Week In The News: ‘Torture Report,’ Cromnibus And The End Of #OccupyCentral

With guest host John Donvan. 

The explosive torture report. Rolling Stone and UVA. Ebola heroes.  Our weekly news roundtable goes behind the headlines.

The CIA, torture and the report that has sparked a war of words. A trillion dollar budget bill…what’s packed inside it.  Rolling Stone and the UVA rape accusation, a story unraveling still. The US tries but fails to rescue a hostage.  ISIS trying to sell a dead man’s body.  Hong Kong protesters, squeezed off the streets. GITMO prisoners — some get to leave. TIME names Ebola fighters for Person of the Year.  Bad weather on the West Coast has a name: the Pineapple Express.  Plus the Golden Globes.  This hour, On Point: our weekly news roundtable goes behind the headlines.
-- John Donvan

Michael Hirsh, national editor for POLITICO Magazine. (@michaelphirsh)

Kristen Welker, White House correspondent for NBC News. (@kwelkernbc)

Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst. (@JackBeattyNPR)

POLITICO Magazine: Michael Hayden Is Not Sorry — "All of us are really upset because we could have used a fair and balanced review of what we did. … The agency clearly admits it was fly-by-wire in the beginning. They were making it up as they went along and it should have been more well-prepared. They’ve freely admitted that. They said that early on they lacked the core competencies required to undertake an unprecedented program of detaining and interrogating suspected terrorists around the world. But then what the committee does is to take what I said out of context."

Washington Post: What’s in the spending bill? We skim it so you don’t have to -- "The $1.01 trillion spending bill unveiled late Tuesday will keep most of the federal government funded through next September — and it's packed with hundreds of policy instructions, known on Capitol Hill as "riders," that will upset or excite Democrats, Republicans and various special interest groups."

New York  Times: Hong Kong Police Begin Removing Protesters as Dismantling of Camp Proceeds -- "For 11 weeks, the street camp in the Admiralty district near the Hong Kong city government offices was an impassioned forum for public discontent, drawing in tens of thousands of people at its peak. But after the police received orders to clear the site, the end came swiftly. On Thursday morning, officers cleared a patch of the camp, and in the afternoon they massed, encircling the rest of the site and warning people to leave."