TV News LIES

For a monthly fee of $50,000 plus expenses, the U.S. agency offered a tantalizing prospect to the Rwandan government: a burnished image, a sophisticated media campaign – and a chance at “drowning out” those pesky opposition voices on the Web.

It was 2009, and the authoritarian regime in Rwanda was facing mounting criticism of its human-rights record. It was accused of censoring the media, suppressing freedom, shutting down newspapers and creating a climate of fear. So it turned to a public-relations agency, Racepoint Group, that had already polished the image of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

A senior Pentagon official on Friday refused to delay a pre-arraignment phase in the prosecution of five Guantánamo captives accused of conspiring in the Sept. 11 attacks. Defense lawyers had asked to delay at least until this summer the process of filing memorandum on why the 9/11 trial should not go forward as a capital case.

They cited an ongoing dispute over the prison camps handling of privileged attorney-client mail, now being addressed in several courts, as well as delays by some defense lawyers in meeting with their alleged terrorist clients.

It's getting harder all the time to counsel patience, to urge a happy-medium approach, to advise letting wisdom -- not more folly -- be the quiet adult in the room, not while our reality-thrashed inner child strains to be let loose, screaming wild, left shredding the whole house.

We can totter down this road again, but the trip's pretty worthless.  Scenery's not changed much, last 20 or 30 years.  Road's still strewn with broken bodies, littered with burnt dreams, stacked high with jagged-edged splinters and shards of busted hope, spirit shot from the skies.

Astronomers have detected a rocky "super-Earth" planet orbiting a nearby star in a region where life could possibly exist, a finding that led one of the team from UC Santa Cruz to predict there must be billions more of them in the Milky Way.

"Detecting this planet so near implies that our galaxy must be teeming with billions of potentially habitable rocky planets," said Steven Vogt, a veteran UC Santa Cruz planet hunter who is a member of the discovery team and is now completing a new telescope called the Automated Planet Finder at the Lick Observatory atop Mount Hamilton near San Jose.

Cardiac computed tomography (CT) and other medical scans sometimes involve injecting a radioactive iodide dye into the bloodstreams of patients in order to highlight the produced images. But a new study published in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine has revealed that this radioactive dye can cause permanent thyroid damage, as well as cancer.

It would seem obvious that pumping doses of radioactive iodide dye hundreds of times higher than the maximum recommended daily exposure level of 150 micrograms (mcg) into patients' veins is a bad idea on all accounts. After all, the thyroid gland will uptake radioactive iodide in place of nutritive iodine when too much of it is present, which was a primary concern after the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Imagine you could step out of our Milky Way a few million light-years and take a look back. This is the sort of view you might see. That is because this dazzling new image from the Hubble Space Telescope is of a galaxy that is thought to resemble our own.

Known as NGC 1073, and lying 55 million light-years away in the constellation of Cetus, it is a spiral galaxy, like so many classic “star cities”, but has a distinctive bar across its middle. This bar apparently denotes a galaxy that has moved on from being a bright young thing and headed into middle age.

The large group of 83 Plaintiffs in OSGATA v. Monsanto is comprised of individual family farmers, independent seed companies and agricultural organizations. The total number of members within the plaintiff group exceeds 300,000 and includes many thousands of certified organic farmers.

The Plaintiffs are not seeking any monetary compensation.  Instead, the farmers are pre-emptively suing Monsanto and seeking court protection under the Declaratory Judgment Act, from Monsanto-initiated patent infringement lawsuits.

The plan, which covers all uses of forest — including timber harvests, grazing, recreation and wilderness — is expected to become final in early March. Until then, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack could still make changes.

But when Vilsack announced the plan last week, he called it "a strong framework to restore and manage our forests and watersheds and help deliver countless benefits to the American people." The plan is being published Friday in the Federal Register.