TV News LIES

No stranger to controversy — the cliché fits Tony Kushner, whose groundbreaking play cycle Angels in America (subtitle A Gay Fantasia on National Themes) was one of the major flashpoints in the modern culture war.  (It is still a sore subject in some places, as Studio 360 reported in 2009.)  Now Kushner's views are once again subject of debate, this time from an unexpected quarter.  

Kushner was to receive an honorary award from the City University of New York's John Jay College.  In an unprecedented move, according to the New York Times report on the events, CUNY's board of trustees voted to deny the award, after a trustee attacked Kushner's views on Israel.  Kushner asserts that his views are shared by Jews and supporters of Israel inside that country and in the US — he responded to CUNY in a letter posted in The Jewish Week.

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Former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft is joining the security firm once known as Blackwater. Investment group USTC Holdings, LLC, said Wednesday that Ashcroft is serving as an independent director for Moyock, N.C.-based Xe (ZEE) Services.

The director positions were created in December when USTC purchased Xe. The private company became famous as Blackwater, which provided guards and services to the U.S. government in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

President Barack Obama has decided not to release death photos of terrorist Osama bin Laden, he said in an interview with CBS's "60 Minutes," amid concerns that the gruesome image could prove inflammatory.

Obama's decision was reported on the CBS News Web site Wednesday after the president sat for an interview with the news magazine program. Releasing graphic images of bin Laden's corpse after his shooting in a U.S. raid on his compound could have dispelled doubts that bin Laden is indeed dead. The worry, though, was that it would feed anti-U.S. sentiment.

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Victims of sexual abuse at the hands of clergy and their advocates say the trial of a Canadian Roman Catholic bishop who faces child pornography charges is a step in the right direction.

Bishop Raymond Lahey's trial is scheduled to begin Wednesday in an Ottawa court - a rare case of high ranking Canadian Church official facing charges over sexual misconduct.

Former chief U.N. nuclear inspector Mohamed ElBaradei suggests in a new memoir that Bush administration officials should face international criminal investigation for the "shame of a needless war" in Iraq.

Freer to speak now than he was as an international civil servant, the Nobel-winning Egyptian accuses U.S. leaders of "grotesque distortion" in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, when then-President George W. Bush and his lieutenants claimed Iraq possessed doomsday weapons despite contrary evidence collected by ElBaradei's and other arms inspectors inside the country.

News that certain mobile phone manufacturers have embedded technology in their devices that tracks owners' movements has raised alarms among privacy rights advocates even though it has been somewhat of an open secret since last year.

The controversy flared up this week when technology bloggers started commenting on a report by two security technology researchers that was presented at a conference in Santa Clara, Calif.