LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Discovery Channel is re-evaluating one of its most popular series, "Man vs. Wild," after allegations surfaced that its survival-expert host was bunking in motels when he was supposed to be braving the great outdoors.

The network issued a statement Monday in response to an investigation launched by British television network Channel 4, which carries the program under the title "Born Survivor: Bear Grylls." Channel 4 confirmed that host Bear Grylls had partaken of indoor accommodations on at least two occasions when his series had depicted him spending the night in the wild.

"Discovery Communications has learned that isolated elements of the 'Man vs. Wild' show in some episodes were not natural to the environment, and that for health and safety concerns the crew and host received some survival assistance while in the field," the network said in a statement.

The production company behind the series, Diverse Television, is cooperating with the Channel 4 investigation, which likely will address a range of allegations that called into question "Wild's" authenticity.

In each episode of the series, Grylls is airlifted into the wilderness with only a few tools to aid in his survival, such as a flint or water bottle. A former British special forces soldier, Grylls is typically depicted as subsisting for several days without intervention or interruption while cameramen follow him offscreen. He has been stranded all over the globe, including Utah's Moab desert and the Costa Rican rain forest.

But among the charges made against Grylls is that a raft he is depicted as having built himself actually was constructed and then disassembled by consultants to the show in order for the host to put it together. In another episode, Grylls happens upon what are referred to as wild horses that were said to be brought in from a trekking station.

The brouhaha could become a PR nightmare for the channel, which in recent years has abandoned contrived unscripted formats in favor of the scientific explorations that first made the Discovery brand famous. "Wild" in particular has emerged as one of its main attractions during the past two seasons.

But the company gave no indication about parting ways with the series, only making certain unspecified alterations.

"Moving forward, the program will be 100% transparent and all elements of the filming will be explained upfront to our viewers," Discovery said. "In addition, shows that are to be repeated will be edited appropriately. Bear Grylls is a world-class adventurer and a terrific talent."

A spokeswoman for Discovery declined to elaborate on what exact measures will be taken to address the concerns raised about "Wild."

Among the likely possibilities: a disclaimer that will precede each episode explaining that some of the events being depicted are dramatized.

On July 13, Grylls spoke at the Television Critics Assn. summer press tour in Los Angeles about production of the series but gave little hint of any shenanigans behind the scenes. At one point, he described what it was like to bed down in the wild.

"Often at nighttime, they will get helicoptered out, and they might have to recharge camera batteries and hand in footage, and then they leave me a little minicamera for the night stuff, and they come and rejoin me in the morning," he said.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Most Americans see President George W. Bush as too inflexible on the war in Iraq and prefer that the Democratic-run Congress have the final word on when to withdraw U.S. forces, a Washington Post/ABC News poll showed on Monday.

Nearly 80 percent of those polled said Bush is not willing enough to change policies over the unpopular war that has taken a huge toll on his approval ratings, the Post reported.

The poll was conducted last week, after Senate Democrats failed to advance a plan that would force Bush to withdraw U.S. combat troops from Iraq by April 2008.

More than six in 10 Americans -- 62 percent -- said Congress should have the final say on when to pull out U.S. forces, compared with 31 percent who said the decision should rest with Bush, the poll showed.

A narrow majority, 55 percent, said they supported the proposed pullout plan, which the Senate may not consider again until after its August recess.

The percentage of Americans seeing Bush as too rigid on Iraq has climbed 12 percentage points since December, the Post said.

It said Bush's approval rating of 33 percent matched his all-time low, with 65 percent disapproving. In previous Post/ABC polls, Bush was also at the 33 percent mark in May 2006 and January 2007.

Congress did not rate much better with a 37 percent approval and 60 percent disapproval rating, which the Post said was equal to dissatisfaction late last year when Republicans controlled Congress.

Other recent polls have shown Bush's approval rating below 30 percent and Congress even lower.

But on the issue of Iraq, the Post/ABC poll showed that the public stands with Congress.

Fifty-five percent said they trusted congressional Democrats on the war, compared with 32 percent who said they trusted Bush, the Post said.

The poll of 1,125 adults was conducted on July 18-21 and had a three-point margin of error.

SAN FRANCISCO, Jul 23 (OneWorld) - Human rights organizations are reacting coldly to President George W. Bush's executive order forbidding the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from torturing, humiliating, or abusing detainees in its once-secret interrogation program.

"It's incredibly vague to the point of being useless as a way to stop torture," said Shayana Kadidal, an attorney at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, who represents detainees held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Bush's five page executive order issued Friday bars CIA agents from acts of violence serious enough to be comparable to murder, torture, mutilation, and cruel or inhumane treatment.

It also bars willful or outrageous acts that any reasonable person would deem "to be beyond the bounds of human decency, such as sexual or sexually indecent acts undertaken for the purpose of humiliation, forcing the individual to perform sexual acts or to pose sexually, [and] threatening the individual with sexual mutilation."

But the order does not explicitly forbid sleep deprivation or mock drowning (often called waterboarding), leaving Kadidal to believe it was written "intentionally to give leeway" to agents and "provide them with a legal defense if charged with torture."

"We're not pleased with it at all," added John Sifton, senior researcher at New York-based Human Rights Watch, which believes the CIA program should be scrapped.

"The bigger issue is that this order continues to formalize a detention system that is outside the rule of law," he told OneWorld.

Detainees held by the CIA, he noted, "have no access to a lawyer, no family visits, and no oversight by the International Committee of the Red Cross. They're held indefinitely. It's an enforced disappearance of a person: a person is thrown into a black hole and no one knows where they are."

It's not known how many people have been arrested by the CIA and secretly detained at so-called "black sites" around the world.

After published newspaper reports appeared on the program last September, Bush confirmed its existence but would not disclose how many individuals were secretly detained.

Human rights organizations have been able to document some of the cases, however.

Last month, six major human rights groups -- Amnesty International, Cageprisoners, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law, Human Rights Watch, and Reprieve -- published a report called "Off the Record" identifying 39 individuals believed to have been held at some point by the United States in secret sites.

All but one remain missing.

Among those in the report is Ali Abdul-Hamid al-Fakhiri, a Libyan national who allegedly ran a training camp in Afghanistan from 1995 to 2000. After being apprehended by Pakistani authorities in November 2001, al-Fakhiri was turned over to the CIA in January 2002.

According to Human Rights Watch, the U.S. government moved al-Fakhiri from a U.S. base in Afghanistan to the U.S.S. Bataan to Egypt and then back to a secret U.S. detention facility in Afghanistan in 2003. Al-Fakhiri was reportedly transferred out of Afghanistan in late 2003 to a secret U.S. detention facility and then transferred to Libya in late 2005 or early 2006. On December 5, 2005, ABC News reported that he had been held in a secret U.S. detention facility in Poland.

"Al-Fakhiri is now reportedly held in isolation in Tripoli," the six-group report reads, "and is said to be suffering from tuberculosis and to be in very poor health. At least one U.S. official has acknowledged U.S. involvement in elements of al-Fakhiri's treatment, including questioning al-Fakhiri and transferring al-Fakhiri to a third country for interrogation.

"On July 19, 2006 his name was included in the 'Terrorists No Longer a Threat' List," the report continues. "No other information about al-Fakhiri's fate has been released by the U.S. government, and his whereabouts remain officially unexplained."

Human Rights Watch's Sifton believes the complex system of secret prisons abroad is unnecessary.

"We have a federal criminal code that dealt with the KKK and the Italian mafia," he said. "The federal courts are also more than able to deal with any of these alleged terrorists just like we indicted the people who carried out the 1998 Embassy bombings or the 1993 World Trade Center bombings."

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HOUSTON (Reuters) - Growing up in East Texas, Dian Avriett loved to watch the turtles sunning on the banks of local rivers and lakes. But now she says it's rare to see them on those same waterways, and the reason is clear -- China's taste for Texas turtle meat.

Hundreds of thousands have been sold to dealers who ship the animals to Asia where the meat is considered a delicacy with health benefits. Some also fetch high prices around the world as pets.

"In Texas, anyone with a $50 dollar non-game permit can take as many (turtles) as they want," said Avriett, who chairs the Piney Woods group of the Sierra Club.

Global turtle populations are at risk, but conservationists said the problem is growing acute in Texas where there are no limits on the collection of unprotected varieties.

An average of 94,442 turtles per year are taken by dealers, mostly for export from the state, according to figures from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD).

Data from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request showed more than 267,000 wild turtles were exported to Hong Kong fromDallas from 2002 to 2005, said Chris Jones, an environmental attorney who has lobbied for turtle protections.

Although there are no state-wide statistics showing declines in Texas turtle population, Jones said abundant anecdotal evidence exists. For example in one section of the Rio Grande river that had been a trap site, an adult turtle has not been seen in 10 years.

"They are taking them so fast the scientists can't study them," Jones said.

Now some varieties including the Texas river cooter could have some protection because the TPWD commissioners on May 24 approved a measure to prohibit the collection of wild turtles on public land.

But under that regulation, which is not yet on the books as law, collectors may harvest three varieties of turtles on private land; the red-eared slider, the common snapping turtle and five types of soft-shell turtles.

SLOW GOING

Turtles need protection from overharvesting because they are slow to mature and their young have a high mortality rate, said Lee Fitzgerald, an associate professor of herpetology at Texas A&M University who has published research on the Texas turtle trade.

"Their population can't take the removal of adults," said Fitzgerald. "If it continues, the population will collapse."

For example he said it takes a female box turtle 15 years to reach sexual maturity. Once at that stage she lays four or five eggs, and most of the hatchlings will not survive.

But Bob Popplewell, the state's largest exporter of live turtles to Asia, disagrees. He said there are plenty of turtles in Texas. And many are a nuisance to ranchers who say the turtles eat fish eggs and birds, and overcrowd their lakes and ponds, he said.

"People tell me they don't want one nasty, stinking turtle in their lake," said Popplewell, who is known as "Bayou Bob." "I've seen a decent-sized snapper pull down a full-grown goose. They are trained, stealthy predators."

Popplewell, who said he has received threats from animal rights activists, works with a network of hundreds of trappers across Texas who can earn up to $20 an hour for their work.

Once snared in net traps, the turtles are shipped to Asia by plane, he said.

The parties are divided over whether the state's proposed limits will protect the turtle population. Popplewell said 99 percent of the turtles his people harvest come from private lakes, so the changes will have little effect on his business.

Texas A&M's Fitzgerald described the protection measure as a step in the right direction, while conservationists say there should be a total ban on commercial turtle collection.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama criticized recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions as hypocritical and inconsistent on Tuesday, saying a ruling upholding a late-term abortion ban was part of a concerted effort to roll back women's rights.

Obama and Democratic White House rival Hillary Clinton, making separate appearances at a conference of abortion rights activists, pointed with pride to their Senate votes against the confirmation of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito.

The two leading Democrats in the 2008 presidential race courted women activists at the conference and said President George W. Bush was taking direct aim at overturning the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion.

Obama said the court's 5-4 rulings to uphold the late-term abortion ban, make it harder for women to sue over pay discrimination and strike down race-based school assignment programs were part an effort "to steadily roll back the hard-won rights of American women."

"There is an inconsistency, and I believe a hypocrisy, in terms of how we see these decisions being issued," the Illinois senator said of the Supreme Court.

"When the science is inconvenient, when the facts don't match up with the ideology, they are cast aside," he said.

Analysts say the top U.S. federal court, led by Roberts and with its newest member Alito, shifted sharply to the right in the last session. Clinton accused Bush of pursuing a conservative political agenda through judicial nominations.

"At the top of the list was this effort to try to overturn Roe vs Wade or at least try to chip away at it," Clinton said, adding the Bush administration has waged war against contraception education and "set out from Day One to dismantle reproduction rights around the world."

Also appearing at the conference sponsored by the action fund of Planned Parenthood, a leading provider of reproductive services including abortion, was Elizabeth Edwards, wife of Democratic presidential contender John Edwards.

Clinton, a New York senator, leads Democratic White House contenders six months before the first votes in the nominating race and 16 months before the November 2008 election. Polls show her with large leads among Democratic women voters.

Both she and Obama said they would take a different approach in their Supreme Court appointments than Bush.

"I would appoint well-qualified judges who really respect the Constitution," Clinton said.

Obama said he would look into the heart of a potential Supreme Court nominee. "We need somebody who's got the empathy to recognize what it's like to be a young teen-aged mom," he said.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon lent support on Tuesday to President George W. Bush on Iraq, saying violence there was a problem for all countries.

As Bush hosted Ban at the White House, the U.N. chief also welcomed the president's plan to hold a high-level meeting on the Middle East peace process in the autumn.

"As for the Iraqi situation, this is the problem of the whole world," Ban said, promising U.N help with rebuilding Iraq politically, economically and socially.

On Monday, Ban warned against an "abrupt withdrawal" by U.S. forces from Iraq and said the international community should not abandon the Iraqi people, shocking some U.N. officials for inserting himself into the U.S. debate on the war.

The show of support comes as Bush faces the American public's growing frustration with the Iraq war and rising pressure even from within his own Republican Party for a U.S. pullout.

The two discussed climate change, said Ban, who invited Bush to participate in a conference on the environment that he has called for September, on the sidelines of the annual U.N. General Assembly.

Bush looks forward to attending the September 24 event, a White House spokesman said later.

Climate change is a contentious issue in the Bush administration, which has fought mandatory caps on the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming.

Ban said he was encouraged by Bush's initiatives on climate change at last month's G8 summit, where world leaders agreed to pursue substantial cuts in greenhouse gases.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Veterans Affairs Secretary James Nicholson said on Tuesday he would step down, leaving an agency criticized for the care provided to veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Nicholson, whose resignation is effective no later than October 1, said he wanted to return to the private sector.

"This coming February, I turn 70 years old, and I feel it is time for me to get back into business, while I still can," he said in a prepared statement.

Nicholson was sworn in on February 1, 2005. He has also served in the Bush administration as U.S. ambassador to the Vatican and was a former chairman of the Republican National Committee.

The Veterans Affairs Department (VA) and Pentagon have faced increasing criticism this year for the quality and level of care received by veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Reports have shown that the rise in post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury among returning troops has not been met with more resources to deal with mental health problems.

Some critics also say the Veterans Affairs Department is still unprepared and lacks the budget to care for a coming wave of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who will draw on veterans care benefits when they leave the military.

Also, during Nicholson's tenure, personal information on 26.5 million U.S. veterans was stolen from an agency employee who took the data home without authorization. That laptop was later recovered.

"It is clear that Secretary Nicholson is leaving the VA worse off than he found it," said Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, a Democrat running for president.

"He oversaw one of the most tumultuous periods in recent VA history, including billion-dollar budget shortfalls, ongoing cuts in services to certain groups of veterans, and the continuation of a dysfunctional bureaucracy that keeps many veterans from getting the disability benefits they deserve."

White House spokesman Tony Snow said Nicholson could have served longer had he wanted to.

"He certainly could have served longer if he had so desired," Snow said.

"There's no back story here. He called up, said he wanted to leave and move on, and the president accepted his resignation."

(Additional reporting by Tabassum Zakaria)

SEATTLE - Duncan M. McDonald is finally off the voter rolls after the Australian shepherd-terrier mix was sent absentee ballots for three elections.

King County Elections Director Sherril Huff said she canceled the voter registration Tuesday for the dog owned by Jane K. Balogh, 66, who registered her pet to protest a change in the law that she said made it too easy for non-citizens to cast ballots.

Balogh put her phone bill in the dog's name, then used that as identification when she mailed in the registration form in April 2006. In November, she wrote "VOID" across Duncan's ballot and returned it with an image of a paw print on the signature line.

She admitted the ruse when an election official called, but the dog was still sent absentee ballots for school bond elections in February and May.

"Quite frankly, the process did take too long, and it should have been addressed after the November election," said Bobbie Egan, an elections office spokeswoman.

County election procedures are being reviewed to provide speedier action against voting fraud, Egan said.

The removal came three weeks after Balogh was charged in King County Superior Court with making a false or misleading statement to a public servant, a misdemeanor. She pleaded not guilty to the charge in June.

A sheriff's investigator wrote that she admitted registering the dog under false pretenses "to make a point that anyone could vote, even an animal."

A preliminary court hearing was pending.

LONDON - Borders is removing "Tintin in the Congo" from the children's section of its British stores, after a customer complained the comic work was racist, the company said Thursday.

David Enright, a London-based human-rights lawyer, was shopping at Borders with his family when he came upon the book, first published in 1931, and opened it to find what he characterized as racist abuse.

"The material suggests to (children) that Africans are subhuman, that they are imbeciles, that they're half savage," Enright said in a telephone interview.

"My black wife, who actually comes from Africa originally, is sitting there with my boys and I'm about to hand this book to them.... What message am I sending to them? That my wife is a monkey, that they are monkeys?"

The book is the second in a series of 23 tracing the adventures of Tintin, an intrepid reporter, and his dog, Snowy. The series has sold 220 million copies worldwide and been translated in 77 languages.

But "Tintin in the Congo" has been widely criticized as racist by fans and critics alike.

In it, Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi depicts the white hero's adventures in the Congo against the backdrop of an idiotic, chimpanzee-like native population that eventually comes to worship Tintin — and his dog — as gods.

Remi later said he was embarrassed by the book, and some editions have had the more objectionable content removed. When an unexpurgated edition was brought out in Britain in 2005, it came wrapped with a warning and was written with a forward explaining the work's colonial context.

Enright, who said he first complained to Borders and Britain's Commission for Racial Equality about a month ago, argued such a warning was not enough.

"Whether it's got a piece of flimsy paper around it or not, it's irrelevant, it's in the children's section," he said, adding that he felt the book should be treated like pornography or anti-Semitic literature and not displayed in mainstream bookstores at all.

Borders agreed to move the book to its adult graphic novels section, but said in a statement it would continue to sell it.

The Commission for Racial Equality backed Enright, saying in a statement Thursday that the book was full of "hideous racial prejudice."

"The only place that it might be acceptable for this to be displayed would be in a museum, with a big sign saying `old fashioned, racist claptrap.'"