Tuesday, May 23, 2017

The Guardian UK:
"Had Assange not sought refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, he would have been on his way to the kind of American torture pit Chelsea Manning had to endure. This prospect was obscured by the grim farce played out in Sweden. 'It's a laughing stock,' said James Catlin, one of Assange's Australian lawyers. 'It is as if they make it up as they go along'.

It may have seemed that way, but there was always serious purpose. In 2008, a secret Pentagon document prepared by the 'Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch' foretold a detailed plan to discredit WikiLeaks and smear Assange personally.

The 'mission' was to destroy the 'trust' that was WikiLeaks' 'centre of gravity'. This would be achieved with threats of 'exposure [and] criminal prosecution'. Silencing and criminalising such an unpredictable source of truth-telling was the aim."

-->The NYT coverage of Assange has always been a perfect example of "fake news" orchestrated by the CIA. Read JohnPilger.com if you want the real story about why the Swedish charges against Assange were dropped.

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Common Dreams:
"Americans are dying at a shockingly high rate from preventable causes, found a first-of-its-kind global health study published late Thursday.

The new research demonstrates that despite the fact that the U.S. has the largest economy in the world, healthcare for many of its residents is woefully inadequate. The U.S. was tied with Estonia and Montenegro, far below other wealthy nations such as Norway, Canada, and Australia, in the study's ranking of 195 countries.

'America's ranking is an embarrassment, especially considering the U.S. spends more than $9,000 per person on healthcare annually, more than any other country,' said Dr. Christopher Murray, senior author of the study and director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. 'Anyone with a stake in the current healthcare debate, including elected officials at the federal, state, and local levels, should take a look at where the U.S. is falling short.' "

-->The NYT didn't cover this story. Our newspaper of record almost always comes out in favor of the big insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Take a peek at the current NYT Board of Directors to see what conflicts of interest they represent. http://www.nytco.com/board-of-directors/

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The Guardian UK:
"Facebook has censored a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist for publishing a series of posts alleging corruption by the prime minister of Malta and his associates.

Matthew Caruana Galizia, a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ award-winning Panama Papers team, was temporarily locked out of his Facebook account over four posts, which were deleted for violating the social network’s community standards. 'For me, this process was enlightening because I realised how crippling and punitive this block is for a journalist,' Caruana Galizia told the Guardian by email.

The posts, which were written in Maltese, contained allegations of wrongdoing by prime minister Joseph Muscat, his chief of staff Keith Schembri, and minister of energy Konrad Mizzi. Each post included images of documents from the Panama Papers leak."


-->No coverage of this by our NYT. A story about Facebook censoring investigative reporters should be big news. Check out the Board of Directors again to see why this story never made it into print.