TV News LIES

We've had to low-crawl on our stomachs and chests all week, under razor wire and raking machine gun fire, but we've finally made it, safe:  The Weekend.

Relax, enjoy your coffee, no rush.  There'll be little mention of politics here today, save for a quick thanks to the cosmos for the Tampa-tantrum finally ending.  (Yes, now that you ask, I will have a little something in my coffee, after all.  Whooo-ah.)

The political conversation about the Bin Laden raid, a key event in the counter-terrorism paradigm, is based on a government-created conspiracy theory. People argue about the nitty-gritty details of the raid as if it actually happened in the real world. Since May 1, 2011, numerous versions of the infamous raid has come out, each one contradicting the other.

Instead of asking if the raid is real, political commentators and columnists are debating about which version of the raid is true. In effect, they are conspiracy theorists, something that they accuse 9/11 truth-tellers of because they can’t handle the truth.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called for Tony Blair and George Bush to be hauled before the international criminal court in The Hague and delivered a damning critique of the physical and moral devastation caused by the Iraq war.

Tutu, a Nobel peace prizewinner and hero of the anti-apartheid movement, accuses the former British and US leaders of lying about weapons of mass destruction and says the invasion left the world more destabilised and divided "than any other conflict in history".

The New York attorney general is investigating whether some of the nation’s biggest private equity firms have abused a tax strategy in order to slice hundreds of millions of dollars from their tax bills, according to executives with direct knowledge of the inquiry.

The attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, has in recent weeks subpoenaed more than a dozen firms seeking documents that would reveal whether they converted certain management fees collected from their investors into fund investments, which are taxed at a far lower rate than ordinary income.

Readers periodically ask me some variation on this question: “Why does the press follow every jot and tittle of Iran’s nuclear program, but we never see any stories about Israel’s nuclear weapons capability?”

It’s a fair question. Going back 10 years into Post archives, I could not find any in-depth reporting on Israeli nuclear capabilities, although national security writer Walter Pincus has touched on it many times in his articles and columns.

I spoke with several experts in the nuclear and nonproliferation fields , and they say that the lack of reporting on Israel’s nuclear weapons is real — and frustrating. There are some obvious reasons for this, and others that are not so obvious.

The vital tasks carried out by tiny "engineers" like earthworms that recycle waste and bees that pollinate crops are under threat because one fifth of the world's spineless creatures may be at risk of extinction, a study showed on Friday.

The rising human population is putting ever more pressure on the "spineless creatures that rule the world" including slugs, spiders, jellyfish, lobsters, corals, and bugs such as beetles and butterflies, it said.

The older the echo, the louder the cry.

And then, there were the waves and waves of echoing cries crashing out in torrents from the tightly-choreographed GOP amateur hour and presidential auditions in Tampa, where everyone's dance steps are painstakingly mapped out in lockstep, on the planks of that sprawling, unbrawling floor.

It is an unusual Tampa-tantrum, this gathering, but one bearing many old echoes.

Peculiar, it was, not having George W. Bush, the previous Republican occupier of the White House, slide on by to cut some conversational brush with us, and remind us how fine those eight years were.  But, the taint of epic disaster lingers among those echoes, so -- please:  No reason to drop by.

The health risks associated with radiation exposure, whether it comes from cancer treatments or medical imaging scans, are much more significant than most people probably think. The latest published data on radiation exposure suggests that roughly 25,000 Americans develop cancer every year as a result of medical radiation exposure, and many more experience DNA damage that could eventually lead to the development of cancer and other health problems in the long term.

CT scans, which are a relatively modern medical imaging technology, are particularly problematic as they emit far higher doses of radiation than traditional x-rays do. Based on the figures, a single CT scan can blast up to 500 times the amount of radiation released by a single x-ray, an astounding level when considering how gratuitously CT scans are administered within the medical profession today.