TV News LIES

On October 2, 2009, the UN Human Rights Council was widely expected to pass a resolution supporting the Goldstone Report, the UN’s probe of war crimes committed during Israel’s war in Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009.

The Council instead agreed to delay a vote on the report until March 2010, following major reservations expressed by the Palestinian Authority, the United States and Israel. A UNHRC endorsement of the report would have brought Israeli officials one step closer to prosecution before a war crimes tribunal, an event many Palestinians were anxious to see.

The Palestine Papers give the world an unprecedented look inside the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, but they also provide a fly-on-the-wall view of how key senior American officials view their role as negotiators which, as the paprs show, apparently means never taking any position to which an Israeli government might object.

The series of six documents that provide a core element to understanding the debates that raged over Israeli settlements show just how willing the U.S. is to acquiesce to Israeli demands – and how willing they are to pressing the PA leadership to move forward on the negotiations despite Israel’s flaunting of international agreements, including freezing all settlement activity.

The Hubble Space Telescope has detected what scientists believe may be the oldest galaxy ever observed. It is thought the galaxy is more than 13 billion years old and existed 480 million years after the Big Bang.

A Nasa team says this was a period when galaxy formation in the early Universe was going into "overdrive". The image, which has been published in Nature journal, was detected using Hubble's recently installed wide field camera.

Starting Thursday, the Homeland Security Department will begin phasing out the nation's color-coded terror-threat system, ending it entirely by April 27, officials tell the Associated Press. The five-tiered warnings were created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The "national threat level" has not changed since 2006 -- yellow, or "elevated," the middle rating.

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The number of U.S. troops killed by roadside bombs in Afghanistan soared by 60 percent last year, while the number of those wounded almost tripled, new U.S. military statistics show.

All told, 268 U.S. troops were killed by the improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, in 2010, about as many as in the three previous years combined, according to the figures, obtained by The Washington Post. More than 3,360 troops were injured, an increase of 178 percent over the year before.

At five thousand dollars a ticket, some business leaders got more than they bargained for when they attended the first day of the Global Competitiveness Forum (GCF) being held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. They were told flying saucers are real, and they better start thinking about the business implications of extraterrestrial life and technologies. Convened each year by the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority, the GCF brings together business and political leaders to discuss ways of promoting business competitiveness. For the first time at its annual conference, the GCF held a panel discussing UFOs and extraterrestrial life. Titled “Learning from Outer Space” the panel comprised five speakers who all endorsed the view that extraterrestrial life is real, and has many implications for the world as we know it.

In the wake of the shootings in Tucson, the familiar questions inevitably resurfaced: Are communities where more people carry guns safer or less safe? Does the availability of high-capacity magazines increase deaths? Do more rigorous background checks make a difference?

The reality is that even these and other basic questions cannot be fully answered, because not enough research has been done. And there is a reason for that. Scientists in the field and former officials with the government agency that used to finance the great bulk of this research agree in saying that the influence of the National Rife Association has all but choked off money for such work.

Medical officials estimate that 25% to 35% of about 10,000 ailing soldiers assigned to special wounded-care companies or battalions are addicted or dependent on drugs — particularly prescription narcotic pain relievers, according to an Army inspector general's report made public Tuesday.

The report also found that these formations known as Warrior Transition Units — created after reports detailed poorly managed care at Walter Reed Army Hospital— have become costly way stations where ill, injured or wounded soldiers can wait more than a year for a medical discharge.