TV News LIES

Cutting global greenhouse emissions might yet save the polar bear and its Arctic habitat, according to scientists in the US. It has been suggested that emissions of greenhouse gases have already put the Arctic ice cap and the polar bear on an irreversible path towards extinction.

But a new study suggests rapid emission cuts could help preserve ice cover to save the iconic bear. Details are published in the academic journal Nature.

An Army doctor who disobeyed orders to deploy to Afghanistan because he questioned President Barack Obama's eligibility to be commander in chief told a jury Wednesday he was wrong to do so and would now deploy if he could.

Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin was speaking during a court martial hearing Wednesday at Fort Meade. In videos posted on YouTube earlier this year, Lakin aligned himself with the so-called "birther" movement, which questions whether Obama is a natural-born citizen as the U.S. Constitution requires for presidents. Lakin had said he would "gladly deploy" if Obama's original birth certificate were released and proved authentic.

The US is suing BP and eight other firms for allegedly violating federal safety regulations in connection with the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. The lawsuit asks that they be held liable without limitation for all clean-up and damage costs.

The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion in April killed 11 workers and spilled millions of barrels of oil over several months. The oil leak became the worst environmental disaster in US history.

By now all reasonable people in the world know that the Bush administration (with almost no opposition from Democrats) used 9/11 as a pretense to invade and occupy an oil-rich Middle Eastern country that posed no threat to America. Even President Bush has admitted in a press conference that there were never any WMDs in Iraq. But the war has been very profitable for some, as war always is, as it has drained American taxpayers of hundreds of billions of dollars. It has also ballooned the warfare state, the military-industrial complex, and the conservative anti-civil liberties lobby. (On the day of this writing the talking heads on the FOX War Channel were all but dancing in the streets of Manhattan in celebration of a bill passed by the U.S. Senate the previous evening that would allow for the suspension of habeas corpus. Can mass burn-the-Constitution rallies, perhaps organized by Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, be far behind?)

Take a look at the short CNN video interview below with 27-year CIA analyst Ray McGovern on WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange. It's astonishing and disturbingly telling.

McGovern, as we noted on Friday, is one of a number of high-level intelligence whistleblowers and former government officials who signed a very strong statement in support of WikiLeaks and Assange last week. Other signatories of the statement include Pentagon Papers' whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and the FBI's 9/11 whistleblower and TIME 2002 Person of the Year, Colleen Rowley.

Barack Obama is expected to claim solid progress in the war in Afghanistan tonight. The review will contradict far gloomier findings by his own intelligence agencies that the war cannot be won while Pakistan refuses to close militant safe havens.

The review is tipped to reaffirm a US-troop drawdown from July next year with a final handover to Afghan security forces in 2014 - a plan endorsed last month by NATO to allow coalition forces sufficient time to improve local military and law enforcement capacity.

The U.S. Air Force is blocking its personnel from using work computers to view the websites of the New York Times and other major publications that have posted classified diplomatic cables, people familiar with the matter said.

Air Force users who try to view the websites of the New York Times, Britain's Guardian, Spain's El Pais, France's Le Monde or German magazine Der Spiegel instead get a page that says, "ACCESS DENIED. Internet Usage is Logged & Monitored," according to a screen shot reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The notice warns that anyone who accesses unauthorized sites from military computers could be punished.

The Obama administration has abandoned its feckless effort to induce Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to accept a 90-day settlement freeze designed to kick start peace negotiations — and save Israel from suicidal settlement expansion. Any doubt that the settlements could be Israel's death warrant should have been eliminated by the recent fire that consumed northern Israel. The Minister of the Interior, an ultra-Orthodox 18th-century man - and 21st century political hack - named Eli Yishai chose funnelling resources to settlements rather than investing in firefighting equipment.

This is typical. The ultra-Orthodox settlers have little use for Israel itself. They really only care about Biblical Israel (which is mostly the West Bank). What's a fire in boring old pre-'67 Israel to a Bible-thumping fanatic like Yishai and his Shas Party? He's got Palestinians to drive out of their homes. In any case, the Obama administration had offered Netanyahu an astonishing $3.5bn for a 90-day freeze in part of the West Bank (in addition to the annual $3.5bn aid package), plus the promise to use our veto in the UN Security Council on Israel's behalf. And most importantly, the US pledged to never ever ask Israel for another settlement freeze again.