TV News LIES

With little surprise, I learned of the recent refusal of Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon to meet with members of the U.S. Congress, whose institution provides Israel with the economic wherewithal to occupy the West Bank. Through astonishing ineptness, rather than principled policy, Israel is risking the anger of its bankroller.."

Rather than meet with them, Mr. Ayalon lashed out at J Street, the new lobby group that had scheduled the meeting. Mr. Ayalon would never reject a meeting arranged by the American Israel Education Foundation, an offshoot of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, because the organization has not been critical of Israel's subjugation of Palestinians in the West Bank.

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Europe's Catholic paedophile scandal now affects institutions in Ireland, the Netherlands, Austria and Germany.

Cardinal Schoenborn later clarified his comments saying it would be wrong to say that celibacy was a prime cause of sexual abuse.

"If celibacy is the problem, then without celibacy there should be no sexual abuse but unfortunately this is not the case. We know about cases inside the family," he said.

A senior advisor to the former American president, George Bush, has defended harsh interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, saying he was proud of the intelligence the US gained by using them.

Karl Rove said the use of waterboarding had helped prevent further attacks against America and its allies after the September the 11th attacks in 2001. He said the technique - a form of simulated drowning - had been used only to break the will of three high-value terrorist suspects.

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After years of fighting in court, lawyers representing the city, construction companies and more than 10,000 ground zero rescue and recovery workers have agreed to a settlement that could pay up to $657.5 million to responders sickened by dust from the destroyed World Trade Center.

The settlement was announced Thursday evening by the WTC Captive Insurance Co., a special entity established to indemnify the city and its contractors against potential legal action as they moved to clean up the site after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

The deal, which still must be approved by a judge and the workers themselves, would make the city and other companies represented by the insurer liable for a minimum of $575 million, with more money available to the sick if certain conditions are met.

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Nobel Prize-winning economists and scientists will deliver a letter to the U.S. Senate today, urging lawmakers to require immediate cuts in global warming emissions. The letter was signed by more than 2,000 prominent U.S. economists and climate scientists, including eight Nobel laureates, 32 National Academy of Sciences members, 11 MacArthur "genius award" winners, and three National Medal of Science recipients.

"The nation's leading scientists and economists have joined together to tell policymakers we agree about the urgency of addressing climate change now," said James McCarthy, one of the letter's organizers and a biological oceanography professor at Harvard University. "The bad news is the science of climate change is indisputable. The good news is we can cost-effectively cut the emissions that are causing it."

McCarthy is a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) board, and a leader of the Nobel Peace Prize winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

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Sean Penn has defended Hugo Chávez as a model democrat and said those who call him a dictator should be jailed. The Oscar-winning actor and political activist accused the US media of smearing Venezuela's socialist president and called for journalists to be punished.

"Every day, this elected leader is called a dictator here, and we just accept it, and accept it. And this is mainstream media. There should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies." Penn, who has visited Chávez in Caracas, said Venezuela's poor majority had willingly embraced his leftist revolution, but that this view was concealed from Americans.

"We are hypnotised by the media. Who do you know here who's gone through 14 of the most transparent elections on the globe, and has been elected democratically, as Hugo Chávez?"

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The Archbishop of Vienna today said priestly celibacy could be one of the causes of the sex abuse scandals to hit the Catholic church. In an article for Thema Kirche, his diocesan magazine, Christoph Schonborn became the most senior figure in the Catholic hierarchy to make the connection between the two and called for an "unflinching examination" of the possible reasons for paedophilia.

He wrote: "These include the issue of priest training, as well as the question of what happened in the so-called sexual revolution. "It also includes the issue of priest celibacy and the issue of personality development. It requires a great deal of honesty, both on the part of the church and of society as a whole."

Schonborn is not the first person to suggest a link between celibacy and paedophilia – the theologian Hans Kung has made the same assertion. A spokesman clarified the archbishop's words, insisting he was "in no way" seeking to question the celibacy rule or call for its abolition.

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The U.N. humanitarian chief says Israel's blockade of Gaza is not helping its security or weakening Hamas' hold on the territory. John Holmes also warned that as bad as the hundreds of tunnels that bypass the blockade are, Gaza would have difficulty surviving if Egypt succeeds in blocking them because they are a conduit for badly needed commercial goods including food and medicine. The tunnels are also widely believed to be used for smuggling cash and weapons to Hamas.

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