TV News LIES

The Turkish military launched an air assault on Kurdish separatists in northern Iraq overnight Wednesday, hitting 60 targets by plane and another 168 with artillery from across the border.

The assault was a response to the killing of nine Turkish soldiers in southeastern Turkey Wednesday by Kurdish separatists and targeted a region "frequented" by the Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK), which has fought for autonomy in southeastern Turkey for decades, The New York Times reports. Both Turkey and the US have the PKK listed as a terrorist organization.

Chinese intelligence has been given access to a secret US helicopter which crashed during the raid in Pakistan in which Osama bin Laden was killed, the Financial Times reported yesterday.

Pakistan gave China access to the previously unknown “stealth” helicopter despite explicit CIA requests not to, it reported.

The day after a giant tsunami set off the continuing disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, thousands of residents at the nearby town of Namie gathered to evacuate.

Given no guidance from Tokyo, town officials led the residents north, believing that winter winds would be blowing south and carrying away any radioactive emissions. For three nights, while hydrogen explosions at four of the reactors spewed radiation into the air, they stayed in a district called Tsushima where the children played outside and some parents used water from a mountain stream to prepare rice.

Forty lawmakers from both the coalition and opposition Wednesday submitted a proposal to the Knesset for a new Basic Law that would change the accepted definition of Israel as a "Jewish and democratic state."

The bill, initiated by MKs Avi Dichter (Kadima ), Zeev Elkin (Likud ) and David Rotem (Yisrael Beiteinu ), and supported by 20 of the 28 Kadima MKs, would make democratic rule subservient to the state's definition as "the national home for the Jewish people."

Two U.S. administrations declined in recent years to place sanctions on Syrian officials who now are involved in that country's harsh crackdown on dissidents, despite the officials' involvement in crushing internal opposition previously, according to secret State Department cables obtained by WikiLeaks.

In one instance, the top diplomat at the U.S. Embassy in Damascus asked the State Department in 2007 to impose sanctions on Ali Mamluk, the chief of intelligence for Syrian President Bashar Assad.

As the world struggles to make sense of the tragic attacks in Norway last week, it has become apparent that Anders Behring Breivik, the main suspect held by police, left a long trail of online comments, a YouTube video, and a manifesto outlining his political beliefs.

The New York Times reports today, Breivik “endeavored to find common cause with xenophobic right-wing groups around the world, particularly in the United States” and his manifesto “quoted extensively from the anti-Islam writings of American bloggers.”