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| Taking a Closer Look at the Stories Ignored by the Corporate Media |
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Archive for the Month of June, 2005.
Viewing ALL NEWS articles 376 through 450 of 511.
- Who are these "vendors"? The vendors are the corporate face on our elections systems the for-profit companies that develop and sell the equipment used to run our elections. They are those who have the most to gain from the influence they buy through their donations and dues to the alphabet soup, and that influence is considerable. They include names like Diebold, Elections Systems and Software (ES&S), Sequoia Voting Systems, Hart InterCivic, Accenture, UniSys, Accupoll, and more. - For the first time in its 40-year history, an international organisation dedicated to preserving historic and architectural heritage has designated an entire country endangered.
- The Senate could consider the measure as soon as next month. - The Palestinian Authority has welcomed a report by Human Rights Watch that accuses the Israeli occupation army of failing to prosecute soldiers involved in killing and wounding innocent Palestinians. - Two criminal investigations based in New York are getting close to exposing a major Bush family and associates' international money laundering operation that has spanned more than a generation and has been used to illegally fund U.S. elections since the Nixon era. According to CIA sources, most Bush family assets are tied up in off-shore accounts that are masked from investigators through the use of pass through companies and secretive interlocking board directorships. - Lobbying Firms Hire More, Pay More, Charge More to Influence Government - "This convention, it took place in America, right?" - The media have been fooled. They have been lazy. They have lost sight of the historic calling of journalism. Journalists have been replaced on television by cheerleaders.
- If the idea of declaring bankruptcy has been on your mind recently, the time to act is now. The new bankruptcy law, signed by President Bush in April, is set to take effect in October of this year. The law makes it much more difficult, if not impossible, for people with unmanageable debts to get a fresh financial start in life. - Although the quest for or preservation of "democracy" is often used as a justification for war, history has incessantly revealed that such a quest is often little more than a thinly-veiled attempt to install a puppet regime.
- US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is considering provoking a military confrontation with Syria by attacking Hizbullah bases near the Syrian border in Lebanon, according to the authoritative London-based Jane's Intelligence Digest. - NDP MP Bill Siksay is lending his support to a campaign aimed at allowing a growing number of American military deserters to find refuge in Canada. - The Social Security Administration has relaxed its privacy restrictions and searched thousands of its files at the request of the F.B.I. as part of terrorism investigations since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, newly disclosed records and interviews show.
- A divided Supreme Court ruled Thursday that local governments may seize people's homes and businesses against their will for private development in a decision anxiously awaited in communities where economic growth often is at war with individual property rights.
- The Defense Department began working yesterday with a private marketing firm to create a database of high school students ages 16 to 18 and all college students to help the military identify potential recruits in a time of dwindling enlistment in some branches.
- It’s looking more and more like the American contribution to population reduction will be in the form of diagnosing half its citizens as mental incompetents. That will naturally lead to reproductive legislation and control. And when they come up with a way to declare eldership and religiosity as mental illnesses, which is well underway, that will clear the way for incarceration and euthanasia legislation, including, but not limited to, starvation and dehydration. - So the American government is pressuring foreign countries to censor their news. Aside from the fact that this act is the height of arrogance by the United States, it makes it exceedingly clear why so many Americans who rely on the corporate media for their news continue to be so misinformed/un-informed about the goings on in Iraq. If the American government is attempting to censor the news in foreign countries, you can imagine what they are doing at home. - America speaks with one voice. Unfortunately, it emanates from its ass.
--Barry Crimmins - In waterways from the Potomac to the Brazos River in Texas, researchers have found fish laden with estrogen and antidepressants, and many show evidence of major neurological or physiological changes - The bill would, in one swoop, negate all the gun laws the district has adopted over the past 30 years, including pre-purchase criminal-background checks and bans on semi-automatic weapons and cop-killer bullets. If it passes the Senate, it is expected to breeze through the House, which passed a similar bill last September.
- Falsehood #1: Abuse at Guantánamo is "minor," allegations are based on "rumor" - What the tort reformers, who are by and large conservatives, fail to reaWhat the tort reformers, who are by and large conservatives, fail to realize is that tort reform is paternalist, if not downright totalitarian. lize is that tort reform is paternalist, if not downright totalitarian. - We have got to make the connection between our own lifestyles and big, global problems like climate change. - National Institutes Of Health Officials Plan Trial On 100 Children - US forces shot and killed a nine-year old Iraqi girl as she came out of her school following final exams in Baghdad. - An Italian judge ordered the arrests of 13 people in the purported CIA abduction of an imam, who then was sent to Egypt, the Milan prosecutor's office said Friday. - Ecuador will not sign a pact to grant U.S. military personnel special immunity from the International Criminal Court, even if that means more aid cuts from Washington, the foreign minister said Thursday. - Federal prosecutors agreed Thursday to temporarily protect members of an adult industry trade group from strict new enforcement regulations. But thousands of porn sites are still fair game, and their webmasters now face hefty prison terms if they don't keep records proving that models and performers are over 18. - As the costs of the Iraq occupation spiral, British and American oil companies meet in secret next week to carve up the country's oil reserves for themselves. - Reynolds is the highest-ranking public official so far to step forward and criticize the government account of 9/11, calling the government story "bogus" and saying the WTC most likely fell from a controlled demolition. - WTC janitor pulls burn victim to safety after basement explosion rocks north tower seconds before jetliner hit top floors. Also, two other men trapped and drowning in a basement elevator shaft, were also pulled to safety from underground explosion..
- Awhile back, a U.S. citizen working in Iraq sent me several photographs he obtained from a soldier in Iraq. Apparently, they had been passed along between several sources before reaching me. I felt that the pictures were particularly controversial and newsworthy, in that they appear to show U.S. soldiers planting weapons on Iraqi teenagers. - Lebanese Deputy Marwan Fares has stressed that Israel is standing behind the recent assassination of the former Secretary General of the Lebanese Communist Party, George Hawi, pointing out to the similarity with the other previous assassinations committed by the Israeli Mossad in Beirut southern suburb against leaders of Hizbullah. - Washington has for the first time acknowledged to the United Nations that prisoners have been tortured at US detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan and Iraq, a UN source says. - Israel has confirmed it tried to assassinate a militant from the Islamic Jihad group in a targeted air strike - Military doctors at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have aided interrogators in conducting and refining coercive interrogations of detainees, including providing advice on how to increase stress levels and exploit fears, according to new, detailed accounts given by former interrogators.
- Once again, the US forces of occupation bombed civilian targets in the town of AlQaim, west of Baghdad, using bomber planes as part of its Operation Arrow in the western region of Iraq. - Six million children could be saved each year if poor countries spent just $1.23 (68p) per head of their population on basic healthcare such as immunisations. - The story of Cordova is not just a sad tale of a few bad fishing seasons. It is the story of how corporations that are, in the words of Brian O'Neill, "nation-states unto themselves", can use the legal system and the seeming apathy of the federal government to bring an entire town to its knees through endless litigation funded by bottomless resources. - I cannot think of any instance in which the federal government has been willing to spend $1 billion a week and 1,700 lives just to improve conditions in any one of the 50 states. Yet that is exactly what it is doing in Iraq, presumably for no other reason than to bring the blessings of liberty to a people we have bombed, starved, impoverished and vilified for 14 years.
- The World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI), a grouping of NGOs, intellectuals and writers opposed to the war in Iraq, accused the United States of causing more deaths in Iraq than ousted president Saddam Hussein.
- Anti-globalization protestors dressed as monks fell to their knees in mock prayer to the gods of money as the world's most powerful central bankers gathered for their annual summit on Saturday. - The drapes, installed in 2002 at a cost of $8,000, allowed then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to speak in the Great Hall without fear of a breast showing up behind him in television or newspaper pictures. - A research team at Sonoma State University has recently finished conducting a network analysis of the boards of directors of the ten big media organizations in the US. The team determined that only 118 people comprise the membership on the boards of director of the ten big media giants. This is a small enough group to fit in a moderate size university classroom. These 118 individuals in turn sit on the corporate boards of 288 national and international corporations. In fact, eight out of ten big media giants share common memberships on boards of directors with each other. - There are many in this world for whom the ravages of war - including arson, looting, murder and rape -- are a way of life. These people have known little else than war all their lives, like their parents before them and their children (if they survive) after them. These generations of war face atrocities on a daily basis, and most of these go unnoticed by the rest of the world. - Cristofaro related a series of actions by local government officials and their hired New London Development Corporation thugs that amount to nothing less than outright intimidation, harassment and extortion. - Spain's Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero may want to watch his back. - Thirteen inmates, among them a Brazilian, a Chilean and a Colombian, have crucified themselves in Ecuadoran prisons as part of a protest to demand reduced sentences, a spokesman for the protesters said. - Is it just me, or is Vice President Cheney, who repeated Thursday that the Iraq insurgency is in its final throes, starting to sound like former Saddam spokesman, "Baghdad Bob"? Is it time to start calling him "D.C. Dick"? - Could the President of the United States ever argue that he has the power and the right – and even the duty – to take any American citizens into custody he chooses, throw them into prison forever, torture them at will, and never even charge them with a crime? The question has long been moot. It has already happened. Meet Jose Padilla.
- Alaska is changing by the hour. From the far north, where higher seas are swamping native villages, to the tundra around Fairbanks, where melting permafrost is forcing some roads and structures to buckle in what looks like a cartoon version of a hangover, to the rivers of ice receding from inlets, warmer temperatures are remaking the Last Frontier State. - In the Third Reich we said We were just following orders. Today we say, We’re just doing our job.... - The Americans stayed at some of the finest hotels in Milan, sometimes for as long as six weeks, ringing up tabs of as much as $500 a day on Diners Club accounts created to match their recently forged identities, according to Italian court documents and other records. Then, after abducting their target and flying him to Cairo under the noses of Italian police, some of them rounded out their European trip with long weekends in Venice and Florence before leaving the country, the records show. - Six months after the Asian tsunami, a leading international charity says the poorest victims have benefited the least from the massive relief effort. - A senior Taliban commander on Sunday dismissed as false Afghan government reports that 178 guerrillas were killed in a U.S.-backed offensive in southwestern Afghanistan last week. - Selecting a lawyer and an engineer with one of the nation's largest corporate law firms, whose clients have deep and occasionally controversial relations with the EPA, triggered concerns that Nakayama would not be able to aggressively enforce environmental laws.
- Attack Was 'Coup de'tat,' Buildings Were Demolished By Controlled Demolitions - More than half of Kenya's 32 million population is in danger of harassment and torture by police, a rights group said in a report that accused security agencies of routinely violating human rights.
- THE American general who commanded allied air forces during the Iraq war appears to have admitted in a briefing to American and British officers that coalition aircraft waged a secret air war against Iraq from the middle of 2002, nine months before the invasion began. - Although much of the inquiry has been conducted behind closed doors, a recent series of public hearings has embarrassed the Canadian government by exposing details of Arar's "extraordinary rendition" -- the phrase used by the CIA to describe the U.S. practice of secretly sending terror suspects to countries where torture is routine. The hearings have also revealed a greater Canadian role in the practice than previously acknowledged.
- Faced with a ballooning prison population, U.S. commanders in Iraq are building new detention facilities at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison and Camp Bucca near the Kuwaiti border and are developing a third major prison, in northern Iraq.
- "I now wish we could go back to Saddam's time. We suffered then, but not like the suffering nowadays. There is no water or electricity. I can't sleep because of the heat. How are we to live these lives of misery?"
- As Clement bantered with the audience, one Republican gadfly noted that they defeated former Vice President Walter Mondale in that race, adding: "We had to kill off Wellstone to get it." - The Daily Telegraph reports today that Tony Blair's 21-year-old son, Euan , has snared a prestigious internship in Washington working under Republican Congressman David Dreier, the powerful conservative chairman of the House Rules Committee (and a hypocritical gay closet case who supports the Republicans' homophobic political agenda). - As a UN envoy arrives to investigate Mugabe's 'Operation Drive Out Trash', thousands of people are dying in rural poverty - Although Pentagon denies under reporting deaths, independent researcher says more than 7,000 GI's may have died in Iraqi combat.
- The average temperature in the Arctic has climbed at about double the average of the rest of the world during the past few decades.
- Many farmers want to grow this 5000 year old long fiber plant that has been turned into thousands of products since being domesticated by the ancient Chinese. That is their heresy. The enforcer is the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in Washington, DC, which has placed industrial hemp on its proscribed list next to marijuana.
- Local actions around GMOs, in particular, are designed to address important gaps in federal and state policy, and mitigate potentially serious threats to public health, the environment, and survival of local farm economies. - The delay in confirming the United States' second case of mad cow disease seems to underscore what critics of the agency have said for a long time: that there are serious and systemic problems in the way the Agriculture Department tests animals for mad cow - The United States reportedly plans to resume production of plutonium 238, a substance so radioactive that a speck can cause cancer. - The US government thrust scores of US-based Muslim men in jail without charge after the September 11, 2001 attacks, US rights groups said in a report. - Thousands of low-wage Wal-Mart workers are on public assistance. Many state lawmakers say it's time the megastore was forced to provide affordable employee health insurance. - "The leadership of the Islamic Army in Iraq categorically denies that its representatives have negotiated with the crusaders either directly or indirectly. Whoever does so will receive the appropriate punishment." - If only those "axis of evil" fellas were a little more ... cooperative.
Pages for June, 2005
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