Friday, June 14, 2013

Fantasyland Media:


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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Mondoweiss (news website devoted to covering American foreign policy in the Middle East, chiefly from a progressive Jewish perspective): 
"During a restoration project repairing gravesites which had collapsed due to natural conditions at the Al-Kazakhana cemetery in Jaffa, workers for the al-Aqsa Foundation for Endowment and Heritage, an NGO based in the city of Umm al-Fahm, discovered the existence of six mass graves with hundreds of skeletons of Palestinians who perished during the Nakba in 1948 and the uprising in 1936.

The al-Aqsa Foundation issued a report on Wednesday (Arabic) titled Jaffa mass graves for victims of the Nakba and the revolution of 1936. The mass graves support documented oral histories collected from Palestinians who lived through the Nakba. Historians have documented testimonies recounting scenes of massacres in Jaffa and the surrounding area from eyewitness who saw piles of bodies scattered thoughout neighborhoods of Jaffa.

'During [the foundation’s] repair and maintenance work on the [Kazkhana] cemetery, we discovered nozzles to dig into the ground where we found the mass graves...including hundreds of skeletons and human remains of rebels, martyrs and civilians who perished during the Nakba,' head of the Islamic Movement in Jaffa, Sheikh Mohammed Najem, said in the report."

-->The NY Times doesn't like to remind its readers of what happened to Palestinians in 1948 and didn't cover this story.

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Guardian UK:
"TransCanada and the provincial government of Alberta are paying former advisors to the Obama administration - as well as former staff of the Hillary Clinton and John Kerry presidential campaigns - to help them lobby for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline to transport tar sands fuel to the U.S.

The pipeline from Alberta - which is to be built by TransCanada - has been delayed for over four years pending approval from the U.S. State Department which has final say because it crosses the international border. President Barack Obama is expected to announce a decision this fall in consultation with John Kerry, who took over the State Department earlier this year from Hilary Clinton.

Potential conflicts of interest for these three top Democratic party officials have been uncovered by Friends of the Earth U.S. This came soon after Mother Jones magazine uncovered evidence that TransCanada has had strong contractual relationships with the firm that provided a positive environmental review of the pipeline for the State department."

-->The big players in the Democratic Party in bed with the TransCanada, and on the Big Oil payroll? This story didn't interest The NY Times which is also in bed with TransCanada. All the news that major corporations see fit to print.

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Common Dreams:
"The Grey Lady roused itself to profile Glenn Greenwald after his blockbuster stories of the last two days: the first on a secret court order now in effect for Verizon to provide the NSA on all telephone records in its systems, the second on the PRISM program, which has given the NSA direct access to servers of information giants including Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, since 2007. But the piece is mean-spirited, underplaying Greenwald’s credentials and coming too close for comfort to character sniping.

Start with first impressions: the headline, the opening paragraph... 'Blogger, With Focus on Surveillance, Is at Center of a Debate: After writing intensely, even obsessively, for years about government surveillance and the prosecution of journalists, Glenn Greenwald has suddenly put himself directly at the intersection of those two issues, and perhaps in the cross hairs of federal prosecutors.' So where do we start with this? First, Greenwald is introduced as a blogger, not a lawyer, and most important, a recognized expert on constitutional law and author of four books, including New York Times best sellers. Second, the depiction of him as intense and obsessive (warning! possibly dangerous!) puts his personality rather than his information and analysis in the spotlight...

The article mentions three times in the first four paragraphs about how Greenwald is likely to have the Administration come after him ... But notice how the emphasis is on the risk, as in the how the authorities may stomp on him, and not a peep on how his actions benefit the public. The article, remarkably, sidesteps the elephant in the room: what does this Administration conduct reveal about our democracy and our rights?"

-->The NY Times did print a strong op-ed article condemning the PRISM program. But we are talking about what our newspaper of record purports to be news.