Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Common Dreams:
"FBI Face Recognition Technology Has 'No Limits,' Congressional Hearing Reveals.
Law enforcement has access to photos of 50 percent of all adult Americans without their knowledge or consent

If Congress doesn't take legislative action, the FBI's vast and growing facial recognition database could someday soon allow the government to track Americans' 'every move' in a breathtaking, nationwide violation of the Fourth Amendment.

That was the takeaway of a scathing hearing in the Congressional Oversight Committee on the FBI's use of facial recognition technology last week.

In June, the FBI's use of such technology was the subject of a damning report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which revealed that the agency's use of the technology was much more far-reaching than privacy advocates had suspected: 30 million photos are contained in the database, and the agency has access to hundreds of millions more—and the majority of subjects committed no crimes."

-->No mention of this in the pages of the NYT. This report makes the US look like a dystopian state, not something our newspaper of record wants to get into. 

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Mondoweiss:
"BDS co-founder: Israel’s arrest and interrogation of Omar Barghouti next step in ‘war against BDS movement.’

Palestinian society has condemned Israel’s arrest and interrogation of Omar Barghouti, a co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement as the next step in Israel’s fight against the BDS movement as a whole.

Israel arrested Barghouti on Sunday, raided his family home in Acre, Israel, held him for 16 hours and released him - however the BDS co-founder has been subjected to daily interrogations with Israeli authorities since then, according to a statement released by the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC)."

-->Principal leader of the Palestinian resistance movement arrested in the West Bank. This story makes Israel look like an oppressive, apartheid state, and so wasn't covered in the NYT.

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Common Dreams:
"Trump Budget Horrifies Majority of Voters, Poll Finds. By extraordinarily wide margins, voters disapprove of President Donald Trump's sweeping proposed cuts to popular government programs. ... 

Trump's proposed severe funding cuts face disapproval by huge margins. The budget's slashing of public funding for medical research, for example, faces a whopping 87 percent disapproval, with only ten percent of respondents voicing approval.

'By wide margins,' Quinnipiac notes, 'American voters say other proposed cuts are a bad idea:' 84 - 13 percent against cutting funding for new road and transit projects;
67 - 31 percent against cuts to scientific research on the environment and climate change; 83 - 14 percent against cutting funding for after-school and summer school programs 66 - 27 percent against eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities; 79 - 17 percent against eliminating the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program."

-->This poll didn't make it into the NYT. Not that the newspaper likes Trump. Just that many of these cuts favor corporate interests.

Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Common Dreams:
"As the tribes suffer the latest in a string of legal defeats, however, the fight against DAPL has been winning a series of major victories in different territory: the pipeline's financial backing.

Campaigns to divest from the pipeline and thus starve it of funding have been growing across the U.S. and around the world. Large cities such as San Francisco and Seattle have divested billions of dollars, and similar campaigns have emerged in New York, Albuquerque, N.M., and Raleigh, N.C., among other U.S. cities. ...

Other cities have already severed those ties. 'Between Davis, [Calif.,] Santa Monica, and Seattle alone—the three cities that have opted to sever their ties with Wells Fargo—the campaign will ultimately deprive Wells Fargo of more than $4 billion in deposits, fees, and more,' writes Jimmy Tobias in The Nation.

In Norway, meanwhile, indigenous Sami people last week convinced the country's second-largest pension fund to divest from the pipeline. The Green Party in the UK has also urged British banks to stop funding the pipeline."

-->Leave it to our newspaper of record to leave out any mention of Dakota Access Pipeline and the campaign to divest from banks like Wells Fargo. Why don't you divest?

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Common Dreams:
"US Pressures G20 Into Dropping Climate Reference from Joint Statement. ... Finance ministers for the Group of 20 (G20), which comprises the world's biggest economies, dropped a joint statement mentioning funding for the fight against climate change after pressure from the United States and Saudi Arabia.

A G20 official taking part in the annual meeting told Reuters that efforts by this year's German leadership to keep climate funding in the statement had hit a wall.
'Climate change is out for the time being,' said the official, who asked to remain anonymous.

At the last G20 meeting in July 2016, the group's financial leaders urged all countries that had signed onto the landmark Paris climate accord to bring the deal into action as soon as possible. But President Donald Trump, who has referred to global warming as a 'Chinese hoax,' took office vowing to remove the U.S. from the voluntary agreement."

-->Why didn't the NYT cover this story? Maybe because it makes the empire look too bad. But is protecting the image of the empire more important than readers getting accurate information? 

Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Mint Press News:
"On Thursday, China’s State Council Information Office released a human rights report on the U.S., noting that while that country continues to act as 'the judge of human rights it continues to ignore its own terrible problems.' ...

On the domestic front, the report highlighted the prison industrial complex which has led to the U.S. having the second highest incarceration rate in the world, with almost 1 in 3 adults having a criminal record. ... The report also noted that in 2016 'The colonial history, enslavement, racial subordination and segregation, racial terrorism and racial inequality in the United States remained a serious challenge,' where 'Police killings were reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynching.' ...

The report noted that the U.S. air campaigns in Syria and Iraq had killed between 4,568 and 6,127 civilians and that since 2009, its illegal drone program had left 800 dead in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia."

->The truth hurts! But the readers of the NYT can avoid the anguish because the paper didn't print this story. Always protective of the empire's good name.

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The Guardian:
"Just before his torturers pushed him out of the van, barely conscious, on to the Nairobi pavement, Abdi was told he was one of the lucky ones: 'You were supposed to die tonight.' The security operatives who picked him up were Kenyan, but new research from the Angaza Foundation for African Reporting suggests they are part of a US-funded counter-terrorism strategy across Africa that is leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.

Since Kenya invaded Somalia in 2011 in an effort to dislodge the Islamist militant group al-Shabaab, thousands of ethnic Somalis like Abdi living in Kenya have been detained, many on dubious grounds.

The security forces, in particular the Kenyan Defence Force, which continues to receive significant US funding, and the anti-terrorism police unit, have been accused of torture and summary executions."

-->More bad news about US human rights violations. The NYT, of course, didn't report the story. 

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The Age:
"Half a century after United States B-52 bombers dropped more than 500,000 tonnes of explosives on Cambodia's countryside Washington wants the country to repay a $US500 million ($662 million) war debt. The demand has prompted expressions of indignation and outrage from Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh. ...

Over 200 nights in 1973 alone, 257,456 tons of explosives fell in secret carpet-bombing sweeps – half as many as were dropped on Japan during the Second World War. According to one genocide researcher, up to 500,000 Cambodians were killed, many of them children.

The bombings drove hundreds of thousands of ordinary Cambodians into the arms of the Khmer Rouge, an ultra-Marxist organisation which seized power in 1975 and over the next four years presided over the deaths of more than almost two million people through starvation disease and execution."

-->No news of this reached NYT readers either. No wonder US citizens view the empire as so benevolent. It is just ignorance, aided and abetted by the US media.

Wednesday, March 08, 2017

The Guardian UK:
"Israel’s main government watchdog has criticised the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in a damning report on the 2014 Gaza war, saying the country was badly prepared for the threat of Hamas tunnels, and that many senior cabinet members were kept in the dark about vital information.

The long-awaited investigation into Operation Protective Edge from the state comptroller also said the government had for months ignored a growing humanitarian crisis inside Gaza, and failed to consider diplomatic moves that could have averted the outbreak of hostilities, Haaretz newspaper reported.

The war killed 2,251 Palestinians, more than half of them civilians according to UN figures, and 74 Israelis, including six civilians. The intense fighting over 50 days also reduced swaths of Gaza to piles of rubble, making 100,000 people homeless."

-->No printed story in the NYT. Only a Reuters story on the NYT webpage. Always providing cover for Israeli war crimes.

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Common Dreams:
"Berta Cáceres' Murder Linked to U.S.-Trained Soldiers, Leaked Court Docs Show.
Leaked documents add weight to whistleblower's claim that U.S.-trained elite military troops killed prominent Honduran activist.

Leaked court documents obtained by the Guardian and reported on Tuesday appear to corroborate a whistleblower's claim that U.S.-trained special forces within the Honduran military were responsible for the death of prominent Indigenous land defender Berta Cáceres last year.

The whistleblower, a former soldier, alleged that the Honduran army was murdering activists on a secret 'kill list,' as Common Dreams reported. ... [T]he documents reveal that several of the military suspects received U.S. training and visited Cáceres' town multiple times in the weeks leading up to her death, according to the Guardian."

-->The NYT printed an opinion piece criticizing the US for continued military support of Honduras. But where was the US training of the murderers? Down the memory hole of our newspaper of record. 

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The Washington Post:
"Tens of thousands of immigrants detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement were forced to work for $1 day, or for nothing at all — a violation of federal anti-slavery laws — a lawsuit claims.

The lawsuit, filed in 2014 against one of the largest private prison companies in the country, reached class-action status this week after a federal judge’s ruling. That means the case could involve as many as 60,000 immigrants who have been detained.

It’s the first time a class-action lawsuit accusing a private U.S. prison company of forced labor has been allowed to move forward."

-->The NYT did not cover this story of immigrant slaves. Possibly because Obama's detention policies were clearly to blame. The Deporter in Chief still holds the title.

Wednesday, March 01, 2017

Common Dreams:
"NEW YORK TIMES: DON'T IGNORE THE WAR & FAMINE IN YEMEN!

United Nations and other international aid officials have been warning that Yemen is on the brink of famine. 'Donald Trump’s Shift On Yemen Risks Plunging The Country Into Famine,' the Huffington Post reports, warning that the Trump Administration may be giving Saudi Arabia a green light to attack and close the critical port of Hodeidah, blocking Yemen's food imports. 

'Yemen war causing world's worst food crisis,' Vatican Radio reports.'Time running out: 1.4 million children could die from famine in Africa & Yemen, says UNICEF,' RT reports. But a search of recent stories on the New York Times' website only turns up wire stories, not a regular New York Times article."

-->The NYT and much of the media avoids talk about war crimes in Yemen. Our bombs are being used, and the US is even fueling the attack jets, flown by Saudi Arabia, our willing thug in the Middle East.

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Democracy Now:
"Keith Ellison started out very strong in this race. He received endorsements not only from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, but also from Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer, from a wide variety of labor unions. I mean, in a way, he really was the unity candidate in that he had brought together Sanders backers and Clinton backers.

But as the campaign developed, we started to see more and more negative hits pop up in the media. We saw one of the largest donors of the Democratic Party, entertainment tycoon Haim Saban, who’s an Israeli-American businessman, come out and say that he’s an anti-Semite, say that he’s anti-Israel. The Anti-Defamation League called on Keith Ellison to be disqualified. The night before the vote, delegates were getting emails from the American Jewish Congress saying that, you know, Keith will be really bad for the U.S.-Israel relationship and that he shouldn’t be confirmed.

There was a widespread sort of smear campaign targeting Keith Ellison for his view about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is actually quite moderate. You know, he believes in a secure Israel. He’s voted for aid to Israel most of the time. But he also believes in rights for Palestinians. He opposes the blockade on Gaza. He opposes the settlement construction. And he’s been vocal about that. And he’s talked to both sides, and he’s been very close to both the American Jewish community and the American Muslim community."

-->The inside story about the Democratic Party, one that the mainstream media avoids. Zionist billionaires continue to destroy progressive options.

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CounterPunch:
"The New York Times is currently engaged in one of its most ambitious projects: Removing a sitting president from office. In fact, Times columnist Nicolas Kristof even said as much in a recent article titled  'How Can We Get Rid of Trump?'

Frankly, it’s an idea that I find attractive, mainly because I think Trump’s views on immigration, the environment, human rights, civil liberties and deregulation are so uniformly horrible, they could destroy the country. But the Times objections are different from my own. The reason the Times wants Trump removed is because Trump wants to normalize relations with Russia which threatens to undermine Washington’s effort to project US power deeper into Central Asia.

Trump’s decision to normalize relations with Moscow poses a direct threat to Washington’s broader imperial strategy to control China’s growth, topple Putin, spread military bases across Central Asia, implement trade agreements that maintain the dominant role of western-owned mega-corporations, and derail attempts by Russia and China to link the wealthy EU to Asia by expanding the web of pipeline corridors and high-speed rail that will draw the continents closer together creating the largest and most populous free trade zone the world has ever seen."

-->Trump removed because he is trying to avoid war? That's an opinion that you will never hear or read in the mainstream media. Our media is often little more than Pentagon propaganda. 

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