News StoriesExcerpts of Key News Stories in Major Media
Note: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.
An independent investigation has found that imprisoned former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham took advantage of secrecy and badgered congressional aides to help slip items into classified bills that would benefit him and his associates. Cunningham's case has put a stark spotlight on the oversight of classified or "black" budgets. Unlike legislation dealing with social and economic issues, intelligence bills and parts of defense bills are written in private, in the name of national security. That means it is up to members of Congress and select aides with security clearances to ensure that legislation is appropriate. Federal prosecutors found that Cunningham accepted $2.4 million in bribes, including payments for a mansion, a Rolls-Royce and a 65-foot yacht, in return for steering defense and intelligence contracts to certain companies. Cunningham pleaded guilty and was sentenced to more than eight years in prison. Efforts to direct money to specific projects or interests, called earmarking, are common. But more than a dozen government officials and other experts...agreed that the process is vulnerable to abuse because of its classified nature. Secret legislation long has been a tool for pet projects. A Democratic aide on the Senate committee from 1985 to 1991 said classified bills are the perfect place to slip in provisions not scrutinized. Rarely do members of Congress examine the legislation, which is stored in safes in each committee's windowless, vault-like offices.
Hundreds of protesters gathered outside an exclusive California retreat for government and business leaders Saturday to challenge the right of a "ruling elite" to make policy decisions without public scrutiny. The annual Bohemian Grove retreat has attracted powerful men such as Ronald Reagan, George Bush, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, philanthropist David Rockefeller, former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. It's also become a magnet for all types of activists who increasingly use the event to network and organize their campaigns. The men who attend the Bohemian Grove retreat spend two weeks performing plays, eating gourmet camp grub, listening to speakers and power-bonding at the 2,700-acre compound near the Russian River in Sonoma County. The retreat is organized by the exclusive San Francisco-based Bohemian Club. The club and event are shrouded in mystery, much like Yale University's most-famous secret society, Skull and Bones, whose members include President George W. Bush and his presidential rival Sen. John Kerry.
Note: This article strangely has been removed from the San Francisco Chronicle website. To see it in the Internet Archive, click here. For an informative five-minute ABC news clip on the power elite gathering Bohemian Grove reported in 1981, click here. And for reliable information on the most secretive meeting of the world's elite reported by the major media, see our Bilderberg Group compilation available here.
At a glittering Los Angeles party, an ambitious new car maker declared the electric car alive and well. The Tesla Roadster, which can go from 0 to 60 mph in 4 seconds doesn't come from Detroit, but from high tech Silicon Valley aiming to do what Detroit couldn't -- make a commercially successful car that doesn't burn gas. "Electric cars don't have to be little, pathetic commuter cars," says Martin Eberhard, CEO of Tesla Motors. "They can be quick and they can be desirable." Eberhard made millions in the computer industry, then convinced other high tech investors like Elon Musk, the founder of PayPal, to put in big money. Musk expects huge rewards if Silicon Valley can break Detroit's grip on the U.S. auto industry. "It's batteries, it's drive electronics, it's electric motors," says Musk. "Those are skills that are present in Silicon Valley and not present in Detroit." There's a quick charger for the Tesla's lithium batteries but the car can be plugged in anywhere. It'll go 250 miles on a single charge -- at a cost the company says, of just 1 cent a mile. Tesla expects to quickly sell its first 100 cars for $100,000 each. But, don't give up. The company also has plans for a car for the rest of us. Tesla promises a less expensive four-door family car within three years. For now, however, it's the rich and famous who are getting a charge out of this electric car, such as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who tried out the car and had two words to say: "Very Nice."
Note: Don't be surprised if this technology inexplicably disappears as so many others have, like the once heralded 100 MPG Toyota Eco Spirit back in 2002. For lots more reliable information on the suppression of new energy inventions, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/newenergyinformation.
Four U.S. soldiers accused of murdering suspected insurgents during a raid in Iraq said they were under orders to "kill all military age males," according to sworn statements obtained by The Associated Press. "The ROE (rule of engagement) was to kill all military age males on Objective Murray," Staff Sgt. Raymond L. Girouard told investigators, referring to the target by its code name. That target, an island on a canal in the northern Salhuddin province, was believed to be an al-Qaeda training camp. The soldiers said officers in their chain of command gave them the order and explained that special forces had tried before to target the island and had come under fire from insurgents. Girouard, Spc. William B. Hunsaker, Pfc. Corey R. Clagett, and Spc. Juston R. Graber are charged with murder and other offenses in the shooting deaths of three of the men during the May 9 raid. Girouard, Hunsaker and Clagett are also charged with obstruction of justice for allegedly threatening to kill another soldier if he told authorities what happened.
The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, American officials said Friday. The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the Bush administration. Israel's request for expedited delivery of the satellite and laser-guided bombs was described as unusual by some military officers, and as an indication that Israel still had a long list of targets in Lebanon to strike. The new American arms shipment to Israel has not been announced publicly, and the officials who described the administration's decision to rush the munitions to Israel would discuss it only after being promised anonymity. Pentagon and military officials declined to describe in detail the size and contents of the shipment to Israel.
The House, displaying a foreign affairs solidarity lacking on issues like Iraq, voted overwhelmingly Thursday to support Israel in its confrontation with Hezbollah guerrillas. The resolution, which was passed on a 410-8 vote, also condemns enemies of the Jewish state. House Republican leader John Boehner cited Israel's "unique relationship" with the United States as a reason for his colleagues to swiftly go on record supporting Israel in the latest flare-up of violence in the Mideast. Yet as Republican and Democratic leaders rally behind the measure in rare bipartisan fashion, a handful of lawmakers have quietly expressed reservations that the resolution was too much the result of a powerful lobbying force and attempts to court Jewish voters.
Note: It's interesting to note that very few major media picked up this revealing story.
Income inequality used to be about rich versus poor, but now it's increasingly a matter of the ultra rich and everyone else. New figures show that from 2003 to 2004, the latest year for which there is data, the richest Americans pulled far ahead of everyone else. In the space of that one year, real average income for the top 1 percent of households...grew by nearly 17 percent. For the remaining 99 percent, the average gain was less than 3 percent, and that probably makes things look better than they really are, since other data...indicate that the average is bolstered by large gains among the top 20 percent of households. The top 1 percent of households enjoyed 36 percent of all income gains in 2004, on top of an already stunning 30 percent in 2003. A recent study done for the Business Roundtable(pdf)...shows that median executive pay at 350 large public companies was $6.8 million in 2005. According to the Wall Street Journal, that's 179 times the pay of the average American worker. The study's calculation of executive pay is widely criticized as an understatement. In 2003, the latest year for which figures are available, the top 1 percent of households owned 57.5 percent of corporate wealth. The top 10 percent of households had 46 percent of the nation's income. The top 1 percent of households had 19.5 percent. [For] the bottom 60 percent, average income grew by [a total of] less than 20 percent from 1979 to 2004, with virtually all of those gains occurring from the mid- to late 1990's. Before and since, real incomes for that group have basically flatlined.
Note: For a related New York Times article on how the current administration is planning to eliminate the jobs of nearly half of the lawyers at the Internal Revenue Service who audit tax returns of some of the wealthiest Americans, click here.
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that President Bush had personally decided to block the Justice Department ethics unit from examining the role played by government lawyers in approving the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping program. Mr. Gonzales made the assertion in response to questioning from Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania and chairman of the committee. Mr. Specter said the Office of Professional Responsibility at the Justice Department had to call off an investigation into the conduct of department lawyers who evaluated the surveillance program because the unit was denied clearance to review classified documents. Representative Zoe Lofgren...said Tuesday that she was shocked that Mr. Bush had blocked the clearances of lawyers from that office. "The president's latest action shows that he is willing to be personally involved in the cover-up of suspected illegal activity," Ms. Lofgren said.
The attorney general's startling revelation that President Bush personally blocked a Justice Department investigation into the administration's controversial secret domestic spying programs hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. Bush's move -- denying the requisite security clearances to attorneys from the department's ethics office -- is unprecedented in that office's history. It also comes in stark contrast to the enthusiastic way in which security clearances were dished out to...those charged with finding out who leaked information about the program to the press. Time and time again, Bush and his aides have selectively leaked or declassified secret intelligence findings that served their political agenda -- while aggressively asserting the need to keep secret the information that would tend to discredit them. Some legal experts and members of Congress who have questioned the legality of the NSA program said Bush's move to quash the Justice probe represents a politically motivated interference in Justice Department affairs. The government has in effect curtailed an investigation of itself and hardly anyone has noticed. It has not caused much interest in Congress, or on the nation's editorial pages, or the even in the blogosphere, which takes pride in causing a stir about things that should but nobody else has yet taken notice."
Note: As noted in our key summary Building a Brighter Future, "Secrecy leads to control through preventing the exposure of hidden agendas, and through breeding distrust, suspicion, and paranoia in the world."
The pharmaceutical industry is beginning to reap a windfall from a surprisingly lucrative niche market: drugs for poor people. The windfall, which by some estimates could be $2 billion or more this year, is a result of the transfer of millions of low-income people into the new Medicare Part D drug program that went into effect in January. Under that program...the prices paid by insurers, and eventually the taxpayer, for the medications given to those transferred are likely to be higher than what was paid under the federal-state Medicaid programs. Analysts expect it to generate hundreds of millions of additional dollars this year for the drug companies. Drugs tend to be cheaper under the Medicaid programs because the states are the buyers and by law they receive the lowest available prices for drugs. But in creating the federal Part D program, Congress -- in what critics saw as a sop to the drug industry -- barred the government from having a negotiating role. The windfall for the drug makers was made possible by a provision of the 2003 Medicare law that exempts Part D drugs from "best price" rebates that the drug makers have been required to give to the state Medicaid programs. Those rebates are meant to make sure that state Medicaid agencies pay no more than the best prices drug companies offer to any big commercial insurer. Now, under Part D, all sorts of price deals will be negotiated by dozens of Medicare drug plans. The prices will be reported to Medicare, but under a provision of the law pushed by industry lobbyists, they will otherwise be kept secret.
By all accounts, the group of nine was a religious powerhouse: Their ranks included rabbis, imams and ministers, including the man hailed by some as the next Billy Graham. But as of Thursday, seven of the nine religious leaders serving on a committee created by the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund to disburse money to churches destroyed by Hurricane Katrina had quit their posts, claiming their advice was ignored. Departing members of the interfaith advisory committee say the fund's Washington staff disregarded their advice, cutting checks for Gulf Coast churches without properly investigating the institutions. "I've been in ministry for 30 years and I don't think I've ever resigned from anything. I'm a loyalist to a fault. But what's happened is unacceptable," said [Bishop T.D.] Jakes who was named one of the 25 most influential evangelists by TIME Magazine. Another committee member who resigned, said the Washington staff wanted the religious leaders to "rubber stamp" their decisions. "They had their agenda and that's unacceptable," he said.
Computerized voting was supposed to be the cure for ballot fiascos such as the 2000 presidential election, but activist groups say it has only worsened the problem. Lawsuits have been filed in at least nine states, alleging that the machines are wide open to computer hackers and prone to temperamental fits of technology that have assigned votes to the wrong candidate. About 80 percent of American voters will use some form of electronic voting in the November election. New York University's Brennan Center for Justice released a one-year study last month that determined that the three most popular types of U.S. voting machines "pose a real danger" to election integrity. More than 120 security threats were identified, including wireless machines that could be hacked "by virtually any member of the public with some (computer) knowledge" and a PC card. Diebold spokesman David Bear said his company's technology "has proven to be more accurate" than punch cards. The company's former CEO, Wally O'Dell, authored a 2003 Republican fundraising letter that promised, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." Bear said there has been no evidence in any election of hackers breaching electronic security measures. However...Lowell Finley, co-director of Voter Action...said, "We had dozens of affidavits from voters in New Mexico who said they touched one candidate's name, but the machine picked the opponent," he said. In the state's biggest county, home to Albuquerque, touch-screens machines purchased from Sequoia lost 13,000 votes.
Note: For lots more on elections problems, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/electionsinformation
KEVIN BARRETT, PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN: I know that 9/11 was an inside job. Professor Steven Jones has found residue on the steel samples from the World Trade Center. We now know that it was taken down in a controlled demolition. (END VIDEO CLIP) SEAN HANNITY, CO-HOST: That was a clip from our exclusive interview Monday night with University of Wisconsin Islamic studies professor Kevin Barrett. Now the university, in fact, says they will allow him to teach his class on Islam, in spite of his controversial theories about 9/11. But Professor Barrett isn't alone in his beliefs. One of his supporters joins us now. Dr. Bob Bowman is a member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, currently a Florida Democratic congressional candidate. So you believe this is an inside job. You believe this was a controlled demolition as he does? BOWMAN: I don't know who did it, and neither do you. We have a right to know who did it. And so do the families of the victims. We need a truly independent investigation to find out the truth. The most unbelievable of all the wild conspiracy theories is the one that our government has told us. COLMES: You believe the United States government itself is putting forth a conspiracy theory when it talks about 19 people with box cutters in an airplane and Usama bin Laden being the mastermind? BOWMAN: Absolutely. There [were] 20 people involved, right? That makes it a conspiracy. More than one person plans a crime. That's a conspiracy.
For the second time in two months, The Journal of the American Medical Association says it was misled by researchers who failed to reveal financial ties to drug companies. The latest incident, disclosed in letters to the editor and a correction in Wednesday's journal, involves a study showing that pregnant women who stop taking antidepressants risk slipping back into depression. Most of the 13 authors have financial ties to drug companies including antidepressant makers, but only two of them revealed their ties when the study was published in February.
Note: To understand how the drug companies manipulate results and even exert tremendous influence over the U.S. Congress, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/healthcoverup
For years the life science companies...have argued that genetically modified food is the next great scientific and technological revolution in agriculture. Nongovernmental organizations...have been cast as the villains in this unfolding agricultural drama...accused of continually blocking scientific and technological progress because of...opposition to genetically modified food. Now, in an ironic twist, new, cutting-edge technologies have made gene splicing and transgenic crops obsolete. The new frontier is called genomics, and the new agricultural technology is called marker-assisted selection, or MAS. This technology offers a sophisticated method to greatly accelerate classical breeding. A growing number of scientists believe that MAS...will eventually replace genetically modified food. Environmental organizations that have long opposed genetically modified crops are guardedly supportive of MAS technology. Rapidly accumulating information about crop genomes is allowing scientists to [use] MAS to locate desired traits in other varieties of a particular food crop, or its relatives that grow in the wild. Then they cross-breed those related plants with the existing commercial varieties to improve the crop. With MAS, the breeding of new varieties always remain within a species, thus greatly reducing the risk of environmental harm and potential adverse health effects associated with genetically modified crops. If properly used as part of a much larger systemic and holistic approach to sustainable agricultural development, MAS technology could be the right technology at the right time in history.
Note: For astonishing information on the dangers to your health of genetically modified foods, see the most popular document on our website in recent months at http://www.WantToKnow.info/deception10pg
Could the attacks of September 11 have been planned by someone other than terrorists? Some people are blaming our own government. The booming conspiracy theory movement claims the point was to launch wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are thousands of Web pages that talk about a cover up. The theorists believe it was an inside job. "There isn't a single word of truth in [the 9/11 Commission Report]," begins Kevin Barrett. Barrett is a lecturer at UW Madison. He's part of a group that calls itself the 9-11 Truth Movement. "I'm sure that the official story that we've been given about what happened is a lie," he says. The 9-11 Truth Movement also believes a tape of Osama Bin Ladin confessing to the attacks... is a fake. They compare the tape to other pictures, and believe the "fake" Osama is too fat. They say the guys is obviously an imposter - a guy that weighs fifty pounds more than Osama ever did - and who has a completely different facial structure and looks about as much like Osama as Laurel looks like Hardy is in this video claiming responsibility for 9-11. Barrett has caught a lot of heat for his ideas because he teaches at UW Madison. The UW Provost says despite complaints against Barrett, he will be allowed to continue teaching.
Note: For an hour-long interview on Wisconsin Public Radio with Kevin Barrett, click here. The most interesting thing about this interview is that at least half of the listeners who called in to the program supported Barrett's position that there was a major cover-up of what really happened on 9/11.
A poignant new documentary asks who killed GM's promising electric car project? A new documentary released June 28 in New York and Los Angeles, appropriately titled Who Killed The Electric Car? tries in Clue-like fashion to figure out why GM pulled the plug on its EV1 electric vehicle program, which by most accounts was approaching success when the first prototype was introduced in the mid-1990s. "It was a revolutionary, modern car, requiring no gas, no oil changes, no mufflers, and rare brake maintenance," according to a synopsis of the film. In the 1990s a strict clean-air mandate introduced in California that called for zero-emission vehicles was what led GM to introduce the EV1. Eventually that California mandate got watered down from "zero" to "low" emissions, and the automakers decided to literally blow up their EV programs. GM, which leased out the EV1 cars it produced, called them all back after California changed its policy. The cars were crushed and shredded. Who were the people leasing these vehicles? Tom Hanks, Mel Gibson and Ted Danson, among others, many of whom appear in the movie and talk favourably about their electric cars. If the implications of an advance means loss of future business to a paradigm, the key players of that paradigm will lobby to kill it. The paradigm? Big oil. Similarly, the auto industry has an interest in perpetuating the manufacture of vehicles that require routine, costly maintenance.
Note: For more information and showing times on the highly revealing Who Killed The Electric Car, visit www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com. For even deeper information www.WantToKnow.info/newenergysources
An instructor at the University of Wisconsin who has said he believes U.S. officials orchestrated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, will be allowed to teach a course on Islam, the school said Monday. Some state politicians had called for the University of Wisconsin-Madison to fire part-time instructor Kevin Barrett after he spoke about his theories on a radio talk show last month. "We cannot allow political pressure from critics of unpopular ideas to inhibit the free exchange of ideas," Provost Patrick Farrell said in a statement. "To the extent that his views are discussed, Mr. Barrett has assured me that students will be free - and encouraged - to challenge his viewpoint." The university does not endorse Barrett's theories, Farrell said, noting they are widely believed in parts of the Muslim world.
Note: Kevin Barrett has drawn quite a bit of attention on Fox News and in the media in Wisconsin. Other than Fox and the above article, no major media picked up this story. In the charged interview on Fox News, he did quite a respectable job. You can view it at http://www.911podcasts.com/display.php?vid=135.
Northfield Lab's experimental blood substitute Polyheme is currently in randomized phase III clinical trials recruiting patients without informed consent all over the country. At one point, it was being tested in as many as 27 cities; it is still being tested in 23 hospitals in 20 cities. With the FDA's approval, Northfield Lab has recruited hospitals to participate in the trial study with exemption from informed consent requirements on study participants. Although Northfield Lab claims that extensive information on the study has been made public, a vast majority of the general public has never heard of the trial.
In these perilous days, we must be ready to think the unthinkable. I'm talking about...the quite reasonable suspicion that the Bush Administration orchestrates its terror alerts and arrests to goose the GOP's poll numbers. The 18 months prior to the 2004 presidential election witnessed a barrage of those ridiculous color-coded terror alerts, quashed-plot headlines and breathless press conferences from Administration officials. Warnings of terror attacks over the Christmas 2003 holidays, warnings over summer terror attacks at the 2004 political conventions, then a whole slew of warnings of terror attacks to disrupt the election itself. Even the timing of the alerts seemed to fall with odd regularity right on the heels of major political events. One of Department of Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge's terror warnings came two days after John Kerry picked John Edwards as his running mate; another came three days after the end of the Democratic convention. So it went right through the 2004 election. And then not long after the [elections], terror alerts seemed to go out of style. With the exception of one warning about mass-transit facilities in response to the London bombing on July 7, 2005, that was pretty much it until this summer. Can I prove any of this was politically motivated? Of course not. All the key facts are veiled in secrecy, as they must be. So it's impossible to know from the outside whether it's on the level or not. But with another election looming, it seems we're about to get a bunch of new chances to wonder.
Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.