Wednesday, January 16, 2019

The Guardian UK:
"New evidence has emerged linking an RAF veteran to the death in 1961 of the UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld in a mysterious plane crash in southern Africa.

Jan van Risseghem has been named as a possible attacker before, but has always been described simply as a Belgian pilot. The Observer can now reveal that he had extensive ties to Britain, including a British mother and wife, trained with the RAF and was decorated by Britain for his service in the second world war. ... Van Risseghem was never interviewed by the authorities or journalists directly about the death of Hammarskjöld.

-->This story implicates all the usual villains: the CIA and MI6 doing the dirty work for US and British corporations. This time it was killing the the head of the United Nations, along with 15 members of his staff. JFK, soon to be assassinated himself, had called Hammarskjöld "the greatest statesman of our century." There wasn't much coverage of this story in our mainstream media, including the NYT.

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Mondoweiss:
"A study released last month by 416Labs, a Toronto-based consulting and research firm, supports the view that mainstream U.S. newspapers consistently portray Palestine in a more negative light than Israel, privilege Israeli sources, and omit key facts helpful to understanding the Israeli occupation, including those expressed by Palestinian sources.

The largest of its kind, the study is based on a sentiment and n-gram analysis of nearly a hundred thousand headlines in five mainstream newspapers dating to 1967. ...

Since 1967, use of the word “occupation” has declined by 85% in the Israeli dataset of headlines, and by 65% in the Palestinian dataset; Since 1967, mentions of Palestinian refugees have declined by an overall 93%; Israeli sources are nearly 250% more likely to be quoted as Palestinians; Explicit recognition that Israeli settlements and settlers are illegal rarely appears in both datasets.

-->Yes, our newspapers are hopelessly biased in support of Israel, and only getting worse. The fact that the NYT didn't cover this story is only one example of our media's staggering disregard for the truth about the occupation of Palestine.  

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The Guardian UK:
"In their rhetoric and policy advocacy, this trio has been steadily moving to the left to keep pace with a leftward-moving Democratic party. ... [But] Booker, Harris and Gillibrand have been making a very different pitch of late – on Wall Street. According to CNBC, all three potential candidates have been reaching out to financial executives lately, including Blackstone’s Jonathan Gray, Robert Wolf from 32 Advisors and the Centerbridge Partners founder Mark Gallogly.

Wall Street, after all, played an important role getting the senators where they are today. During his 2014 Senate run, in which just 7% of his contributions came from small donors, Booker raised $2.2m from the securities and investment industry. Harris and Gillibrand weren’t far behind in 2018, and even the progressive Democrat Sherrod Brown has solicited donations from Gallogly and other powerful executives."

-->Yes, corporate backed Democratic candidates posing as left leaning reformers. Why can't the NYT, our newspaper of record, tell us about these things?