The myth of altruism and generosity surrounding Mother Teresa is dispelled in a paper by Serge Larivée and Genevieve Chenard of University of Montreal's Department of Psychoeducation and Carole Sénéchal of the University of Ottawa's Faculty of Education.

The paper will be published in the March issue of the journal Studies in Religion/Sciences religieuses and is an analysis of the published writings about Mother Teresa. Like the journalist and author Christopher Hitchens, who is amply quoted in their analysis, the researchers conclude that her hallowed image - which does not stand up to analysis of the facts - was constructed, and that her beatification was orchestrated by an effective media relations campaign.

"While looking for documentation on the phenomenon of altruism for a seminar on ethics, one of us stumbled upon the life and work of one of Catholic Church's most celebrated woman and now part of our collective imagination - Mother Teresa - whose real name was Agnes Gonxha," says Professor Larivée, who led the research. "The description was so ecstatic that it piqued our curiosity and pushed us to research further."

As a result, the three researchers collected 502 documents on the life and work of Mother Teresa. After eliminating 195 duplicates, they consulted 287 documents to conduct their analysis, representing 96% of the literature on the founder of the Order of the Missionaries of Charity (OMC). Facts debunk the myth of Mother Teresa

In their article, Serge Larivée and his colleagues also cite a number of problems not take into account by the Vatican in Mother Teresa's beatification process, such as "her rather dubious way of caring for the sick, her questionable political contacts, her suspicious management of the enormous sums of money she received, and her overly dogmatic views regarding, in particular, abortion, contraception, and divorce."

Multiple public information requests for the results of an extensive inquiry into the treatment of soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have been denied according to NBC News, but the Army says the results will be made public sooner or later.

The probe centers on Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, Washington, where some soldiers claim their PTSD diagnoses have been wrongly changed to save the government money. The review was launched after an Army psychiatrist at Madigan gave a lecture citing a memo that claims veterans suffering from PTSD could get up to $1.5 million in health benefits over their lifetimes.

"The U.S. Army private accused of providing secret documents to the WikiLeaks website pleaded guilty on Thursday to misusing classified material he felt "should become public," but denied the top charge of aiding the enemy."*

Bradley Manning is facing prosecution for giving military information to Wikileaks. He's plead guilty to some charges. He maintains that he did release the information and that he did it because he wanted to help the country. What will happen with the other treasonous charges against him that could net a life sentence? Cenk Uygur breaks it down.

Did you pay sales tax on the last item you bought on the Internet? Unless it was from Amazon, you probably did not. You may soon though if a gaggle of U.S. lawmakers working hand-in-hand with big business get their way.

And if you're an online retailer, you may have to collect and remit sales taxes for all fifty states no matter where your online business resides. But don't worry, lawmakers want to force all states to adopt the same standard for sales taxes, thus making it easier for you to comply.

Earlier this month, a large collection of lawmakers introduced the Marketplace Fairness Act in both the Senate (S. 336) and the House (H.R. 684). Lawmakers who oppose the measure have renamed it more appropriately, the "National Internet Tax Mandate" because that's what it is.

Bradley Manning, the US Army intelligence officer accused of passing sensitive military documents to whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, has pleaded guilty to ten separate charges. The army, however, will pursue the grave charge of aiding the enemy.

Although the army judge has accepted Manning's guilty pleas on ten counts, the remaining 12 charges are still to be reviewed. The army accuses Manning, 25, of aiding the enemy. If convicted, he could face a life sentence.

Private First Manning told a military court that he was responsible for uploading a trove of material to the website and pleaded guilty to 10 counts, RT's Andrew Blake reported from the courtroom.

After his plea was read to the court, Pfc Manning for the first time formally admitted guilt in the court, more than 1,000 days after being arrested. Reading a 35-page statement from his seat before Col. Denise Lind, Manning explained why exactly he risked his life to publish state-secrets

Washington -- Bob Woodward isn't the only person who's received threats for airing the Obama administration's dirty laundry. It seems anyone is a potential target of the White House these days - even former senior members of the Clinton administration.

A day after Woodward's claim that a senior White House official had told him he would "regret" writing a column criticizing President Obama's stance on the sequester, Lanny Davis, a longtime close advisor to President Bill Clinton, told WMAL's Mornings on the Mall Thursday he had received similar threats for newspaper columns he had written about Obama in the Washington Times.

Davis told WMAL that his editor, John Solomon, "received a phone call from a senior Obama White House official who didn't like some of my columns, even though I'm a supporter of Obama. I couldn't imagine why this call was made." Davis says the Obama aide told Solomon, "that if he continued to run my columns, he would lose, or his reporters would lose their White House credentials."

U.S. politicians have cried wolf over austerity long enough for the public to ignore them. A perfect time, then, for politicians to actually unleash the wolves. Barring an unlikely last minute deal, here's a short list of some of the massive, national bi-partisan-created austerity cuts, according to the New York Times:

• 600,000 food stamp recipients will be cut from the program
• Massive education cuts. According to President Obama:

"Once these cuts take effect thousands of teachers and educators will be laid off and tens of thousands of parents will have to scramble to find child care for their kids. "

• 12 billion in Medicare cuts (more to come after 2013)
• Millions receiving unemployment will see their checks cut by 11% (an average of 132 a month)
• Federal funds to state governments will be cut, creating even more deficits for states and municipalities, and thus more localized cuts (the states have already made austerity cuts of $337 billion!)
• Also, 700,000 jobs are expected to be loss, while 70,000 kids are also expected to be kicked off of 'Head Start'.

And this is just for 2013. The current plan for the austerity "sequester" cuts is $100 billion of federal cuts every year for ten years, equaling massive cuts to jobs, Medicare, education, and completely destroying federally funded social programs.

Deutsche Bank, long coddled by the German government, is mired in a swamp of costly "matters," such as the Libor rate-rigging scandal or the carbon-trading tax-fraud scandal that broke with a televised raid by 500 police officers on its headquarters.

It's writing down assets and setting up reserves to settle these allegations. Co-CEO Jürgen Fitschen insinuated more gloom was to come. The bank, he said, would "be confronted with more developments in these and other matters" [The Putrid Smell Suddenly Emanating From European Banks].

And now, one of these other matters seeped to the surface: the bank had known for years about the impact of commodities speculation on food prices and the havoc it wreaked on people in poor countries. And it had lied to the German Parliament about it.

On June 27, 2012, David Folkerts-Landau, head of Deutsche Bank's DB Research, educated a parliamentary commission about the dire consequences of food price inflation - and what didn't cause it.

The big story buried in all the commentary about the US government's drone policy is that the old algorithm of the liberal state no longer works. Focusing on drones is almost a distraction, if it weren't for the number of men, women and children they have killed in only a few years. What we should focus on is the deeper condition that enables the drone policy, and so much more, and that is the sharp increase in unaccountable executive power, no matter what party is in power.

The 1960s and the 1970s saw the making of laws that called for the executive branch of government to be more responsive to basic principles of a division of power and accountability to citizens. Many of its owners were curtailed by the legislative. With Reagan, Clinton and especially Bush-Cheney, many of these laws were violated under the claim of a state of exception due to the "War on Terror".

What we are facing is a profound degradation of the liberal state. Drone killings and unlawful imprisonment are at one end of that spectrum of degradation, and the rise of the power, economic destructions and unaccountability of the financial sector are at the other end.

Injustices do not become any less unjust the longer they are not addressed, and when it comes to the "war on terror" launched by President Bush following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, those injustices continue to fester, and to poison America's soul.

One of those injustices is Guantánamo, where 166 men are still imprisoned, even though 86 of them were cleared for release by a task force established by the President four years ago, and another is Bagram in Afghanistan (renamed and rebranded the Parwan Detention Facility), where the Geneva Conventions were torn up by George W. Bush, and have not been reinstated, and where foreign prisoners seized elsewhere and rendered to US custody in Afghanistan remain imprisoned. Some of these men have been held for as long as the men in Guantánamo, but without being allowed the rights to be visited by civilian lawyers, which the men in Cuba were twice granted by the Supreme Court - in 2004 and 2008 - even if those rights have now been taken away by judges in the Court of Appeals in Washington D.C., demonstrating a susceptibility to the general hysteria regarding the "war on terror," rather than a desire to bring justice to the men in Guantánamo.