TV News LIES

Richard Clarke, the nation’s top counterterrorism official under former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, accused Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney of committing war crimes in their 2003 invasion of Iraq during an interview Tuesday with Democracy Now! that will air next week.

"I think things that they authorized probably fall within the area of war crimes. Whether that would be productive or not, I think, is a discussion we could all have,” said Clarke, who resigned in 2003 after the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq. “But we have established procedures now with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where people who take actions as serving presidents or prime ministers of countries have been indicted and have been tried.”

Every system is perfectly designed to produce exactly the results it produces.

Research indicates our existing public health system is designed to produce an increasing number of mass shootings, along with 20,000 gun suicides and 10,000 gun homicides annually and a tragic number of unintentional shootings involving children.

The results are not caused by one particular feature of our system, but by all the parts acting together.  Our cultural norms frequently promote violence over nonviolent conflict resolution, and there are 300 million firearms in the hands of civilians.

New Orleans’s Recovery School District will close all of its remaining traditional public schools, according to the Washington Post.

Education was one of the major reforms for the city after its recovery from Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Benjamin Banneker Elementary closed Wednesday as New Orleans’s Recovery School District permanently shuttered its last five traditional public schools this week.

Department of Homeland Security documents obtained last month reveal details of incidents in which transgender travelers were subjected to heightened scrutiny when passing through airport security checkpoints.

Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests netted civil rights complaints, incident reports and internal memos and emails from DHS's Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and the Transportation Security Administration. They show that trans people have been required to undergo pat-down searches by officers of the opposite gender, reveal or remove items such as chest binders and prosthetic penises and defend challenges to their gender identities and their right to opt out of body scans, among other problems.

The CIA has ended the use of vaccine programmes in its spying operations amid concerns for the safety of health workers, the White House has said.

In a letter to US public health schools, a White House aide said the CIA stopped such practices in August.  The CIA used a fake vaccine programme to try to find Osama Bin Laden before US special forces killed him in 2011.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has announced the appointment of a new president, marking Saturday's 60th anniversary of the landmark Brown vs Board of Education supreme court decision.

The announcement came two weeks after the organisation was drawn into the furore over Donald Sterling, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers NBA franchise.

Cornell William Brooks, a New Jersey lawyer and activist, will become the 18th NAACP national president, replacing Lorraine Miller, who has lead the organisation since Benjamin Jealous stepped down last year.