TV News LIES

Sheryl Sandberg gave us “Lean In,” her neo-feminist mantra that, if women are to get ahead in American society, they need to remain committed to the workplace and not let career take a backseat to family and marriage.

Now, the fourth annual Women in the World Summit has added to and amended that vocabulary by highlighting how women must, in the words of summit founder and co-host, Newsweek and The Daily Beast editor-in-chief Tina Brown, “Lean On”: on corporations, on courts, on governments and clerics, and, above all, on fathers, brothers, boyfriends and male acquaintances to stop persecuting women and to “safeguard the rights and well-being, and to free up the economic potential, of a full half of all [the world’s] citizens.”

Nek Muhammad knew he was being followed. On a hot day in June 2004, the Pashtun tribesman was lounging inside a mud compound in South Waziristan, speaking by satellite phone to one of the many reporters who regularly interviewed him on how he had fought and humbled Pakistan’s army in the country’s western mountains.

He asked one of his followers about the strange, metallic bird hovering above him.

Less than 24 hours later, a missile tore through the compound, severing Mr. Muhammad’s left leg and killing him and several others, including two boys, ages 10 and 16. A Pakistani military spokesman was quick to claim responsibility for the attack, saying that Pakistani forces had fired at the compound. That was a lie.

Birgitta Jónsdóttir, the Icelandic MP who was part of a small team of activists that produced the WikiLeaks dump of US state secrets, has arrived in the United States for the first time since the controversy three years ago, to protest against what she sees as a disproportionate clampdown by the US government on internet whistleblowers.

Jónsdóttir is marking the third anniversary of the "Collateral Murder" video –which put WikiLeaks on the map on 5 April 2010 by revealing footage of a US apache helicopter attack on unarmed civilians in Baghdad – by staging an exhibition of still photographs drawn from the video in New York. She hopes the display will draw attention to the plight of Bradley Manning, the US soldier currently facing court martial for being the source of the WikiLeaks material, as well as increase public debate about the treatment of online whistleblowers.

Bradley Manning tried to save the eleven men who died – burned alive – on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in 2010. But Barack Obama and the New York Times made sure that wouldn’t happen. Three years ago this month, on the 20th of April, 2010, the BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blew itself to kingdom come.

Soon thereafter, a message came in to our office’s chief of investigations, Ms Badpenny, from a person I dare not name, who was floating somewhere in the Caspian Sea along the coast of Baku, Central Asia.

A clear majority of Americans support legalizing marijuana for the first time in 40 years, according to a poll released Thursday.

In the Pew Research Center poll released Thursday, 52 percent support legalizing the drug and only 45 percent oppose legalization. While support has generally tracked upward over time, it has spiked 11 percentage points since 2010.

Millions of internal records have leaked from Britain's offshore financial industry, exposing for the first time the identities of thousands of holders of anonymous wealth from around the world, from presidents to plutocrats, the daughter of a notorious dictator and a British millionaire accused of concealing assets from his ex-wife.

The leak of 2m emails and other documents, mainly from the offshore haven of the British Virgin Islands (BVI), has the potential to cause a seismic shock worldwide to the booming offshore trade, with a former chief economist at McKinsey estimating that wealthy individuals may have as much as $32tn (£21tn) stashed in overseas havens.