TV News LIES

USA Today interviewed lawmakers, social scientists and people who have worked on the sexual assault issue inside the military to determine why the Pentagon hasn't been able to stem this predatory tide. All pointed to two factors — one a new plague, the other as old as the military itself — standing in the way:

•A military culture more coarse toward women in the ranks, the result of stress from a decade of war and the status of females as second-class warriors barred from combat roles. Male recruits are drawn from a society where violence and objectification of women are staple elements of films and video games.

Public and press access to the military justice system suffered a serious blow Wednesday, as the military's highest appeals court narrowly ruled that it has no power to consider media challenges to military judges' rulings on access to courts martial.

The decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces came on a bid by journalists to gain access to legal filings and court orders in the court martial of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, who's accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of military reports and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks.

The Army program charged with keeping thousands of eight-wheeled Strykers running over the past decade had its eye so much on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that it neglected to keep its books.

It accumulated nearly $900 million worth of Stryker replacement parts - most of them in an Auburn warehouse - with much of the gear becoming outdated even as the military continued to order more equipment, according to a Defense Department Inspector General report released late last year.

I am not sure exactly when the death of television news took place. The descent was gradual—a slide into the tawdry, the trivial and the inane, into the charade on cable news channels such as Fox and MSNBC in which hosts hold up corporate political puppets to laud or ridicule, and treat celebrity foibles as legitimate news.

But if I had to pick a date when commercial television decided amassing corporate money and providing entertainment were its central mission, when it consciously chose to become a carnival act, it would probably be Feb. 25, 2003, when MSNBC took Phil Donahue off the air because of his opposition to the calls for war in Iraq.

There was no doubt in the young Marine’s mind when he clambered to the top of the enormous statue of Saddam Hussein, tied a noose around its neck — and tore down the graven image.

Brooklyn-born Edward Chin continued to believe in the mission, even as the U.S. death toll mounted in Iraq, even as Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction turned out to be a mirage. Now, 10 years after Chin signaled to the world that Baghdad had fallen, he is not so certain.

BAE Systems has been awarded a new contract from the US military worth up to $780m (£512m), in a rare spending boost from its largest single customer.

The US is BAE's biggest market but the defence contractor has warned it faced weak demand from across the Atlantic due to the scaling back of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as public spending cuts.