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Excerpts of Key News Articles in Major Media

Below are key excerpts of little-known, yet highly revealing news articles from the media. Links are provided to the full news articles for verification. If any link fails to function, read this webpage. These articles are listed by order of importance. You can also explore these articles listed by order of the date of the news article or by the date posted. By choosing to educate ourselves, we can build a brighter future.

Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on dozens of engaging topics. And read excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

The son of [a] rocket scientist thinks he is close to perfecting...a machine that might make cheap, clean electricity from the ocean. "I believe it'll change the world," said second-generation inventor Tom Woodbridge, a NASA engineer. In theory, the idea is simple. Spinning copper wires through a stable magnetic field makes electricity — lots of electrons jumping off the magnetic field and zooming through a conductive metal. And since the ocean waves are already moving, why not cobble together a machine to harness that energy? Think Pogo Stick inside a floating drum. The rocking motion of the waves pushes a long cylinder of magnets up and down a copper coil. His small model generates 10 watts of power in a 6-inch wave chop. A full-scale version could generate 160 kilowatts. That one buoy is enough to power 160 houses, following the rule of thumb that the average U.S. home uses about 1,000 kilowatts of electricity each month.

Note: The Houston Chronicle actually cut off part of the original article, including the last three sentences above. To read the entire article, click here. For lots more on new energy inventions, see click here.

Former CIA chief Stansfield Turner lashed out at Dick Cheney on Thursday, calling him a "vice president for torture" that is out of touch with the American people. Turner's condemnation...comes amid an effort by Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, to pass legislation forbidding any U.S. authority from torturing a prisoner. McCain was tortured as a Vietnam prisoner of war. Cheney has lobbied against the legislation, prompting Turner to say he's "embarrassed that the United State[s] has a vice president for torture. I think it is just reprehensible." Turner...scoffed at assertions that challenging the administration's strategy aided the terrorists' propaganda efforts. "It's the vice president who is out there advocating torture. He's the one who has made himself the vice president in favor of torture," said Turner, who from 1972 to 1974 was president of the Naval War College, a think tank for strategic and national security policy. "We military people don't want future military people who are taken prisoner by other countries to be subjected to torture in the name of doing just what the United States does," he said.

An Israeli army officer who fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was acquitted on all charges by a military court yesterday. The soldier, who has only been identified as "Captain R", was charged with relatively minor offences for the killing of Iman al-Hams who was shot 17 times as she ventured near an Israeli army post near Rafah refugee camp in Gaza a year ago. The manner of Iman's killing, and the revelation of a tape recording in which the captain is warned that she was just a child who was "scared to death", made the shooting one of the most controversial since the Palestinian intifada erupted five years ago even though hundreds of other children have also died. After the verdict, Iman's father, Samir al-Hams, said the army never intended to hold the soldier accountable. "They did not charge him with Iman's murder, only with small offences, and now they say he is innocent of those even though he shot my daughter so many times," he said. "This was the cold-blooded murder of a girl. The soldier murdered her once and the court has murdered her again. What is the message? They are telling their soldiers to kill Palestinian children." The military court cleared the soldier of illegal use of his weapon, conduct unbecoming an officer and perverting the course of justice by asking soldiers under his command to alter their accounts of the incident.

[Gary] Butcher has been an extension veterinarian at the University of Florida's College of Veterinary Medicine since 1988. He was trained as a veterinarian specializing in avian diseases, and has a Ph.D. in poultry virology. Butcher begins his presentation with a slide that shows a "news flash" from the British press agency Reuters reporting that avian flu "poses the single biggest threat to the world right now." So far, however...no one has yet been proven to have given avian influenza to someone else. "The emphasis of all my work has changed to dealing with this madness," Butcher said Friday. "Realistically, avian influenza is not a threat to people, but everywhere you go, it has turned into a circus." Millions of chickens and waterfowl have been slaughtered in Asia...but Butcher said that of the billions of people who have probably been exposed, only about 120 have been reported to have fallen ill with avian flu. They were people who worked closely with chickens and came into contact with the birds' blood and feces. Not all health officials are sounding a warning about avian influenza, either. Dr. Marc Siegel, a practicing internist and associate professor of medicine at the New York University School of Medicine...isn't buying into the scare scenario. "If anything is contagious right now, it's judgment clouded by fear," Siegel said. [Butcher] said that although there is a potential that the virus could mutate, as it exists, it could not become an important disease in humans. "For it to become dangerous to humans, it has to go through a pretty significant genetic change. If you put this in perspective, it's not going to happen.

Note: When major corruption threatens to be exposed, those threatened know that by creating massive fear (such as a global pandemic), they can divert attention and keep money flowing into corrupt coffers. For more on this, click here and here.

The National Security Agency has kept secret since 2001 a finding by an agency historian that during the Tonkin Gulf episode, which helped precipitate the Vietnam War, N.S.A. officers deliberately distorted critical intelligence to cover up their mistakes. The historian's conclusion is the first serious accusation that communications intercepted by the N.S.A., the secretive eavesdropping and code-breaking agency, were falsified so that they made it look as if North Vietnam had attacked American destroyers on Aug. 4, 1964, two days after a previous clash. President Lyndon B. Johnson cited the supposed attack to persuade Congress to authorize broad military action in Vietnam, but most historians have concluded in recent years that there was no second attack. The N.S.A. historian, Robert J. Hanyok, found a pattern of translation mistakes that went uncorrected, altered intercept times and selective citation of intelligence that persuaded him that midlevel agency officers had deliberately skewed the evidence. Mr. Hanyok's findings were published nearly five years ago in a classified in-house journal, and starting in 2002 he and other government historians argued that it should be made public. But their effort was rebuffed by higher-level agency policymakers, according to an intelligence official. The intelligence official said the evidence for deliberate falsification is "about as certain as it can be."

Note: For lots more on war fabrication see the excellent information in our War Information Center and the released FOIA documents from the early 1960s showing that top Pentagon officials planned to kill innocent Americans in order to provoke a war against Cuba at http://www.WantToKnow.info/010501operationnorthwoods

Drafting a plan for global dominance. Few writers are more ambitious than the writers of government policy papers, and few policy papers are more ambitious than Dick Cheney's masterwork. It has taken several forms over the last decade and is in fact the product of several ghostwriters (notably Paul Wolfowitz and Colin Powell), but Cheney has been consistent in his dedication to the ideas in the documents that bear his name, and he has maintained a close association with the ideologues behind them. Let us, therefore, call Cheney the author, and this series of documents the Plan. The Plan was published in unclassified form most recently under the title of Defense Strategy for the 1990s, as Cheney ended his term as secretary of defense under the elder George Bush in early 1993. The Plan is for the United States to rule the world. The overt theme is unilateralism, but it is ultimately a story of domination. It calls for the United States to maintain its overwhelming military superiority and prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge it on the world stage. It calls for dominion over friends and enemies alike. It says not that the United States must be more powerful, or most powerful, but that it must be absolutely powerful. The Plan is disturbing in many ways, and ultimately unworkable. Yet it is being sold now as an answer to the 'new realities' of the post-September 11 world, even as it was sold previously as the answer to the new realities of the post-Cold War world. For Cheney, the Plan has always been the right answer, no matter how different the questions.

Several major media articles have sung the praises of microcredit, also known as microfinance and microlending: New York Times: Tiny Loans Make a Big Difference in Lives of Poor; Wall Street Journal: A new way to do well by doing good; BusinessWeek: Microfinance funds lift poor entrepreneurs—and benefit investors; The Economist: Microcredit in India, High finance benefits the poor; Excellent general article in Time magazine titled "The End of Poverty" CNN/Associated Press: Bankers for poor win peace Nobel. Without donating a penny, you can help to break the cycle poverty in a very real way. Microcredit investments are not donations or charity. Like other investments, the money is always yours. You even earn a small amount of interest. Yet for every $1,000 you invest, several entire families in the developing world can be pulled out of poverty every year. That is part of the reason why the United Nations declared 2005 to be the International Year of Microcredit and why the individual and group who originated the microcredit concept were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. To download a free 24-page guide to microcredit and community investing, click here.  And note that these investments are not influenced at all by market fluctuations.

Note: For more detailed information on this incredibly inspiring means of decimating poverty, click here.

Secrecy has been perhaps the most consistent trait of the George W. Bush presidency. Whether it involves refusing to provide the names of oil executives who advised Vice President Dick Cheney on energy policy, prohibiting photographs of flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq, or forbidding the release of files pertaining to Chief Justice John Roberts...President Bush seems determined to control what the public is permitted to know. Perhaps the most egregious example occurred on Nov. 1, 2001, when President Bush signed Executive Order 13233, under which a former president's private papers can be released only with the approval of both that former president (or his heirs) and the current one. Before that executive order, the National Archives had controlled the release of documents under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which stipulated that all papers, except those pertaining to national security, had to be made available 12 years after a president left office. Now, however, Mr. Bush can prevent the public from knowing not only what he did in office, but what Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan did in the name of democracy. The best interests of the nation are at stake. As the American Political Science Association, one plaintiff in the federal lawsuit, put it: "The only way we can improve the operation of government, enhance the accountability of decision-makers and ultimately help maintain public trust in government is for people to understand how it worked in the past."

Note: For more on secrecy and what we can do about it, click here.

The United States...is spending $5.6 billion a month fighting this war in Iraq. Now we have the hurricanes to pay for. One way our government pays for a lot of things is by borrowing from countries like China. Another way...is by cutting spending for things like Medicare prescriptions, highway construction, farm payments, AMTRAK, National Public Radio and loans to graduate students. We ought to start saving on our bloated military establishment. We have more than 10,000 nuclear weapons -- enough to destroy all of mankind. We're spending $200 million a year on bullets alone. We had a great commander in WWII, Dwight Eisenhower. He became President and on leaving the White House in 1961, he said this: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." Well, Ike was right. That's just what’s happened.

Note: See the text of Eisenhower's farewell speech on the Yale University website. To view a video of the original speech, click here.

Four years after the nation's deadliest terror attack, evidence is accumulating that a super-secret Pentagon intelligence unit identified the organizer of the Sept. 11 hijackings, Mohamed Atta, as an Al Qaeda operative months before he entered the U.S. Had the FBI been alerted to what the Pentagon purportedly knew in early 2000, Atta's name could have been put on a list that would have tagged him as someone to be watched the moment he stepped off a plane in Newark, N.J., in June of that year. Physical and electronic surveillance of Atta, who lived openly in Florida for more than a year, and who acquired a driver's license and even an FAA pilot's license in his true name, might well have made it possible for the FBI to expose the Sept. 11 plot before the fact. Anthony Shaffer, a civilian Pentagon employee, says he was asked in the summer of 2000 by a Navy captain, Scott Phillpott, to arrange a meeting between the FBI and representatives of the Pentagon intelligence program, code-named Able/Danger. But he said the meeting was canceled after Pentagon lawyers concluded that information on suspected Al Qaeda operatives with ties to the U.S. might violate Pentagon prohibitions on retaining information on "U.S. persons," a term that includes U.S. citizens and permanent resident aliens. Asked by Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, at a hearing last week whether Atta...was a "U.S. person," a senior Pentagon official answered, "No, he was not."

Note: If the above link fails, click here.

President Bush issued an executive order Thursday allowing federal contractors rebuilding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to pay below the prevailing wage. In a notice to Congress, Bush said the hurricane had caused "a national emergency" that permits him to take such action. Bush's action came as the federal government moved to provide billions of dollars in aid. The administration is using the devastation of Hurricane Katrina to cut the wages of people desperately trying to rebuild their lives and their communities.

Faced with a record-high national gasoline price of $3.07 per gallon, a senior Republican senator said on Tuesday it was time for lawmakers to take another look at imposing stricter mileage standards on mini-vans and other vehicles. Most Republicans and the White House oppose significantly higher mileage requirements because of the potential impact on U.S. automakers and passenger safety. On Tuesday, the U.S. government reported that the average U.S. weekly retail gasoline price rocketed to $3.07 cents per gallon, up nearly 46 cents from last week, because of Katrina's damage to refineries and pipelines. In June, the Senate voted to reject a Democratic amendment to the energy bill to require better mileage for new gas-guzzling sport utility and other vehicles. Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin had proposed that the standards be revised to boost the fuel economy of passenger cars to 40 miles per gallon (mpg) by 2016, and sport utility vehicles to 27.5 mpg. The proposal was defeated.

Note: Why did no major media pick up on this crucial story from one of the most watched news services in the world? Why, with all of the talk about getting off of our dependence on oil, wouldn't lawmakers want our cars to get better car mileage? For possible answers, click here.

For years, the U.S. military has explored a new kind of firepower that is instantaneous, precise and virtually inexhaustible: beams of electromagnetic energy. "Directed-energy" pulses can be throttled up or down depending on the situation, much like the phasers on "Star Trek" could be set to kill or merely stun. Such weapons are now nearing fruition. The hallmark of all directed-energy weapons is that the target -- whether a human or a mechanical object -- has no chance to avoid the shot because it moves at the speed of light. At some frequencies, it can penetrate walls. "When you're dealing with people whose full intent is to die, you can't give people a choice of whether to comply," said George Gibbs, a systems engineer for the Marine Expeditionary Rifle Squad Program who oversees directed-energy projects. "What I'm looking for is a way to shoot everybody, and they're all OK." Among the simplest forms are inexpensive, handheld lasers that fill people's field of vision, inducing a temporary blindness to ensure they stop at a checkpoint, for example. Some of these already are used in Iraq. A separate branch of directed-energy research involves bigger, badder beams: lasers that could obliterate targets tens of miles away from ships or planes. Such a strike would be so surgical that, as some designers put it at a recent conference here, the military could plausibly deny responsibility. The directed-energy component in the project is the Active Denial System, developed by Air Force researchers and built by Raytheon Co. It produces a millimeter-wavelength burst of energy that penetrates 1/64 of an inch into a person's skin, agitating water molecules to produce heat. The sensation is certain to get people to halt whatever they are doing.

"Consumers and regulators are putting more pressure on the auto industry to enhance fuel economy, which was stagnant at an average 20.8 miles per gallon among all 2004 models and below the 1988 high of 22.1 mpg."  -- Detroit News, 4/11/05

"The Prius is the first significant departure from the combustion engine to make any major inroads in the auto industry since Henry Ford invented the Model T in 1908."  -- Newsweek, 9/20/04

"Ford's Model T, which went 25 miles on a gallon of gasoline, was more fuel efficient than the current Ford Explorer sport-utility vehicle -- which manages just 16 miles per gallon."
  -- Detroit News, 6/4/03

Genius inventors for the past 100 years have made remarkable discoveries of new, more efficient energy sources, only to find their inventions either suppressed or not given the attention and funding needed to break us free of our dependence on archaic oil-based technologies. Read this article for more reliable information on this vital topic.

It started during British Prime Minister Tony Blair's re-election campaign last month, when details leaked about a top-secret memo, written in July 2002 -- eight months before the Iraq war. In the memo, British officials just back from Washington reported that prewar "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" to invade Iraq. Just last week, both President George W. Bush and Blair vigorously denied that war was inevitable. “No, the facts were not being fixed, in any shape or form at all,” said Blair at a White House news conference with the president on June 7. But now, war critics have come up with seven more memos, verified by NBC News. Current and former diplomats tell NBC News they understood from the beginning the Bush policy to be that Saddam had to be removed -- one way or the other. The only question was when and how.

In a case that has horrified Americans way beyond the Bible Belt, Louis Lamonica ... and eight members the Hosanna Church are accused of being members of a Satanic paedophile ring who ritually raped up to 25 children, as well as performing animal sacrifices. Police say some of those charged - who include Lamonica's wife and a deputy sheriff - have already admitted devil worship inside the now defunct church. The discovery of badly rubbed-out pentagrams on the floor and eight boxes of hooded black costumes - allegedly used both in the abuse and in "morality tales" performed to prepare the young victims - bear out some of the claims. Lamonica himself astonished police by walking into a neighbouring sheriff's office a few weeks ago and confessing out of the blue that over five years he and other church members had sexually abused boys and girls aged between one and 16 and taught them to have sex with each other, as well as with a dog. Local police say his claims have been confirmed by some of the victims, of whom half a dozen have so far been interviewed, and by some of the fellow abusers, whose names Lamonica freely gave to police. Lamonica ... claimed the abuse began in 1999 and stopped in 2003 when the Hosanna Church closed. But police believe it may have continued in members' homes. Most of the accused have been charged with aggravated rape of a child under 13.

Note: The US military accepts avowed Satanists in their ranks. 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 deeply revealing sexual abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.

A Times survey of the state's largest companies shows that CEOs' pay is growing at a much faster pace than that of rank-and-file employees. The difference is even sharper at the top rungs of the ladder. The 10 highest-paid executives on this year's list earned 36.7% more than last year's top 10 — garnering a collective $467.5 million. That's enough to buy about 275 homes in Malibu or 1.5 million sets of golf clubs or two 747 jumbo jets. Although limited to California companies, the survey reflects a national trend: a widening chasm between the pay of chief executives and rank-and-file employees. CEOs at California's largest 100 public companies took home a collective $1.1 billion in 2004, up almost 20% from 2003. That compares with the 2.9% raise that the average California worker saw last year. The average CEO made 42 times the average worker's pay in 1980. That increased to 85 times in 1990 and is now over 300 times. Sometimes, executive pay soars even in bad years. Sanmina-SCI Corp., a San Jose telecommunications company with $12 billion in sales, lost money in 2003 and 2004. Yet Chief Executive Jure Sola scored a 1,500% hike in total pay during 2004, according to The Times survey. Sola was paid $19.8 million last year, while the company lost $14.9 million.

Declassified US government documents show that a man suspected of involvement in the bombing of a Cuban passenger plane worked for the CIA. Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban-born Venezuelan and anti-Castro dissident, was an agent and informer. The papers also reveal that an FBI informer "all but admitted" that Mr Posada was one of those behind the 1976 bombing that killed 73 people. Mr Posada, who denies any involvement, is said to be seeking asylum in the US. His lawyer says his client, thought to be in hiding in the Miami area, deserves US protection because of his long years of service to the country. The documents, released by George Washington University's National Security Archive, show that Mr Posada, now in his 70s, was on the CIA payroll from the 1960s until mid-1976. Mr Posada once boasted of being responsible for a series of bomb attacks on Havana tourist spots in the 1990s.

Note: Why did the U.S. media fail to pick up this astounding story?

Merck & Co.'s longtime leader Raymond V. Gilmartin abruptly resigned yesterday on the same day congressional investigators released a slew of documents detailing how the company continued to aggressively promote its arthritis drug Vioxx after it knew of potentially serious safety concerns. The documents...showed that Merck directed its 3,000-person Vioxx sales force to avoid discussions with doctors about the cardiovascular risks identified in a major clinical trial of the drug in 2000. Sales representatives were told instead to rely on a "Cardiovascular Card" that said Vioxx was protecting the heart rather than potentially harming it. They were [also] trained how to smile, speak and position themselves most effectively when talking with doctors, and were exhorted to sell Vioxx and other Merck drugs using the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. Vioxx was withdrawn from the market last September after another clinical trial found that people who had taken the drug for 18 months were five times more likely to have heart attacks and strokes than those on a placebo. Merck was sharply criticized in a hearing into how the company and the Food and Drug Administration had handled the safety concerns surrounding Vioxx.

The federal judge overseeing the prosecution of admitted al Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui has blocked an attempt by the Justice Department's inspector general to release a report on FBI missteps prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to a ruling unsealed yesterday. Without explanation, U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema denied the request by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine, who completed the report last July but since has been unable to get permission to provide an unclassified version of the document to the public. The report, titled "A Review of the FBI's Handling of Intelligence Information Related to the September 11 Attacks," provides an in-depth examination of three episodes considered potential missed opportunities to detect the Sept. 11 plot, including Moussaoui's arrest in August 2001.

Note: Moussaoui is one of only two people ever to be charged with direct involvement in 9/11. For more key info on Moussaoui, click here. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, on Aug. 27, 2001, an FBI agent was trying to make sure that Moussaoui did "not take control of a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center." Why have we not heard more about all this?

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key 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.