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Revealing News For a Better World

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.


Mexico orders HPV vaccinations for all 5th-grade girls, saying it will end threat of cervical cancer
2012-10-03, Miami Herald
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/10/03/3032961/mexico-orders-hpv-vaccinations....

Mexico on [October 3] launched a massive program to vaccinate fifth-grade girls against human papillomavirus, making it one of the few nations in the world with a universal campaign against the sexually transmitted virus. One million schoolgirls ages 11 or 12 will receive the HPV vaccination this week, Mexican President Felipe Calderon said. Another 200,000 girls who aren’t in school also will be given the vaccine. Mexico becomes one of the few countries in the world to follow in the footsteps of Greece, which in 2007 made the HPV vaccination mandatory for girls entering seventh grade. All fifth-grade girls will be given an initial shot, then a second shot six months later. A third and final dose will be given to girls in ninth grade. Mexico began an obligatory vaccination program of schoolchildren and pregnant women in 1991, and currently [administers] 14 types of vaccines, Health Secretary Salomon Chertorivski said. During weeklong periods three times a year, thousands of doctors and nurses spread across the country to schools and rural clinics to administer the free vaccinations.

Note: Once again the pharmaceutical companies are persuading governments to force the public to take their questionable vaccines. For an excellent report endorsed by dozens of respected doctors and nurses on the serious risks and dangers of vaccines, click here. Read about a key scientific study which showed that monkeys given standard human vaccines developed autism symptoms, at this link. For powerful evidence presented in major media articles that some vaccines are much more dangerous than the health industry will acknowledge, click here.


Why the US demonises Venezuela's democracy
2012-10-03, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/03/why-us-dcemonises-venezue...

On 30 May, Dan Rather, one of America's best-known journalists, referred to [Venezuelan president Hugo] Chávez as "the dictator" – a term that few, if any, political scientists familiar with the country would countenance. Here is what Jimmy Carter said about Venezuela's "dictatorship" a few weeks ago: "As a matter of fact, of the 92 elections that we've monitored, I would say that the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world." Carter won a Nobel prize for his work through the election-monitoring Carter Center, which has observed and certified past Venezuelan elections. The opposition will probably lose this election ... because the living standards of the majority of Venezuelans have dramatically improved under Chávez. Since 2004, when the government gained control over the oil industry and the economy had recovered from the devastating, extra-legal attempts to overthrow it (including the 2002 US-backed military coup), poverty has been cut in half and extreme poverty by 70%. And this measures only cash income. Millions have access to healthcare for the first time, and college enrolment has doubled, with free tuition for many students. Inequality has also been considerably reduced. By contrast, the two decades that preceded Chávez amount to one of the worst economic failures in Latin America, with real income per person actually falling by 14% between 1980 and 1998. In Washington, democracy has a simple definition: does a government do what the state department wants it to do?

Note: For a powerful movie which shows how much our media distorts our perception of global events, watch "The Revolution Will Not be Televised" about Venezuela and Hugo Chavez at this link. For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on mass media corruption, click here.


Intelligence Effort Named Citizens, Not Terrorists
2012-10-03, ABC News/Associated Press
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/intelligence-effort-named-citizens...

A multibillion-dollar information-sharing program created in the aftermath of 9/11 has improperly collected information about innocent Americans and produced little valuable intelligence on terrorism, a Senate report concludes. It portrays an effort that ballooned far beyond anyone's ability to control. What began as an attempt to put local, state and federal officials in the same room analyzing the same intelligence has instead cost huge amounts of money for data-mining software, flat screen televisions and, in Arizona, two fully equipped Chevrolet Tahoes that are used for commuting, investigators found. The report underscores a reality of post-9/11 Washington: National security programs tend to grow, never shrink, even when their money and manpower far surpass the actual subject of terrorism. When fusion centers did address terrorism, they sometimes did so in ways that infringed on civil liberties. The centers have made headlines for circulating information about Ron Paul supporters, the ACLU, activists on both sides of the abortion debate, war protesters and advocates of gun rights. One fusion center cited in the Senate investigation wrote a report about a Muslim community group's list of book recommendations. Others discussed American citizens speaking at mosques or talking to Muslim groups about parenting. No evidence of criminal activity was contained in those reports. The government did not circulate them, but it kept them on government computers. The federal government is prohibited from storing information about First Amendment activities not related to crimes.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on civil liberties, click here.


Top 1% Got 93% of Income Growth as Rich-Poor Gap Widened in U.S.
2012-10-02, San Francisco Chronicle/Bloomberg News
http://www.sfgate.com/business/bloomberg/article/Top-1-Got-93-of-Income-Growt...

The U.S. has gone through two recoveries. The 1.2 million households whose incomes put them in the top 1 percent of the U.S. saw their earnings increase 5.5 percent last year, according to estimates released last month by the U.S. Census Bureau. Earnings fell 1.7 percent for the 96 million households in the bottom 80 percent -- those that made less than $101,583. The recovery that officially began in mid-2009 hasn’t arrived in most Americans’ paychecks. In 2010, the top 1 percent of U.S. families captured as much as 93 percent of the nation’s income growth, according to a March paper by Emmanuel Saez, a University of California at Berkeley economist who studied Internal Revenue Service data. The earnings gap between rich and poor Americans was the widest in more than four decades in 2011, Census data show, surpassing income inequality previously reported in Uganda and Kazakhstan. The notion that each generation does better than the last -- one aspect of the American Dream -- has been challenged by evidence that average family incomes fell last decade for the first time since World War II. In this recovery it’s proved better to own stock than a house. For stockholders ... the value of all outstanding shares has soared $6 trillion to $17 trillion since June 2009, the recession’s end. Even after a recent rebound, the value of owner-occupied housing, the chief asset of most middle- income families, has dropped $41 billion in the same period, part of a $5.8 trillion loss in home values since 2006.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on income inequality, click here.


Energy firm uses 'land grabs' to secure fracking rights from reluctant landowners
2012-10-02, NBC News
http://openchannel.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/02/14183177-energy-firm-uses-lan...

Ranjana Bhandari and her husband knew the natural gas beneath their ranch-style home in Arlington, Texas, could be worth a lot - especially when they got offer after offer from Chesapeake Energy Corp. Their repeated refusals didn't stop Chesapeake, the second-largest natural gas producer in the United States. This June, after petitioning a Texas state agency for an exception to a 93-year-old statute, the company effectively secured the ability to drain the gas from beneath the Bhandari property anyway -- without having to pay the couple a penny. In fact, since January 2005, the Texas agency has rejected just five of Chesapeake's 1,628 requests for such exceptions. Chesapeake's use of the Texas law is among the latest examples of how the company executes what it calls a "land grab" -- an aggressive leasing strategy intended to lock up prospective drilling sites and lock out competitors. Chesapeake has become the principal player in the largest land boom in America since the California Gold Rush of the late 1840s and ‘50s, amassing drilling rights on more land than almost any U.S. energy company. After years of leasing tracts from New York to Wyoming, the company now controls the right to drill for oil and gas on about 15 million acres -- roughly the size of West Virginia.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on corporate corruption, click here.


Pesticide use ramping up as GMO crop technology backfires: study
2012-10-01, NBC News/Reuters
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/02/14178036-study-us-farmers-using-mo...

U.S. farmers are using more hazardous pesticides to fight weeds and insects due largely to heavy adoption of genetically modified crop technologies that are sparking a rise of "superweeds" and hard-to-kill insects, according to a newly released study. Genetically engineered crops have led to an increase in overall pesticide use, by 404 million pounds from the time they were introduced in 1996 through 2011, according to the report by Charles Benbrook, a research professor at the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources at Washington State University. Of that total, herbicide use increased over the 16-year period by 527 million pounds while insecticide use decreased by 123 million pounds. Herbicide-tolerant crops were the first genetically modified crops introduced to world, rolled out by Monsanto Co. in 1996, first in "Roundup Ready" soybeans and then in corn, cotton and other crops. Roundup Ready crops are engineered through transgenic modification to tolerate dousings of Monsanto's Roundup herbicide. In recent years, more than two dozen weed species have become resistant to Roundup's chief ingredient glyphosate, causing farmers to use increasing amounts both of glyphosate and other weedkilling chemicals to try to control the so-called "superweeds." Resistant weeds have become a major problem for many farmers reliant on GE crops, and are now driving up the volume of herbicide needed each year by about 25 percent.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on the environmental and health risks posed by GMO foods, click here.


GM cow designed to produce milk without an allergy-causing protein
2012-10-01, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/oct/01/gm-cow-milk-alllergy-protein

A genetically modified cow whose milk lacks a substance that causes allergic reactions in people has been created by scientists in New Zealand. In their first year of life, two or three in every hundred infants are allergic to a whey protein in milk called BLG. The researchers engineered the cow, called Daisy, to produce milk that doesn't contain the protein. While the genetic alteration slashed levels of BLG protein in the cow's milk to undetectable levels, it more than doubled the concentrations of other milk proteins called caseins. The cow was created with the same cloning procedure that led to Dolly the sheep in 1996. Most of the differences between cow and human milk do not cause problems for people who consume it, but BLG or beta-lactoglobulin protein, which is found in milk from cows and other ruminants, is a major cause of allergic reactions. To make Daisy, scientists took a cow skin cell and genetically modified it to produce molecules that block the manufacture of BLG protein. The nucleus of this cell was then transferred into a cow egg that had its own nucleus removed. The reconstituted egg was grown in the lab until it formed what is called a blastocyst, a ball of around 100 cells, and then transplanted into the womb of a foster cow. The cloning technique is not efficient. Of around 100 blastocysts the scientists implanted into cows, more than half of the pregnancies failed early on, and only one live calf, Daisy, was born. One question the New Zealand team is working on now is why Daisy was born without a tail. The cloning process is most likely to blame for the birth defect.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on genetically modified organisms (GMOs), click here.


Study: Scientific research fraud on the rise
2012-10-01, CBS News/Associated Press
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-204_162-57523932/study-scientific-research-fraud-...

Fraud in scientific research, while still rare, is growing at a troubling pace, a new study finds. A review of retractions in medical and biological peer-reviewed journals finds the percentage of studies withdrawn because of fraud or suspected fraud has jumped substantially since the mid-1970s. In 1976, there were fewer than 10 fraud retractions for every 1 million studies published, compared with 96 retractions per million in 2007. The study authors aren't quite sure why this is happening. But they and outside experts point to pressure to hit it big in science, both for funding and attention, and to what seems to be a subtle increase in deception in overall society that science may simply be mirroring. Fraud in life sciences research is still minuscule and committed by only a few dozen scientific scofflaws. However, it causes big problems, said Arturo Casadevall, a professor of microbiology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. Casadevall is the lead author of the study which looked at the reasons for 2,047 retractions among many millions of studies published in journals and kept in a government database. Fraud was the No. 1 cause of retractions, accounting for 43 percent of them. When fraud was combined with other areas of misconduct, such as plagiarism, it explained about 2 out of 3 retractions, the study found. "Very few people are doing it, but when they do it, they are doing it in areas that are very important," Casadevall said. "And when these things come out, society loses faith in science."

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on corruption in science, click here.


Jimmy Savile case: when will we start listening to children who are abused?
2012-10-01, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/01/jimmy-savile-abused-child...

Jimmy Savile, the television presenter and media personality, knighted for his charity work for sick and disabled children is to be exposed as a prolific sexual abuser of girls as young as 12 in a documentary this week. This news will not come as a shock to many, as the rumours about Savile have been in the public domain for decades. That's the truly shocking part of this story – so many people either knew or suspected the fact that Savile was assaulting underage girls but chose to do nothing whatsoever about it. A number of Savile's former colleagues interviewed for the documentary admitted that his predatory behaviour towards young girls was an open secret at the BBC. Wilfred De'Ath, who worked with Savile in the 1960s, ... admitted that it was "common gossip" that Savile was an abuser. Still, it appears that neither he nor any other colleagues reported him either to the BBC bosses or police. In 2007, Surrey police received a complaint from a woman who said she was sexually assaulted by Savile at an approved school that Savile regularly visited in the 1970s, but the Crown Prosecution Service decided there was insufficient evidence to take it forward. Esther Rantzen hits the nail on the head in an interview about the revelations when she says, "in some way we colluded with him as a child abuser" and that, "We made him into the Jimmy Savile who was untouchable, who nobody could criticise." But it is not only celebrities who are protected from justice. Throughout society, there is a culture of denial, minimisation and disbelief around child sexual abuse..

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on sexual abuse, click here.


Abuse of smallest babies may have risen, study finds
2012-10-01, NBC News
http://vitals.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/01/14163696-abuse-of-smallest-babies-...

A new look at child abuse reports suggests there may have been a small but worrying rise in injuries to babies over the past decade or so. [A] report published ... in the journal Pediatrics ... contradicts government data collected over the same time. It’s still happening and that’s a concern, says Dr. John Leventhal of Yale University, who led the study. “Maybe parents are doing better and hurting their children less in general, but there is a small group where there continue to be substantial injuries that end in hospitalization,” Leventhal said. Leventhal and colleague Julie Gaither looked at statistics on children admitted to hospitals for serious injuries. They said they found a nearly 11 percent increase over 12 years in serious injuries to babies a year old and younger. This is at the same time that two major national surveys of child abuse found decreases of between 55 percent and 23 percent in child abuse injuries overall, for all ages, between 1997 and 2009. It's important to point out that each study goes to different sources for data -- this week's study looks at hospital admissions, while the government studies examined reports of abuse filed to Child Protective Services and other agencies by doctors and other sources. Child abuse is a serious problem in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says more than 740,000 children and youth are treated in hospital emergency departments for injuries resulting from violence every year.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on sexual abuse, click here.


Women Hurting Women
2012-09-30, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/opinion/sunday/kristof-women-hurting-women....

It would be nice to think that women who achieve power would want to help women at the bottom. But one continuing global drama underscores that women in power can be every bit as contemptible as men. Sheikh Hasina, prime minister of Bangladesh, is mounting a scorched-earth offensive against Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank and champion of the economic empowerment of women around the world. Yunus, 72, won a Nobel Peace Prize for his pioneering work in microfinance, focused on helping women lift their families out of poverty. Yet Sheikh Hasina’s government has already driven Yunus from his job as managing director of Grameen Bank. Worse, since last month, her government has tried to seize control of the bank from its 5.5 million small-time shareholders, almost all of them women, who collectively own more than 95 percent of the bank. The government has also started various investigations of Yunus and his finances and taxes, and his supporters fear that he might be arrested on some pretext or another.

Note: To sign a petition to the Bangladeshi PM to stop government intervention in this empowering bank, click here. For excellent information on the amazing Grameen Bank and microlending movement, click here.


Billionaire Koch brothers try to buy state’s court
2012-09-29, Miami Herald
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/09/29/3025110/billionaire-koch-brothers-try.html

The new stealth campaign against three Florida Supreme Court justices is being backed by those meddling right-wing billionaires from Wichita, Charles and David Koch. Last week they uncorked the first of a series of commercials from their political action committee, Americans for Prosperity. The targets are Justices R. Fred Lewis, Barbara Pariente and Peggy Quince. They were three of the five-vote majority that in 2010 knocked down a half-baked amendment slapped together by state lawmakers seeking to nullify the federal Affordable Health Care Act. The Florida Supreme Court upheld lower court decisions in finding that the proposed amendment contained “misleading and ambiguous language,” the hallmark of practically everything produced by this Legislature. On the November ballot, Lewis, Pariente and Quince are up for merit retention, meaning voters can choose to retain them or not. This simple system was put in place to keep the state’s high court above the sleaze of political races. The mission of the Kochs, hiding as always behind their super PAC, is to get the three justices dumped at the polls so that Gov. Rick Scott can appoint replacements. The last thing these guys want is fair judges who know the law; they want partisan judges who’ll obediently support their political agenda. It’s worse than just trying to buy an election. It’s trying to hijack Florida’s justice system at the highest levels.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on the control of elections by corporations and rich individuals, click here.


HSAs force health providers to compete
2012-09-29, San Francisco Chronicle (SF's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/HSAs-force-health-providers-to-compete-...

A growing number of patients are paying directly most, or all, of their medical bills these days. One problem they face: Finding out what health care services really cost before they make the decision to buy. Even though it accounts for one-sixth of the U.S. economy, health care is difficult to shop for in all but a small percentage of health care purchases. For the most part, no one ever sees a real price for health care services - not doctors, not patients, not employers, not employees. The reason patients never see the prices is because third-party payers (insurance companies, employers and government) negotiate with providers - leaving patients with a small co-pay under traditional insurance. And without real prices, there is no basis for third-party payers or anyone to negotiate the lowest possible prices. Recently, however, more and more employers are encouraging their employees to shop for health care the way they shop for groceries. To encourage that activity, employers are allowing their employees to manage more of their own health care dollars by means of a health savings account. The idea behind an HSA is a simple one: Instead of giving all of your health dollars to an insurance company or the government, you put some of those dollars into an account that you own and control. This reduces wasteful health care spending because individuals ... spending their own money often get the lowest prices, and they also can decide whether they really want to buy those services. A recent Rand Corp. study found that patients with HSA plans reduced medical spending by about 30 percent, without adversely affecting their health.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on corporate corruption, click here.


Study linking GM maize to cancer must be taken seriously by regulators
2012-09-28, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/sep/28/study-gm-maize-cancer

For seven years [Professor Gilles-Eric Séralini, professor of molecular biology at Caen university in France] and his team have questioned the safety standards applied to varieties of GM maize and tried to re-analyse industry-funded studies presented to governments. Last week, Seralini brought the whole scientific and corporate establishment crashing down on his head. In a peer-reviewed US journal, Food and Chemical Toxicology, he reported the results of a ₏3.2m study. Fed a diet of Monsanto's Roundup-tolerant GM maize NK603 for two years, or exposed to Roundup over the same period, rats developed higher levels of cancers and died earlier than controls. But barely had the paper surfaced than it was attracting heavyweight academic criticism. Commentators variously claimed the study to be "biased", "poorly performed", "bogus", "fraudulent", "sub-standard", "sloppy agenda-based science", "inadequate" and "unsatisfactory". Séralini and his scientists were labelled "crafty activists" and "anti-science". It was a triumph for the scientific and corporate establishment which has used similar tactics to crush other scientists like Arpad Pusztai of the Rowett Institute in Scotland, who was sacked after his research suggested GM potatoes damaged the stomach lining and immune system of rats, and David Quist and Ignacio Chapela, who studied the flow of genes from illegally planted GM maize to Mexican wild maize.

Note: For a powerful summary of the risks to health from GMO foods including the story of the above-mentioned Arpad Pusztai, click here. For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on GMOs, click here. For a powerful 13-minute video revealing the disturbing results of the first long-term scientific study on GMOs showing how they greatly increased cancer incidence in rats, click here.


France unveils 'harshest budget in 30 years' ... 75% supertax on the rich
2012-09-28, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/28/france-harshest-budget-30-years

To the dismay of a swath of French bankers, business leaders and the wealthy, President François Hollande has remained true to his word and unveiled ₏20bn (Ł16bn) in new taxes, including a 75% "supertax" band that will hit the rich. However, the Socialist government sidestepped ... cuts in public spending, including pensions and state salaries, in its 2013 budget, which aims to find ₏36.9bn in savings. The budget was a delicate balancing act in which Hollande sought to reassure investors and the financial markets, while simultaneously hiking taxes on large businesses and high-earners. However, it commits the government to an austerity programme that will be unpopular with leftwingers in the party, at a time when unemployment is rising and the economy teeters on the brink of recession. The budget aims to raise two-thirds of the Ł36.9bn savings with extra taxes split evenly between households and large companies, plus more than ₏10bn in public spending cuts. The burden between taxes and spending cuts would be shared 50-50 from 2014. The standout measure, from a public perspective, was a new 75% tax rate on people earning more than ₏1m a year. A new 45% income tax band is to be introduced for those earning more than ₏150,000 a year.


US calls Assange 'enemy of state'
2012-09-27, Sydney Morning Herald (One of Australia's leading newspapers)
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/us-calls-assange-enemy-of-state-...

The US military has designated Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as enemies of the United States - the same legal category as the al-Qaeda terrorist network and the Taliban insurgency. Declassified US Air Force counter-intelligence documents, released under US freedom-of-information laws, reveal that military personnel who contact WikiLeaks or WikiLeaks supporters may be at risk of being charged with "communicating with the enemy", a military crime that carries a maximum sentence of death. The documents, some originally classified "Secret/NoForn" - not releasable to non-US nationals - record a probe by the air force's Office of Special Investigations into a cyber systems analyst based in Britain who allegedly expressed support for WikiLeaks and attended pro-Assange demonstrations in London. The suspected offence was "communicating with the enemy, 104-D", an article in the US Uniform Code of Military Justice that prohibits military personnel from "communicating, corresponding or holding intercourse with the enemy". US Vice-President Joe Biden labelled Mr Assange a "high-tech terrorist" in December 2010 and US congressional leaders have called for him to be charged with espionage. Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee - both once involved in presidential campaigns - have both urged that Mr Assange be "hunted down". Mr Assange's US attorney, Michael Ratner, said the designation of WikiLeaks as an "enemy" had serious implications for the WikiLeaks publisher if he were to be extradited to the US, including possible military detention.

Note: So revealing top secrets can cause you to be labelled an enemy of the state. Write you political and media representatives to protest this stance. For analysis of this story, click here. For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on military corruption, click here.


How lawmakers and lobbyists keep a lock on the private prison business
2012-09-27, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/27/lawmakers-lobbyists-keep-...

America's three largest private prison companies ... spent in the region of $45m over the past 10 years in lobbying state and federal governments. During the same period, these companies saw their profits soar as they scored more government contracts. [Also] during the same period, various pieces of legislation got passed ensuring that immigrant detention, in particular, would remain a lucrative growth market. Thanks to mandatory sentencing laws and the "war on drugs", the prison population has exploded over the past 30 years – to the point where it has become an untenable burden on state budgets. The private prison business [is] reliant on state and federal governments to provide them with their customer base: that is, bodies to fill their cells. The companies maintain that their lobbying efforts have nothing to do with this expansion and insist that it is their policy to "expressly prohibit their lobbyists from working to pass or oppose immigration legislation", such as the Arizona immigration bill SB1070, which provides for the mandatory detention of immigrants who cannot produce papers on request. [Then] where are the private prison firms spending those millions of lobbying dollars? A report compiled by the Justice Policy Institute issued in 2011 and using data from the National Institute on Money in State Politics found that between 2003 and 2010, the [Corrections Corporation of America] contributed a total of $1,552,350 to state election campaigns. Approximately half was to candidates, more than a third was to party committees and around one tenth was spent on ballot measures.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on corruption in the prison/industrial complex, click here.


Fighting Recession the Icelandic Way
2012-09-26, Bloomberg
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-26/is-remedy-for-next-crisis-buried-in-...

Few countries blew up more spectacularly than Iceland in the 2008 financial crisis. The local stock market plunged 90 percent; unemployment rose ninefold; inflation shot to more than 18 percent; the country’s biggest banks all failed. Since then, Iceland has turned in a pretty impressive performance. It has repaid International Monetary Fund rescue loans ahead of schedule. Growth this year will be about 2.5 percent, better than most developed economies. Unemployment has fallen by half. Iceland’s approach was the polar opposite of the U.S. and Europe, which rescued their banks and did little to aid indebted homeowners. Nothing distinguishes Iceland as much as its aid to consumers. To homeowners with negative equity, the country offered write-offs that would wipe out debt above 110 percent of the property value. The government also provided means-tested subsidies to reduce mortgage-interest expenses: Those with lower earnings, less home equity and children were granted the most generous support. In June 2010, the nation’s Supreme Court gave debtors another break: Bank loans that were indexed to foreign currencies were declared illegal. Because the Icelandic krona plunged 80 percent during the crisis, the cost of repaying foreign debt more than doubled. The ruling let consumers repay the banks as if the loans were in krona. These policies helped consumers erase debt equal to 13 percent of Iceland’s $14 billion economy. Now, consumers have money to spend on other things.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on the collusion of most major governments with the financial sector whose profiteering contributed to the global economic crisis, click here.


Rented computers secretly photographed users having sex
2012-09-26, BBC News
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19726954

Rented computers from seven different companies secretly took photographs of their users, US authorities have said. The companies used software made by US company Designerware which could track key strokes and other personal data. The software, called PC Rental Agent, captured people engaging in "intimate acts", including sex. It is believed that PC Rental Agent has been installed in approximately 420,000 computers worldwide. The Federal Trade Commission ruling concerned a feature in the software, called Detective Mode, which would typically become activated if the user was late in returning equipment, or failed to pay for use. Detective Mode would assist the rental store in locating the overdue computer in order to pursue its return. Part of the process involved a pop-up window designed to look like a software registration screen. It would request personal information such as email addresses and telephone numbers that could then be used to pursue the users for payment and/or the return of equipment. In addition, the FTC said the software had access to much more sensitive information, including: usernames and passwords for email accounts, social media websites, and financial institutions. Among the other data collected were social security numbers; medical records; private emails to doctors; bank and credit card statements. Webcam pictures of children, partially undressed individuals, and intimate activities at home were also found. In the FTC's formal complaint document, it said the software had captured "couples engaged in sexual activities".

Note: Do you think other companies or intelligence agencies might be conducting similar monitoring? For more on this, click here.


UC to pay nearly $1 million in UC Davis pepper-spray settlement
2012-09-26, Chicago Tribune/Los Angeles Times
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/sns-la-uc-to-pay-nearly-1-mill...

The University of California will pay damages of $30,000 to each of the 21 UC Davis students and alumni who were pepper-sprayed by campus police during an otherwise peaceful protest 10 months ago, the university system announced. The agreement ... also calls for UC to pay a total of $250,000 to the plaintiffs' attorneys and set aside a maximum of $100,000 to pay up to $20,000 to any other individuals who join the class-action lawsuit by proving they were either arrested or directly pepper-sprayed, a university statement said. A video released online, showing an officer spraying seated students directly in their faces at close range during an Occupy rally, had triggered outrage. And UC's own investigations and a shake-up at the UC Davis police force put the university in a weak position to argue against the students' lawsuit. The settlement also calls for UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi to write a formal apology to each of the students and alumni who were pepper-sprayed or arrested. In April, a UC task force headed by former state Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso found that UC Davis police had violated policy and that campus administrators mishandled the November 2011 campus protest. In May, a separate draft report about campus responses to civil disobedience across UC urged administrators to use mediation instead of confrontation in most cases, although it said pepper spray might remain a necessary tool of last resort. A final version was released this month with no major policy changes.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on civil liberties, click here.


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