TV News LIES

The first trial in France over Rwanda's genocide has opened in a Paris court.

Pascal Simbikangwa, a 54-year-old former intelligence chief, faces charges of complicity in genocide and complicity in war crimes. He could face a life sentence if convicted after the seven-week trial.

The case has highlighted criticism of France's own reaction to the genocide a generation ago, and its slow exercise of justice after the slaughter of at least 500,000 people over 100 days.

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Some 300 Palestinian activists descended on a cluster of palm trees and long-abandoned houses north of the Dead Sea on Friday to establish the protest village of ‘Ein Hijleh.’ The aim of the action was to protest demands made by the Israeli government to retain control of the Jordan Valley and other settlements in the midst of current peace negotiations. The action is the first in a campaign of protest villages activists termed ‘Melh Al-Ard’ (Salt of the Earth).

Haaretz reported earlier this month that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he “did not intend to uproot any Israeli citizen” from the West Bank and doubled down on his insistence to hold onto the Jordan Valley amid peace talks brokered by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

A representative of a criminal defendant has for the first time been granted permission to view evidence gathered against him under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, one of the wellsprings of authority for terrorism surveillance.

Judge Sharon Coleman, a federal district judge in Illinois, issued an order on Wednesday permitting a lawyer for Adel Daoud, who is accused of attempting to detonate a car bomb near a Chicago bar, to learn the origins of the information the FBI or other US authorities collected about him under an order from a secret court that permits surveillance on terrorists or “agents of a foreign power”.

It was three in the afternoon when Lulu's phone stopped working somewhere in east Damascus near the Air Force Intelligence building, one of Syria's most feared security agencies.

That was last November. The 30-year-old had been shopping in Hamra, a 15-minute drive away. She has yet to come home.

Lulu's disappearance was one of many believed to have occurred in the weeks leading up to the peace talks in Geneva between President Bashar al-Assad's government and members of Syria's political opposition in exile.

For 19 minutes over a streaming video feed on Tuesday morning, the American public got its first glimpse into President Obama’s new review process for Guantánamo detainees, touted as a key step toward closing the notorious detention center.

The few members of the public who witnessed the session – a handful of journalists and representatives of human rights groups, more than 1,000 miles away in Virginia and watching on a 40-second delay – never heard from Abdel Malik Ahmed Abdel Wahab al-Rahabi, a Yemeni who has been held without charge at Guantánamo Bay for 12 years.

Poland's official stance of denying it hosted a secret CIA jail is harming its reputation and it needs to be frank about what really happened, a senior intelligence official at the time the alleged prison was operating told Reuters.

A growing weight of information gathered by rights groups, lawyers and parliamentary inquiries suggests that Poland allowed its NATO ally the United States from around 2003 to detain al Qaeda suspects in a facility in a northern Polish forest.