TV News LIES

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Thursday that the United States must make its position on Israel's nuclear strategy clear before talks on Tehran's atomic programme could resume. Sanctions imposed by "arrogant" Western powers would not slow Iran's nuclear progress, he said.

The United States, Europe and the United Nations have imposed sanctions on Iran over its disputed nuclear programme. Iran says its aim is to generate electricity and rejects Western suspicions it is seeking to build a nuclear bomb.

Euro MPs have approved a new deal to allow US anti-terror investigators to access Europeans' bank data. The vote followed tough negotiations with US authorities after a previous agreement was blocked by the European Parliament in February.

EU negotiators say the new deal gives EU officials authority to monitor the US investigators' actions.

As President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meet, a report reveals 42 per cent of territory is controlled by settlers.

The jurisdiction of some 200 settlements, illegal under international law, cover much more of the occupied Palestinian territory than previously thought. And a large section of the land has been seized from private Palestinian landowners in defiance even of an Israeli supreme court ruling, the report said, a finding which sits uncomfortably with Israeli claims that it builds only on state land.

At least 220 people are feared dead after an oil tanker exploded and set fire to parts of a village in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The truck, travelling from Tanzania, overturned in the village of Sange near the country's eastern border.

The fuel oil spread through the village before exploding, AFP news agency said.
Scores more people are believed injured. The UN has corrected its earlier report that five peacekeepers had died and now says none were killed.

Hamas and Hezbollah, groups that have long battled Israel with violent tactics, have begun to embrace civil disobedience, protest marches, lawsuits and boycotts—tactics they once dismissed.

For decades, Palestinian statehood aspirations seemed to lurch between negotiations and armed resistance against Israel. But a small cadre of Palestinian activists has long argued that nonviolence, in the tradition of the American civil rights movement, would be far more effective.

At least seven Israeli arms dealers are currently in jail in four countries - the United States, Russia, France and Britain - on charges of illegal arms dealing. Some of them are also suspected of crimes such as forgery, bribery, money laundering and violating UN Security Council embargoes.

Such arrests are briefly covered in Israel and then forgotten. But they have a cumulative effect that is very damaging to Israel's image, or what remains of it.