TV News LIES

Rupert Murdoch's News International is thought to have prepared a legal fund of £100m to settle civil litigation actions brought by victims of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal ahead of a High Court showdown in the new year.

It was a typically controversial statement by Venezuela's socialist leader, who underwent surgery in June to remove a tumor from his pelvis. But he stressed that he was not making any accusations, just thinking aloud.

"It would not be strange if they had developed the technology to induce cancer and nobody knew about it until now ... I don't know. I'm just reflecting," he said in a televised speech to troops at a military base.

The Obama administration’s counterterrorism accomplishments are most apparent in what it has been able to dismantle, including CIA prisons and entire tiers of al-Qaeda’s leadership. But what the administration has assembled, hidden from public view, may be equally consequential.

In the space of three years, the administration has built an extensive apparatus for using drones to carry out targeted killings of suspected terrorists and stealth surveillance of other adversaries. The apparatus involves dozens of secret facilities, including two operational hubs on the East Coast, virtual Air Force­ ­cockpits in the Southwest and clandestine bases in at least six countries on two continents.

On Dec. 22, while even the nerdiest observers were thinking more about Christmas plans than food-safety policy, the FDA snuck a holiday gift to the meat industry into the Federal Register. The agency announced it had essentially given up any pretense of regulating antibiotic abuse on factory farms, at least for the time being.

Wired's diligent Maryn McKenna has the background. She reports that way back in 1977—when livestock farming was much less industrialized than it is today—the FDA announced its intention to limit use of key antibiotics on animal farms. The reason: By that time, it was already obvious that routine use of these drugs would generate antibiotic-resistant pathogens that endanger humans.

Reclusive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar was never on the FBI's list of most wanted terrorists, an agency spokesman said.

The Express Tribune, owned by The New York Times, reported that the FBI removed Omar's name from its list of most-wanted terrorism suspects. Since the report initially surfaced, The Express Tribune removed the story from its Web site.

Across the country, state legislatures and governors are pushing laws that seek to restrict access to the voting booth, laws that will disproportionately harm people of color, low-income people, and young and elderly voters.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund have just released a comprehensive report on the crisis, "Defending Democracy: Confronting Modern Barriers to Voting Rights in America."

Between 1984 and 2009, the median net worth of a member of the House more than doubled, according to the analysis of financial disclosures, from $280,000 to $725,000 in inflation-adjusted 2009 dollars, excluding home ­equity.

Over the same period, the wealth of an American family has declined slightly, with the comparable median figure sliding from $20,600 to $20,500, according to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from the University of Michigan.

You see, in the Never-Never land of the ADL, Muslim hostility toward Jews has nothing to do with actual Jewish behavior toward Muslims in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. It’s a corollary of the general Jewish stance that anti-Semitism never has anything to do with the behavior of Jews but only with various psychopathologies and delusions of non-Jews. Both Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney called on the Obama administration to dismiss Gutman for these remarks, and the ADL was predictably outraged.

Bank on this: If the Israel Lobby doesn’t get its war by pressuring the Obama Administration, it will certainly get it from the Gingrich administration. As Gingrich said, “The only rational long-term policy is regime replacement.”