TV News LIES

The crudely made anti-Muslim video that has sparked violent outrage in Egypt and Libya this week was posted prominently Monday on the Web site of a Coptic Christian group headed by a Morris Sadek, an Egyptian American activist and lawyer who lives in Northern Virginia.

The site features a grainy photo of two actors in white turbans, the title “English Muhammad Movie Trailer” and a link to the video on YouTube. Next comes an ad for “International Judge Muhammad Day” on Sept. 11, questioning whether the prophet Muhammad was a “pedophile” and a “deceiver,” and a photograph of Sadek shaking hands with rightist Florida pastor Terry Jones.

In a run-down theater on a seedy stretch of Hollywood Boulevard this summer, an independent movie made its debut. The acting was amateurish, the dialogue clunky and the costumes no better than those sold for Halloween. Even with a pretty young woman beckoning pedestrians inside, fewer than 10 people attended.

But three months later, the movie — "Innocence of Muslims" — would be blamed the world over for inciting mobs in Egypt and Libya. The movie was filmed and first released in Southern California, but much else about its origins remains a mystery.

Brace yourselves, Florida voters: The election ballot you'll see this fall is longer than ever. It's so long that voters will have to fill out multiple sheets with races on both sides, then feed those multiple pages through ballot scanners, one page at a time.

It's a pocketbook issue, too: Some people who vote by mail will have to dig deeper and pay at least 65 cents postage and up to $1.50 to return their multipage ballots in heavier envelopes.

The George Washington University National Security Archive recently published a newly released CIA document from January 2006 titled “Misreading Intentions: Iraq’s Reaction to Inspection Created Picture of Deception”.

The document, the Archive notes, “blames ‘analyst liabilities’ such as neglecting to examine Iraq’s deceptive behavior ‘through an Iraqi prism,’ for the failure to correctly assess the country’s virtually non-existent WMD capabilities.” Foreign Policy magazine describes it as a “remarkable CIA mea culpa”. But nothing could be further from the truth.

A Missouri judge has convicted Kansas City Bishop Robert Finn of failing to report suspected child abuse, making him the most senior U.S. Catholic official found guilty in the long-running scandal involving sexually abusive priests.

Jackson County Circuit Court Judge John Torrence acquitted Finn of another count of failing to report suspicions of child abuse. The judge sentenced Finn to two years of unsupervised probation, then suspended the sentence. Finn was also ordered to be trained on reporting abuse.

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Score one for highbrow tastes: If you’ve ever downloaded a popular movie, TV show or music album from a site like Pirate Bay, there’s a strong chance your IP address is sitting on a database somewhere. But anyone who’s used Torrent sites to obtain some obscure French art-house from the 1970s is likely flying under the radar.

That’s according to a report published today by a team of computer scientists based out of the University of Birmingham, England. The project, the first of its kind, took three years to complete, and offers a tremendous amount of new information about the extent to which various organizations are monitoring file sharing via BitTorrent.