TV News LIES

A synthetic form of marijuana is widely used at the U.S. Naval Academy because it cannot be detected in routine drug tests, according to several former midshipmen who have been removed from campus for using or possessing the substance.

Since its introduction at the academy last year, synthetic marijuana has become popular among rank-and-file midshipmen and on the football and wrestling teams, the former midshipmen said. Some isolated corners of the historic Annapolis campus, they said, have become well-known gathering spots for smoking it.

More than four decades after Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, his convicted murderer wants to go free for a crime he says he can't remember.

It is not old age or some memory-snatching disease that has erased an act Sirhan Bishara Sirhan once said he committed "with 20 years of malice aforethought." It's been this way almost from the beginning. Hypnotists and psychologists, lawyers and investigators have tried to jog his memory with no useful result.

He is on an advisory body to the Queen, works as an environmental campaigner and is credited with integrating Canada's armed forces.

But aside from all this, the ex-Canadian defence minister says UFOs are real, aliens have visited Earth and the U.S. government is covering up information about them.

Shocking as it may seem, U.S. government doctors once thought it was fine to experiment on disabled people and prison inmates. Such experiments included giving hepatitis to mental patients in Connecticut, squirting a pandemic flu virus up the noses of prisoners in Maryland, and injecting cancer cells into chronically ill people at a New York hospital.

Much of this horrific history is 40 to 80 years old, but it is the backdrop for a meeting in Washington this week by a presidential bioethics commission. The meeting was triggered by the government's apology last fall for federal doctors infecting prisoners and mental patients in Guatemala with syphilis 65 years ago.

Israeli military and political officials should not be forced to assume personal responsibility for the 2002 Gaza assassination of a Hamas strongman which resulted in the death of 13 innocent Palestinians, a panel probing the incident said in its report on Sunday.

On July 22, 2002 an Israeli plane dropped a 1-ton bomb on a house in Gaza City in which Hamas military wing commander Salah Shehadeh was staying. In addition to Shehadeh and his aide, 13 civilians, including eight children were killed in the incident.

Authorities were having difficulty this afternoon as they started clearing thousands of protesters from the Capitol building after two weeks of demonstrations against legislation that would remove collective bargaining for thousands of public employees.

While some people tried this afternoon to get out, others blocked exits on both of the doors. Police, just after 4 p.m., appeared confused about what to do and were trying to diffuse the situation.

U.S. Navy medical officials are promising an unprecedented amount of mental health evalution and counseling for Marines and sailors returning to Camp Pendleton after months of bloody fighting in the Sangin district of Afghanistan.

"Our goal is to make sure that when anyone goes forward and goes through what these guys have gone through, it is not at the expense of their families or their own mental health," Rear Adm. C. Forrest Faison III, commander of Navy Medicine West and Naval Medical Center San Diego, told the North (San Diego) County Times.

So much for Angelo Mozilo taking the fall for the financial crisis. Late last week, word leaked out that Mr. Mozilo, who had co-founded Countrywide Financial in 1969 — and, for nearly 40 years, presided over its astonishing rise and its equally astonishing fall — would not be prosecuted by the Justice Department.

Not for insider trading. Not for failing to disclose to investors his private worries about subprime loans. Not for helping to create a culture at Countrywide in which mortgage originators were rewarded for pushing fraudulent loans on borrowers.