TV News LIES

A UN human rights group has accused Israel of abuses against Palestinian children that include torture, solitary confinement and threats of death and sexual assault in prisons.

In the report released on Thursday, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child said it expressed its "deepest concern about the reported practice of torture and ill-treatment of Palestinian children arrested, prosecuted and detained by the military and the police".

Norway's Parliament voted overwhelmingly to install a policy of gender-neutral armed forces conscription, Norway's defense minister announced.

The new measure was adopted in Oslo Friday, making Norway the only European country with a policy of gender-neutral conscription, said Anne-Grete Stroem Erichsen, the defense minister.

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Turkey’s leader offered protesters concessions early Friday, officials and protesters said, in a step that may help quiet the demonstrations that have swept the country for two weeks.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told a delegation of protesters in a closed-door meeting in Ankara that he would be willing to soften his approach to redevelopment in Istanbul’s central Gezi Park, the issue that originally sparked demonstrations.

At least 23 people are dead and thousands were evacuated Sunday in Germany and Hungary amid some of the worst flooding ever in central Europe, authorities said.

Heavy rains across the region during the past week, combined with a wet spring, prompted the flooding and swelling of the Elbe and Danube rivers. High waters have receded in parts of Austria and the Czech Republic, but the swollen rivers are inundating Germany and Hungary downstream.

Destruction and Death, as Pope Francis offered this homily in St. Peter's Square, had just left the scene in the central African nation of Chad, where in a single night in mid-March 89 elephants were slaughtered for their tusks.

Reports described the ivory poachers as 50 or so men on camel and horseback, speaking Arabic, armed with AK-47s, and presumed to be the same band that came over from Sudan last year to execute more than 450 elephants in Cameroon -- on that foray, dispatching their victims with rocket-propelled grenades.

The European Union advised member states Friday to test certain wheat shipments from the United States, and South Korea joined Japan in suspending some U.S. wheat imports in response to the recent discovery of unapproved genetically modified wheat in an 80-acre field in Oregon.

The E.U. consumer protection office said in a statement that it was “following carefully the presence of this non-authorized GM [genetically modified] wheat in Oregon in order to ensure that European consumers are protected from any unauthorized GM presence and make sure that the E.U. zero tolerance for such GM events is implemented.”