TV News LIES

No stranger to controversy — the cliché fits Tony Kushner, whose groundbreaking play cycle Angels in America (subtitle A Gay Fantasia on National Themes) was one of the major flashpoints in the modern culture war.  (It is still a sore subject in some places, as Studio 360 reported in 2009.)  Now Kushner's views are once again subject of debate, this time from an unexpected quarter.  

Kushner was to receive an honorary award from the City University of New York's John Jay College.  In an unprecedented move, according to the New York Times report on the events, CUNY's board of trustees voted to deny the award, after a trustee attacked Kushner's views on Israel.  Kushner asserts that his views are shared by Jews and supporters of Israel inside that country and in the US — he responded to CUNY in a letter posted in The Jewish Week.

More...

Osama bin Laden's possible al-Qaida successor, Anwar al-Awlaki, was targeted but missed by a U.S. drone attack in Yemen, military officials said.
Pentagon officials said an unmanned aircraft bombed a remote compound Thursday, targeting the U.S.-born al-Awlaki, The New York Times reported Saturday.

There were casualties, but al-Awlaki was not among them, unidentified military officials told the Times. Since locating and killing bin Laden in Pakistan Sunday, the U.S. intelligence community's concern has been to identify the apparent heir to the leadership of the Muslim terrorist group.

House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) and other top House Republicans are warning President Barack Obama not to issue a proposed executive order requiring disclosure of political donations by federal contractors, calling it "a blatant attempt to intimidate, and potentially silence, certain speakers who are engaged in their constitutionally protected right to free speech."

The proposal, which has not been formally introduced by Obama yet, would require big federal contractors and their top corporate officers and directors, to disclose their political donations, even to outside groups involved in "independent expenditure" campaigns. Business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are already infuriated by the move, and GOP congressional leaders in both chambers have come out against the initiative.

Im­agine that the more than 700 Guan­tanamo files re­leased two weeks ago by WikiLeaks con­tained in­for­ma­tion ex­plain­ing how in­ter­rogators ob­tained "in­tel­lig­ence" from "war on ter­ror" de­tainees cap­tured or sold to US for­ces after 9/11, such as this firsthand ac­count:

"On a co­u­ple of oc­cas­ions, I en­tered in­ter­view rooms to find a de­tainee chained hand and foot in a fetal posi­tion to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or de­fecated on them­selves and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more. On one oc­cas­ion, the air con­dition­ing had been tur­ned down so far and the tem­pera­ture was so cold in the room that the barefooted de­tainee was shak­ing with cold.

The Obama administration deftly shaped the media coverage of its prized kill by detailing a picture-perfect, morally unambiguous special forces operation, which culminated in the death of Osama bin Laden. Most of the details of that narrative have now unravelled, but the conventional wisdom that the tale established remains.

As Glenn Greenwald put it, that's par for the course: “the narrative is set forever by first-day government falsehoods uncritically amplified by establishment media outlets, which endure no matter how definitively they are disproven in subsequent days.”

After a series of high-profile natural gas drilling spills, the Energy Department named a panel to recommend ways to improve the safety of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a technique that has expanded the country's potential to extract the fuel.

President Barack Obama asked the DOE to form the panel of academic and environmental experts to identify any immediate steps that can be taken to improve the safety and environmental performance of fracking, the DOE said on Thursday.

From the time they arrived to the moment they laid their heads on hotel pillows, the thousands of cardiologists attending this week's Heart Rhythm Society conference have been bombarded with pitches for drugs and medical devices.

St. Jude Medical adorns every hotel key card. Medtronic ads are splashed on buses, banners and the stairs underfoot. Logos splay across shuttle bus headrests, carpets and cellphone-charging stations. And at night, a drug firm gets the last word: A promo for the heart drug Multaq stood on each doctor's nightstand Wednesday.

Who arranged this commercial barrage? The society itself, which sold access to its members and their purchasing power.

Pancreatic cancer drug Afinitor by Novartis AG's has been approved by the U.S. FDA for a rare type of pancreatic cancer that has few treatment options, reports Reuters. The Swiss drugmaker said in a statement, "Data show Afinitor delays tumor growth and reduces risk of disease progression in patients with advanced neuroendocrine tumours (NET) of pancreatic origin."

"This marks the first approval of a treatment for this patient population in the United States in nearly 30 years," they added, Reuters reports.

More...