TV News LIES

Solomon Northup’s story, which has been studied by historians for decades, now has a second life in American popular culture, thanks to director Steve McQueen’s extraordinary movie “12 Years a Slave.” The film — nominated for nine Oscars, including best picture and best director — brings Northup’s remarkable 1853 memoir to life with searing portrayals of torture and survival.

It has revived curiosity about Northup’s life and renewed debate over how to depict the pain of the past and the present. Does McQueen’s movie go too far with violence?

Renee Petro believes an illegal drug, marijuana, could save her son Branden’s life where sophisticated modern medical therapies have failed. Expert physicians say she might be right.

For three years, the Petro family of Fishhawk have lived through a nightmare that took away their smart, happy 8-year-old almost overnight, and left instead a child afflicted with constant seizures, severe learning disabilities and suicidal depression — a child who could die at any moment, his mother believes.

“I just want my son back,” Petro said in an interview at her home last week.

A new report by the U.S. surgeon general greatly broadens the list of disease evils linked to cigarettes and concludes that urgent, aggressive action is needed to further reduce smoking rates and save lives. The report, released Friday, recommends prevention efforts that especially target groups most vulnerable to smoking, including low-income Americans and ethnic minorities and youth.

If smoking rates persist unchanged, 5.6 million American children alive today will die prematurely because of smoking, the report finds. It pegs the economic costs of smoking at $289 billion a year or more in medical care and productivity losses.

The family of a prisoner who was executed in Ohio on Thursday using an untested combination of medical drugs that appeared to cause him prolonged distress are planning to sue the state for inflicting cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the US constitution.

Dennis McGuire, 53, was put to death using an untested two-drug protocol involving the sedative midazolam and painkiller hydromorphone. Before the execution, which took an abnormally long 25 minutes, Ohio courts were warned by an anaesthesiologist who served as an expert witness for McGuire that the procedure and the doses of drugs to be used would inflict untold suffering upon the inmate. The state decided to go ahead.

Hackers used cheap, off-the-shelf malware to breach security at U.S. Target stores and compromise data for more than 110 million customers, a tech website said.

Target confirmed last weekend malicious software was embedded in point-of-sale equipment at its checkout counters to collect secure data as credit cards were swiped during transactions. Brian Krebs, of the Krebs on Security website, reported Thursday the malware has been determined to be BlackPOS -- also known as "reedum" -- which uses a memory-scraping technique to collect secure data, temporarily stored in Windows OS computers during a transaction.

The United Methodist Church has formally charged another clergyman for presiding at the same-sex wedding of his son.

The Rev. Thomas Ogletree will be tried March 10 for violating church law against officiating at gay unions, his spokeswoman, Dorothee Benz, announced Friday. It's the second high-profile United Methodist trial in recent months over same-sex relationships. In December, pastor Frank Schaefer of central Pennsylvania was defrocked after he officiated at his son's gay wedding. The church considers homosexuality "incompatible with Christian teaching."

Deep beneath desert sands, an embattled Middle Eastern state has built a covert nuclear bomb, using technology and materials provided by friendly powers or stolen by a clandestine network of agents. It is the stuff of pulp thrillers and the sort of narrative often used to characterise the worst fears about the Iranian nuclear programme. In reality, though, neither US nor British intelligence believe Tehran has decided to build a bomb, and Iran's atomic projects are under constant international monitoring.

The exotic tale of the bomb hidden in the desert is a true story, though. It's just one that applies to another country. In an extraordinary feat of subterfuge, Israel managed to assemble an entire underground nuclear arsenal – now estimated at 80 warheads, on a par with India and Pakistan – and even tested a bomb nearly half a century ago, with a minimum of international outcry or even much public awareness of what it was doing.

The National Security Agency has implanted software in nearly 100,000 computers around the world — but not in the United States — that allows the U.S. to conduct surveillance on those machines, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

The Times cited NSA documents, computer experts and U.S. officials in its report about the use of secret technology using radio waves to gain access to computers that other countries have tried to protect from spying or cyberattacks. The software network could also create a digital highway for launching cyberattacks, the Times reported.