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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 May, 2005.
Viewing ALL NEWS articles 1 through 75 of 229.
- A secret document from the heart of government reveals today that Tony Blair privately committed Britain to war with Iraq and then set out to lure Saddam Hussein into providing the legal justification.
- Here is a breakdown of the four-day death toll since Iraq named its new government April 28. At least 105 Iraqis and 11 U.S. soldiers have been killed. - The man who led Britain's armed forces into Iraq has said that Tony Blair and the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, will join British soldiers in prison if the military are ever prosecuted for war crimes in Iraq - US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld paid a secret visit to former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and offered him freedom and possible return to public life if he made a televised request to armed groups for a ceasefire with allied forces - After two years and at least $1.2 billion, the U.S. effort to resuscitate Iraq's electrical system is still very wide of its mark. - While nearly 100,000 Iraqis and 1600 US troops have died as a result of the Iraq war and tens of thousands have been severely wounded, the war has proven to be extremely lucrative for the Houston-based oil services company Halliburton and the San Francisco-based construction company Bechtel. - Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in comments apparently directed at the United States that the Islamic republic's nuclear programme was 'none of your business'. - Colleges altering courses, tapping into Homeland Security funds - "Collateral damage" is a euphemism for mass murder. It is perfectly moral to protect innocents against aggressors. It is not moral, nor has it ever been necessary, to blow up cities filled with innocent people. When a State drops bombs on another country and predictably kills innocents, it cannot be exempted from ethical culpability simply because it didn’t want to kill innocents.
- USAF Col. George Nelson (ret.), a 30 year veteran, aircraft accident investigator and expert in aircraft maintenance and aircraft identification, stunned the Power Hour listeners by questioning official explanations of the September 11th attacks. - Gratuitous violence is routinely inflicted by American soldiers on ordinary Iraqis. "Guys in my unit, particularly the younger guys, would drive by in their Humvee and shatter bottles over the heads of Iraqi civilians passing by. They'd keep a bunch of empty Coke bottles in the Humvee to break over people's heads." US soldiers punch, beat, and kick ordinary Iraqis.
- In an unprecedented move, 17,000 "Confronting The Evidence" DVDs were distributed to the voters of Sedgefield in an attempt to educate Blair's constituency about the 9-11 cover-up and to contribute towards efforts to unseat the Prime Minister. - No strain of rat or mice is naturally obese, so the scientists have to create them. They make these morbidly obese creatures by injecting them with MSG when they are first born. They even have a title for the race of fat rodents they create: "MSG-Treated Rats." - The number of new cancer cases is growing twice as fast as population in Canada: as of now, 44% of Canadian men and 38% of Canadian women will be affected during their lifetimes. The Canadian Cancer Society recently highlighted the urgency of establishing prevention policies. Yet its recommendations refer only to the adoption of "healthy" individual behaviors (regular physical activity, better diet, life without tobacco), as though no external factor had any influence on people's health - The U.S. military plans to allow regional combatant commanders to request the president for approval to carry out preemptive nuclear strikes against possible attacks on the United States or its allies with weapons of mass destruction, according to a draft new nuclear operations paper - Google’s plan 'to build a database that will compare the track record and credibility of all news sources around the world, and adjust the ranking of any search results accordingly' is a new form of censorship in the technological era.
- As distinct from the concept of real democracy, democratic fascism is a political ideology, fully backed up by corporate terrorists and war lords in the 'mainstream media' and academia, that adherents would apply to consummate police state at home and impose puppet regimes in the Muslim world, and which they propagate, besides with the barrel of a gun, through economic genocide. - Now into the Iraq fiasco's third year, it's admitted there were never any weapons of mass destruction. Perpetual conflict? Endless occupation? How many lives per gallon? - More than 10,000 Striking Workers at Japanese-Invested Walmart Supplies Firm in Shenzhen Demand Right To Set Up Their Own Trade Union.
- At the outset of Bush's second term, Vice President Dick Cheney dropped a bombshell. He hinted, in no uncertain terms, that Iran was "right at the top of the list" of the rogue enemies of America, and that Israel would, so to speak, "be doing the bombing for us", without US military involvement and without us putting pressure on them 'to do it'. - Shoplifting is more than a way to survive in the cutthroat competition of the 'free market' and protest corporate injustices. It is also a different kind of orientation to the world and to life. The shoplifter makes do with an environment that has been conquered by capitalism and industry, where there is no longer a natural world from which to gather resources and everything has become private property, without accepting it or the absurd way of life it entails. - Wal-Mart wants in on banking, but critics are concerned that Wal-Mart's interest in establishing an industrial bank may open a Pandora's box (a bank branch in every store), which could devastate community banks, credit unions and others. - The War in Iraq has been very good for Halliburton. KBR, a Haliburton subsidiary was given $10.5 billion in contracts. It charged $88 million for 3.4 million meals that it never served. In one outrageous example, KBR allegedly billed $27.5 million to deliver liquefied petroleum gas that had been purchased in Kuwait for $82,000. - The shocking case of two 16-year-old girls from New York City arrested a month ago ought to inspire outrage among every American worthy of the name. Since the government's reasons for the girls' imprisonment could apply to virtually any teenager, it should also spark fear.
- The bankruptcy reform bill that President Bush just signed into law will do more than discipline those who live riotously on loans without paying them back in full. Think for a moment about new prisons to house the indebted. Back to the future of debtors' prison. - The military invites firms to show off their latest, greatest gizmos. - Today's U.S. also is undergoing a program of moral cleanliness. Censorship is in. Creativity and saying anything against the new morals automatically earns one the label of 'un-Amercan.' This counter cultural revolution took decades to implement. Today, it is solidly in place and shows no signs of abatement. It will stick around for years, if not decades. There is little opposition to it. - Make an assertion, promote your opinion, or provide your interpretation. Before your opponent can question your motive, strength of argument, or basis for your assertions, call for them to prove you wrong. Place the burden of proof for your assumptions on your opponent.
- A new group of Wal-Mart critics ran a full-page advertisement on April 20 contending that the company's low pay had forced tens of thousands of its workers to resort to food stamps and Medicaid, costing taxpayers billions of dollars. On April 26, as part of a campaign called "Love Mom, Not Wal-Mart," five members of Congress joined women's advocates and labor leaders to assail the company for not paying its female employees more. - 'I feel like I got hit with a bullet.' She told us that she realized that 'it wasn't me who had been shot,' as her boy lay limp and lifeless beside her, his 'blood and brain matter were sliding down my arm.' - Substantial scientific evidence gained in the past decade has shown that various aspects of the built environment can have profound, directly measurable effects on both physical and mental health outcomes, particularly adding to the burden of illness among ethnic minority populations and low-income communities. - BP has a legal right to get a licence from Indonesia to extract gas in West Papua. Its moral case is less clearcut. - Defence expenditure in the US will equal that of the rest of the world combined within 12 months, making it 'increasingly pressing' for European contractors to develop a "closer association" with the US, corporate finance group PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) says. - CAFTA, the proposed trade agreement with Central America and the Dominican Republic, would double U.S. agricultural exports to the region. That has Central American farmers worried. CAFTA would flood Central America's markets with products of U.S. agribusiness, much of which is still heavily subsidized.
- The shops facing each other on Martyrs’ Square in central Baghdad say much about the state of Iraq: on one side, a coffin-makers’ workshop does a roaring trade. Across the road, a gun shop displays pistols and leather holsters. - Forty four percent of Americans are overworked using at least one of three different measures, and those overworked employees have, on average, poorer health and higher rates of clinical depression, both of which help to drive up health care costs, as you'd expect.
- US aid to Palestinians goes to checkpoints, Zionist organization. - Odigo, the instant messaging service, says that two of its workers received messages two hours before the Twin Towers attack on September 11 predicting the attack would happen, and the company has been cooperating with Israeli and American law enforcement, including the FBI, in trying to find the original sender of the message predicting the attack.
- Splenda/sucralose is being used as a replacement for Aspartame. It is a chlorinated sugar; a chlorocarbon. Common chlorocarbons include carbon tetrachloride, trichlorethelene and methylene chloride, all deadly. Chlorine is nature's Doberman attack dog, a highly excitable, ferocious atomic element employed as a biocide in bleach, disinfectants, insecticide, WWI poison gas and hydrochloric acid. - Chemicals in oral contraceptives and food containers harm the development of baby mice and US experts are concerned about the effects in humans. - In the latest South Florida election mishap, workers in 35 percent of Miami-Dade County’s 749 polling places last November filed counts of voter signatures that differed from the number of ballots cast on the touch-screen voting machines, a new analysis has found.
- Many of us greeted the unveiling of the government's new food pyramid with a mixture of puzzlement and confusion. Indeed, the dizzying layers of rainbow-colored lines helped distract from the fact that the food industry's fingerprints are all over the new dietary guidelines; in ways that hurt rather than help consumers. - Prison facilities exist in America, many in remote areas across our country adjacent to major highways, railroads, and airports. The infrastructure for incarcerating and executing resisters and dissenters in the coming American Holocaust has been already set up, according to the 1968 government plans code-named Operation Cable Splicer and Operation Garden Plot (FM 19-15), sub programs of the Rex 84 Program. - 'He's like my Hannibal Lecter, he really is. He's the monster in my life,' said the wife of Charles Graner. These are the kind of evil psychotics that the US military uses. - A list of some of the liars in the Bush administration, current and past, who should be in prison.
- Never before in history has a special interest group, the pharmaceutical industry, so shamelessly tried to compromise the health of billions of people for no other reason than its desire to maintain multi-billion dollar markets for prescription drugs. - Humans have the capacity to create and to destroy. It seems to me that if we do not rein in our destructive capacity, bugs will one day inherit an otherwise empty and barren planet. - A proposal by a small shareholder to withhold approval from the Board of Directors for failure to investigate signs of insurance fraud on 9/11 has been published on the website of the Allianz Group, one of the world’s largest insurers, in preparation for its May 4th annual meeting. - Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, says that he has reliable information that the United States is sheltering Cuban-born terrorist Luis Posada Carriles. The Venezuelan leader has demanded a response to the extradition request presented by Caracas. - A former British military official has backed a sensational claim that the Russian nuclear submarine, the Kursk, was torpedoed by US forces in August 2000. - With help from some unlikely places, Corrections Corporation of America is hoping to build the largest for-profit private prison in the United States. - Over the course of the last two years, Bechtel has been making tons of money from the war on Iraq that its executives helped orchestrate. But two years after the fall of Baghdad and billions later in reconstruction contracts, the daily situation for most Iraqis is worse than it was before the war. The power grid remains unreliable. Hundreds of sewage treatment plants are still inoperable, with millions of gallons of filthy water pouring into the Tigris and Euphrates every day. The phone system is primitive at best. The trains still don’t run. The highways are cratered. The Baghdad airport serves only military flights. Schools are splashed with a coat of paint and told to reopen. When local Iraqi officials object or try to offer advice, they are ignored or bullied. 'The impression we get is that Bechtel is more powerful than the US Army.'
- Rabid right-wing, anti-abortion extremist Neal Horsley was a guest on The Alan Colmes Show and admitted to having sex with a mule. - At 5:00 pm Eastern time on Election Day, I checked the sportsbook odds in Las Vegas and via the offshore bookmakers to see the odds as of that moment on the Presidential election. John Kerry was a two-to-one favorite. And he most certainly was, at least if the votes had been fairly and legally counted. What happened instead was the biggest crime in the history of the nation, and the collective media silence which has followed is the greatest fourth-estate failure ever on our soil. - America has a multi-billion pornographic moviemaking industry. It turns out on an average around 4,000 films every year, which yield revenue of $13 billion. Thousands of people are engaged in it from its production to distribution. To get over health problems and to reduce costs, there is a serious thinking on the part of the industry to outsource it. Already a number of Hollywood producers are making their non-porn films outside America. - The number of prisoners held in U.S. military detention centers in Iraq has risen without interruption since autumn, filling the centers to capacity and prompting commanders to embark on an unanticipated prison expansion plan. As U.S. and Iraqi forces battle an entrenched insurgency, the detainee population surpassed 11,350 last week, a nearly 20 percent jump since Iraq's Jan. 30 elections. U.S. prisons now contain more than twice the number of people they did in early October. - It has become clear that Israel played a major role in the battle for Fallujah, despite the American concern to conceal this fact. What news leaked of officers, soldiers, and even rabbis of dual citizenships that took part in the battles, some of which were killed by the resistance’s bullets, is only the tip of the iceberg. - A small plane strayed within three miles of the White House on Wednesday, leading to frantic evacuation of the executive mansion and the Capitol with military jets scrambling to intercept the aircraft and firing flares to steer it away. - Iraqi police hurled insults at US soldiers after two suicide car bomb blasts in Baghdad killed at least seven people and left 19 wounded, including policemen. "Since Americans invaded our country they have brought nothing but evil." - Corroborated allegations that Mr. Bolton’s first wife, Christina Bolton, was forced to engage in group sex have not been refuted by the State Department despite inquires posed by Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt concerning the allegations. Mr. Flynt has obtained information from numerous sources that Mr. Bolton participated in paid visits to Plato’s Retreat, the popular swingers club that operated in New York City in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
- How would you like a 54-percent pay raise? That's how much pay jumped last year for the chief executives of the 500 largest U.S. companies, according to Forbes magazine. Worker pay is shrinking, the economy is stalling, the trade deficit is growing, and the stock market is below 1999 levels -- but CEO pay is still on steroids. The highest-paid CEO in 2004 was Yahoo's Terry Semel, who hauled in $230.6 million. That's more than $4 million a week - In the wake of the recent cancellation of the CHEERS study in which parents were to be paid to expose their infant children to pesticides, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is finalizing a new policy that encourages the same type of human dosing studies by industry. - Sibel Edmonds, who was fired after alleging national security breaches within the bureau's translation service, plans to appeal to the Supreme Court to lift a gag order that she has been under for almost three years. - In the ’70s and ’80s, the banana companies Dole, Del Monte and Chiquita used a carcinogenic pesticide, Nemagon, to protect their crops in Nicaragua. Today, the men and women who worked on those plantations suffer from incurable illnesses. Their children are deformed. The companies feign innocence. - Some 12.3 million people are enslaved worldwide, according to a major report. - US researchers have devised a simple robot that can make copies of itself from spare parts.
- A third federal agency has admitted it paid a journalist to write favorable stories about its work. Documents released by the Agriculture Department show it paid a freelance writer $9,375 in 2003 to "research and write articles for hunting and fishing magazines describing the benefits of NRCS (Natural Resources Conservation Service) programs." - Is that a bit of desperation coming from Bill O'Reilly? His show's lost a third of its viewers over the past few months and now he won't shut up about celebrities who refuse to put their heads on his chopping block of a show. - King Abdullah of Jordan has agreed to pardon Ahmed Chalabi, the controversial Iraqi political leader, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison for fraud after his bank collapsed with $300m (£160m) in missing deposits in 1989.
- The killing has reached record levels. Four hundred Iraqis in the past two weeks have been killed. Yesterday 71 died in four suicide bombings in Baghdad, Tikrit and Hawija. There was also a bomb attack on a fertiliser plant in Basra, a mortar attack on the old Oil Ministry and a drive-by shooting in the capital, in which two Iraqi soldiers were killed. - The scandal of Iraqi POW abuse at Abu Ghraib has the world in an uproar. However, there is a precedent that went unnoticed and underreported of brutal treatment of Iraqi POWs — the 1991 abuse of Iraqi POWs during and after Operation Desert Storm. - Fox ran a one-hour documentary called "Iran: The Nuclear Threat." It glorifies Israeli preemptive attacks on Iraq and promotes a preemptive attack on Iran. - A leading Israeli doctor and medical ethicist has called for the prosecution of doctors responsible for thousands of unauthorised and often illegal experiments on small children and geriatric and psychiatric patients in Israeli hospitals. - The U.S. military—the most powerful and destructive in the world—is growing increasingly desperate to fill its ranks. They are now recruiting in front of Wal-Mart stores. - CBS News has learned that the Army will halt recruiting for one day later this month to re-instruct its recruiters on what they may and may not legally do to persuade young people to enlist.
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