http://www.fantasylandmedia.org
News fashioned by the people in charge, the corporations and your government. Each week, we cover the stories that are just left out of the US propaganda machine.
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"Israeli forces killed hundreds of unarmed Palestinian civilians and destroyed thousands of homes in Gaza in attacks which breached the laws of war, Amnesty International concluded in a new report published on Thursday. Operation 'Cast Lead': 22 days of death and destruction, is the first comprehensive report to be published on the conflict, which took place earlier this year.
'Israel's failure to properly investigate its forces' conduct in Gaza, including war crimes, and its continuing refusal to cooperate with the UN international independent fact-finding mission headed by Richard Goldstone, is evidence of its intention to avoid public scrutiny and accountability,' said Donatella Rovera, who headed a field research mission to Gaza and southern Israel during and after the conflict.
'The international community, led by the UN Security Council, must use all its leverage to ensure that Israel cooperates fully with the Goldstone inquiry, which now offers the best means to establish the truth.'"
http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/report/impunity-war-crimes-gaza-southern-israel-recipe-further-civilian-suffering-20090702
-->The NY Times reported the story, but some of the facts were changed to protect the guilty, namely Israel. The NY Times story reports that both Israel and Hamas committed war crimes, while the Amnesty report was much more critical of Israel. By the third paragraph, we are reading criticisms of the report by the Israeli military.
The last two sentences of the article, interestingly enough, reported the detention of Cynthia McKinney and Irish Nobel laureate Mairead Maguire by the Israeli Navy, something the NY Times had refused to report on previously.
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"This is Cynthia McKinney and Iím speaking from an Israeli prison cellblock in Ramle. [I am one of] the Free Gaza 21, human rights activists currently imprisoned for trying to take medical supplies to Gaza, building supplies - and even crayons for children, I had a suitcase full of crayons for children. While we were on our way to Gaza the Israelis threatened to fire on our boat, but we did not turn around. The Israelis high-jacked and arrested us because we wanted to give crayons to the children in Gaza. We have been detained, and we want the people of the world to see how we have been treated just because we wanted to deliver humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza...
During Operation Cast Lead, U.S.-supplied F-16ís rained hellfire on a trapped people. Ethnic cleansing became full scale outright genocide. U.S.-supplied white phosphorus, depleted uranium, robotic technology, DIME weapons, and cluster bombs - new weapons creating injuries never treated before by Jordanian and Norwegian doctors. I was later told by doctors who were there in Gaza during Israelís onslaught that Gaza had become Israelís veritable weapons testing laboratory, people used to test and improve the kill ratio of their weapons."
-letter was originally broadcast on WBAIX
-->The NY Times gave this story two sentences, while it was front page news in many newspapers around the world.
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"Three years ago, U.S. Department of Agriculture employees determined that synthetic additives in organic baby formula violated federal standards and should be banned from a product carrying the federal organic label. Today the same additives, purported to boost brainpower and vision, can be found in 90 percent of organic baby formula.
The government's turnaround, from prohibition to permission, came after a USDA program manager was lobbied by the formula makers and overruled her staff. That decision and others by a handful of USDA employees, along with an advisory board's approval of a growing list of non-organic ingredients, have helped numerous companies win a coveted green-and-white 'USDA Organic' seal on an array of products.
Relaxation of the federal standards, and an explosion of consumer demand, have helped push the organics market into a $23 billion-a-year business, the fastest growing segment of the food industry...
But the USDA program's shortcomings mean that consumers, who at times must pay twice as much for organic products, are not always getting what they expect: foods without pesticides and other chemicals, produced in a way that is gentle to the environment."
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/07/03
-->The NY Times is as protective of big agriculture as it is of Israel. There has been little mention of the attempt to water down the meaning of the 'USDA Organic' seal."
