TV News LIES

Halliburton Co. said on Wednesday that it has gotten a letter of intent from Shell Iraq Petroleum Development BV that would make Halliburton the project manager for developing the Majnoon field in southern Iraq.

Halliburton said it wold be working with Nabors Drilling and the Iraq Drilling Company. The contract needs final approval by Iraqi authorities, Halliburton said.

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The private security company formerly called Blackwater Worldwide, long plagued by accusations of impropriety, has reached an agreement with the State Department for the company to pay $42 million in fines for hundreds of violations of United States export control regulations.

The violations included illegal weapons exports to Afghanistan, making unauthorized proposals to train troops in south Sudan and providing sniper training for Taiwanese police officers, according to company and government officials familiar with the deal.

While much of the focus has been on Google and Verizon when it comes to net neutrality as of late, the Wall Street Journal has reported that lobbyists began a new set of talks among a much wider group on Wednesday.

The Information Technology Industry Council is a lobbying firm which represents dozens of companies, including Apple, AOL, Cisco, HP, Microsoft, Nokia, and RIM among others. Reports indicate Microsoft is in attendance as is Cisco. AT&T and Verizon are also involved in the negotiations, but Google is not.

Early Thursday, less than two weeks before the president's Aug. 31 deadline for ending American combat operations in Iraq, the 4th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division crossed the border from Iraq into Kuwait.

With the departure of this last combat brigade, the U.S. military presence in Iraq is now down to 50,000 troops, fewer than at any time since the 2003 invasion. The shift offers a useful moment to take stock of both how much has been accomplished and how much is left to be done in what is fast becoming our forgotten war.

1. As of this month, the United States no longer has combat troops in Iraq.

Israeli and Palestinian officials are expected to be invited to meet in Washington next month for their first direct talks in a year and a half, according to media reports. Formal announcements are anticipated from the US state department and the quartet of Middle East peace negotiators - the UN, Russia the EU and the United States - regarding developments later on Friday.

Let me start out by saying I am not a Roger Clemens fan. To me he seems like a mentally disturbed person. Ever since he threw the head of a broken bat at Mike Piazza who was running to first base at the time, I knew they guy was either on drugs or he was a mental case. He also represents one of the two things that ruined baseball for me...free agency (not-Clemens related), and steroids (and Clemens is part of that problem!)

That said, let me be the latest to point out that Congress had no business spending time worrying about baseball; not on our time and not on our dime. Let me put this in perspective...the world has ample evidence, or, how should I say this...PROOF, that the invasion of Iraq was started on false pretenses that were know to be false at the time they were made. To put this simply the Iraq invasion was the proverbial war based on lies. Folks...there is no higher crime a President can commit than committing his nation to war based on lies...and George W. Bush, as Dick Cheney's puppet, did this.

Former Israeli soldier, who caused an international uproar by posting Facebook images of herself posing with Palestinian detainees, says she would "gladly kill Arabs, even slaughter them."

Writing on the social network Facebook, Eden Abergil defended publishing the controversial photos, saying, “In war there are no rules,” Haaretz qouted her as saying on Thursday.

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In the past few weeks Iran’s gas infrastructure, which is central to the country’s energy requirements, has been hit by a series of unexplained explosions.

The series of mysterious explosions began at the end of July when the state-owned Tehran Times reported that a pipeline carrying gas from Iran to Turkey had exploded near the eastern Turkish town of Dogubayazit. Iranian officials blamed the blast on Kurdish rebels.