TV News LIES

This is getting to be a serial adventure with this guy, like Harry Potter -- but way heavier at the nightmare end of things.

So far, Paul Ryan's running his campaign as Veep wannabe about like he does a marathon:  running his own course, running his mouth, and running out his clock on his own sense of time and timing.  For someone who considers himself so fleet of foot, he's certainly being footloose with the truth, getting so often tripped up by it and tangled all around in it.

Gone are the days of the all-American army hero. These days, the US military is more like a sanctuary for racists, gang members and the chronically unfit.

The three most common barriers for potential recruits were failure to graduate high school, a criminal record and physical fitness issues, including obesity. The criminal record had been dealt with by "moral waivers" and the obesity problem by "medical waivers", but dropping the standards on educational attainment would not be so easy without seriously affecting operational readiness. There was a way for non-graduates to get into the military, however: the general equivalency degree, or GED, which can afford recruits a waiver if they score well enough on the military's entrance exam. The army accepts about 15% of recruits without a high school diploma if they have a GED. Alive to this loophole, the military instituted another program in 2008, the so-called GED Plus, to give more of America's youth the requisite qualifications they needed to go and fight. It opened its first prep school for the purpose, targeted at tough, inner-city areas.

For Palestinian farmer Esam Foqaha, agriculture is more than a profession, it's a way of life. "Farming is not only a job. It's our lifestyle and we will do it forever," Foqaha said.

Foqaha lives in Ein Al-Beida, a Palestinian agricultural village located in the West Bank's northern Jordan Valley area. With his three brothers, he cultivates about 300 dunams (0.3km) of agricultural land. Most of his produce – tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant and other vegetables – is marketed to Jenin, Nablus and other major Palestinian cities in the West Bank.

The former archbishop of Milan and papal candidate Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini said the Catholic church was "200 years out of date" in his final interview before his death.

Martini, once favoured by Vatican progressives to succeed Pope John Paul II and a prominent voice in the church until his death on Friday at the age of 85, gave a scathing account of a pompous and bureaucratic organisation failing to move with the times.

After more than 25 years of legal battle to keep its home, a Palestinian family of four was forced Sunday to leave its one-room house in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Ras el-Amoud after an Israeli court ordered their eviction. The family must turn the house over to its new owners, Israeli settlers.

The settlers led by Florida millionaire Irving Moskowitz, who made his money from gambling, have been after two brothers from the Hamdallah family in Ras el-Amoud since 1985 to get them to leave a plot of land they have lived on for decades.

We've had to low-crawl on our stomachs and chests all week, under razor wire and raking machine gun fire, but we've finally made it, safe:  The Weekend.

Relax, enjoy your coffee, no rush.  There'll be little mention of politics here today, save for a quick thanks to the cosmos for the Tampa-tantrum finally ending.  (Yes, now that you ask, I will have a little something in my coffee, after all.  Whooo-ah.)

The political conversation about the Bin Laden raid, a key event in the counter-terrorism paradigm, is based on a government-created conspiracy theory. People argue about the nitty-gritty details of the raid as if it actually happened in the real world. Since May 1, 2011, numerous versions of the infamous raid has come out, each one contradicting the other.

Instead of asking if the raid is real, political commentators and columnists are debating about which version of the raid is true. In effect, they are conspiracy theorists, something that they accuse 9/11 truth-tellers of because they can’t handle the truth.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called for Tony Blair and George Bush to be hauled before the international criminal court in The Hague and delivered a damning critique of the physical and moral devastation caused by the Iraq war.

Tutu, a Nobel peace prizewinner and hero of the anti-apartheid movement, accuses the former British and US leaders of lying about weapons of mass destruction and says the invasion left the world more destabilised and divided "than any other conflict in history".