Media ArticlesExcerpts of Key Media Articles in Major Media
Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.
BP, the company in charge of the rig that exploded last month in the Gulf of Mexico, hasn't publicly divulged the results of tests on the extent of workers' exposure to evaporating oil or from the burning of crude over the gulf, even though researchers say those data are crucial in determining whether the conditions are safe. Moreover, the company isn't monitoring the extent of the spill and only reluctantly released videos of the spill site that could give scientists a clue to the amount of the oil in the gulf. BP's role as the primary source of information has raised questions about whether the government should intervene to gather such data and to publicize them and whether an adequate cleanup can be accomplished without the details of crude oil spreading across the gulf. The company also hasn't publicly released air sampling for oil spill workers although Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the agency in charge of monitoring compliance with worker safety regulations, is relying on the information and has urged it to do so.
Note: For lots more from major media sources on corporate and government collusion and corruption, click here and here.
Inside the humdrum offices of a tiny trading firm called Tradeworx, workers ... tend high-speed computers that typically buy and sell 80 million shares a day. But on the afternoon of May 6, as the stock market began to plunge in the “flash crash,” someone here walked up to one of those computers and typed the command HF STOP: sell everything and shutdown. Across the country, several of Tradeworx’s counterparts did the same. In a blink, some of the most powerful players in the stock market — high-frequency traders — went dark. The result sent chills through the financial world. After the brief 1,000-point plunge in the stock market that day, the growing role of high-frequency traders in the nation’s financial markets is drawing new scrutiny. Over the last decade, these high-tech operators have become sort of a shadow Wall Street — from New Jersey to Kansas City, from Texas to Chicago. Depending on whose estimates you believe, high-frequency traders account for 40 to 70 percent of all trading on every stock market in the country. Some of the biggest players trade more than a billion shares a day. These are short-term bets. Very short. The founder of Tradebot, in Kansas City, Mo., told students in 2008 that his firm typically held stocks for 11 seconds. Tradebot, one of the biggest high-frequency traders around, had not had a losing day in four years, he said.
Note: For key reports on the dubious practices which underlay the financial crisis and the impoverishment of the public treasury, click here.
A new analysis of U.S. health data links children's attention-deficit disorder with exposure to common pesticides used on fruits and vegetables. While the study couldn't prove that pesticides used in agriculture contribute to childhood learning problems, experts said the research is persuasive. "I would take it quite seriously," said Virginia Rauh of Columbia University, who has studied prenatal exposure to pesticides and wasn't involved in the new study. Children may be especially prone to the health risks of pesticides because they're still growing and they may consume more pesticide residue than adults relative to their body weight. The compounds turned up in the urine of 94 percent of the children. The kids with higher levels had increased chances of having ADHD, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, a common problem that causes students to have trouble in school. The findings were published Monday in Pediatrics. "Exposure is practically ubiquitous. We're all exposed," said lead author Maryse Bouchard of the University of Montreal. She said people can limit their exposure by eating organic produce. A 2008 Emory University study found that in children who switched to organically grown fruits and vegetables, urine levels of pesticide compounds dropped to undetectable or close to undetectable levels.
Note: For a treasure trove of key health reports from reliable sources, click here.
The Australian founder of the whistleblower website Wikileaks had his passport confiscated by police when he arrived in Melbourne last week. Julian Assange, who does not have an official home base and travels every six weeks, [said] that immigration officials had said his passport was going to be cancelled because it was looking worn. However he then received a letter from the Australian Communication Minister Steven Conroy’s office stating that the recent disclosure on Wikileaks of a blacklist of websites the Australian government is preparing to ban had been referred to the Australian Federal Police (AFP). Last year Wikileaks published a confidential list of websites that the Australian government is preparing to ban under a proposed internet filter – which in turn caused the whistleblower site to be placed on that list. Mr Assange, 37, told The Age newspaper that half an hour after his passport was returned to him an AFP officer searched one of his bags and questioned him about a previous criminal record for computer hacking offences when he was a teenager. He was then told his passport status was classified as “normal” on the immigration database. In 1991 Mr Assange, described by Wikileaks as “Australia’s most famous ethical computer hacker”, was charged with 30 offences over the alleged hacking of police, Telco’s and US military computers. He admitted to 24 charges and was fined.
The gusher unleashed in the Gulf of Mexico continues to spew crude oil. There are no reliable estimates of how much oil is pouring into the gulf. But it comes to many millions of gallons since the catastrophic blowout. Mike Williams, one of the last crewmembers to escape the inferno ... says the destruction of the Deepwater Horizon [oil rig] had been building for weeks in a series of mishaps. The tension in every drilling operation is between doing things safely and doing them fast; time is money and this job was costing BP a million dollars a day. But Williams says there was trouble from the start - getting to the oil was taking too long. Williams said they were told it would take 21 days; according to him, it actually took six weeks. With the schedule slipping, Williams says a BP manager ordered a faster pace. Williams says there was an accident on the rig that has not been reported before. He says, four weeks before the explosion, the rig's most vital piece of safety equipment was damaged ... the blowout preventer, or BOP. The spill has cost BP about $500 million so far. But consider, in just the first three months this year, BP made profits of $6 billion. There are plenty of accusations to go around that BP pressed for speed, Halliburton's cement plugs failed, and Transocean damaged the blowout preventer. Through all the red flags, they pressed ahead.
Note: For lots more from major media sources on corporate and government collusion and corruption, click here and here.
Accused of "the biggest military hack of all time", Gary McKinnon could be the most dangerous hacker in the world. Facing charges of hacking into 97 US military and Nasa computers and banned from using the internet in 2005, the 44-year-old will never touch a computer again if the US military has its way. Here, in his own words via email ... McKinnon gives [Independent on Sunday] readers an insight into how he feels after a four-year legal battle to stay out of the hands of the US authorities. [Q.] So, what punishment would be appropriate? [McKinnon:] A punishment proportionate to the crime and consistent with other accused hackers in the UK, including those accused of hacking into the Pentagon. 300 people a day still infiltrate Nasa and US military computers. There have been no other extradition requests from the US for any other hackers in the world. [Q.] What were you looking for at Nasa? [McKinnon:] Suppressed evidence of reverse engineered UFO technology, free energy that would help to stop climate change and would help to stop old age pensioners from dying of cold ... and also evidence of anti-gravity. [Q.] What did you find? [McKinnon:] A space fleet and an impressive UFO and a total lack of Nasa and military internet security.
Note: For many kinds of evidence for UFOs and reports from reliable sources on governmental secrecy on this issue, see our UFO Information Center.
G.D.P. is an index of a country’s entire economic output — a tally of, among many other things, manufacturers’ shipments, farmers’ harvests, retail sales and construction spending. It’s a figure that compresses the immensity of a national economy into a single data point of surpassing density. The conventional feeling about G.D.P. is that the more it grows, the better a country and its citizens are doing. [But] it has been a difficult few years for G.D.P. For decades, academics and gadflies have been critical of the measure, suggesting that it is an inaccurate and misleading gauge of prosperity. What has changed more recently is that G.D.P. has been actively challenged by a variety of world leaders, especially in Europe, as well as by a number of international groups, like the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The G.D.P. ... has not only failed to capture the well-being of a 21st-century society but has also skewed global political objectives toward the single-minded pursuit of economic growth. Which indicators are the most suitable replacements for, or most suitable enhancements to, G.D.P. Should they measure educational attainment or employment? Should they account for carbon emissions or happiness?
Note: Which is more important, the economic prosperity of a people, or the well being and level of happiness?
Top military officials have continued to rely on a secret network of private spies who have produced hundreds of reports from deep inside Afghanistan and Pakistan. Earlier this year, government officials admitted that the military had sent a group of former Central Intelligence Agency officers and retired Special Operations troops into the region to collect information — some of which was used to track and kill people suspected of being militants. Many portrayed it as a rogue operation that had been hastily shut down once an investigation began. But interviews with more than a dozen current and former government officials and businessmen, and an examination of government documents, tell a different a story. Not only are the networks still operating, their detailed reports on subjects like the workings of the Taliban leadership in Pakistan and the movements of enemy fighters in southern Afghanistan are also submitted almost daily to top commanders and have become an important source of intelligence. Pentagon officials said that ... the supervisor who set up the contractor network, Michael D. Furlong, was now under investigation. But a review of the program by The New York Times found that Mr. Furlong’s operatives were still providing information using the same intelligence gathering methods as before.
Note: For revealing reports on the secret and extra-legal operations of the US military in Afghanistan and Iraq, click here.
The Obama administration’s decision to authorize the killing by the Central Intelligence Agency of a terrorism suspect who is an American citizen has set off a debate over the legal and political limits of drone missile strikes, a mainstay of the campaign against terrorism. The notion that the government can, in effect, execute one of its own citizens far from a combat zone, with no judicial process and based on secret intelligence, makes some legal authorities deeply uneasy. To eavesdrop on the terrorism suspect who was added to the target list, the American-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is hiding in Yemen, intelligence agencies would have to get a court warrant. But designating him for death, as C.I.A. officials did early this year with the National Security Council’s approval, required no judicial review. “Congress has protected Awlaki’s cellphone calls,” said Vicki Divoll, a former C.I.A. lawyer who now teaches at the United States Naval Academy. “But it has not provided any protections for his life. That makes no sense.” But like the debate over torture during the Bush administration, public discussion of what officials call targeted killing has been limited by the secrecy of the C.I.A. drone program.
Note: Obama is the first president to publicly order the assassination of an American citizen. Neither George W. Bush nor Dick Cheney asserted such a power on the part of the president. For an analysis, click here.
The amount of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico may be at least 10 times the size of official estimates, according to an exclusive analysis conducted for NPR. At NPR's request, experts examined video that BP released Wednesday. Their findings suggest the BP spill is already far larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska, which spilled at least 250,000 barrels of oil. BP has said repeatedly that there is no reliable way to measure the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico by looking at the oil gushing out of the pipe. But scientists say there are actually many proven techniques for doing just that. Steven Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, analyzed videotape of the seafloor gusher using a technique called particle image velocimetry. A computer program simply tracks particles and calculates how fast they are moving. Wereley put the BP video of the gusher into his computer. He made a few simple calculations and came up with an astonishing value for the rate of the oil spill: 70,000 barrels a day — much higher than the official estimate of 5,000 barrels a day. The method is accurate to a degree of plus or minus 20 percent. This new, much larger number suggests that capturing — and cleaning up — this oil may be a much bigger challenge than anyone has let on.
Note: For lots more from reliable souces on government corruption and collusion with industries it is supposed to be regulating, click here.
The federal Minerals Management Service gave permission to BP and dozens of other oil companies to drill in the Gulf of Mexico without first getting required permits from another agency that assesses threats to endangered species — and despite strong warnings from that agency about the impact the drilling was likely to have on the gulf. Those approvals, federal records show, include one for the well drilled by the Deepwater Horizon rig, which exploded on April 20, killing 11 workers and resulting in thousands of barrels of oil spilling into the gulf each day. The Minerals Management Service, or M.M.S., also routinely overruled its staff biologists and engineers who raised concerns about the safety and the environmental impact of certain drilling proposals in the gulf and in Alaska, according to a half-dozen current and former agency scientists. Those scientists said they were also regularly pressured by agency officials to change the findings of their internal studies if they predicted that an accident was likely to occur or if wildlife might be harmed. “M.M.S. has given up any pretense of regulating the offshore oil industry,” said Kierán Suckling, director of the Center for Biological Diversity, ... which filed notice of intent to sue the agency over its noncompliance with federal law concerning endangered species. “The agency seems to think its mission is to help the oil industry evade environmental laws.”
Note: For lots more from reliable souces on government corruption and collusion with industries it is supposed to be regulating, click here.
More than a year and a half after Iceland's major banks failed, all but sinking the country's economy, police have begun rounding up a number of top bankers while other former executives and owners face a $US2 billion ($2.24 billion) lawsuit. Since Iceland's three largest banks - Kaupthing, Landsbanki and Glitnir - collapsed in late 2008, their former executives and owners have largely been living untroubled lives abroad. But the publication last month of a parliamentary inquiry into the island nation's profound financial and economic crisis signalled a turning of the tide, laying much of the blame for the downfall on the former bank heads who had taken "inappropriate loans from the banks" they worked for. Overnight, the administrators of Glitnir's liquidation announced they had filed a $US2 billion lawsuit in a New York court against former large shareholders and executives for alleged fraud. "I think this lawsuit is without precedence in Iceland," Steinunn Gudbjartsdottir, who chairs Glitnir's so-called winding-up board, told reporters in Reykjavik. The bank also said it was "taking action against its former auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) for facilitating and helping to conceal the fraudulent transactions engineered by [its principal shareholder] and his associates, which ultimately led to the bank's collapse in October 2008."
Note: Yet American and British bankers who played a major role in the economic collapse are getting record pay. For an incisive article in Rolling Stone titled "Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?" click here. For key reports on financial fraud from major media sources, click here.
It is the Wall Street equivalent of a perfect game of baseball — 27 up, 27 down, the final score measured in millions of dollars a day. Despite the running unease in world markets, four giants of American finance managed to make money from trading every single day during the first three months of the year. Their remarkable 61-day streak is one for the record books. Perfect trading quarters on Wall Street are about as rare as perfect games in Major League Baseball. But Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase & Company produced the equivalent of four perfect games during the first quarter. Each one finished the period without losing money for even one day. Their showing ... underscored the outsize — and controversial — role that trading has assumed at major financial institutions. It also drives home the widening lead that a handful of big banks are enjoying over lesser rivals on post-bailout Wall Street. The four banks ... reaped big rewards without necessarily placing big bets that stocks or bonds would go up or down. “This is not about hitting home runs,” said Jaidev Iyer, who runs his own risk management consulting firm, J-Risk Advisors. “This is just, as we call it, milking the market and your captive client base.”
Note: For an astounding list on the Forbes website of the richest companies in the world by assets, click here. All of the top 10 companies are banks, with collective assets of over $22 trillion! Yet we as taxpayers continue to pay to bail them out when they have problems. Is something wrong with this picture? For a graphic representation of this, click here. And for an abundance of deep reporting in major media articles on the hidden realities of Wall Street's shadowy operations, click here.
Pope Benedict XVI on [May 11] issued his most forceful remarks on the sexual abuse crisis sweeping the Catholic Church. He called it �truly terrifying� and, in a marked shift in tone, suggested that its origins lay with abusive priests and with highly placed church officials who for decades concealed or minimized the problem. The problem, he said, was �the sin inside the church,� and by implication not accusations from victims or the media. �Forgiveness is not a substitute for justice,� he said, in remarks that underscored the Vatican�s recent if fitful efforts to break with a longstanding practice of handling abuse cases inside the church, rather than reporting abuse to civil authorities for prosecution. Victims groups said they were still waiting for concrete action more than words, and the Vatican has not yet announced whether it will change its norms for handling abuse. Benedict ... has been criticized for not acting aggressively enough against allegations of abuse as archbishop of Munich and later as the head of a powerful Vatican office.
There are around 450 criminal gangs around the world making money from images of child sex abuse, the UK's Internet Watch Foundation has said. The watchdog's annual report says that the 10 most prolific of these account for more than 650 web pages. But despite these gangs being well-established online, the IWF says the the industry is not growing. To help obscure their movements, they move their distribution networks regularly between different providers and countries. Most of the gangs operate a pay-per-view system, charging a monthly fee of around �55 for access to images and videos. Critics have accused the IWF of being ineffective, partly because it is separate from the police and partly because much of the illegal material online does not originate from the UK. IWF spokeswoman Sarah Robertson admits that it is not a policing body but denies that means it cannot act. "The amount of child abuse content hosted in the UK has fallen from 18% to 1% in the last seven years," she said. It is important to remember the serious nature of the content the IWF polices, she said, and that behind every image is a child being abused. Some 44% of the content highlighted to the IWF last year depicted the rape of a child and 23% of it featured children below the age of six.
Note: For powerful evidence that this kind of abuse is much more widespread than believed, and even goes to the highest level of government, click here.
Even the world’s most savvy stock-market giants (e.g., Warren E. Buffett) have warned over the past decade that derivatives are the fiscal equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction. And the consequences of such an explosion would make the recent global financial and economic crisis seem like penny ante. But generously lubricated lobbyists for the unrestricted, unsupervised derivatives markets tell congressional committees and government regulators to butt out. While banks all over the world were imploding and some $50 trillion vanished in global stock markets, the derivatives market grew by an estimated 65 percent, according the Bank for International Settlements. BIS convenes the world’s 57 most powerful central bankers in Basel, Switzerland, for periodic secret meetings. Occasionally, they issue a cry of alarm. This time, derivatives had soared from $414.8 trillion at the end of 2006 to $683.7 trillion in mid-2008 - 18 months’ time. The derivatives market is now estimated at $700 trillion. What’s so difficult to understand about derivatives? Essentially, they are bets for or against the house - red or black at the roulette wheel. Or betting for or against the weather in situations in which the weather is critical (e.g., vineyards). Forwards, futures, options and swaps form the panoply of derivatives. Credit derivatives are based on loans, bonds or other forms of credit. Over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives are contracts that are traded and privately negotiated directly between two parties, outside of a regular exchange. All of this is unregulated.
Note: Though not from one of the top U.S. newspapers, this incisive article lays bare severe market manipulations that greatly endanger our world. The entire article is highly recommended. $700 trillion is equivalent to $100,000 for every man, woman, and child in the world! Do you think the financial industry is out of control? For lots more powerful, reliable information on major banking manipulations, click here. For a powerful analysis describing just how crazy things have gotten and giving some rays of hope by researcher David Wilcock, click here.
Ten years and 1.5 billion Norwegian kroner ($252 million) in the making, [Halden Fengsel, Norway's newest prison,] is spread over 75 acres (30 hectares) of gently sloping forest in southeastern Norway. The facility boasts amenities like a sound studio, jogging trails and a freestanding two-bedroom house where inmates can host their families during overnight visits. The scent of orange sorbet emanates from the "kitchen laboratory" where inmates take cooking courses. "In the Norwegian prison system, there's a focus on human rights and respect," says Are Hoidal, the prison's governor. "We don't see any of this as unusual." Halden ... embodies the guiding principles of the country's penal system: that repressive prisons do not work and that treating prisoners humanely boosts their chances of reintegrating into society. "When they arrive, many of them are in bad shape," Hoidal says, noting that Halden houses drug dealers, murderers and rapists, among others. "We want to build them up, give them confidence through education and work and have them leave as better people." Within two years of their release, 20% of Norway's prisoners end up back in jail. In the U.K. and the U.S., the figure hovers between 50% and 60%.
Prahlad Jani, an 82-year-old Indian yogi, is making headlines by claims that for the past 70 years he has had nothing -- not one calorie -- to eat and not one drop of liquid to drink. To test his claims, Indian military doctors put him under round-the-clock observation during a two-week hospital stay that ended last week, news reports say. During that time he didn't ingest any food or water – and remained perfectly healthy, the researchers said. But that's simply impossible, said Dr. Michael Van Rooyen, ... the director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative – which focuses on aid to displaced populations who lack food and water. Van Rooyen said he's clearly getting fluid somehow. Jani, dubbed "the starving yogi" by some, did have limited contact with water while gargling and periodically bathing, reported the news wire service AFP.
Note: Military doctors had this man under 24-hour observation for two weeks, yet doctors not involved with the investigation claim it's impossible. How sad that many scientists can't accept the possibility of miracles.
You�re not likely to hear about this from your doctor, but fake medical treatment can work amazingly well. For a range of ailments, from pain and nausea to depression and Parkinson�s disease, placebos--whether sugar pills, saline injections, or sham surgery--have often produced results that rival those of standard therapies. As evidence of the effect�s power mounts, members of the medical community are increasingly asking an intriguing question: if the placebo effect can help patients, shouldn�t we start putting it to work? In certain ways, placebos are ideal drugs: they typically have no side effects and are essentially free. And in recent years, research has confirmed that they can bring about genuine improvements in a number of conditions. An active conversation is now under way in leading medical journals, as bioethicists and researchers explore how to give people the real benefits of pretend treatment. But any attempt to harness the placebo effect immediately runs into thorny ethical and practical dilemmas. To present a dummy pill as real medicine would be, by most standards, to lie. To prescribe one openly, however, would risk undermining the effect. And even if these issues were resolved, the whole idea still might sound a little shady--offering bogus pills or procedures could seem, from the patient�s perspective, hard to distinguish from skimping on care.
Note: For key reports from major media sources on important health issues, click here.
The owner of the oil rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 people and causing a giant slick, has made a $270 million profit from insurance payouts for the disaster. The revelation by Transocean, the world’s biggest offshore driller, will add to the political storm over the disaster. The company was hired by BP to drill the well. The “accounting gain” arose because the $560 million insurance policy Transocean took out on its Deepwater Horizon rig was greater than the value of the rig itself. Transocean has already received a cash payment of $401 million with the rest due in the next few weeks. The windfall, revealed in a conference call with analysts, will more than cover the $200 million that Transocean expects to pay to survivors and their families and for higher insurance costs. The total cost of the clean-up and compensation could reach $30 billion, according to some estimates. Transocean said that virtually all of that must be covered by BP and two smaller partners, Anadarko Petroleum and Mitsui of Japan.
Note: For lots more from major media sources on corporate and government collusion and corruption, click here and here.
Important Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.