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.
After a week of early voting, a handful of glitches with electronic voting machines have drawn the ire of voters, reassurances from elections supervisors -- and a caution against the careless casting of ballots. Several South Florida voters say the choices they touched on the electronic screens were not the ones that appeared on the review screen -- the final voting step. In Broward County, for example, they don't know how widespread the machine problems are because there's no process for poll workers to quickly report minor issues and no central database of machine problems. Debra A. Reed voted with her boss on Wednesday at African-American Research Library and Cultural Center near Fort Lauderdale. Her vote went smoothly, but boss Gary Rudolf called her over to look at what was happening on his machine. He touched the screen for gubernatorial candidate Jim Davis, a Democrat, but the review screen repeatedly registered the Republican, Charlie Crist. A poll worker then helped Rudolf, but it took three tries to get it right, Reed said. Broward Supervisor of Elections spokeswoman Mary Cooney said it's not uncommon for screens on heavily used machines to slip out of sync, making votes register incorrectly.
David M. Walker...has a job as head of the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that audits and evaluates the performance of the federal government. That makes Walker the nation's accountant-in-chief. And the accountant-in-chief's professional opinion is that the American public needs to tell Washington it's time to steer the nation off the path to financial ruin. The vast majority of economists and budget analysts agree: The ship of state is on a disastrous course, and will founder on the reefs of economic disaster if nothing is done to correct it. There's a good reason politicians don't like to talk about the nation's long-term fiscal prospects. It reveals serious problems and offers no easy solutions. Anybody who wanted to deal with it seriously would have to talk about raising taxes and cutting benefits. Walker...has committed to touring the nation through the 2008 elections, talking to anybody who will listen about the fiscal black hole Washington has dug itself, the "demographic tsunami" that will come when the baby boom generation begins retiring and the recklessness of borrowing money from foreign lenders to pay for the operation of the U.S. government. To show that the looming fiscal crisis is not a partisan issue, he brings along economists and budget analysts from across the political spectrum. Their basic message is this: If the United States government conducts business as usual over the next few decades, a national debt that is already $8.5 trillion could reach $46 trillion. A hole that big could paralyze the U.S. economy. And every year that nothing is done about it, Walker says, the problem grows by $2 trillion to $3 trillion.
ExxonMobil should stop funding groups that have spread the idea that global warming is a myth and that try to influence policymakers to adopt that view, two senators said today in a letter to the oil company. In their letter to ExxonMobil chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson, Sens. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., appealed to Exxon's sense of corporate responsibility, asking the company to "come clean about its past denial activities." The two senators called on ExxonMobil to "end any further financial assistance" to groups "whose public advocacy has contributed to the small but unfortunately effective climate change denial myth." An upcoming study from the Union of Concerned Scientists reported that ExxonMobil funded 29 climate change denial groups in 2004 alone. Since 1990, the report said, the company has spent more than $19 million funding groups that promote their views through publications and Web sites that are not peer reviewed by the scientific community.
Two weeks before the midterm elections, at least 10 states...remain ripe for voting problems, according to a study released yesterday by a nonpartisan clearinghouse that tracks electoral reforms across the United States. The report by Electionline.org says those states, and possibly others, could encounter trouble on Election Day because they have a combustible mix of fledgling voting-machine technology, confusion over voting procedures or recent litigation over election rules -- and close races. The report cautions that the Nov. 7 elections, which will determine which political party controls the House and Senate, promise "to bring more of what voters have come to expect since the 2000 elections -- a divided body politic...and the possibility -- if not certainty -- of problems at polls nationwide." The report of the clearinghouse, sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts, is the latest of several warnings in recent weeks and months by organizations and scholars who say that electoral problems persist in spite of six years of efforts by the federal government and states to correct voting flaws. The decisions by many states to convert to electronic voting machines have yielded new concerns about whether they are secure and accurate, about paper records as backup proof and...about whether the electronic or paper record should be considered the official tally if a candidate demands a recount.
After an avalanche of panicked inquiries from patients across the country who claim to have been stricken with a mysterious skin disease, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is preparing to begin a full investigation. The patients ... describe symptoms that include sores that are slow to heal, a sensation of things crawling through their skin, joint pain and persistent fatigue. Many say they believe they have Morgellons disease, a diagnosis that has received wide attention on the Internet but is viewed skeptically by some doctors. Morgellons disease joins a growing list of symptom clusters that public health officials have been forced to examine closely in part because of the organizing power and unprecedented reach of the Internet. Morgellons was brought to public attention by ... Mary Leitao, who in 2001 created a Web site describing the mysterious sores and bizarre threadlike extrusions that afflicted her young son. She said she had tried for years to find a medical explanation for his illness. Ultimately, she said, doctors accused her of staging it. After creating the Web site...she was inundated with e-mail messages from people who said they also had the disease. Many of the people who visit her site have been told by doctors that their symptoms are delusional. Several mothers...told her that they had lost custody of their children after doctors decided the youngsters’ symptoms were contrived. Doctors themselves are divided over whether Morgellons is a medical or a psychiatric illness. The patients are clearly suffering from something; it is just not clear what that something is. “I think it’s a real disease,” said Dr. Rafael Stricker, a physician in San Francisco who sees many patients claiming to have Morgellons. Many patients also test positive for Lyme disease.
Mohammed al-Qahtani, detainee No. 063, was forced to wear a bra. He had a thong placed on his head. He was massaged by a female interrogator who straddled him like a lap dancer. He was told that his mother and sisters were whores. He was told that other detainees knew he was gay. He was forced to dance with a male interrogator. He was strip-searched in front of women. He was led on a leash and forced to perform dog tricks. That much is known. These details were among the findings of the U.S. Army’s investigation of al-Qahtani's aggressive interrogation at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But only now is a picture emerging of how the interrogation policy developed, and the battle that law enforcement agents waged, inside Guantanamo and in the offices of the Pentagon, against harsh treatment of al-Qahtani and other detainees by military intelligence interrogators. In interviews with MSNBC.com — the first time they have spoken publicly — former senior law enforcement agents described their attempts to stop the abusive interrogations. The agents of the Pentagon's Criminal Investigation Task Force, working to build legal cases against suspected terrorists, said they objected to coercive tactics used...after Guantanamo's prison camp opened in early 2002. They ultimately carried their battle up to the office of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who approved the more aggressive techniques. And they described their disappointment when military prosecutors told them not to worry about making a criminal case against al-Qahtani, the suspected "20th hijacker" of Sept. 11, because what had been done to him would prevent him from ever being put on trial.
A non-partisan civic organization today claimed it had hacked into the voter database for the 1.35 million voters in the city of Chicago. Bob Wilson, an official with the Illinois Ballot Integrity Project — which bills itself as a not-for-profit civic organization dedicated to the correction of election system deficiencies — tells ABC News that last week his organization hacked the database, which contains detailed information about hundreds of thousands of Chicago voters, including their Social Security numbers, and dates of birth. "It was a serious identity theft problem, but also a problem that could potentially create problems with the election," Wilson said. A nefarious hacker could have changed every voter's status from active to inactive, which would have prevented them from voting, he said. "Or we could've changed the information on what precinct you were in or what polling place you were supposed to go to," he said. "There were ways that we could potentially change the entire online data base and disenfranchise voters throughout the entire city of Chicago. If we'd wanted to, we could've wiped the entire database out."
Edwin Wilson...was hurtling into history as one of this nation's most infamous traitors until three years ago when a federal judge concluded he'd been buried with the help of government lies. Now 78 and paroled, Wilson works in his Seattle office...to prove he didn't earn the spectacular fall from skilled CIA agent to despised federal prisoner. In books about his downfall, he is the villain: a ruthless renegade who left the CIA and made himself rich by selling arms and training terrorists for Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. Three years ago, a federal judge in Texas threw out a major conviction...and blasted the government for covering up the truth. Wilson had finally gotten documents [proving] that despite his 1971 retirement, the CIA was still secretly using him to gather intelligence. The government had denied it for years. The people Wilson is suing—former officials in the U.S. Attorney's Office, the Justice Department and the CIA, including two men who are now federal judges—contend they can't be held liable for doing their jobs, even if his rights were violated. Wilson spent 22 years in prison. U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes found that about two dozen government lawyers were involved in hiding information from Wilson's defense attorney. In his blistering opinion, Hughes noted that the CIA had more than 80 contacts with Wilson after he left the agency, which, among other things, had used him to "trade weapons or explosives for sophisticated Soviet military equipment—like MiG-25 fighters, tanks, missiles and ocean mines—with Libya." A CIA agent had even discussed with Wilson that "sending tons—yes, tons—of explosives to a hostile power could be authorized" if the U.S. got good enough information for it, the judge wrote.
Note: For another famous case of a major "traitor" who was framed by the U.S. government, click here.
Cheryl Kagan, a former Maryland Democratic legislator, was shocked when she opened her mail [and] discovered three computer discs. The discs contained the secret source code for vote-counting that could be used to alter the votes cast through Maryland's new electronic voting machines. An independent report commissioned by the state of Maryland...shows myriad other security flaws. Computer experts and government officials have voiced serious concerns that if these machines malfunction, no paper record will exist for a recount. Even worse is the fear that an election could be hacked. Princeton University researchers using an Accuvote TS — a touch screen version of the Diebold machine — showed how easy it would be to deploy a virus that would, in seconds, flip the vote of any election. Cyber-security expert Stephen Spoonamore [says] Diebold's "system is utterly unsecured. The entire cyber-security community is begging them to come back to reality and secure our nation's voting." There is also the matter of computer glitches. In primary elections...machines malfunctioned in Texas, where 100,000 votes were added. In Maryland, screens froze and memory cards went missing. Gov. Robert Ehrlich, a Republican running for reelection, advised residents to vote by absentee ballot because he had no confidence in the machines. Electronic voting machines were supposed to be the solution to the paper ballot problems from the 2000 presidential election. But to many critics, America's voting system has gone out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Steven Jones, the Brigham Young University physics professor embroiled in controversy over his theories on the Twin Towers' collapse, is retiring Jan. 1. "I am electing to retire so that I can spend more time speaking and conducting research of my choosing," Jones said in an interview Friday. "I appreciate the wonderful opportunity I have had to teach and serve and do research at BYU for more than 21 years." In September, the university...placed Jones on paid leave in order to conduct a professional review of his controversial Sept. 11 theories. The review...has been canceled due to Jones' retirement. The professor had given several public lectures on his theories of why the World Trade Center collapsed. Jones published the paper, "Why Indeed Did the World Trade Center Buildings Collapse?" online and began lecturing about his theories. Jones also recently was appointed co-chairman of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, "a nonpartisan association of faculty, students, and scholars, in fields as diverse as history, science, military affairs, psychology and philosophy, dedicated to exposing falsehoods and to revealing truths behind 9/11." He is also the co-editor of Journal of 9/11 Studies. He said he is not bitter toward BYU, and hopes to continue his research. [Jones' letter states] "Two structural engineering professors in Switzerland have recently spoken out as I have also done, declaring that explosives were with 'utmost probability' responsible for the collapse of World Trade Center 7 on Sept. 11."
This year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner and some high-tech entrepreneurs are competing to provide credit to the world’s poor. In November, 2004, [eBay founder Pierre Omidyar,] Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the co-founders of Google, and other leaders of the high-tech community gathered at the San Francisco home of the venture capitalist John Doerr for a weekend session with Muhammad Yunus, who is considered the godfather of microcredit. Yunus...is a highly gifted interlocutor between the extremely poor in the developing world and the West. This December, he will go to Oslo to receive [the Nobel Peace Prize]. During the famine of 1974 in Bangladesh...Yunus, an economics professor at Chittagong University, found the theories he was teaching maddeningly irrelevant; so he went into a neighboring village and began talking to the poor. He lent twenty-seven dollars to a group of forty-two villagers. Before long he became convinced that he had a remedy for their condition: providing very small individual loans to the impoverished to start activities ranging from making bamboo stools to buying a dairy cow. In 1976, after local banks refused his entreaties to make the loans...he founded the Grameen Bank. In early May, representatives from eight microfinance institutions around the world were invited to a three-day event at the Gates Foundation’s headquarters, in Seattle. At one point, the group met with Melinda and Bill Gates, and with Warren Buffett, too.
Note: If you want to be inspired by the amazing microfinance movement, which is transforming the face of poverty in our world, read this highly engaging, informative article. To be a part of this exciting global transformation, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/051023microcredit
The House Appropriations Committee has let go about 60 private contractors who made up most of an investigative unit that was auditing billions of dollars in government spending, including the $62 billion federal relief package for Hurricane Katrina. The investigators...were released during the past week. The shake-up — which leaves only 16 full-time employees in the investigative unit — comes about a year after the Appropriations Committee's chairman, Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., launched the Katrina review by saying the unit would "conduct a wide-ranging assessment and analysis of disaster spending." At the time, Lewis said the unit had a tradition of "comprehensive" reporting. It's unclear how the departures will affect the work of the unit, whose contract staff is made up of former employees of the FBI, CIA and other government investigative services. Some of them had worked for the unit for several years. Scofield said he could not identify the specific work being done by investigators because much of the unit's inquiries involve classified information. Established in 1943, the investigative unit has focused mainly on defense and intelligence spending programs.
The Republican Party will begin airing a hard-hitting ad this weekend that warns of more cataclysmic terror attacks against the U.S. homeland. The ad portrays Osama bin Laden and quotes his threats against America dating to February 1998. "These are the stakes," the ad concludes. "Vote November 7." The ad displays an array of quotes from bin Laden and his top lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahri, that include bin Laden's Dec. 26, 2001 vow that "what is yet to come will be even greater." The ad also cites al-Zawahri's claim to have obtained "some suitcase bombs," followed by a scene that appears to show a nuclear explosion. Despite al-Zawahri's claim, portable nuclear devices are believed to be particularly difficult to produce and elusive to rogue regimes and terror groups.
Note: Promoting fear is the easiest way to cause people to feel powerless and surrender their freedoms and tax dollars to those in power. Click here for more.
Several government doctors say drug maker Eli Lilly & Co. subtly orchestrated medical guidelines for treatment of an often lethal blood infection, hoping to boost sales of a drug whose value is being debated. “This company is trying to insinuate its drug into many aspects of patient care that industry really shouldn’t be involved in,” said Dr. Naomi O’Grady, a critical care specialist at the National Institutes of Health. Three of her NIH colleagues claim in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine that Lilly worked through medical societies to influence standards for treating the blood infection, sepsis. Ultimately, Xigris was incorporated into the guidelines. Both the guidelines committee and a larger information campaign on sepsis were heavily funded by [Lilly]. Dr. Phil Dellinger, who helped lead the guidelines committee, said...“We’ve been catching grief because we’ve been taking a lot of Lilly money — and we’re appreciative of Lilly giving it.” The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Xigris in 2001, despite an evenly split vote by its advisory committee. The lead author of Thursday’s journal article, Dr. Peter Q. Eichacker, voted against approval. Some critics are unhappy that the drug, which works only for the sickest patients, was approved on the basis of a single experiment. Academic officials acknowledged in the published guidelines that Lilly gave more than 90 percent of $861,000 in grants for the campaign and medical recommendations. O’Grady, of NIH, said a panel of disease experts that she headed refused to endorse the sepsis guidelines largely because Lilly “convened the whole panel.”
Note: For lots more on how the powerful pharmaceutical industry endangers our lives, click here.
Three years after the Food and Drug Administration first hinted that it might permit the sale of milk and meat from cloned animals...the agency is poised to endorse marketing of the mass-produced animals for public consumption. The decision...is based largely on new data indicating that milk and meat from cloned livestock and their offspring pose no unique risks to consumers. On Thursday, advocacy groups filed a petition asking the FDA to regulate cloned farm animals one type at a time, much as it regulates new drugs, a change that would drastically slow marketing approval. "The available science shows that cloning presents serious food safety risks, animal welfare concerns and unresolved ethical issues that require strict oversight," the petition states. "The government talks about being science-based, and that's great, but I think there is another pillar here: the question of whether we really want to do this," said Carol Tucker Foreman, director of food policy at the Consumer Federation of America. Each clone is a genetic replica of the animal that donated the cell from which it was grown. It was October 2003 when the FDA released its first draft document concluding that clones and their offspring are safe to eat. But an agency advisory panel and the National Academies, while generally supportive, raised flags, citing a paucity of safety data. Clonal meat or milk would be impossible to authenticate, since there is no way to distinguish them from conventional products. "That you can go online today to any number of different Web sites and purchase semen from cloned bulls tells you there are cloned sires out there fathering calves in the food supply."
Note: For an ABC article on this, click here. If you believe that government agencies are unbiased on matters of public health, I most highly urge you to read our summary at http://www.WantToKnow.info/deception10pg
Only a tiny fraction of Americans – 7 percent, according to a recent survey by The Ponemon Institute – change any behaviors in an effort to preserve their privacy. Few people turn down a discount at toll booths to avoid using the EZ-Pass system that can track automobile movements. And few turn down supermarket loyalty cards. Privacy will remain in the headlines in the months to come, as states implement the federal government’s Real ID Act, which will effectively create a national identification program by requiring new high-tech standards for driver’s licenses and ID cards. The “right to be left alone” is a decidedly conservative -- even Libertarian -- principle. People are now well aware there are video cameras and Internet cookies everywhere, [yet] there is abundant evidence that people live their lives ignorant of the monitoring. People write e-mails and type instant messages they never expect anyone to see. Just ask Mark Foley or even Bill Gates, whose e-mails were a cornerstone of the Justice Department’s antitrust case against Microsoft. It is also impossible to deny that Americans are now being watched more than at any time in history. But there is another point in the discussion about which there is little disagreement: The debate over how much privacy we are willing to give up never occurred.
The U.S. Marine Corps has threatened to punish two members of the military legal team representing a terrorism suspect being held at Guantanamo Bay if they continue to speak publicly about reported prisoner abuse, a civilian lawyer from the defense team said Saturday. The action directed at Lt. Col. Colby Vokey and Sgt. Heather Cerveny follows their report last week that Guantanamo guards bragged about beating detainees. The order has heightened fears among the military defense lawyers for Guantanamo prisoners that their careers will suffer for exposing flaws and injustices in the system. Defense lawyers for Guantanamo prisoners say the personal stakes are high and point to the Navy's failure to promote Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift after he successfully challenged the legitimacy of the Pentagon's war-crimes commissions. Two weeks after the Supreme Court ruled the commissions unconstitutional and lacking in due process, Swift was passed over for advancement and will be forced by the Navy's up-or-out policy to retire by summer. At least three other military defense lawyers for the 10 charged terrorism suspects have also been passed over for promotion in what some consider a subtle reprimand of their vigorous defense of their clients.
Bangladeshi microcredit pioneer Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for their work in advancing economic and social opportunities for the poor, particularly women. The economist and the bank he founded will share the prize. They were cited for their efforts to help "create economic and social development from below" ... by using innovative economic programs such as microcredit lending. Grameen Bank has been instrumental in helping millions of poor ... improve their standard of living by letting them borrow small sums to start businesses. Loans go toward buying items such as cows to start a dairy, chickens for an egg business, or mobile phones to start businesses where villagers who have no access to phones pay a small fee to make calls. "Every single individual on earth has both the potential and the right to live a decent life. Across cultures and civilizations, Yunus and Grameen Bank have shown that even the poorest of the poor can work to bring about their own development," the Nobel Committee said in its citation. Microcredit is the extension of small loans, typically US$50 to US$100, to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans. The bank claims to have 6.6 million borrowers, 97 percent of whom are women, and provides services in more than 70,000 villages in Bangladesh.
Note: If the above CNN link does not work, click here. To make a real difference in the world and to help reduce poverty in a dramatic way, see our empowering summary of this inspiring worldwide movement.
The president has...managed to kill the writ of habeas corpus. Tonight, a special investigation, how that, in turn, kills nothing less than your Bill of Rights. Because the Mark Foley story began to break on the night of September 28...many people may not have noticed the bill passed by the Senate that night. Congress passed the Military Commission’s Act to give Mr. Bush the power to deal effectively with America’s enemies—those who seek to harm the country. He has been very clear on who he thinks that is. GEORGE W. BUSH: For people to leak that program and for a newspaper to publish it does great harm to the United States of America. That fact that we’re discussing this program is helping the enemy. OLBERMANN: So, the president said it was urgent that Congress send him this bill as quickly as possible, not for the politics of next month’s elections, but for America. One bit of trivia that caught our eye was the elimination of habeas corpus, which apparently used to be the right of anyone who’s tossed in prison to appear in court and say “Hey, why am I in prison?” COUNTDOWN has obtained a copy of [the] “Constitution” of the United States, and sources tell us it was originally sneaked through the constitutional convention and state ratification in order to establish America’s fundamental legal principles. There’s only one reference to habeas corpus: “The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.”
A Florida law that bars exit polling near voting places violates the press' rights under the First Amendment, a lawsuit filed by The Associated Press and five television networks alleges. The lawsuits...contend that state laws that prohibit asking a voter a "fact" or "opinion" within 100 feet of a polling place is unconstitutional. The AP and the five television networks - ABC, CNN, CBS, Fox News and NBC - formed a consortium to collect exit-polling data in Florida and other states. The news organizations had also challenged a 2004 directive by Ohio's elections chief against exit polling within 100 feet of a voting place. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Michael H. Watson ruled the verbal order by Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell before the 2004 presidential election violated the press' rights under the First Amendment. A federal judge ruled in 1988 that a Florida law prohibiting exit polling within 150 feet of polling places was unconstitutional.
Note: A university study of exit polls in the 2004 election showed strong evidence of elections manipulations. Could this be why certain powerful individuals want to limit exit polls?
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.