TV News LIES

A senior Swedish prosecutor has ordered the reopening of a rape investigation into Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Public Prosecutions Director Marianne Ny said there was "reason to believe a crime has been committed" and that the crime was classified as rape.

Last week prosecutors cancelled an arrest warrant for Mr Assange on accusations of rape and molestation, saying he was no longer suspected. Mr Assange denies any wrongdoing saying the accusations are "without basis".

The nation's biggest job-cutting companies paid their top executives an average of $12 million last year, according to a report released today. The 50 U.S. chief executives who laid off the most employees between November 2008 and April 2010 eliminated a total of 531,363 jobs, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, a research group that works for social justice and against wealth concentration.

In "CEO Pay and the Great Recession," the institute said the $598 million in combined pay for the 50 executives would have paid one month's worth of average-sized unemployment benefits for each of the laid-off workers.

A singer who performed in front of a “mixed audience” of men and women was lashed 39 times to make him “repent,” after a ruling by a self-described rabbinic court on Wednesday.

Rabbi Amnon Yitzhak, founder of the Shofar organization aimed at bringing Jews “back to religion” (hazara betshuva), has made it his recent mission to fight against musical performances for both men and women.

If Barack Obama were to marshal America’s vast scientific and strategic resources behind a new Manhattan Project, he might reasonably hope to reinvent the global energy landscape and sketch an end to our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years.

We could then stop arguing about wind mills, deepwater drilling, IPCC hockey sticks, or strategic reliance on the Kremlin. History will move on fast.

On the charts that the American military provides, those numbers are seen as success, from nearly 4,000 dead in one month in 2006 to the few hundred today. The Interior Ministry offers its own toll of war — 72,124 since 2003, a number too precise to be true. At the morgue, more than 20,000 of the dead, which even sober estimates suggest total 100,000 or more, are still unidentified.

Last week nearly 60 theater professionals announced they would refuse to perform at new cultural center built in West Bank settlement of Ariel.The actors' boycott of the new Ariel cultural center received a boost yesterday with over 150 academics and several dozen authors and artists signing letters in their support.

In the academics' letter, released yesterday, over 150 faculty members from universities across the country vowed not to lecture or participate in any discussions in settlements, and voiced support for the theater artists who have said they would refuse to perform in the West Bank city. "We will not take part in any kind of cultural activity beyond the Green Line, take part in discussions and seminars, or lecture in any kind of academic setting in these settlements," the academics wrote.

Smoking marijuana modestly reduced pain and other symptoms of chronic neuropathic pain, results of a small randomized, placebo-controlled trial showed. The most potent dose used reduced average daily pain scores by 0.7 points on an 11-point scale (5.4 versus 6.1 with placebo, 95% confidence interval for difference 0.02 to 1.4), according to Mark A. Ware, MBBS, of McGill University in Montreal, and colleagues.

Those who smoked weed with 9.4% of the active ingredient tetrahydrocannabinol THC) also reported sleeping better, the researchers reported online in CMAJ.These results are important in light of the fact that patients who hear about pain relief from ongoing publicity about medical marijuana have had only a "trickle" of evidence to prove it, explained Henry J. McQuay, DM, of Oxford University, in an accompanying editorial.

On the charts that the American military provides, those numbers are seen as success, from nearly 4,000 dead in one month in 2006 to the few hundred today. The Interior Ministry offers its own toll of war — 72,124 since 2003, a number too precise to be true. At the morgue, more than 20,000 of the dead, which even sober estimates suggest total 100,000 or more, are still unidentified.

This number had a name, though. No. 5061 was Muhammad Jassem Bouhan al-Izzawi, father, son and brother. At 9 a.m., on that Sunday, Aug. 15, his family left the morgue in a white Nissan and set out to find his body in a city torn between remembering and forgetting, where death haunts a country neither at war nor peace.