TV News LIES

Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak approved an order for 20 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters in a deal valued at around $2.75 billion, according to Haaretz. The Israeli Air Force expects to take delivery of the first aircraft in 2015. The article quotes Barak saying the F-35 costs $96 million a copy. The entire deal will be funded by American military aid.

Yesha Council, representing the Jewish settler movement, and the rightwing Israel Sheli (My I srael) movement, ran their first workshop this week in Jerusalem, teaching participants how to rewrite and revise some of the most hotly disputed pages of the online reference site.

One Jerusalem-based Wikipedia editor, who doesn't want to be named, said that publicising the initiative might not be such a good idea. "Going public in the past has had a bad effect," she says. "There is a war going on and unfortunately the way to fight it has to be underground."

I mean, right? You know? Because gosh Jesus in angry apocalyptic heaven, wouldn't it be just terrible if it were all true? Wouldn't it be horrible if all this stunning, insanely mounting, irrefutable evidence -- death, floods, fires, heat waves, the worst this and the most violent that in 1,000 years -- were some sort of surefire, cumulative sign that we have, if not directly caused, then wildly accelerated and amplified the imminent implosion of this planet?

But we didn't! And we haven't! And we aren't! I mean, whew.

A Roman Catholic adoption charity's appeal to be allowed to discriminate against gay people wanting it to place children with them has been rejected. Catholic Care wants exemption from new anti-discrimination laws so it can comply with Church teaching ruling out homosexual couples as adoptive parents.

The Charity Commission said gay people were suitable parents and religious views did not justify discrimination. The Leeds-based charity said it was "very disappointed" and might appeal.

A neutron star with a mighty magnetic field has thrown down the gauntlet to theories about stellar evolution and the birth of black holes, astronomers said today. The "magnetar" lies in a cluster of stars known as Westerlund 1, located 16,000 light years away in the constellation of Ara, the Altar.

Westerlund 1, discovered in 1961 by a Swedish astronomer, is a favoured observation site in stellar physics. It is one of the biggest cluster of superstars in the Milky Way, comprising hundreds of very massive stars, some shining with a brilliance of almost a million Suns and some two thousand times the Sun's diameter.

No mosque is going up at ground zero. The center would be established at 45-51 Park Place, just over two blocks from the northern edge of the sprawling, 16-acre World Trade Center site. Its location is roughly half a dozen normal Lower Manhattan blocks from the site of the North Tower, the nearest of the two destroyed in the attacks.

The center's location, in a former Burlington Coat Factory store, is already used by the cleric for worship, drawing a spillover from the imam's former main place for prayers, the al-Farah mosque. That mosque, at 245 West Broadway, is about a dozen blocks north of the World Trade Center grounds.

A court in Peru revoked parole for American activist Lori Berenson and ordered that she be arrested Wednesday and sent back to prison to finish the last five years of her 20-year prison sentence for aiding leftist rebels.

Deputy Justice Minister Luis Marill said Berenson should be detained in the coming hours. Marill said the court overturned a May ruling granting Berenson parole that was widely unpopular in Peru.

The CIA does indeed have videotapes of the interrogation of a man suspected of helping to plot the September 11, 2001, attacks, despite twice telling the US justice department those tapes had been destroyed.
Ramzi Binalshibh was detained in Pakistan in 2002; the CIA said tapes of his interrogation were destroyed in 2005, when the agency destroyed dozens of other recordings.

But the Associated Press (AP) news agency reported on Tuesday that two videotapes and one audiotape still exist. They were discovered in 2007 under a desk at the CIA's counterterrorism centre and leaked to the news agency.