madoff's trusted former workers got an early lump of coal for Christmas this morning from a judge who revoked her bail and ordered her to surrender to US Marshals. Annette Bongiorno -- who allegedly pocketed $14.5 million through her boss's Ponzi scheme -- surrendered to marshals in West Palm Beach, Fla., this afternoon.

Earlier in the day, Manhattan federal Judge Laura Taylor Swain said Bongiorno has an "abundance of unrestricted assets" that could help her flee conspiracy charges that could send her to prison for life, Manhattan federal Judge Laura Taylor Swain said.

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.

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.