TV News LIES

A massive U.N.-supervised project to rebuild Gaza got underway earlier last week, but officials in Gaza and Ramallah are already doubtful that it will bring immediate aid to residents of the battered strip. The reconstruction plan calls for a highly intricate monitoring system, with restrictive measures on the import and distribution of building materials.

This comes at the behest of the Israelis, who have long barred the entry of basic construction materials — including cement, metal pipes and steel — into Gaza, insisting that they are "dual use" items that Hamas could use to build underground tunnels for military purposes.

The British parliament voted in favor of a symbolic move to recognize Palestine as an official state, answering impassioned pleas by pro-Palestinian ministers and activists.
The vote, which took place on Monday evening, saw 274 MPs come out in support of the motion, while 12 voted against.

"This House believes that the Government should recognise the state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel as a contribution to securing a negotiated two-state solution," the motion reads.

A meeting between Hong Kong officials and pro-democracy movement student leaders, planned for Friday, was called off Thursday.

Hong Kong Chief Secretary Carrie Lam said the protest leaders' call for continuation of the occupation of primary protest sites in the city made it "impossible to have a constructive dialogue" and blamed the leaders for "undermining trust" in the scheduled negotiations.

"The dialogue cannot be deployed as an excuse to incite more people to join the protest. The illegal occupation activists must stop."

A video has surfaced online that appears to show the beheading of British captive Alan Henning by a purported member of the terror group ISIS, who then threatens the life of an American hostage.

“I am Alan Henning. Because of our Parliament’s decision to attack the Islamic State [ISIS], I, as a member of the British public, will now pay the price for that decision,” Henning says in the video, before his apparent executioner speaks.

In Moscow this summer, while reporting a story for Wired magazine, I had the rare opportunity to hang out for three days with Edward J. Snowden. It gave me a chance to get a deeper understanding of who he is and why, as a National Security Agency contractor, he took the momentous step of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents.

Among his most shocking discoveries, he told me, was the fact that the N.S.A. was routinely passing along the private communications of Americans to a large and very secretive Israeli military organization known as Unit 8200. This transfer of intercepts, he said, included the contents of the communications as well as metadata such as who was calling whom.

Forty-three veterans of one of Israel’s most secretive military intelligence units – many of them still active reservists – have signed a public letter refusing to serve in operations involving the occupied Palestinian territories because of the widespread surveillance of innocent residents.

The signatories include officers, former instructors and senior NCOs from the country’s equivalent of America’s NSA or Britain’s GCHQ, known as Unit 8200 – or in Hebrew as Yehida Shmoneh-Matayim.