TV News LIES

With lights, floats and flying, Russia kicked off the opening ceremony in Sochi as the world turns its attention to the costliest Olympic Games in history.

Spectators from all over the world watched the introduction of athletes that marked the official start of the Winter Olympics.

Light shows and music, lots of it, filled the air, starting at exactly 8:14 p.m. local time, or 20:14 in military time.

The Vatican "systematically" adopted policies that allowed priests to rape and molest tens of thousands of children over decades, a U.N. human rights committee said Wednesday, urging the Holy See to open its files on pedophiles and bishops who concealed their crimes.

In a devastating report hailed by abuse victims, the U.N. committee severely criticized the Holy See for its attitudes toward homosexuality, contraception and abortion and said it should change its own canon law to ensure children's rights and their access to health care are guaranteed.

Israel's prison service says a former soldier who passed hundreds of classified documents to a newspaper reporter has been freed after more than two years in jail.

Spokeswoman Sivan Weizman said Anat Kamm walked free Sunday morning.

Kamm began serving a prison term at the end of 2011 after being convicted of passing military information to a Haaretz reporter.

Four Egyptian embassy staff were kidnapped in Tripoli on Saturday, a day after the abduction of another Egyptian diplomat, in what Libya's government called a reaction to Egypt's arrest of a Libyan militia commander.

No group claimed responsibility for any of the abductions, but they came soon after a powerful Islamist-leaning militia group reported its commander had been arrested in Egypt and warned of a response unless he was freed.

Seven bomb explosions killed 26 people and wounded 67 in the Iraqi capital on Monday, police and medics said, as security forces battled Sunni Muslim militants around the western cities of Falluja and Ramadi.

The bloodiest attack occurred in the mainly Shi'ite Muslim Abu Dsheer district in southern Baghdad, where a car bomb near a crowded market killed seven people and wounded 18.

Deep beneath desert sands, an embattled Middle Eastern state has built a covert nuclear bomb, using technology and materials provided by friendly powers or stolen by a clandestine network of agents. It is the stuff of pulp thrillers and the sort of narrative often used to characterise the worst fears about the Iranian nuclear programme. In reality, though, neither US nor British intelligence believe Tehran has decided to build a bomb, and Iran's atomic projects are under constant international monitoring.

The exotic tale of the bomb hidden in the desert is a true story, though. It's just one that applies to another country. In an extraordinary feat of subterfuge, Israel managed to assemble an entire underground nuclear arsenal – now estimated at 80 warheads, on a par with India and Pakistan – and even tested a bomb nearly half a century ago, with a minimum of international outcry or even much public awareness of what it was doing.