http://www.fantasylandmedia.org
Each week, we cover the stories that are just left out of the US propaganda machine. News that the people in charge, the corporations and your government want keep from the public eye.
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Reuters:
"Israel's expansion of settlements in East Jerusalem and eviction of Palestinians from their homes there is a form of ethnic cleansing, a United Nations investigator said on Monday.
United States academic Richard Falk was speaking to the UN Human Rights Council as it prepared to pass resolutions condemning settlement building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The 'continued pattern of settlement expansion in East Jerusalem combined with the forcible eviction of long-residing Palestinians are creating an intolerable situation' in the part of the city previously controlled by Jordan, he said.
This situation 'can only be described in its cumulative impact as a form of ethnic cleansing,' Falk declared.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/03/21-3
-->Ethnic cleansing only makes the pages of The NY Times when it concerns a regime the US government considers hostile to its interests. A long time protector of Israel's image in America, our newspaper of record would never cover this accusation, despite the fact that it was made by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights.
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The Guardian, UK:
"The face of Jeremy Morlock, a young US soldier, grins at the camera, his hand holding up the head of the dead and bloodied youth he and his colleagues have just killed in an act military prosecutors say was premeditated murder.
Moments before the picture was taken in January last year, the unsuspecting victim had been waved over by a group of US soldiers who had driven to his village in Kandahar province in one of their armoured Stryker tanks.
According to testimony collected by Der Spiegel magazine the boy had, as a matter of routine, lifted up his shirt to reveal that he was not hiding a suicide bomb vest.
That was the moment Morlock, according to a pre-arranged plan, threw a grenade at the boy that exploded while other members of the rogue group who called themselves the 'kill team' opened fire."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/21/afghanistan-trophy-photos-us-soldier
-->Although The NY Times covered this story, specifics about the killings were sanitized. The "boy" lured to his death becomes a "civilian...who appears to be dead." The photos of the victims are "inflammatory" because the faces of the soldiers "look disconcertingly satisfied." Perhaps the headline says it all: "Photos Stoke Tension Over Afghan Civilian Deaths," as if this were all a problem in public relations.
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NPR:
This week, WAMC/NPR covered a story about America's nuclear fears by interviewing a psychologist at George Washington University. The psychologist concluded that Americans are subject to these unreasonable fears because radiation cannot be seen and lends itself to hysterical responses. In addition, the US public can't separate nuclear bombs from nuclear energy, a totally different concept.
What to do to allay these irrational fears? The psychologist recommends desensitizing the public with field trips to nuclear reactors. That way, people will get used to this form of energy and their fears will diminish.
Perhaps local elementary schools around the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant would be interested. Their baby teeth already have greater concentrations of radiation then children living 100 miles away from the facility. Why not see first hand the plant that is spreading radiation in their bodies?
Leave it to NPR to treat citizens' fears of nuclear energy as pathology.
