TV News LIES

The U.S. military armed and trained members of a dissident Iranian opposition group during the Bush administration, according to a report published Friday in The New Yorker.

The report claims members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq organization were provided with extensive training by the U.S. Defense Department's Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). The training sessions were allegedly conducted in secret at a site belonging to the U.S. Department on Energy in Nevada.

Trust business, Cameron tells us, self-regulation is a force for social good. Silly me – I thought it was an invitation to disaster

This column is a plea for distrust. Distrust is the resource on which democracy relies. Distrust inspires the scrutiny and accountability without which representation becomes a lie. Distrust is all that stands between us and bamboozlement by people who, like Reece, Cowie and Brogan, channel the instincts of the billionaire owners of newspapers and broadcasters.

An Italian cruise ship with more than 1,000 people on board is without power in the Indian Ocean following a fire. No one has been injured.

The cruise operator has stressed that the ship is steady and conditions are safe.

The liner sent out a distress signal, Costa Cruises said, and all passengers and crew not involved in fighting the fire assembled at the muster stations.

Israeli defense officials on Sunday confirmed $1.6 billion in deals to sell drones as well as anti-aircraft and missile defense systems to Azerbaijan, bringing sophisticated Israeli technology to the doorstep of archenemy Iran.

The sales by state-run Israel Aerospace Industries come at a delicate time. Israel has been laboring hard to form diplomatic alliances in a region that seems to be growing increasingly hostile to Israel.

Even as the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog said in a new report Friday that Iran had accelerated its uranium enrichment program, American intelligence analysts continue to believe that there is no hard evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear bomb.

Recent assessments by American spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier, according to current and former American officials. The officials said that assessment was largely reaffirmed in a 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, and that it remains the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies.

The disgraced former head of the International Monetary Fund – who lost his job amid claims he tried to rape a New York chambermaid – could face jail over the ‘sex parties’ he has admitted attending around the world.

Strauss-Kahn, 62, whose wife Anne Sinclair is standing by him, has made the extraordinary claim that he was unaware the women at the orgies were prostitutes because ‘they were naked at the time’.