Common Dreams:
“With Congress on the verge of taking up the controversial, corporate-friendly Trans Pacific Partnership, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is demanding that the chief trade representative for the United States turn over the full text of the proposed trade agreement.
‘It is incomprehensible to me that the leaders of major corporate interests who stand to gain enormous financial benefits from this agreement are actively involved in the writing of the TPP while, at the same time, the elected officials of this country, representing the American people, have little or no knowledge as to what is in it,’ Sanders said in a letter sent Monday to U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman. …
Proponents of the pact, which would encompass 12 nations that represent 40 percent of the global economy, are pushing for a fast-track process that would hand over negotiating authority to President Barack Obama, who supports the deal. Critics claim the TPP poses threats to civil liberties, workers rights, public health, food safety, and global financial stability.”
—>The NYT didn’t cover this report. The outrageous stories about corporate dominance of our democracy are often filtered out by our newspaper of record.
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Common Dreams:
“The identity of the Sony hackers is still unknown. President Obama, in a December 19 press conference, announced: ‘We can confirm that North Korea engaged in this attack.’ He then vowed: ‘We will respond. . . . We cannot have a society in which some dictator some place can start imposing censorship here in the United States.’
The U.S. Government’s campaign to blame North Korea actually began two days earlier, when The New York Times – as usual – corruptly granted anonymity to ‘senior administration officials’ to disseminate their inflammatory claims with no accountability. These hidden ‘American officials’ used the Paper of Record to announce that they ‘have concluded that North Korea was centrally involved in the hacking of Sony Pictures computers.’ With virtually no skepticism about the official accusation, reporters David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth deemed the incident a ‘cyberterrorism attack’ and devoted the bulk of the article to examining the retaliatory actions the government could take against the North Koreans.“
—>Sad that we see this so often in our media. Government senior administration officials are granted anonymity to spread false truths to the general public. This is the type of propaganda we saw before the invasion of Iraq.
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Guardian UK:
“A 2,500 Square-Mile Methane Plume Is Silently Hovering over Western US.
Legacy of fossil fuel drilling is ‘giant cloud’ of powerful greenhouse gas now visible from space.
A monstrous cloud of accumulated methane—a potent greenhouse gas—is now hovering over a large portion of the western United States according to satellite imagery analyzed by NASA and reported by the Washington Post.
Created by years of intentionally released and errantly leaked natural gas during fossil fuel drilling operations, the cloud—invisible to the human eye but captured by advanced satellite imaging technology—is centered over northwest New Mexico and described by the Post as ‘a permanent, Delaware-sized methane cloud, so vast that scientists questioned their own data when they first studied it three years ago.’ ”
—>The methane plume may be visible from space, but not from the pages of the NYT. Our pro-drilling newspaper of record likes to bury stories that would displease the corporate elite.
