News ArticlesExcerpts of Key News Articles in Major Media
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.
Iraqi authorities are investigating a fire that destroyed sensitive documents during an apparent Al Qaeda in Iraq attack against the Central Bank of Iraq, amid suspicions that the fire may have been set to destroy evidence in a potentially huge corruption case, officials say. Investigators became suspicious ... after they discovered that the fire was not caused by [the attack] but rather appeared to have been started deliberately in a second-floor room that is used by the inspector general responsible for investigating corruption cases, said Sabah Saadi, who heads the Integrity Committee in Iraq's parliament, charged with monitoring corruption. According to Saadi, the fire destroyed documents stored in the room that pertained to a particularly sensitive case involving a series of fraudulent checks drawn against accounts held by different companies with state-owned banks. At least $711 million had been found to be missing in the scheme, and two bank managers had been detained as part of an investigation before the fire, he said. But Saadi suspects that the scam may have been much larger and could have involved many more people. The investigation into the fire raises tantalizing questions about the nature of the attack, the role of Al Qaeda in Iraq and the extent of corruption in the country.
Note: This highly visible attack by "terrorists" masking the destruction of evidence of government corruption parallels the attacks of 9/11, in which the destruction (likely by controlled demolition) of WTC 7 served to destroy massive evidence of government and corporate fraud in SEC cases under investigation.
Genetic engineers, move over: the latest scheme for creating children to a parent’s specifications requires no DNA tinkering, but merely giving mom a steroid while she’s pregnant, and presto —- no chance that her daughters will be lesbians or (worse?) ‘uppity.’ Or so one might guess from the storm brewing over the prenatal use of that steroid, called dexamethasone. In February, bioethicist Alice Dreger of Northwestern University and two colleagues blew the whistle on the controversial practice of giving pregnant women dexamethasone to keep the female fetuses they are carrying from developing ambiguous genitalia. Dreger and her colleagues pluck numerous brow-raising statements from the writings of pediatric endocrinologist Maria New of Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, who has long promoted prenatal dexamethasone. New has indeed argued that prenatal androgens can affect a woman’s sexual orientation, her interest in becoming a mother and housewife, her interest in traditionally masculine careers, and—in childhood—whether she plays with dolls or trucks. A book that Harvard University Press will publish in September, called Brain Storm: Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences, argues that studies claiming to find innate, sex-based brain differences are seriously flawed.
The chief executive of Goldman Sachs Canada has been named a special adviser to the head of Canada's central bank. The Bank of Canada said [on June 29] that Timothy Hodgson will advise central bank head Mark Carney, a former Goldman Sachs executive, on financial reform. Carney says Hodgson is one of Canada's top investment bankers. Hodgson is leaving Goldman Sachs. The company has come under sharp criticism over civil fraud charges brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and because of the high pay its executives and traders received during the financial crisis. Hodgson joined Goldman Sachs in 1990 and became CEO of its Canadian operations in 2005.
Note: So Canada's central bank head, a former Goldman Sachs exec, will now be advised by the chief executive of Goldman Sachs Canada. Hmmmmm.
My city feels like a crime scene and the criminals are all melting into the night, fleeing the scene. No, I’m not talking about the kids in black who smashed windows and burned cop cars on Saturday. I’m talking about the heads of state who, on Sunday night, smashed social safety nets and burned good jobs in the middle of a recession. Faced with the effects of a crisis created by the world’s wealthiest and most privileged strata, they decided to stick the poorest and most vulnerable people in their countries with the bill. How else can we interpret the G20’s final communiqué, which includes not even a measly tax on banks or financial transactions, yet instructs governments to slash their deficits in half by 2013. This is a huge and shocking cut, and we should be very clear who will pay the price: students who will see their public educations further deteriorate as their fees go up; pensioners who will lose hard-earned benefits; public-sector workers whose jobs will be eliminated. And the list goes on. These types of cuts have already begun in many G20 countries including Canada, and they are about to get a lot worse. But there is nothing to say that citizens of G20 countries need to take orders from this hand-picked club. Already, workers, pensioners and students have taken to the streets against austerity measures in Italy, Germany, France, Spain and Greece, often marching under the slogan: “We won’t pay for your crisis.” And they have plenty of suggestions for how to raise revenues to meet their respective budget shortfalls. Many are calling for a financial transaction tax that would slow down hot money and raise new money for social programs.
Note: This report from Toronto is by Naomi Klein, the author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. For powerful evidence that the violence at the recent G20 meeting was largely instigated by undercover police, click here.
The U.S Supreme Court has severely restricted the ability of federal prosecutors to bring corruption cases against public officials and corporate executives. The court unanimously imposed stark limits on the so-called honest services law that for decades has been a key tool in prosecuting corruption cases. The court's ruling came in the case of former Enron executive Jeffrey Skilling, convicted of engaging in a scheme to enrich himself by deceiving shareholders about his company's true financial condition. He was convicted of a variety of charges, including depriving the Enron investors of his honest services. The Supreme Court ruled that the definition of honest services in federal law was so broad that, if viewed literally, it would be unconstitutionally vague, providing inadequate notice to citizens about what conduct is legal and what is not. Instead, a six-justice majority led by Ruth Bader Ginsburg declined to invalidate the law outright, but read it narrowly to cover only bribery and kickbacks. Three other justices — Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas — would have, for all practical purposes, invalided the statute in its entirety.
Note: For lots more from major media sources on corporate and government (including the judicial branch) corruption, click here and here.
The base-line measures of the [Gulf of Mexico] crisis have steadily worsened. The estimated flow rate keeps rising. The well is like something deranged, stronger than anyone anticipated. Week by week, the truth of this disaster has drifted toward the stamping ground of the alarmists. The most disturbing of the worst-case scenarios ... is that the Deepwater Horizon well has been so badly damaged that it has spawned multiple leaks from the seafloor, making containment impossible and a long-term solution much more complicated. Much of the worst-case-scenario talk has centered on the flow rate of the well. Rep. Edward J. Markey [said on NBC's "Meet the Press], "I ... have a document that shows that BP actually believes it could go upwards of 100,000 barrels per day. So, again, right from the beginning, BP was either lying or grossly incompetent." Today the official government estimate of the flow, based on multiple techniques that include subsea video and satellite surveys of the oil sick on the surface, is 35,000 to 60,000 barrels a day. In effect, what BP considered the worst-case scenario in early May is in late June the bitter reality -- call it the new normal -- of the gulf blowout.
Note: A NASA photo of the extent of the gulf oil spill speaks a thousand words at this link.
The elusive founder of WikiLeaks, who is at the centre of a potential US national security sensation, has surfaced from almost a month in hiding to tell the Guardian he does not fear for his safety but is on permanent alert. Julian Assange, a renowned Australian hacker who founded the electronic whistleblowers' platform WikiLeaks, vanished when a young US intelligence analyst in Baghdad was arrested. The analyst, Bradley Manning, had bragged he had sent 260,000 incendiary US state department cables on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks. The prospect of the cache of classified intelligence on the US conduct of the two wars being put online is a nightmare for Washington. The sensitivity of the information has generated media reports that Assange is the target of a US manhunt. Assange told the Guardian in Brussels, "Politically it would be a great error for them to act. I feel perfectly safe … but I have been advised by my lawyers not to travel to the US during this period." Assange appeared in public in Brussels for the first time in almost a month to speak at a seminar on freedom of information at the European parliament.
Julian Assange, the Australian-born founder of Wikileaks, is said to be under threat with reports that the site has hundreds of thousands of classified cables containing explosive revelations. Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked Pentagon papers in the 1970s showing government deceit over the Vietnam War, says he believes Mr Assange has reason to keep his whereabouts secret. "I think he would not be safe, even physically, entirely wherever he is. We have ... for the first time ever ... in any democratic country ... a president who has announced that he feels he has the right to use special operations operatives against anyone abroad that he thinks is associated with terrorism." As far fetched as Mr Ellsberg's claim sounds, the national president of Whistleblowers Australia, Peter Bennett, agrees Mr Assange's life may be at risk. "There is a lot of money to be made from wars. There is a lot of people who will become very, very wealthy through the course of this Afghan war," he said. "To stop anybody raising questions about its conduct would put those profits at risk and profit is a high motivation to stop somebody interfering with those profits. There is a serious chance that his wellbeing could be at risk."
Note: For more on the ever-increasing governmental threats to civil liberties, click here.
Imagine a siege of hydrocarbons spewing from deep below ground, polluting water and air, sickening animals and threatening the health of unsuspecting Americans. And no one knows how long it will last. No, we’re not talking about BP’s gulf oil spill. We’re talking about hydraulic fracturing of natural gas deposits. Fracking, as the practice is also known, may be coming to a drinking well or a water system near you. It involves blasting water, sand and chemicals, many of them toxic, into underground rock to extract oil or gas. "Gasland," a compelling documentary on HBO ..., traces hydraulic fracturing across 34 states from California to Louisiana to Pennsylvania. The exposé by filmmaker Josh Fox, alternately chilling and darkly humorous, won the 2010 Sundance Film Festival’s special jury prize for documentary. It details how former Vice President Dick Cheney, in partnership with the energy industry and drilling companies such as his former employer, Halliburton Corp., successfully pressured Congress in 2005 to exempt fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act and other environmental laws. Each well requires the high-pressure injection of a cocktail of nearly 600 chemicals, including known carcinogens and neurotoxins, diluted in 1 million to 7 million gallons of water. Some 450,000 wells have been drilled nationwide.
Note: For many reliable reports on government and corporate corruption, click here and here.
Mafia bosses planned to "compromise" Bobby and Edward Kennedy at a New York party in a plot involving Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe, according to FBI documents. The intention was to work through "associates" of the two stars to lure the Kennedys, as well as Peter Lawford, their British actor brother-in-law and fellow member of Sinatra's "rat pack", into actions they would regret. The plot is thought to have fizzled out, but it is consistent with other accounts of the extraordinary links between [the Kennedys], the country's biggest stars and organised crime. Monroe, who died in 1962, allegedly had affairs with both Bobby Kennedy and John F Kennedy. It has previously been claimed that she passed on pillow talk from Bobby Kennedy to Sinatra who in turn passed them on to his mafia friends. As attorney general Robert Kennedy launched several investigations into the mob which it may have felt warranted a measure of retribution. From early on in his four-decade career in the senate, Edward Kennedy, the youngest of the three brothers, was known for his affairs with women and extravagant drinking habits. Papers released earlier this year the library of former president Richard Nixon showed that in the early 1970s he discussed with the aides the possibility of discrediting Kennedy by leaking news of his infidelities. Agents in Milwaukee took the information from an unidentified source "who had furnished reliable information in the past," according to the memo. However, the informant could not verify the truth of any of the rumor's details.
A Sunday Times investigation has exposed Japan for bribing small nations with cash and prostitutes to gain their support for the mass slaughter of whales. The undercover investigation found officials from six countries were willing to consider selling their votes on the International Whaling Commission (IWC). The revelations come as Japan seeks to break the 24-year moratorium on commercial whaling. An IWC meeting that will decide the fate of thousands of whales, including endangered species, begins this month in Morocco. Japan denies buying the votes of IWC members. However, The Sunday Times filmed officials from pro-whaling governments admitting: - They voted with the whalers because of the large amounts of aid from Japan. One said he was not sure if his country had any whales in its territorial waters. Others are landlocked. – They receive cash payments in envelopes at IWC meetings from Japanese officials who pay their travel and hotel bills. - One disclosed that call girls were offered when fisheries ministers and civil servants visited Japan for meetings. Barry Gardiner, an MP and former Labour biodiversity minister, said the investigation revealed "disgraceful, shady practice", which is "effectively buying votes".
Note: For key articles from reliable sources on the amazing qualities and sad human abuse of marine mammals, click here.
BP, the very company responsible for the oil spill that is already the worst in U.S. history, has purchased several phrases on search engines such as Google and Yahoo so that the first result that shows up directs information seekers to the company's official website. A simple Google search of "oil spill" turns up several thousand news results, but the first link, highlighted at the very top of the page, is from BP. "Learn more about how BP is helping," the link's tagline reads. A spokesman for the company confirmed to ABC News that it had, in fact, bought these search terms to make information on the spill more accessible to the public. Several search engine marketing experts are questioning BP's intentions, suggesting that controlling what the public finds when they look online for oil spill information is just another way for the company to try and rebuild the company's suffering public image. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal slammed BP for its PR efforts, saying in a statement, "Instead of BP shelling out $50 million on an ad campaign that promises to do good work in responding to this spill, BP should just focus on actually doing a good job and spend the $50 million on assistance to our people, our industries and our communities that are suffering as a result of this ongoing spill."
Note: For revealing reports from major media sources on corporate corruption and collusion, click here.
Canada's public safety minister says the country is spending nearly $1 billion for security at the G-8 and G-20 summits next month. Public Safety Minister Vic Toews said Wednesday Canada has budgeted up to $930 million Canadian (US$872 million). Toews says hosting two summits back-to-back is unprecedented. Canada is hosting the G-20 -- the group of leading rich and developing nations -- economic summit on June 26-27 in Toronto. The G-8 -- the group of leading industrial nations -- is meeting in Huntsville, Ontario, the day before the G-20 summit. Toews says it is a necessary level of security but opposition parties decried the cost.
Note: When the world's leaders have to spend $1 billion to protect themselves, it is a good indicator that they no longer trust the people, and the people don't trust them.
Accused of "the biggest military hack of all time", Gary McKinnon could be the most dangerous hacker in the world. Facing charges of hacking into 97 US military and Nasa computers and banned from using the internet in 2005, the 44-year-old will never touch a computer again if the US military has its way. Here, in his own words via email ... McKinnon gives [Independent on Sunday] readers an insight into how he feels after a four-year legal battle to stay out of the hands of the US authorities. [Q.] So, what punishment would be appropriate? [McKinnon:] A punishment proportionate to the crime and consistent with other accused hackers in the UK, including those accused of hacking into the Pentagon. 300 people a day still infiltrate Nasa and US military computers. There have been no other extradition requests from the US for any other hackers in the world. [Q.] What were you looking for at Nasa? [McKinnon:] Suppressed evidence of reverse engineered UFO technology, free energy that would help to stop climate change and would help to stop old age pensioners from dying of cold ... and also evidence of anti-gravity. [Q.] What did you find? [McKinnon:] A space fleet and an impressive UFO and a total lack of Nasa and military internet security.
Note: For many kinds of evidence for UFOs and reports from reliable sources on governmental secrecy on this issue, see our UFO Information Center.
G.D.P. is an index of a country’s entire economic output — a tally of, among many other things, manufacturers’ shipments, farmers’ harvests, retail sales and construction spending. It’s a figure that compresses the immensity of a national economy into a single data point of surpassing density. The conventional feeling about G.D.P. is that the more it grows, the better a country and its citizens are doing. [But] it has been a difficult few years for G.D.P. For decades, academics and gadflies have been critical of the measure, suggesting that it is an inaccurate and misleading gauge of prosperity. What has changed more recently is that G.D.P. has been actively challenged by a variety of world leaders, especially in Europe, as well as by a number of international groups, like the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The G.D.P. ... has not only failed to capture the well-being of a 21st-century society but has also skewed global political objectives toward the single-minded pursuit of economic growth. Which indicators are the most suitable replacements for, or most suitable enhancements to, G.D.P. Should they measure educational attainment or employment? Should they account for carbon emissions or happiness?
Note: Which is more important, the economic prosperity of a people, or the well being and level of happiness?
The amount of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico may be at least 10 times the size of official estimates, according to an exclusive analysis conducted for NPR. At NPR's request, experts examined video that BP released Wednesday. Their findings suggest the BP spill is already far larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska, which spilled at least 250,000 barrels of oil. BP has said repeatedly that there is no reliable way to measure the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico by looking at the oil gushing out of the pipe. But scientists say there are actually many proven techniques for doing just that. Steven Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, analyzed videotape of the seafloor gusher using a technique called particle image velocimetry. A computer program simply tracks particles and calculates how fast they are moving. Wereley put the BP video of the gusher into his computer. He made a few simple calculations and came up with an astonishing value for the rate of the oil spill: 70,000 barrels a day — much higher than the official estimate of 5,000 barrels a day. The method is accurate to a degree of plus or minus 20 percent. This new, much larger number suggests that capturing — and cleaning up — this oil may be a much bigger challenge than anyone has let on.
Note: For lots more from reliable souces on government corruption and collusion with industries it is supposed to be regulating, click here.
More than a year and a half after Iceland's major banks failed, all but sinking the country's economy, police have begun rounding up a number of top bankers while other former executives and owners face a $US2 billion ($2.24 billion) lawsuit. Since Iceland's three largest banks - Kaupthing, Landsbanki and Glitnir - collapsed in late 2008, their former executives and owners have largely been living untroubled lives abroad. But the publication last month of a parliamentary inquiry into the island nation's profound financial and economic crisis signalled a turning of the tide, laying much of the blame for the downfall on the former bank heads who had taken "inappropriate loans from the banks" they worked for. Overnight, the administrators of Glitnir's liquidation announced they had filed a $US2 billion lawsuit in a New York court against former large shareholders and executives for alleged fraud. "I think this lawsuit is without precedence in Iceland," Steinunn Gudbjartsdottir, who chairs Glitnir's so-called winding-up board, told reporters in Reykjavik. The bank also said it was "taking action against its former auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) for facilitating and helping to conceal the fraudulent transactions engineered by [its principal shareholder] and his associates, which ultimately led to the bank's collapse in October 2008."
Note: Yet American and British bankers who played a major role in the economic collapse are getting record pay. For an incisive article in Rolling Stone titled "Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?" click here. For key reports on financial fraud from major media sources, click here.
Trees and algae have been turning CO2 into fuel since the dawn of time, unlocking the chemical energy within this molecule to power metabolic processes. With a little ingenuity, it is already possible to transform CO2 into anything from petrol to natural gas. Any conversion processes will take a lot of energy. The question is, can these processes be refined to ensure that less energy is used to create this fuel than is provided by it? The key challenge is to convert CO2 into carbon monoxide (CO), by removing one of its oxygen atoms. Once you have CO, the process of creating hydrocarbon fuels such as petrol is easy. It's achieved through a reaction known as the Fischer-Tropsch process – most commonly used to synthesise liquid fuel from coal. But getting from CO2 to CO requires ... a lot of energy. The US Government's Sandia National Laboratories, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, have opted for ... a system that takes its energy source from concentrated solar power. As Green Futures goes to press, researchers from Bristol and Bath Universities in the UK have also announced plans for solar-powered CO2-to-fuel conversion.
Note: If plants are able to convert CO2 to energy and have been doing this for billions of years, why can't scientists figure out a way to do this for human use?
You'd think that General Motors Co., having been rescued by U.S. taxpayers, would be more up-front with them. In an ad that has been blanketing the airwaves since last week, General Motors Chairman and chief executive Ed Whitacre boasts that "we have repaid our government loan, in full, with interest, five years ahead of the original schedule." In a press release, Whitacre said GM was able to repay the loans "because more customers are buying vehicles like the Chevrolet Malibu and Buick LaCrosse." Neither the ad nor the press release mentioned that GM repaid its government loan with other government money, or that U.S. taxpayers could lose money on the roughly $50 billion they still have invested in General Motors. In a letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner last week, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said the repayment "appears to be nothing more than an elaborate TARP money shuffle."
Note: For lots more on the bailout shell game from reliable sources, click here.
Before Wikileaks, or even the Internet, there were just plain leaks. Two weeks ago, Wikileaks.org released a classified video showing a United States Apache helicopter killing 12 civilians in Baghdad. The reaction was so swift and powerful — an edited version has been viewed six million times on YouTube — that the episode provoked many questions about how such material is now released and digested. Put another way: if someone today had the Pentagon Papers, or the modern equivalent, would he still go to the press, as Daniel Ellsberg did nearly 40 years ago and wait for the documents to be analyzed and published? Or would that person simply post them online immediately? Mr. Ellsberg knows his answer. “I wouldn’t have waited that long,” he said in an interview last week. “I would have gotten a scanner and put them on the Internet.” Today, he says, there is something enticing about being independent — not at the whim of publishers or government attempts to control release. “The government wouldn’t have been tempted to enjoin it, if I had put it all out at once,” he said. “We got this duel going between newspapers and the government.”
Note: For many key reports from reliable sources on government secrecy, click here.
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.