TV News LIES

Erik Prince, the founder of the international security giant Blackwater Worldwide, is secretly backing an effort by a controversial South African mercenary firm to insert itself into Somalia’s bloody civil war by protecting government leaders, training Somali militias, and battling pirates and Islamic militants there, according to Western and African officials.

The disclosure comes as Mr. Prince sells off his interest in the company he built into a behemoth with billions of dollars in American government contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, work that mired him in controversy and lawsuits amid reports of reckless behavior by his operatives, including the deaths of civilians in Iraq.

Hersh, whose exposés of gross abuses by members of the U.S. military in Vietnam and Iraq have earned him worldwide fame and high journalistic honors, said he was writing a book on what he called the "Cheney-Bush years" and saw little difference between that period and the Obama administration.

He said that he was keeping a "checklist" of aggressive U.S. policies that remained in place, including torture and "rendition" of terrorist suspects to allied countries, which he alleged was ongoing.

A newly disclosed document reveals that Vatican officials instructed the bishops of Ireland in 1997 that they must not adopt a policy of reporting priests suspected of child abuse to the police or civil authorities.

The document appears to contradict Vatican claims that the hierarchy in Rome never determined the actions of local bishops in abuse cases, and that the church did not impede criminal investigations of accused child abusers.

Before President Reagan urged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall," and even before President Kennedy told Americans to ask "what you can do for your country," President Dwight D. Eisenhower coined his own phrase about "the military-industrial complex."

That statement, spoken just days before Eisenhower left office in 1961, was his warning to the nation. At the time, the United States was sitting atop a huge military establishment built from its participation in three major wars. This buildup led Eisenhower to caution against the misplacement of power and influence of the military.

The Dimona complex in the Negev desert is famous as the heavily guarded heart of Israel’s never-acknowledged nuclear arms program, where neat rows of factories make atomic fuel for the arsenal.

Over the past two years, according to intelligence and military experts familiar with its operations, Dimona has taken on a new, equally secret role — as a critical testing ground in a joint American and Israeli effort to undermine Iran’s efforts to make a bomb of its own.

Ronald Reagan's son thinks his father's Alzheimer's disease began while he was president, he writes in a new memoir. In "My Father at 100," which is being released Tuesday, Ron Reagan says he saw evidence that his father was losing his mental edge in his first term, Politico reports.

"Today, we are aware that the physiological and neurological changes associated with Alzheimer's can be in evidence years, even decades, before identifiable symptoms arise," the younger Reagan wrote. "The question ... of whether my father suffered from the beginning stages of Alzheimer's while in office more or less answers itself."

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