The media's ability to confuse celebrity "news" with war and economic disaster grows stronger.

As North Korea ramped up its threats to attack South Korea, CNN reassured its viewers that a nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula would have "no effect whatsoever" on its Whitney Houston coverage. (The Borowitz Report)

Whitney even in death outranks fighting in Syria, wherever that is. Right wing preachers distract their electorate (congregations) by linking God to political issues.

TV appeals by Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell sucked millions of dollars from their flocks. God spoke to them, they said. "God may have allowed what the nation deserved because of moral decay," Falwell warned. "God wants you to succeed in business," he preached. (Quest for Power: The Origins of the New American Right, film by Landau and Frank Diamand 1982)

Petition: Investigate betrayal of the Nobel Peace Prize
Dear Members of Stockholm's County Administrative Board:
The signers of this petition include an array of peace groups and peace activists based in the United States.

The undersigned wish to endorse and support the investigation that Stockholm’s County Administrative Board has reportedly begun based on it supervisory role over the Nobel Foundation and information received from Norwegian peace researcher/author Fredrik Heffermehl. We understand your Board has formally asked the Nobel Foundation to respond to allegations that the peace prize no longer reflects Nobel's will that the purpose of the prize was to diminish the role of military power in international relations. According to Heffermehl, “Nobel called it a prize for the champions of peace,…and it's indisputable that (Nobel) had in mind the peace movement, the movement which is actively pursuing a new global order ... where nations safely can drop national armaments.” br>
The undersigned non-profit peace organizations and activists base their endorsement of your inquiry on the following facts: br>

The net is closing around media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Investigators in London report that senior News Corp. employees authorized hundreds of bribes to police officers and other government officials.1 And on Wednesday his disgraced son James stepped down from his role as executive chairman of News International.

But these reports of rampant criminal behavior have yet to trigger a prosecution of Murdoch here in the U.S., where executives can be held liable for systematically bribing foreign officials.2

Don’t let Murdoch dodge justice.

Demand a full U.S. investigation of News Corp.

Murdoch’s henchmen are now trying to defang the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it unlawful for a U.S. corporation to pay off a foreign official for the purpose of advancing or protecting a business interest.3 Their goal? Stopping U.S. prosecutors from reining in the culture of corruption that has overtaken News Corp.

News Corp. has also sought to mute coverage of the phone-hacking and bribery scandals across its news empire.

No mail on Saturday, maybe, but small-town police get armored personnel carriers? Let’s take a moment — in the context of these bitter times, and President Obama’s recent austerity budget proposal — to celebrate the questions the residents of Keene, N.H., are asking their city council about the kind of world we’re creating.

First of all, the grotesque insult of “austerity” in the shadow of limitless military spending is destroying our national sanity. And the proposed cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, mental health services, environmental cleanup, National Parks programs and even, yeah, Saturday mail delivery are miniscule compared to the unmet social needs we haven’t yet begun to address in this country, in education, renewable energy and so much more. But we’re spending with reckless abandon to arm ourselves and our allies and provoke our enemies, and sometimes arm them as well, creating the sort of world no one (almost no one) wants: a world of endless war.

Twelve students at the University of Virginia on Saturday began a hunger strike for a living wage policy for university employees. They've taken this step after having exhausted just about every other possible approach over a period of 14 years. I was part of the campaign way back when it started. I can support the assertion made by hunger-striking student A.J. Chandra on Saturday, who said,

"We have not spent 14 years building up the case for a living wage. Rather, the campaign has made the case over and over again."

This is the latest in a long series of reports making the case.

Another striking student, David Flood, explained, "We have researched long enough. We have campaigned long enough. We have protested long enough. The time for a living wage is now."