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 to keep from the public eye.
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Common Dreams:
"Introducing a couple from Texas who, despite their objection, had the natural gas sucked out from beneath their property by the Chesapeake Energy Corporation without paying a dime in compensation, an investigative report by Reuters recounts how the gas giant has embarked on an aggressive nationwide 'landgrab' with a series of legal maneuvers and industrial fracking equipment in tow.
In a special report, The casualties of Chesapeake's 'land grab' across America, a review of official state records by Reuters shows that since January 2005, the Texas agency in charge of granting waivers under a land regulation statute—known as Rule 37—'rejected just five of Chesapeake's 1,628 requests' to access land without the owners permission.
The exemptions granted by the state 'effectively secured [Chesapeake's] ability to drain the gas' from private properties without royalties or other payments."
-->Are there other dangers posed by the fracking companies to residents of New York State? The NY Times didn't cover this obvious abuse of corporate power.
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Huffington Post:
"The Obama administration has overseen a sharp increase in the number of people subjected to warrantless electronic surveillance of their telephone, email and Facebook accounts by federal law enforcement agencies, new documents released by the American Civil Liberties Union on Friday revealed.
The documents, released by the ACLU after a months-long legal battle with the Department of Justice, show that in the last two years, more people were spied on by the government than in the preceding decade. The documents do not include information on most terrorism investigations and requests from state and local law enforcers. Nor do they include surveillance by federal agencies outside Justice Department purview, like the Secret Service.
Department of Justice agencies obtained 37,616 court orders for information about phone calls in 2011, according to the documents. That's an increase of 47 percent from the 25,535 orders obtained by the government in 2009. Including Internet and email information requests, more than 40,000 people were targeted in 2011."
-->The NY Times didn't cover this story with all the excitement about the upcoming election. Warrantless electronic surveillance is another area that the two parties behave as one, not something our mainstream media wants people to notice.
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The Sydney Morning Herald AU:
"New evidence has emerged that all Guantanamo Bay detainees, including David Hicks, were drugged involuntarily with a substance that has a long history as a truth serum. Recently declassified US documents revealing medical procedures have shown that scopolamine was administered to all detainees taken to the Cuban detention centre.
The documents, which were standard operating procedures for nursing staff, were obtained by the independent US news outlet Truthout, and reveal that the rationale for the drug's use on all detainees was to prevent motion sickness.
However, US military experts have said that scopolamine is not recommended for motion sickness because of its severe side effects.
The US government has not responded to questions by The Sun-Herald about drugs given involuntarily to detainees. The Sun-Herald revealed this month that Mr Hicks and other detainees were drugged against their will with unknown substances and that detainees' medical records were incomplete, with the names and dosages of drugs removed."
-->Drugs given Guantanamo inmates instead of a fair trial? That's the way things work in the Empire. The NY Times, the propaganda instrument of the Empire, is not about to dwell on human rights abuses by the US military. Our newspaper of record didn't print this story.
