TV News LIES

Abortion foes scored a third major win Wednesday when a bill to regulate abortion clinics cleared the Kansas Legislature. The Senate voted 24-15 to approve a bill requiring the state’s three abortion clinics to be inspected twice a year, including one unannounced review.

The bill goes to Republican Gov. Sam Brownback, a staunch abortion opponent who’s expected to sign the measure. The governor has already signed two other abortion bills, including one that further restricts abortions after 21 weeks of pregnancy.

Start­ing in late 2005, U.S. and NATO for­ces in Afghanis­tan began turn­ing de­tainees over to the Afghan Nation­al Di­rec­torate of Secur­ity (NDS), de­spite its well-known re­puta­tion for tor­ture.

In­ter­views with form­er U.S. and NATO di­plomats and other evi­d­ence now avail­able show that Uni­ted States and other NATO govern­ments be­come com­plicit in NDS tor­ture of de­tainees for two dis­tinct­ly dif­ferent rea­sons.

Has there ever been a more absurdly surreal moment, even in US politics, that unchallengeable theatre of the absurd and the surreal? One moment, we were watching a property magnate, with one eye on the presidency, the other on his reality TV show ratings, and puffed up like a bullfrog, rejoicing on an airport tarmac in New Hampshire that America's President of two years had finally made public his birth certificate.

The next, America's TV networks interrupted their schedules to cut to the White House, where that self-same President appeared to confirm the momentous fact: not that Barack Obama had indeed been born, but that the happy event indeed took place, as no sane person has ever doubted, on the unimpeachably American soil of Hawaii, one August evening in 1961.

If we don't bust up Big Finance, there soon will be another financial crisis that will destroy what's left of our middle-class way of life. For all the damning evidence you’ll ever need about Wall Street corruption, take a look at the recent report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, “Wall Street and the Financial Crisis:

An Anatomy of a Financial Collapse” (PDF). The 650-page indictment reveals the myriad of ways Wall Street lies, cheats, steals and defrauds on a routine basis. Arguably the report is as revealing as the Nixon tapes or the Pentagon Papers. Unfortunately, it’s too technical to get widely read. So here are the Cliff Notes.

How clean is your air? Most U.S. cities with the dirtiest air are getting cleaner but half of Americans still live in in areas where it's often difficult to breathe, the American Lung Association reports today.

Los Angeles remains the smoggiest metro area, although it's improved significantly in the last decade, and Bakersfield, Calif., has the worst particle pollution such as soot and ash, both on a daily and annual level, according to the ALA's 12th annual "State of the Air" report.

A lesbian cadet who resigned from West Point last year has been rejected for readmission to the academy even as the military moves toward repealing its "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

Officials at the U.S. Military Academy said they had no choice but to reject Katherine Miller's application, because the repeal of the policy barring gays from serving openly in the military is not in effect yet. The policy's repeal did not occur immediately after President Barack Obama signed the legislation in December as training and certification are required before the ban is lifted.

Gen David Petraeus, the US head of international forces in Afghanistan, will be nominated as CIA director when its chief moves to head the Pentagon, unnamed US officials have said.

CIA director Leon Panetta will be nominated to take over as US defence secretary when Robert Gates retires in 2011, the sources said. The changes will be officially announced on Thursday.

Mr Obama said he was bemused over the conspiracy theories over his birthplace, and said that the obsession over the "sideshow" issues was a distraction in a "serious time". "We're not going to solve our problems if we get distracted by carnival acts and sideshow barkers,

We do not have time for this kind of silliness, we've got big stuff to do, I've got big stuff to do," he said. Earlier, Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said: "The president feels this (controversy) is bad for the country, that it is not healthy for the political debate."