TV News LIES

A month and a half has gone by since the doctor told Khaleda Jarrar she needed an urgent brain examination. Early tests were worrisome, but more information was needed to make an exact diagnosis. But Jarrar has not yet undergone the examination. And she knows, as do her partner and friends, the significance of each day of delay. During all the waiting, it's clear who the uber-doctor is who makes decisions about the health of the Palestinians, and the uber-doctor is not in a hurry.

Jarrar, 47, is a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. She is prevented from traveling abroad for what is known, with the usual ambiguity, as security reasons.

Researchers have demonstrated tiny solar cells just billionths of a metre across that can repair themselves, extending their useful lifetime. The cells make use of proteins from the machinery of plants, turning sunlight into electric charges that can do work. The cells simply assemble themselves from a mixture of the proteins, minute tubes of carbon and other materials.

The self-repairing mechanism, reported in Nature Chemistry, could lead to much longer-lasting solar cells. The design and improvement of solar cells is one of the most vibrant areas of science, in part because sunlight is far and away the planet's most abundant renewable energy source.

Earlier this summer, a group of scientists spent two weeks in Indonesia atop a glacier called Puncak Jaya, one of the few remaining tropical glaciers in the world. They were taking samples of ice cores to study the impacts of climate change on the glacier.

Lonnie Thompson, a professor of earth sciences at Ohio State University, led the team and what he witnessed shocked him: The glacier was literally melting under their feet.

NATO commanders were overly optimistic when they predicted quick success taking the key Taliban-held town of Marjah last winter, the outgoing deputy commander said.

There are now fledgling signs of a turnaround, but burned once by Marjah's unpredictability, the military will be more restrained in forecasting success, British Lt. Gen. Nick Parker told reporters Saturday at the headquarters of the NATO-led force.

In what authorities call the largest human-trafficking case in U.S. history, a federal grand jury in Honolulu this week indicted the owner and four employees of Global Horizons Manpower Inc., along with two Thai labor recruiters, on charges of engaging in a conspiracy to coerce the labor of those workers and about 400 other Thai nationals.

"The case is mind-boggling," said Chanchanit Martorell, executive director of the Thai Community Development Center, which has worked on the case for seven years and played a pivotal role in half a dozen other human-trafficking cases involving Thai workers. "It is by far the largest and most protracted case we've ever worked on."

The fight over a November ballot initiative to suspend California's global warming law has escalated sharply with the Koch brothers, oil billionaires and "tea party" backers, making a million-dollar entry into the fray.

The contribution to the campaign for Proposition 23 came Thursday from a subsidiary of Wichita, Kan.-based Koch Industries, the nation's second-largest private company (after the agribusiness giant Cargill). A spokeswoman for the subsidiary, Flint Hills Resources, said the company "may consider additional support." The Kochs' company has estimated annual revenues of $100 billion, owns refineries in Alaska, Texas and Minnesota, and controls about 4,000 miles of oil pipelines.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has told the Mainichi he believes the Iraq War -- which began while he was in office in 2003 -- could have been averted.

Powell also stated during an Aug. 24 telephone interview that he regretted the false intelligence that led the United States to claim the Saddam Hussein regime possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which Powell presented to the United Nations and which underpinned the U.S. case to invade Iraq.

Edward Bernays, the American nephew of Sigmund Freud, is said to have invented modern propaganda. During the First World War, he was one of a group of influential liberals who mounted a secret government campaign to persuade reluctant Americans to send an army to the bloodbath in Europe. In his book, "Propaganda," published in 1928, Bernays wrote that the "intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses was an important element in democratic society" and that the manipulators "constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country." Instead of propaganda, he coined the euphemism "public relations."