Like a simple parlor trick, the networks are able to make skeptical scientists vanish, at least from the eyes of their viewers.

In some cases, the broadcast networks have failed to include such scientists for years, while including alarmist scientists within the past six months. ABC, CBS and NBC's lengthy omission of scientists critical of global warming alarmism propped up the myth of a scientific consensus, despite the fact that many scientists and thousands of peer-reviewed studies disagree.

Newsweek, the weekly magazine once thought to be on journalistic life support, returns to print life Friday with a bang.

Its cover piece, which ran online Thursday, revealed the unconfirmed identity of the elusive founder of crypto-currency Bitcoin, birthing a literal interpretation of reporters chasing a story.

In a bizarre sequence, reporters at other news outlets rushed Thursday to the house belonging to Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto in Temple City, Calif., near Los Angeles, and waited to confirm Newsweek's piece. As Nakamoto, who later seemed to be denying his role in Bitcoin, fled the throng with a reporter from the Associated Press, a chase ensued through the freeways of Los Angeles.

"It's been overwhelming," says Newsweek editor Jim Impoco, a veteran business journalist who previously worked for Fortune, Reuters, the AP and The New York Times. "I was happy to have low expectations, and I think we over-delivered."

A Japanese American man thought to be the reclusive multi-millionaire father of Bitcoin emerged from a modest Southern California home and denied involvement with the digital currency before leading reporters on a freeway car chase to the local headquarters of the Associated Press.

Satoshi Nakamoto, a name known to legions of bitcoin traders, practitioners and boosters around the world, appeared to lose his anonymity on Thursday after Newsweek published a story that said he lived in Temple City, California, just east of Los Angeles.

© Sally Kohn or Unknown
Sally Kohn looks like she got a haircut from a meat grinder.

Editor's note: Sally Kohn is a progressive activist, columnist and television commentator. Follow her on Twitter @sallykohn.

(CNN) -- While hosting CNN's Crossfire this week, I said: "Republicans are practically cheering for Vladimir Putin today. He's given them a new excuse to bash President Obama."



I pointed out that Republicans have been slamming Obama for his handling of the Ukraine crisis even though I have not heard a single, specific way in which they would handle the situation differently. No new ideas, just new insults.


The howls came quickly, and my assertion has been repeatedlyattacked and mischaracterized. But the evidence to support it is, troublingly, everywhere.


I'm not saying Republicans are pro-Putin or that they want him to invade Ukraine. But they certainly have - conveniently, even gleefully -- found a good way to put Putin's actions to political use at home. Just listen to former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani on Monday: "Putin decides what he wants to do and he does it in half a day... he makes a decision and he executes it. Quickly. Then everybody reacts. That's what you call a leader."


And Sarah Palin: "People are looking at Putin as one who wrestles bears and drills for oil; they look at our President as one who wears mom jeans and equivocates and bloviates."

A CNN team in Crimea was told to stop broadcasting on Thursday or they'd be kicked out of their hotel.

CNN International correspondent Anna Coren told Anderson Cooper her team was told by the management of the hotel they are staying in that unless they stopped broadcasting the hotel would kick them out.

"Really bizarre, just a couple of hours ago the management of our hotel where we've been staying for over a week, we've got a team here, told us we basically have to shut down our operation or we'd be kicked out. We asked for the reason, they didn't give us one. Very unusual, basically said stop broadcasting or we'll kick you out,' Coren said.

Coren told Cooper her team got the "very strong feeling" the hotel was getting pressured.

"They're getting pressured, whether it be from local milita, who obviously had the major run in with the UN official envoy Robert Serry yesterday and basically rode him out of the country, or whether it came from the new Crimean government which as we know is very much pro-Russian," Coren said.

In the midst of a flurry of court cases and Senate activity over sexual assault in the military, the news that the Army's top sexual assault prosecutor assaulted a woman himself is probably not the kind of thing Army officials are excited about having to address. Well, whoops - here we go anyway.

Stars and Stripes reports that a female lawyer who worked for Lt. Col. Joseph "Jay" Morse recently alleged that Morse "groped her and tried to kiss her," most appropriately, at a sexual assault legal conference in 2011. While sources say no official charges have been filed against Morse, he was suspended from his position as Chief of the Trial Counsel Assistance Program (a position he was appointed to after the incident in question) when the woman came forward with her claim. An Army official revealed to Stars and Stripes that the case is currently being investigated.

According to his bio on the military's Response Systems to Sexual Assault Panel website, Morse oversaw "twenty-three Special Victim Prosecutors, all criminal law experts focusing on the prosecution of crimes involving sexual assault, domestic violence, and children as victims" in his role.

A Minnesota public high school was so committed to obeying its fire drill policy to the exact letter of the law that it forced a female student - dressed only in a swimsuit, and sopping wet - to stand outside in the freezing cold for ten minutes. As a result, she suffered frostbite.

Administrators wouldn't let the student retrieve her clothes, sit in a car or wait inside another building, according to WCCO.

The trouble began when a small science experiment triggered the fire alarm at Como Park Senior High School in St. Paul, Minnesota. Fourteen-year-old Kayona Hagen-Tietz was swimming in the school pool for health class at the time. Her clothes were in her locker, and a teacher told her that there was no time for her to change. Hagen-Tietz was rushed outside - still wet and dressed in only swimsuit.

It was 5 degrees below zero in St. Paul that day. With the windchill, it was 25 degrees below zero.

Hagen-Tietz asked to wait inside an employee's car, or at the elementary school across the street. But administrators believed that this would violate official policy, and could get the school in trouble, so they opted to simply let the girl freeze.

Her fellow classmates, at least, huddled around her to try to keep her warm. And one teacher did eventually lend her a coat.

Still, Hagen-Tietz came down with frostbite on her feet, according to her mother, Eva Tietz, who took her to the doctor as soon as she found out what had happened.

Stunning allegations are emerging about Bill Gothard, who is a big deal in conservative Protestant homeschooling circles. Here is a new allegation from a woman, "Charlotte" (she's pictured), who says she was raped by her conservative pastor father at age eight, and later, at 16, sent to work at Gothard's headquarters at Gothard's request. Excerpt:

He wanted all the details of my past sexual experiences. He asked me a lot about how much I had let my boyfriend touch me, how we kissed - it went on and on. He seemed to get pleasure from pulling every detail out of me. We would then kneel at the couch and pray. I remember how my knees would hurt after a while. He made me confess, often holding my hand. He liked to make me cry over it. Bill told me that God had a better plan for me.

He knew what my father had done to me, but he called me into repentance for my own sins without confronting my father or addressing his sin. I was a temptation to men; Bill Gothard told me that I had tempted my own father.

I craved Bill's attention but felt guilty about the increasing touches he gave me. I wanted a relationship with a man that was like a relationship with a father. Bill Gothard gave me that feeling of being worth something.

A property owner in Bridgeport, Michigan was addressing his grievances at the monthly township board meeting when he went over the 3 minutes allowed for public comment. The police went to remove him from the meeting and when he didn't comply in a fast enough manner for them, it sounded like they said he was under arrest for disturbing the peace.

Congressional aides involved in preparing the Senate Intelligence Committee's unreleased study of the CIA's secret interrogation and detention program walked out of the spy agency's fortress-like headquarters with classified documents that the CIA contended they weren't authorized to have, McClatchy has learned.

After the CIA confronted the panel in January about the removal of the material last fall, panel staff concluded that the agency had monitored computers they'd been given to use in a high-security research room at the CIA campus in Langley, Va., a McClatchy investigation found.

It remained unclear Wednesday if the monitoring, the unauthorized removal of classified material or another matter were the subject of a recent CIA request to the Justice Department for an investigation into alleged malfeasance in connection with the committee's top-secret study.

The documents removed from the agency included a draft of an internal CIA review that at least one lawmaker has publicly said showed that agency leaders misled the Intelligence Committee in disputing some of the committee report's findings, according to a knowledgeable person who requested anonymity because of the matter's extraordinary sensitivity.

In a combative statement issued Wednesday evening, CIA Director John Brennan chastised unidentified senators for making "spurious allegations about CIA actions that are wholly unsupported by the facts.

"I am very confident that the appropriate authorities reviewing this matter will determine where wrongdoing, if any, occurred in either the executive branch or legislative branch," he said in an apparent reference to the request for a Justice Department investigation. "Until then, I would encourage others to refrain from outbursts that do a disservice to the important relationship that needs to be maintained between intelligence officials and congressional overseers."

The removal of the documents is the focus of an intense legal dispute between the CIA and its congressional overseers, said several people who also cited the matter's sensitivity in asking to remain anonymous.

Some committee members regard the monitoring as a possible violation of the law and contend that their oversight powers give them the right to the documents that were removed. On the other hand, the CIA considers the removal as a massive security breach because the agency doesn't believe that the committee had a right to those particular materials.