Media ArticlesExcerpts of Key Media Articles in Major Media
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The devastating trauma and abuse inflicted on children held by Australia in offshore detention has been laid bare in the largest cache of leaked documents released from inside its immigration regime. More than 2,000 leaked incident reports from Australia’s detention camp for asylum seekers on the remote Pacific island of Nauru – totalling more than 8,000 pages – are published by the Guardian today. The Nauru files set out as never before the assaults, sexual abuse, self-harm attempts, child abuse and living conditions endured by asylum seekers held by the Australian government, painting a picture of routine dysfunction and cruelty. Children are vastly over-represented in the reports. More than half of the 2,116 reports – a total of 1,086 incidents, or 51.3% – involve children, although children made up only about 18% of those in detention on Nauru during the time covered by the reports, May 2013 to October 2015. The findings come just weeks after the brutal treatment of young people in juvenile detention in the Northern Territory was exposed. Allegations of sexual assault ... are a persistent theme of the files. In one report an asylum seeker described being told she was “on a list” written by local Nauruan guards naming single women they were “waiting for”. In [another] report a “cultural adviser” for Wilson Security, the company that employs guards at the detention camp, allegedly told an asylum seeker who had been sexually assaulted in camp that “rape in Australia is very common and people don’t get punished”.
Note: Watch an excellent segment by Australia's "60-Minutes" team "Spies, Lords and Predators" on a pedophile ring in the UK which leads directly to the highest levels of government. A second suppressed documentary, "Conspiracy of Silence," goes even deeper into this topic in the US. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and sexual abuse scandals.
Half a century ago, cold war tensions nearly came to a head over a couple of sunspots. On May 23, 1967, the US Air Force was preparing its nuclear-armed aircraft for takeoff. The Soviet Union had jammed US surveillance radars, military officials believed, which was considered an act of war. But according to a new study ... scientists arrived just in time to defuse the situation: it was actually a solar storm, not a Soviet military operation, that jammed the radars. Earlier that month, researchers had noticed a large group of magnetically charged sunspots on the solar surface. These cool, dark sunspots are known to launch bursts of solar radiation, called solar flares, as well as plasma eruptions called coronal mass ejections (CMEs). On May 23, they recorded a solar flare so intense that it was visible by the naked eye. The same day, US military officials found that three of its Ballistic Missile Early Warning System radar sites appeared to be jammed. The Air Force prepared aircraft with nuclear weapons, ready to scramble in retaliation. Solar forecasters from the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) intervened in time to stop the launch. When convention and science don’t offer satisfactory answers, we often turn to the fantastic. Last month, an unidentified blip was spotted in the corner of an International Space Station video feed. But just as the object approached Earth’s atmosphere, the feed cut off, prompting that rumors NASA was covering up evidence of UFOs.
Note: A solar storm in 1859 was powerful enough to cause sparks to leap from telegraph equipment. A similar storm today would likely decimate communications systems around the world. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the mysterious nature of reality.
As part of an ongoing effort to exploit medical intelligence, the National Security Agency teamed up with the military-focused Defense Intelligence Agency to extract medical SIGINT from the intercepted communications of nonprofit groups starting in the early 2000s, a top-secret document shows. Medical intelligence can include information about disease outbreaks; the ability of a foreign regime to respond to chemical, biological, and nuclear attacks; the capabilities of overseas drugs companies; advances in medical technology; medical research, and the medical response capabilities of various governments, according to the document and others like it, provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. One of the more prominent examples of focused medical spying came in 2010, when the agency crafted a plan to stow tracking devices with medical supplies bound for an ill Osama bin Laden in order to locate the terrorist leader. One article from August 2003 identifies an NSA project to keep an eye on the evolution of biotechnology in various countries. Can we ... determine the specific features that would distinguish a Bio Warfare Program from a benign civilian pharmaceutical production effort? the author wrote, identifying a suspect Iranian [biological warfare] facility as a target for inspection. Medical intelligence gathering has continued since then, according to the so-called black budget proposed for the 2013 fiscal year, published in February 2012.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and terrorism.
By the time I started working at the Defense Department in the early years of the Obama administration, the Pentagon's 17.5 miles of corridors had sprouted dozens of shops and restaurants catering to the building's 23,000 employees. And, over time, the U.S. military has itself come to offer a similar one-stop shopping experience to the nation's top policymakers. As retired Army Lt. Gen. Dave Barno once put it to me, the relentlessly expanding U.S. military has become "a Super Walmart with everything under one roof" - and two successive presidential administrations have been eager consumers. The military's transformation into the world's biggest one-stop shopping outfit is ... at once the product and the driver of seismic changes in how we think about war, with consequent challenges both to our laws and to the military itself. We've gotten into the habit of viewing every new threat through the lens of "war," thus asking our military to take on an ever-expanding range of nontraditional tasks. But viewing more and more threats as "war" brings more and more spheres of human activity into the ambit of the law of war, with its greater tolerance of secrecy, violence, and coercion - and its reduced protections for basic rights. Meanwhile, asking the military to take on more and more new tasks requires higher military budgets, forcing us to look for savings elsewhere. As budget cuts cripple civilian agencies, their capabilities dwindle, and we look to the military to pick up the slack, further expanding its role.
Note: As the Tribune has strangely removed this article, here's an alternate link. Another cutting article shows that according to the latest report on public relations spending from the Government Accountability Office, the US government PR apparatus has spent over $1 billion annually — $626 million of which the Pentagon allots to employ a massive propaganda army. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing war news articles from reliable major media sources.
In 18th-century America, colonial society and Native American society sat side by side. The former was buddingly commercial; the latter was communal and tribal. As time went by, the settlers from Europe noticed something: No Indians were defecting to join colonial society, but many whites were defecting to live in the Native American one. Even as late as 1782, the pattern was still going strong. The native cultures were more communal. If colonial culture was relatively atomized, imagine American culture of today. As we’ve gotten richer, we’ve used wealth to buy space: bigger homes, bigger yards, separate bedrooms, private cars, autonomous lifestyles. Each individual choice makes sense, but the overall atomizing trajectory sometimes seems to backfire. According to the World Health Organization, people in wealthy countries suffer depression by as much as eight times the rate as people in poor countries. Every generation faces the challenge of how to reconcile freedom and community. But [possibly no] generation has faced it as acutely as millennials. Millennials are oriented around neighborhood hospitality, rather than national identity or the borderless digital world. Instead of just paying lip service to community while living for autonomy ... a lot of people are actually about to make the break and immerse themselves in demanding local community movements. It wouldn’t [be a surprise] if the big change in the coming decades were this: an end to the apotheosis of freedom; more people making the modern equivalent of the Native American leap.
Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.
One of the most senior police officers in the UK has called for greater debate about treating paedophiles rather than sending them to prison, amid concerns there is not enough space in prisons to jail them all. Currently, there are close to 45,000 names on the sex offenders register. The list contains details of people convicted of sexual offences and is used to monitor offenders following their release from prison. It has been steadily increasing since it was established in 1997. Chief Superintendent Gavin Thomas, president of the Police Superintendents Association of England and Wales ... said: One of the major concerns from our members is managing the register already, and its growing. He added that there is not enough room in prisons to jail all child sex offenders and called for discussion of alternatives: Should we be going down the criminal justice route or, based on a proper assessment, should we be going down the health route? At the moment I am not seeing alternative thinking on how we deal with this issue as it grows and grows and grows. The number of people being convicted of sexual offences has soared in recent times, partly due to high profile cases such as Jimmy Savile encouraging other abuse survivors to come forward. Of 86,200 people who are currently in jail, around 11,500 have been convicted of a sexual offence.
Note: According to a recent article in the Sunday Express, the only British charity which specializes in preventing non-offending paedophiles from abusing currently faces closure due to a funding crisis. Watch an excellent segment by Australia's "60-Minutes" team "Spies, Lords and Predators" on a pedophile ring in the UK which leads to the highest levels of government. A second suppressed documentary, "Conspiracy of Silence," goes even deeper into this topic in the US. For more, see concise summaries of revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from media sources.
When Anna Pesce was visiting her children in Wagener, SC, in November 2014, the then-85-year-old Orangeburg, NY, native almost collapsed trying to climb a set of stairs. I had this horrible pain shooting up my back, Pesce [said]. I had to be carried up the stairs and put into a wheelchair for the rest of my stay. For the past few decades, Pesce suffered from hunchbacklike posture - the result of a herniated disc, scoliosis and osteoporosis, which weakens the bones and can lead to curvature of the spine. Three months after her South Carolina visit, she began working with certified yoga instructor Rachel Jesien, [who] visited Pesce in her home once a week, teaching her restorative poses and stretches. After one month of sessions, Pesce was able to walk again. Yoga, done with the guidance of a back-care specialist, can strengthen bone density and muscles and alleviate back pain caused by osteoporosis, osteoarthritis and other conditions that affect the elderly. Dr. Houman Danesh, director of integrative pain management at Mount Sinai Hospital, agrees that doing yoga poses can help some people manage painful back conditions. While Danesh recommends that people go to a physical therapist first for a proper diagnosis, he stresses that one-on-one care with a specialist is key. While older people may feel intimidated by yoga, Jesien says its worth seeking out a certified back-care instructor, and Pesce agrees. I feel wonderful now because I can drive by myself and do the things I wasnt able to do before, Pesce says.
Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.
Police departments will be required to give the US justice department full details of deadly incidents involving their officers each quarter, under a new government system for counting killings by police that was influenced by the Guardian. Announcing a new program for documenting all “arrest-related deaths”, federal officials said they would actively work to confirm fatal cases seen in media reports and other open sources rather than wait for departments to report them voluntarily. The new system, which aims to replace a discredited count by the FBI, mirrors that of The Counted, an ongoing Guardian effort to document every death caused by law enforcement officers. Writing in the Federal Register, Department of Justice officials said their new program should increase transparency around the use of force by police and improve accountability for the actions of individual officers. The federal government has kept no comprehensive record of killings by police officers, even as a series of controversial deaths set off unrest in cities across the country over the past two years. An annual voluntary count by the FBI of fatal shootings by officers has recorded only about half the true number. The new system is being overseen by the department’s bureau of justice statistics (BJS). It would, like the Guardian’s, document deaths caused by physical force, Taser shocks and some vehicle crashes caused by law enforcement in addition to fatal shootings by officers.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing police corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.
Of all the world's lost cities, none surely can compete for evocative splendour, age or mystery with Babylon. Here on the desert plains 60 miles south of Baghdad, where the sun turns horizons into flashing pools of mercury, is where so much human history began. Land of the Fertile Crescent, bounded by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, this is successively the realm of Sumer and Akkad, Assyria, Babylonia, Mesopotamia and Iraq. I visited the site in November 2004, just as Polish troops were preparing to hand it over to the Iraqi authorities. The late Donny George, then head of the Iraq Museum, had warned me in Baghdad about the terrible damage done to the site by the Polish military. He was aghast at reports of soldiers filling sandbags with earth containing archaeological fragments; of armoured vehicles crushing sixth-century BC bricks on the Processional Way; of looters gouging out pieces of dragons from the Ishtar Gate; of digging, levelling, compacting and gravelling in this ancient city. "It's mankind's greatest heritage site," he said. "You don't just start digging it up to make more room for your tanks." Dr John Curtis, keeper of the Department of the Ancient Near East at the British Museum, visited Babylon in late 2004. In his report, he said it was "regrettable" that a large military base should have been established on one of the world's most important archaeological sites. "This is tantamount to establishing a military camp around the Great Pyramid in Egypt or around Stonehenge in Britain."
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on archaeology and war from reliable major media sources.
Think tanks, which position themselves as “universities without students,” have power in government policy debates because they are seen as researchers independent of moneyed interests. But in the chase for funds, think tanks are pushing agendas important to corporate donors, at times blurring the line between researchers and lobbyists. And they are doing so while reaping the benefits of their tax-exempt status, sometimes without disclosing their connections to corporate interests. On issues as varied as military sales to foreign countries, international trade, highway management systems and real estate development, think tanks have frequently become vehicles for corporate influence and branding campaigns. “This is about giant corporations who figured out that by spending, hey, a few tens of millions of dollars, if they can influence outcomes here in Washington, they can make billions of dollars,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, a frequent critic of undisclosed Wall Street donations to think tanks. Washington has seen a proliferation of think tanks, particularly small institutions with narrow interests tied to specific industries. At the same time, the brand names of the field have experienced explosive growth. [The Brookings Institution]’s annual budget has doubled in the last decade, to $100 million. The American Enterprise Institute is spending at least $80 million on a new headquarters in Washington, not far from where the Center for Strategic and International Studies built a $100 million office tower.
Note: Read more about how big money buys off institutions democracy depends on. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in the corporate world.
A specialist unit created by the British domestic counterintelligence and security agency MI5 to “get inside the heads” of terrorists has helped foil seven attacks in the past year. The Behavioural Science Unit at Thames House, the headquarters of MI5 [establishes] whether people flagged as potential threats are "talkers" or "walkers" - those who simply boast or those who are preparing to act. Research by MI5 shows that more than 60 per cent of so-called lone wolves unwittingly provide clues that they are preparing to strike. The BSU’s work involves picking up signs of such changing behaviour. Neil, an Arabic and Norwegian speaker who has worked for the unit for six years, said ... his team is passed intelligence by officers that is gleaned from a network of informants and the public. The BSU then looks for signs of unusual activity. The BSU team pays close attention to “lone-actor” terrorists. The number of experts working in the BSU, which was created in 2004, has more than doubled since ... 2013. “We deal with probabilities and that is the nature of our work,” said Neil, [adding that] some of those they profiled lied to themselves about their intention and the ultimate aim was to persuade them to abandon their radical ideology. He said the assumption that many extremists had mental health problems was wrong. “Only 2 per cent of members of terrorist organisations suffer from mental health problems, compared with an average of up to 30 per cent of members of the public,” Neil said.
Note: See the full text of this article on this webpage. If this article is accurate, MI5 is using very different tactics than those used by the FBI to fight the war on terror.
Princeton professor Andrew Appel decided to hack into a voting machine. He bought one online. Appel parted with $82 and became the owner of ...the Sequoia AVC Advantage, one of the oldest and vulnerable, electronic voting machines in the United States. He summoned a graduate student named Alex Halderman, who could pick the machine’s lock in seven seconds. Clutching a screwdriver, [Appel then] deftly wedged out the four ROM chips - they weren’t soldered into the circuit board, as sense might dictate - making it simple to replace them with one of his own: A version of modified firmware that could throw off the machine’s results, subtly altering the tally of votes, never to betray a hint to the voter. The attack was concluded in minutes. Elections could be vulnerable at myriad strike points, among them the software that aggregates the precinct vote totals, and the voter registration rolls that are increasingly digitized. But the threat, the cyber experts say, starts with the machines that tally the votes and crucially keep a record of them - or, in some cases, don't. It’s not just the voting machines themselves - it’s the desktop and laptop computers that election officials use. And the computers that aggregate the results together from all of the optical scans. If any of those get hacked, it could could significantly disrupt the election. Hackers this year have [already] targeted voter registration rolls in Illinois and possibly Arizona, another attack highlighted by the Princeton alums.
Note: For the text of the video at the above link and more, see this webpage. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing elections corruption news articles from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our Elections Information Center.
For more than a decade, professional snoops have been able to search troves of ... addresses, DMV records, photographs of a person’s car - and condense them into comprehensive reports costing as little as $10. Now they can combine that information with the kinds of things marketers know about you, such as which politicians you donate to, what you spend on groceries, and whether it’s weird that you ate in last night, to create a portrait of your life and predict your behavior. IDI, a year-old company in the so-called data-fusion business, is the first to centralize and weaponize all that information for its customers. Chief Executive Officer Derek Dubner says the system isn’t waiting for requests from clients - it’s already built a profile on every American adult, including young people who wouldn’t be swept up in conventional databases, which only index transactions. These personal profiles include all known addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses; every piece of property ever bought or sold, plus related mortgages; past and present vehicles owned; criminal citations, from speeding tickets on up; voter registration; hunting permits; and names and phone numbers of neighbors. The reports also include photos of cars taken by private companies using automated license plate readers - billions of snapshots tagged with GPS coordinates and time stamps to help PIs surveil people or bust alibis. IDI also runs two coupon websites ... that collect purchasing and behavioral data.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption and the erosion of privacy.
Buried below the ice sheet that covers most of Greenland, there's an abandoned U.S. Army base. Camp Century had trucks, tunnels, even a nuclear reactor. It was also a test site for deploying nuclear missiles. The camp was abandoned almost 50 years ago. But serious pollutants were left behind. Now a team of scientists says that as climate warming melts the ice sheet, those pollutants could spread. [Researcher William Colgan] found unclassified records that described what was left behind there - for example, the nuclear reactor was removed, but low-level radioactive cooling water used in it was not. There were very likely PCBs, which are toxic compounds in electrical equipment. There's no record of how much remained. Colgan says the Army figured all of it would be entombed forever. "They thought it would snow in perpetuity," he says, "and the phrase they used was that the waste would be preserved for eternity by perpetually accumulating snow." Except now, the climate has changed. Greenland's ice sheet is melting. Computer models say the camp could be uncovered by the end of this century. Meltwater could easily end up in the buried camp and then carry contamination through under-ice channels to the ocean. Colgan says it's unclear who owns this waste. The Army built the camp under a treaty between the U.S. and Denmark, which had jurisdiction over Greenland. It's a legal dilemma that's likely to start cropping up more often.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing global warming news articles from reliable major media sources.
Days before an ISIS sympathizer attacked a cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, he received a text from an undercover FBI agent. “Tear up Texas,” the agent messaged Elton Simpson days before he opened fire at the Draw Muhammad event, according to an affidavit filed in federal court Thursday. “U know what happened in Paris,” Simpson responded. “So that goes without saying ... No need to be direct.” That revelation comes amidst a national debate about the use of undercover officers and human sources in terrorism cases. The texts were included in the indictment, released Thursday, of Erick Jamal Hendricks. He was charged with conspiring to provide material support to ISIS. [Hendricks] tried to recruit other Americans to form an ISIS cell on secret compounds and introduced an undercover agent to one of the Draw Muhammad attackers, according to the FBI. But Hendricks did more than make a connection. According to the court papers, he asked the undercover officer about the Draw Muhammad event’s security, size, and police presence, during the event, according to an affidavit filed in court. FBI spokeswoman Carol Cratty hung up on The Daily Beast after being asked about the “tear up Texas” text. But shortly after that exchange, Simpson and his accomplice, Nadir Soofi, drove up to the contest and opened fire. Both men were killed in the altercation, but Hendricks would remain free for another year. Every major U.S. attack was linked to FBI investigation before it happened.
Note: The FBI has been stepping up its use of stings in ISIS cases. Read how an FBI mole posing as a potential lover recently convinced a man to become a terrorist. If terrorism is such a grave threat in the US, why does the FBI have to manufacture "terrorist" plots and then exaggerate its anti-terrorism success?
A stunning, detailed investigation published Thursday by the Indianapolis Star found that USA Gymnastics, the sport’s governing body in this country, did little to investigate numerous claims of sexual abuse levied against gymnastics coaches across the country, routinely dismissing the allegations as hearsay. This approach runs counter to best practices when dealing with reports of sexual abuse against minors and is possibly illegal, as every state in the country has a law requiring people to report suspected sexual abuse of a minor to authorities. But instead of investigating or reporting the allegations, USA Gymnastics ... compiled complaint dossiers on more than 50 coaches and filed them in a drawer in its executive office in Indianapolis. The most damning incident involves a coach named William “Bill” McCabe. USA Gymnastics received at least four complaints about him starting in 1998. USA Gymnastics never reported the allegations to police and, according to federal authorities, he began molesting an underage girl in 1999. McCabe continued to coach children for nearly seven more years, until Lisa Ganser went to the FBI with concerns about emails to her then-11-year-old daughter. McCabe was charged with molesting gymnasts, secretly videotaping girls changing clothes and posting their naked pictures on the internet. He pleaded guilty in 2006 in Savannah, Georgia, to federal charges of sexual exploitation of children and making false statements. He is serving a 30-year sentence.
Note: Watch an excellent segment by Australia's "60-Minutes" team "Spies, Lords and Predators" on a pedophile ring in the UK which leads directly to the highest levels of government. A second suppressed documentary, "Conspiracy of Silence," goes even deeper into this topic in the US. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.
Weeks after taking a job as a breeding technician at Eagle Point Farms, an anguished Sharee Santorineos sat down and wrote a three-page whistleblower complaint. "I seen pigs that are pregnant beat with steel bars," said her letter to the Illinois Bureau of Animal Health and Welfare. Santorineos knows about raising animals. At a friend's rural Illinois farmhouse, she grows pigs and poultry that they eventually will have slaughtered. Like other worker allegations about animal abuse in Illinois' 900-plus hog confinement facilities, Santorineos' account went nowhere. The state has regularly discounted or dismissed such worker complaints, a Tribune investigation has found. In the Illinois hog confinements that send 12 million pigs to market annually, the bureau did not find a single animal welfare infraction or violation during the past five years. A lack of inspectors - the bureau has just six - contributes to the scant enforcement, while weak Illinois and federal livestock protection laws do little to safeguard animals. In on-the-record interviews, Santorineos and more than a dozen other Illinois swine-confinement workers told the Tribune they witnessed fellow employees whip pigs with metal rods and gouge them with pliers and ballpoint pens to hurry the animals from one stall to the next or onto the trucks that took them to slaughter. They described employees abusing pigs for amusement and encouraging colleagues to take out their frustrations on the animals.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in the food system.
It's a dirty little secret in the food industry that plenty of goods wind up in the trash. As the world's population grows, so does the pressure to tackle the problem. This week, Italy passed new measures to curb food waste. It will now be easier for businesses to donate surplus food and easier for customers to request a "doggy bag" in restaurants - currently not a widespread practice in Italy. There's also an emerging business model that can help take a bite out of food waste. It involves rescuing leftovers and peddling them to consumers at a discount. In 2014, consulting firm Value Chain Management calculated that more than $31 billion worth of food is wasted every year in Canada. Josh Domingues in Toronto ... recently quit his six-figure finance job on Bay Street to create an app called Flashfood. It will connect Toronto food vendors selling leftover food at a discount with customers. Domingues felt he had little choice but to switch careers after his sister, who works as a chef, complained about an epic food waste incident. He did his research and discovered that along with restaurants tossing food, grocers sometimes throw out goods days before they hit their "best before" date. "There's no easy way to connect these food companies directly to the [consumer]," says Domingues. His app, he explains, will help bridge that gap. None of the food sold on Flashfood will have actually passed its "best before" date. Domingues wants to make Flashfood available across Canada and eventually expand to other countries.
Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.
When Ebony Buggs followed the noise of commotion to a vacant unit below her apartment on Chicago’s West Side, she found a group of men beating teens from the neighborhood. One man grabbed her and punched her in the face, according to Buggs, now 26. Buggs’ mother, seeing her daughter lying on the ground, threatened to call the police. “We are the police,” one of the men responded, as he grabbed her phone and threw it. The man who Buggs alleges beat her is Edwin Utreras. He was part of a group of five officers that city residents dubbed the “Skullcap Crew”, who patrolled the city’s South Side public housing communities until they were torn down. The members of this crew – Edwin Utreras, Robert Stegmiller, Christ Savickas, Andrew Schoeff and Joe Seinitz – have together faced at least 128 known official allegations from more than 60 citizen-filed complaints over almost a decade and a half. They have also been named in more than 20 federal lawsuits. Yet over the course of their careers, these officers have received little discipline. Instead, they have won praise from the department, accruing more than 180 commendations. All of them remain on the force except Seinitz, who resigned in 2007. The Citizens Police Data Project, a repository of more than 56,000 official complaints against police, has found that less than 3% of Chicago police misconduct complaints lead to disciplinary action.
Note: Another gang of Chicago police was recently reported to have run a drug dealing and extortion ring with the tacit support of their fellow officers. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing police corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.
Massachusetts is set to adopt a first of its kind equal pay law – one that its supporters are lauding as the most thorough in the nation. The law ... will make it illegal for employers to inquire about salary or wage history. However, employees will be able to share their salary history if they choose to. Massachusetts is the first US state to bar inquiries into salary history. The law is intended to break the pattern of unequal pay for women in the workforce, since employers will no longer be encouraged to low-ball female employees in negotiations who may have been paid unequally in their previous jobs. “For too many generations women have done equally hard, equally skilled, and equally responsible work as men in the same workplace,” said state senator Pat Jehlen, one of the bill’s backers. “This is an important milestone on the journey toward equity for women and families all across this Commonwealth.” Supporters cite a study which shows women in the state still earn 82 cents for every dollar earned by their male peers, despite the fact that Massachusetts was the first in the nation to adopt an equal pay law more than 60 years ago, nine years before the first federal legislation was passed. [The law] will also make Massachusetts the one of a few states including California and New York to pass a “comparable work” law, giving leverage to employees who may try to sue their employers over unequal pay.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing income inequality news articles from reliable major media sources.
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.