TV News LIES

Michael David Dunn lived the beachside life Northerners dream of: oceanfront condominium, successful software-engineering career, a pilot's license, a loving fiancee.

The day after last Thanksgiving, Dunn was in good spirits when he attended his son's wedding at a historic home overlooking the St. Johns River in Orange Park, a quaint Jacksonville suburb.

But after the wedding, Dunn got into a parking lot dispute with teenagers at a gas station that ended with a 17-year-old dead and Dunn charged with murder.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White says her team will not shy away from high-stakes trials, and not just strike settlements with wrongdoers, but a string of recent court setbacks shows she has her work cut out for her.

On Tuesday, a federal judge in California rejected a securities fraud case brought by the SEC and said the agency had "not carried its burden of proof" against two former senior executives at Basin Water Inc who were accused of fraudulently boosting their company's revenue.

South Africa buried Nelson Mandela on Sunday, leaving the multi-racial democracy he founded without its living inspiration and still striving for the "Rainbow Nation" ideal of shared prosperity he had dreamed of.

The Nobel peace laureate, who was held in apartheid prisons for 27 years before emerging to preach forgiveness and reconciliation, was laid to rest at his ancestral home in Qunu after a send-off combining military pomp with the traditional rites of his Xhosa abaThembu clan.

Sebastian Prevot watched helplessly as three police officers advanced on his wife. Prevot was handcuffed and bleeding in the back of a cop car. Half of his left ear dangled where it had been torn from his head. The Houston Police Department doesn’t deny that its officers gave Prevot these injuries during a late-night arrest in January 2012. The only dispute is whether he earned them.

Prevot had been returning home from a night out with a friend. He was two miles from his house when he stopped just past the white line at a four-way stop sign. Two officers in a patrol car tried to pull him over, but he kept driving. Prevot says he didn’t want to pull over and continued home—“going the speed limit, stopping at every stop sign”—because he knew he was about to be detained and have his car impounded.

The Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General published Friday its annual report titled "Top Management and Performance Challenges Facing the Justice Department." The memo, which is 15 pages long, can be found online here and is worth reading. Not because it is particularly candid or revealing— these are lawyers writing about other lawyers, after all—but rather because we see in both the light and in the shadows of this document so much of what has animated this busy year at the intersection of law and politics.

Interspersed here are quotes from an interview I conducted by telephone Friday with the inspector general himself, Michael Horowitz, who offered to explain as best he can the memo he vetted, signed and delivered up to the world. I'll offer these in the order in which they appear in the memo, although I suspect that "Growing Crisis in the Federal Prison System," which is the title of the first section of the memo, won't get nearly as much attention as will subsequent sections about civil liberties and federal mismanagement.

n Real Time with Bill Maher last August, Maher asked his guest, newly retired Rep. Barney Frank, if he felt liberated now that he was a private citizen. Frank said he did, since he no longer gets phone calls saying someone screwed something up and he has to “unscrew it.” Maher pressed on, saying, “You were in a fairly safe district.

You were not one of those congresspeople who have to worry about every little thing. You could come on this show and sit next to a pot-smoking atheist, and it wouldn’t bother you.” Frank shot back: “Which pot-smoking atheist were you talking about?” Then he pointed back and forth to Maher and himself.

Government officials have concluded that they may never know the full extent of information leaked by the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, according to a report published on Saturday by the New York Times.

Senior government officials told the newspaper that investigators are unsure of the scope of information Snowden collected, partially because the Hawaii data facility he worked at, as a contractor, did not have employee monitoring software with which other NSA facilities were equipped. Such software is meant to detect unusual behavior among the agency's approximately 35,000 employees.

The number of people being diagnosed with cancer in the world each year has leaped to more than 14 million, the World Health Organization says.

The data for 2012 shows a marked rise on the 12.7 million cases in 2008. In that time the number of deaths has also increased, from 7.6 million to 8.2 million.

The rising burden of cancer is being driven by a rapid shift in lifestyles in the developing world to more closely reflect industrialised countries.