TV News LIES

The August deadline might be seen back home as a milestone in the fulfillment of President Obama’s promise to end the war in Iraq, but here it is more complex.

American soldiers still find and kill enemy fighters, on their own and in partnership with Iraqi security forces, and will continue to do so after the official end of combat operations. More Americans are certain to die, if significantly fewer than in the height of fighting here.

A coalition of major news organizations is challenging as unconstitutional Pentagon rules that were used in May to ban four reporters from covering military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In a letter to Pentagon General Counsel Jeh Johnson, the organizations argue that the Pentagon's interpretation of the rules is "plainly illegal'' because it bars publication of information considered "protected'' even if the information is already widely known and publicly available.

An appeals court put government prosecutors on notice that they must show evidence that an Algerian detainee held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for more than eight years is actually "part of" al Qaida, or set him free.

The decision reverses what had been a rare victory for the government since the Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo detainees had the right to contest their incarceration in U.S. courts. Of the 50 cases that have been decided by district courts, the government has prevailed in only 14.

IDF soldiers seized a high-school student, held burning cigarettes to his forehead and hands and cut his cheek with a penknife.   The scars speak for themselves: a scorched hole in the middle of his forehead, like a mark of Cain, two more burn holes on his right hand and one on his left arm.

The scratches on his face and arm have already healed. That's what remains from the night on which soldiers decided to have a little fun with Salah Rajabi, a student in the 12th grade at the Tareq School in Hebron.

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.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - After years of difficult negotiations, the U.N. General Assembly voted on Friday to set up a body that will seek to improve the situation of women and girls around the world.

The new body will be known officially as the U.N. Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, although officials say it will be referred to as U.N. Women (www.unwomen.org). It will consolidate four separate U.N. divisions now dealing with women's and gender issues.

The Israeli occupation of the West Bank is widely acknowledged to be unsustainable and costly to the country’s image. But one more blunt truth must be acknowledged: the occupation is morally repugnant.

On one side of a barbed-wire fence here in the southern Hebron hills is the Bedouin village of Umm al-Kheir, where Palestinians live in ramshackle tents and huts. They aren’t allowed to connect to the electrical grid, and Israel won’t permit them to build homes, barns for their animals or even toilets. When the villagers build permanent structures, the Israeli authorities come and demolish them, according to villagers and Israeli human rights organizations.

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.