Media Articles

Excerpts of Key Media Articles in Major Media

Below are key excerpts of highly revealing media articles from the major media. Links are provided to the full articles on their media websites. If any link fails to function, read this webpage. These media articles are listed in reverse date order. You can also explore the articles listed by order of importance or by date posted. By choosing to educate ourselves and to spread the word, we can build a brighter future.

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.

Hunting for guerillas, handling roadside bombs, crawling across the caves and crumbling towns of Afghanistan and Iraq -- all of that was just a start. Now, the Army is prepping its squad of robotic vehicles for a new set of assignments. And this time, they'll be carrying guns. "Putting something like this into the field, we're about to start something that's never been done before," said Staff Sgt. Santiago Tordillos, waving to the black, 2-foot-six-inch robot rolling around the carpeted floor on twin treads, an M249 machine gun cradled in its mechanical grip. "This opens up great vistas, some quite pleasant, others quite nightmarish. On the one hand, this could make our flesh-and-blood soldiers so hard to get to that traditional war -- a match of relatively evenly matched peers -- could become a thing of the past," he said. "But this might also rob us of our humanity. We could be the ones that wind up looking like Terminators, in the world's eyes."

Lockheed Martin doesn't run the United States. But it does help run a breathtakingly big part of it. Lockheed ... has built a formidable information-technology empire that now stretches from the Pentagon to the post office. It sorts your mail and totals your taxes. It cuts Social Security checks and counts the United States census. It runs space flights and monitors air traffic. Lockheed ... is best known for its weapons. But in the post-9/11 world, Lockheed has become more than just the biggest corporate cog in what Dwight D. Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. It is increasingly putting its stamp on the nation's military policies. Former Lockheed executives, lobbyists and lawyers hold crucial posts at the White House and the Pentagon, picking weapons and setting policies. War and crisis have been good for business. The company's stock has tripled in the last four years. Lockheed is creating robot soldiers and neural software - "intelligent agents" - to do their work. Israel spends much of the $1.8 billion in annual military aid from the United States to buy F-16 warplanes from Lockheed. Its own executives say the concentration of power among military contractors is more intense than in any other sector of business outside banking. AND, after 9/11 ... cost is essentially irrelevant. Former Lockheed executives serve on the Defense Policy Board ... and the Homeland Security Advisory Council, which help make military and intelligence policy and pick weapons for future battles. Lockheed's board includes E. C. Aldridge Jr. ... the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer.

Note: If the above link fails, click here. To say that "war and crisis have been good for business" is quite an understatement. To read what one of the most highly decorated generals had to say about this, click here.

Peter Hagelstein is trying to revive hope for a future of clean, inexhaustible, inexpensive energy. Fifteen years after the scientific embarrassment of the century ... a panel of scientists gathered. The panel's charge was simple: to determine whether [cold fusion] had even a prayer of a chance at working. The Department of Energy went to great lengths to cloak the meeting from public view. No announcement, no reporters. None of the names of the people attending that day was disclosed. Since 1989, hundreds of scientists working in dozens of labs around the world have claimed ... results. Supporters point to the written literature -- more than 3,000 papers -- as proof of the effect. But the most credible cold fusion advocates concede that the vast majority of those papers are of poor quality. "Brilliant," "genius" and "reclusive" were words used to describe [SRI scientist Peter] Hagelstein 20 years ago, when he rose to prominence as one of the young scientists behind President Ronald Reagan's plans to build a missile shield in outer space. Hagelstein [now] describes the mainstream scientific community as "mafias" that promote and publish their friends' work, unwilling to accept new ideas. As Hagelstein explains it, leading physicists came out swiftly and prematurely against cold fusion. Hagelstein says his acceptance of cold fusion was by no means immediate. It took several years before he was convinced. [Now] Hagelstein says, he has seen enough cold fusion data to convince him that the science is clearly real. The field's acceptance, he maintains, will be simply a matter of the scientific community's looking at the improved experimental results in the future and coming to understand them.

Note: If the above link fails, click here. Why all the secrecy around this important topic? To learn why the power elite don't want cheap energy, click here.

In Minnesota, pigs are being born with human blood in their veins. In Nevada, there are sheep whose livers and hearts are largely human. In California, mice peer from their cages with human brain cells firing inside their skulls. Biologists call these hybrid animals chimeras, after the mythical Greek creature with a lion's head, a goat's body and a serpent's tail. Chimeras are allowing scientists to watch, for the first time, how nascent human cells and organs mature and interact ... inside the bodies of living creatures. But with no federal guidelines in place ... how human must a chimera be before more stringent research rules should kick in? Chimerism becomes a more sensitive topic when it involves growing entire human organs inside animals. And it becomes especially sensitive when it deals in brain cells. Imagine, said Robert Streiffer, a professor of philosophy and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, a human-chimpanzee chimera endowed with speech ... what some have called a "humanzee." Perhaps the most ambitious efforts to make use of chimeras come from Irving Weissman, director of Stanford University's Institute of Cancer/Stem Cell Biology and Medicine. Weissman helped make the first mouse with a nearly complete human immune system. More recently his team injected human neural stem cells into mouse fetuses, creating mice whose brains are about 1 percent human. Now Weissman says he is thinking about making chimeric mice whose brains are 100 percent human.

Note: If the above link fails, click here.

During a nine month investigation, the BBC has uncovered the disturbing truth about the way authorities in New York City are conducting the fight against Aids. HIV positive children - some only a few months old - are enrolled in toxic experiments without the consent of guardians or relatives. In some cases where parents have refused to give children their medication, they have been placed in care. The city's Administration of Children's Services (ACS) does not even require a court order to place HIV kids with foster parents or in children's homes, where they can continue to give them experimental drugs. In 2002, the Incarnation Children's Center - a children's home in Harlem - was at the hub of controversy over secretive drugs trials. [Reporter Jamie Doran] speaks to a boy who spent most of his life at Incaranation. Medical records, obtained by the This World team, prove the boy had been enrolled in these trials. "I did not want to take my medication," said the boy, "but if you want to get out of there, you have to do what they say." He also conveys a horrifying account of what happened to the children at Incarnation who refused to obey the rules. "My friend Daniel didn't like to take his medicine and he got a tube in his stomach," he said. For months, the BBC tried to get information from the people responsible for the trials, but none would comment. The companies that supply drugs for the trials are among the world's largest, including Britain's own Glaxo SmithKline (GSK).

Note: Read a long list of examples of humans being treated as guinea pigs by corporate and governmental programs. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in Big Pharma from reliable major media sources.

Voters in Utah County had more than a one in five chance that their ballots did not get counted in the initial, unofficial tally from Election Day. A programming glitch in the punch-card counter dropped 33,000 ballots from the totals - all of them straight-party ballots. That was more than 22 percent of the 145,769 ballots cast in the Republican stronghold. "The card readers were fine; it was just the way it was programmed initially," Utah County elections coordinator Kristen Swensen said Friday. "It was just off by one letter."

A hand recount of ballots cast using optical scanning technology gave a Democrat enough extra votes to bump a Republican from victory in a county commissioner's race. The erroneous tally was caused when the Fidlar Election Co. scanning system recorded straight-Democratic Party votes as votes for Libertarians in southeastern Indiana's Franklin County.

Note: How many cases like this go unnoticed?

In Baker County, Fla...there are 12,887 registered voters: 69.3 percent are Democrats, 24.3 percent are Republicans. Yet 2,180 of county residents voted for Kerry while 7,738 voted for Bush -- the opposite of what some election critics say was the typically pattern elsewhere in the United States. In Florida's Dixie County...77.5 percent of the 4,988 registered voters are Democrats, 15 percent are Republicans. On Election Day, Bush carried the county with 4,433 votes vs. 1,959 for Kerry. Nationally, few outlets have pursued the story of what happened in Baker and Dixie.

Officials in Franklin County — which includes state capital Columbus — acknowledged that they may have improperly counted votes for Bush because of a touch-screen voting system malfunction. A precinct in the county reported that a 4,000-vote margin won by Bush appeared to exceed the number of registered voters.”

Note: How many cases like this go unnoticed? How can we trust our elections to unreliable machines?

The grainy 30-second commercials ... suggest a government cover-up of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The advertisements, which ran repeatedly ... on several cable networks, including CNN, Fox News and ESPN, offer a Web site, an address and a phone number. The ads are the latest salvo from James W. Walter ... who over the years has financed programs promoting voter registration in low-income neighborhoods and prison reform. The television commercials, as well as ads in magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Daily News, are part of a $3 million national campaign paid for by Mr. Walter in an effort to press for the reopening of the investigation by the independent Sept. 11 commission. "We've never gotten solid answers on why Tower 7 collapsed when it was two full blocks away from where the planes hit," he said. "We've also never received an answer for how such a large plane left such a small hole in the side of the Pentagon." A Zogby poll of New Yorkers' opinions about the 9/11 investigation, released last month, indicated that 49 percent of New York City residents and 41 percent of New York state residents believed that some federal officials "knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act." The poll also found that 66 percent of New York City residents and 56 percent of state residents wanted a fuller investigation of the "still unanswered questions."

Note: For lots more reliable information suggesting a major cover-up of 9/11, click here.

"Just about everybody is pretty serious about their chow," says Deborah Koons Garcia, enjoying the understatement. No matter how serious they are, though, Garcia knows most people don't realize that genetically engineered foods have quietly slipped into much of the American food supply, mostly from corn and canola. They're in an estimated 60 percent of all processed foods. "We are at a crossroads," says Garcia. She's spent the last three years ... making "The Future of Food," a documentary about GMO (genetically modified organism) foods. "Someone needed to make this film, because if this technology isn't challenged and if this corporatization of our whole food system isn't stopped, at some point it will be too late," says Garcia. "It became clear that GMOs are really a much bigger issue ... And it was really clear that there hadn't been a really good film that told the whole story from the cellular, from the microscopic level, all the way up to the global," Garcia says. Her 90-minute documentary ... expresses a strong point of view against letting new life forms loose on the land without long-term testing of the health effects and real government controls, especially labeling of foods. Garcia threads a clear path through the history, science and politics of GMO foods to a clear call for action.

Note: To view this highly educational film, which may encourage you to change your eating habits, click here.

Note: The best reporting by far in the mainstream media of the 2004 election was by MSNBC's news anchor Keith Olbermann. Both on TV and on his blog, Mr. Olbermann asked the tough questions. He even asked why other major media weren't reporting many of these crucial stories. His most excellent blog gave continual updates of developments in the elections scandals. Here are a few key quotes from three of the entries there:

Nov. 7, 6:55 p.m: Officials in Warren County, Ohio, "locked down" its administration building to prevent anybody from observing the vote count there....Emergency Services Director Frank Young explained that he had been advised by the federal government to implement the measures for the sake of Homeland Security. The majority of the media has yet to touch the other stories of Ohio or huge margins for Bush in Florida counties in which registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans 2-1.

Nov. 9, 12:55 a.m: ...the remarkable results out of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In 29 precincts there, the County's website shows, we had the most unexpected results in years: more votes than voters. I'll repeat that: more votes than voters. 93,000 more votes than voters. [more on this below]

November 10, 12:43 p.m: The computerized balloting in North Carolina is so thoroughly messed up that all state-wide voting may be thrown out and a second election day scheduled.

Dec. 2, 8:13 p.m.: We are not only busting our humps on the voting irregularities beat, but we remain the only mainstream news organization to continue to cover this vital story.

Note: Click below to watch 16 minutes of the excellent MSNBC news program broadcast nationally on November 11^th covering this topic. Note that it may take several minutes to download. You must have installed either QuickTime (QT) or Windows Media. For dial-up connections, use the 56K option.

http://websrvr20.audiovideoweb.com/avwebdswebsrvr2143/news_video/5.countdown_300k.mov (QT high speed)
http://websrvr20.audiovideoweb.com/avwebdswebsrvr2143/news_video/5.countdown_56k.mov (QT 56K)
http://win20ca.audiovideoweb.com/ca20win15004/5.countdown_300k.wmv  (Windows Media high speed)
http://win20ca.audiovideoweb.com/ca20win15004/5.countdown_56k.wmv  (Windows Media 56K)

In Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking - the results seem to contain substantial anomalies. In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry. In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush. The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used.

The vote counting was marred in several places by computer glitches. The most serious appears to be in Ohio, which provided Bush with his decisive margin. Election officials in Franklin County, in the Columbus area, said yesterday that a computer error gave Bush 3,893 extra votes in one precinct. Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct out of 638 votes cast. It was not clear whether Ohio experienced any other problems with electronic ballots. About 30 percent of the voters in the state voted electronically. In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because officials misjudged the amount of data that could be stored electronically by a computer.

An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said. Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct. In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because officials mistakenly believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. And in San Francisco, a malfunction with custom voting software could delay efforts to declare the winners of four races for county supervisor. In the Ohio precinct in question, the votes are recorded onto a cartridge. On one of the three machines at that precinct, a malfunction occurred in the recording process, Damschroder said. He could not explain how the malfunction occurred. Damschroder said people who had seen poll results on the election board's Web site called to point out the discrepancy. The reader also recorded zero votes in a county commissioner race on the machine.

A North Carolina newspaper reports that "a systems software glitch in Craven County's electronic voting equipment is being blamed for a vote miscount that ... swelled the number of votes for president here by 11,283 more votes than the total number cast.

Early Thursday, as Broward County elections officials wrapped up after a long day of canvassing votes, something unusual caught their eye. Tallies should go up as more votes are counted. That's simple math. But in some races, the numbers had gone down. Officials found the software used in Broward can handle only 32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the system starts counting backward."

Thousands of new votes on some constitutional amendment questions were discovered early Thursday, potentially forcing a recount on the question of a South Florida vote on slot machines. As absentee ballot counting wound down after midnight in Broward County's elections warehouse, attorneys scrutinizing the close vote on Amendment Four noticed that vote totals changed in an unexpected way after 13,000 final ballots were counted. Election officials quickly determined the problem was caused by the Unity Software that pulls together votes from five machines tabulating absentee ballots. Because no precinct has more than 32,000 voters, the software caps the total votes at that number. From there, it begins to count backward. The glitch was discovered two years ago, and should have been corrected by software manufacturer ES&S of Omaha, Neb., according to Broward County Mayor Ilene Lieberman. "I was so angry last night," Lieberman said. She spoke to representatives from ES&S early Thursday morning, and later was having a spirited telephone conversation with Secretary of State Glenda Hood.

Sarpy County election officials are trying to figure out how they ended up with more votes than voters in the general election. Sarpy County borrowed the election equipment from Omaha-based Election Systems & Software. Its employees operated the machines that are now double-checking the ballots. No one is sure exactly what went wrong.

Note: What the article fails to mention is that with no paper trail, there is not way to know what happened. How is it possible we let our elections use machines that could not be audited or verified?

In LaPorte County, Indiana, a Democratic stronghold, electronic voting machines decided that each precinct only had 300 voters. "At about 7 p.m. Tuesday," according to this report, "it was noticed that the first two or three printouts from individual precinct reports all listed an identical number of voters. Each precinct was listed as having 300 registered voters. That means the total number of voters for the county would be 22,200, although there are more than 79,000 registered voters.

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.