Thursday, September 13, 2012

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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Common Dreams:
"What an official of the rightwing government of Honduras is calling the 'most important project in half a century,' critics of the neoliberal plan to build private cities in the Central American nation are calling a 'catastrophe' and argue that so-called 'chartered cities' would violate the rights of all Hondurans, with particularly negative impacts for the nation's indigenous population.

President Porfirio Lobo—who came to power in a military coup in 2009—has fully endorsed the proposals to create privately-funded 'charter cities' as a way to attract foreign investment to his nation. Details remain elusive, but the experimental cities would be modeled on independently-governed and profit-driven business center cities, so-called 'free trade zones' like Dubai or Hong Kong, but would be built virtually from scratch on lands to be determined by the government.

Inspired by US economist advisers—namely US economist Paul Romer, a graduate of the University of Chicago school of economics and currently a professor at the Stern School of Business at NYU—the cities would operate outside the control of the regular Honduran government and have 'their own police, laws, government and tax systems.' " http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/09/06-6

-- >In US supported Latin American dictators, we see the Neoliberal future of America. The NY Times rarely prints criticism of Honduras, and certainly would not want to call attention to the plans multilateral corporations have of overthrowing the last traces of democracy.

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Common Dreams:
"Trade negotiators from the US and eight other Pacific Rim countries met outside of Washington, DC Wednesday, commencing a new round of the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement negotiations, also known as 'Nafta on steroids.'

The TPP negotiations began in 2007 and have been carried through by the Obama administration and several Pacific nations under conditions of 'extreme secrecy' without press, public or policymaker oversight. Although most of the content involved in the discussions have been kept in secret, document leaks have revealed that negotiators are working out deals which could hamper free speech on the Internet, reduce access to affordable medicines, deregulate environmental laws, and harm labor rights around the world. Earlier this year Public Citizen posted a leaked document from a past TPP meeting on their website revealing that the pact will give multinational corporations radical new political powers in global trade, including the allotment of vast legal powers to multinational corporations over governments." http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/09/06-11

-- >This story appeared in The NY Times "Green Blog," although not in print. The on-line article extolls the wonders of sharing "green growth" between nations. Only the last sentence states that one group considers the talks "overly secretive."

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Common Dreams:
"The rate of Arctic Sea ice melt has caught scientists by surprise, leaving them to describe the current record low levels as 'amazing,' 'a Goliath' and 'unprecedented.'  While a record low was recorded on Aug. 26, the ice level continues to fall, and the National Snow and Ice Data Center reports that there is still a week left in the melting season.

The speed of the Arctic ice melt is astounding, scientists say. 'It is a greater change than we could even imagine 20 years ago, even 10 years ago,' Dr. Kim Holmen, international director of the Norwegian Polar Institute told the BBC. 'And it has taken us by surprise and we must adjust our understanding of the system and we must adjust our science and we must adjust our feelings for the nature around us.'

'This year's melting season is a Goliath,' also notes geophysicist Marco Tedesco, director of the Cryospheric Processes Laboratory at City University of New York, the Wall Street Journal reports. 'The ice is being lost at a very strong pace.' " http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/09/07-3

-- >This news about the Goliath ice melt wasn't important enough for The NY Times to print. More important stories took the front page that day, like what a Muslim woman was told in a premarital counseling class in Egypt.


Thursday, August 30, 2012

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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Common Dreams:
"The Obama administration finalized new fuel economy rules Tuesday, boasting new requirements that are slated to double fuel efficiency of new cars and trucks sold in the US over the next 13 years; however, environmental scientists at the Center for Biological Diversity warned Tuesday that the new numbers are misleading in the complex regulations. Due to loopholes in the plan, total greenhouse gas emissions from cars and light trucks will actually increase from 2017 through 2025 and over the long term...

According to CBD, several loopholes in the rules will actually allow an increase in total greenhouse gas emissions. The rules titled, 'Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE,' allows automakers to produce cars with poorer mileage by using credits acquired by selling natural gas and electric vehicles, changing air conditioning fluid to one that pollutes less, and placing louvers on car grilles to improve aerodynamics."

-->The NY Times omitted this bad news in its story on the new fuel economy rules. Our newspaper of record called the new standards: "a victory for environmentalists and advocates of fuel conservation" and "one of President Obama’s proudest accomplishments." 

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Guardian UK:
 "Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel laureate and icon of the anti-apartheid struggle, has withdrawn from a seminar in South Africa in protest at the presence of Tony Blair and the former prime minister's support for the 2003 Iraq war.

'The archbishop is of the view that Mr Blair's decision to support the United States' military invasion of Iraq, on the basis of unproven allegations of the existence in Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, was morally indefensible,' said Roger Friedman, a spokesman for the cleric, who won the Nobel peace prize in 1984.

'Morality and leadership are indivisible. In this context, it would be inappropriate and untenable for the archbishop to share a platform with Mr Blair,' he added.

-->The NY Times doesn't like to admit how unpopular the US invasions of the Middle East are in the rest of the world. Desmond Tutu is making the Empire look bad, so the story never got printed in our newspaper of record.

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Common Dreams:
"Testimony by ex-Israeli Defense Force soldiers reveals a devastating portrayal of ill-treatment and abuse of Palestinian youth by members of Israel's occupying army in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The testimony by more than 30 soldiers, and fashioned into a booklet by Breaking the Silence, an organisation of former IDF soldiers dedicated to speaking out against Israeli policy in the occupied territories, contains descriptions of beatings, intimidation and humiliation of Palestinian children.

'It is crucial that people in Israel are confronted about what it means for Palestinian children to live under military occupation,' says Yehuda Shaul, one of the founders of Breaking the Silence.

'This is what [Israeli] society is made of, you cannot ignore it, you cannot just run away from it — this is who we are as people and I think this is something we should face.' "

-->Our premier newspaper, The NY Times, just doesn't print articles like this about Israel. It chooses to both ignore and run away from presenting the truth to its readers.

Thursday, August 23, 2012

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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Reuters:
"CIA agents have written books about it. Former President George W. Bush has explained why he thought it was necessary and legal. Yet the al Qaeda suspects who were subjected to so-called harsh interrogation techniques, and the lawyers charged with defending them at the Guantanamo Bay military tribunals, are not allowed to talk about the treatment they consider torture.

Defense attorneys say that and other Kafkaesque legal restrictions on what they can discuss with their clients and raise in the courtroom undermine their ability to mount a proper defense on charges that could lead to the death penalty.
Those restrictions will be the focus of a pretrial hearing that convenes this week.

Prosecutors say every utterance of the alleged al Qaeda murderers, and what their lawyers in turn pass on to the court, must be strictly monitored precisely because of the defendants' intimate personal knowledge of highly classified CIA interrogation methods they endured in the agency's clandestine overseas prisons."

-->The NY Times printed a short editorial calling the Guantanamo Bay military tribunals a "regrettable step in undermining the rule of law." Why not include more specifics and make it a news story on page one if is so regrettable?

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World Socialist Website:
"The secrecy surrounding the U.S. use of drone attacks must end, and each drone strike carried out by the U.S. should be independently investigated, London barrister and UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter-Terrorism Ben Emmerson said Sunday. 

Emmerson is preparing a report for the next session of the Human Rights Council in March covering the use of drone attacks, which have spiked since Obama's presidency. 

He questioned the legality of the drone strikes and noted the growing global outrage over their use.

'We can't make a decision on whether it is lawful or unlawful if we do not have the data. The recommendation I have made is that users of targeted killing technology should be required to subject themselves, in the case of each and every death, to impartial investigation. If they do not establish a mechanism to do so, it will be my recommendation that the UN should put the mechanisms in place through the Human Rights Council, the General Assembly and the Office of the High Commissioner.' "

-->The NY Times doesn't print many official statements that criticize the empire. Our newspaper of record is too busy hiding America's violations of international law.

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Guardian UK:
"Violence by Jewish settlers has been cited for the first time in a US state department list of "terrorist incidents", as Israeli political leaders condemned a string of recent attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

The inclusion of assaults on Palestinian targets in the annual report on terrorism reflects growing concern in Israel and internationally that violence by a minority of Jewish extremists could trigger a new cycle of conflict and further damage the prospects of a peace agreement between the two sides.

"Attacks by extremist Israeli settlers against Palestinian residents, property and places of worship in the West Bank continued,' said the Country Reports on Terrorism 2011. It referred to 'price tag" operations, meaning violence committed by radical settlers against Palestinians in retribution for actions by the Israeli government or army deemed to be 'anti-settler'.

US and European officials have become more vocal in criticising settler violence amid fears that the actions of a minority of Jewish extremists could provoke a militant response from Palestinians. According to the UN, violent attacks by settlers on Palestinians and their property, mosques and farmland has increased by almost 150% since 2009."

-->The NY Times doesn't just doesn't print articles like this about Israel, even when the story involves the US State Department. Instead, it runs stories like "A Settler Leader, Worldly and Pragmatic," a very favorable profile of the settlement leader, Dani Dayan. 

Thursday, August 16, 2012

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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Common Dreams:
"US wind production soars, but politics threaten federal subsidies that have helped elevate industry. As the US wind energy industry hit a new milestone recently by reaching 50GW of power production, the industry trade group warns that 'the best of times' could become the 'worst of times' if a looming deadline to extend federal subsidies for clean energy investment is not met.

The American Wind Energy Association, the lobbying arm of the wind industry, announced recently that the wind sector's 50GW (gigawatts) of capacity is enough to power nearly 13 million American homes, or as many as in Nevada, Colorado, Wisconsin, Virginia, Alabama, and Connecticut combined.

In addition, the number of new operational wind projects across the US is enough to supplant '44 coal-fired power stations or 11 nuclear power plants', and will result in emission reductions that would equate to taking 14 million cars off the road, and -- because wind energy demands almost no water use -- conserves 30 billion gallons of water a year compared to thermal electric power generation."

-->The NY Times referred to this danger of defunding wind energy on its Green Blog. But why not in print? It is a clear threat to the clean energy movement that is so desperately needed if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change.

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World Socialist Website:
"Over the last month, heavily armed 'domestic terrorism' units of the FBI used battering rams and stun grenades to conduct early-morning raids on the homes of political protesters in Seattle and Olympia, Washington and Portland, Oregon. On July 25, three homes were raided in Portland alone and, since July 10, as many as six homes have been raided.

These raids are only the latest in an emerging pattern of similar raids conducted by the Obama administration in order to terrorize, suppress and chill political dissent, in flagrant violation of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights...

At 6:00 a.m. on July 25, Dennison Williams was asleep in his Portland home when FBI agents smashed down his door without warning with a battering ram and threw flash or stun grenades into the building. FBI agents armed with assault rifles then stormed into Williams’ bedroom, pointed their rifles at him while they handcuffed him, and forced him to sit in a chair for a half an hour without pants on while they searched his apartment.

Williams, a 33-year-old self-described anarchist who helped run an information booth at recent protests and events, reported that FBI agents boxed up and removed his laptop computer, political literature, his cell phone, thumb drives, and various pieces of clothing bearing political slogans."

-->The NY Times didn't cover this story. Our newspaper of record decided that the current FBI suppression of dissent under President Obama is not a fit subject to print. 

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Guardian UK:
"The British ambassador to Israel has said international support for the Jewish state among those in the political mainstream is eroding, driven by settlement expansion in the West Bank and continued restrictions on Gaza.

There is 'growing concern' in the UK over lack of progress towards peace with the Palestinians, and Israel was now being seen as Goliath against the Palestinians as David, said Matthew Gould, in reference to the biblical story.
In an unusually forthright interview for Israel's Channel 10 news, Gould said he detected a shift among the middle ground of British members of parliament towards a more critical view of Israel...

'Support for Israel is starting to erode and that's not about these people on the fringe who are shouting loudly and calling for boycotts and all the rest of it. The interesting category are those members of parliament in the middle, and in that group I see a shift.' "

-->The NY Times doesn't print articles critical of Israel unless it absolutely has to. This story about eroding support for Israel in Britain was never covered.

Friday, August 03, 2012

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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Common Dreams:
"UNITED NATIONS - As U.N.-led talks on disarmament resume in Geneva Monday, calls are growing for nuclear-armed nations to cut spending on their stockpiles and instead divert resources to development.

'The amount still being spent on nuclear arms makes no sense, just as continued reliance on the weapons themselves makes no sense,' David Kreiger, president of the U.S.-based Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, told IPS.
His remarks alluded to the fact that nine out of 193 U.N. member states continue to increase budgetary allocations for the maintenance and modernization of nuclear weapons, despite promises to reduce their stockpiles.

Last year, the nuclear states spent around 105 billion dollars on their arsenals, according to independent estimates. The share of the United States alone was 61 billion dollars."
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/07/28-0

-->The NY Times didn't bother its readers with this news about tens of billions being spent on nuclear arms. It's the Olympics, for God's sake; there are better things to write stories about.

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Reuters:
"A New York man agreed on Tuesday to pay a $6,500 fine to settle a long-running dispute with the U.S. Treasury Department over a trip he made to Cuba as an unauthorized tourist 14 years ago.

Zachary Sanders, now 38, said he was 23 and had been living and teaching English in Mexico when he decided to go to Cuba for a couple of weeks in 1998.

'I wanted to learn about how a socialist country worked in practice,' Sanders said in an interview. 'I had no illusions. ... I'm not like some diehard supporter of the (Cuban) government or anything like that.'

The United States has long restricted U.S. travel to Cuba as part of a 50-year-old trade embargo aimed at punishing Cuba's communist government. The actual restrictions and the degree of enforcement have varied with different U.S. administrations and with the evolving state of U.S.-Cuba relations."
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/24/us-usa-cuba-travel-idUSBRE86N1MC20120724

-->The NY Times didn't cover this story. Fining someone for visiting a foreign country just doesn't look good for the United States, that supposed bastion of freedom and democracy.

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Common Dreams:
"A recent University of Texas study, which claims to prove that the natural gas extraction process known as fracking does not cause environmental damage or water contamination, was led by a gas industry insider who currently holds up to $1.6 million in stock at a large fracking company. The information was revealed in a new exposé released by the Public Accountability Initiative (PAI).

The 400-page pro-fracking review in question was led by author Charles Groat of the University of Texas. Neither Groat nor the University openly reported that Groat himself is on the board of a fracking company, Plains Exploration and Production Company.

As a board member, Groat receives 10,000 shares of restricted stock a year. His holdings as of July 19th were worth $1.6 million. He also receives an annual fee, which was $58,500 in 2011, according to filings.

Groat did not reveal his position with the company when the report was released and told reporters that the university had turned down all industry funds for the study."
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/07/27-7

-->This article should have been printed in the NY Times because it reveals the  depth of the corporate fracking scam. Putting it on the NY Times' "Dot Earth" blog minimizes the damage to corporate and college reputations.

Friday, July 27, 2012

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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MSNBC:
"The National Rifle Association (NRA) might not like it, but the majority of Americans believe in tougher gun control...a Pew poll found a minority of Americans interested in stricter gun laws—just 45%. But when other pollsters asked specific questions about restrictions, they found a different picture:

-86 percent believe in further background checks, regardless of where a gun is purchased (January 2011 American ViewPoint/Momentum Analysis poll) -63 percent want a ban on high capacity clips (January 2011 CBS News poll) -69 percent want to limit the number of guns a citizen can buy in a period of time (April 2012 Ipsos/Reuters poll) -66 percent want a National gun registry (January 2011 American ViewPoint/Momentum Analysis poll) -88 percent want to prohibit those on the terror watch list from buying guns (January 2011 American ViewPoint/Momentum Analysis poll)
And yet, Congress has been unable to pass stricter gun laws and a spokesman for President Obama said he would not be pursuing such laws in the wake of Friday's mass shooting in Aurora, Colo."
-->Mainstream media, including The NY Times, doesn't blame the NRA for the lack of gun control legislation in the US. According to a number of The NY Times stories printed after the latest massacre, it's the people's fault because they just don't want the government limiting their access to firearms. Reporting like this just another way to protect another corporate interests at the expense of the people's right to know.
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Examiner UK:
"A United Nations independent human rights representative on Friday accused Israel of placing Palestinian children in solitary confinement.
'According to testimony received, Israel uses solitary confinement against 12 per cent of Palestinian child detainees,' Ambassador Palitha T.B. Kohona of Sri Lanka said in a news release emailed to journalists. 'This is especially troubling when one considers that Israel arrests about 500 to 700 Palestinian children every year.'
'Israel’s use of solitary confinement against children flagrantly violates international human rights standards,' said Richard Falk, another UN representative.
'Witnesses informed the Committee that mistreatment of Palestinian children starts from the moment of detention,' Kohona said. 'Large numbers are routinely detained. Children’s homes are surrounded by Israeli soldiers late at night, sound grenades are fired into the houses, doors are broken down, live shots are often fired; no warrant is presented. Children are tightly bound, blindfolded and forced into the backs of military vehicles.'
Parents are not allowed to accompany the detainees, the UN representatives claimed, and that family members are insulted, intimidated and at times physically assaulted."
-->The NY Times routinely omits stories deemed critical of Israel. If this had happened in China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, etc., it would have made the front page. More than any other major newspaper in the world, The NY Times  covers up Israeli Apartheid, a record that will forever call into question its commitment to both honest reporting and basic human rights. 
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Guardian UK:
"Two-thirds of food for the billion-dollar US food aid programme last year was bought from just three US-based multinationals. The main beneficiaries of the programme, billed as aid to the world's poorest countries, were the highly profitable and politically powerful companies that dominate the global grain trade: ADM, Cargill and Bunge.
The Guardian has analysed and collated for the first time details of hundreds of food aid contracts awarded by the US department of agriculture (USDA) in 2010-11 to show where the money goes.
ADM, incorporated in the tax haven state of Delaware, won nearly half by volume of all the contracts to supply food for aid and was paid nearly $300m (£190m) by the US government for it. Cargill, in most years the world's largest private company and still majority owned by the Cargill family, was paid $96m for food aid and was the second-largest supplier, with 16% of the contracted volume. Bunge, the US-headquartered global grain trader incorporated in the tax haven of Bermuda, comes third in the list by volume, and was paid $75m to supply food aid.
Together, these three agribusinesses sold the US government 1.2m tonnes of food, or almost 70% of the total bought. Critics of the US system of food aid have complained for years that the programme is as much about corporate welfare for American companies as helping the hungry overseas."
-->Leave it to a foreign newspaper to expose the huge corporate welfare scam that is the US food aid program. The NY Times shows itself again incapable of investigating US corporate dominance over almost every aspect of the US government.

Thursday, July 19, 2012

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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School of the America's Watch:
"Honduras: The Struggle for Democracy, Independence and Self-Determination Continues.
The coup organized by SOA graduates that toppled President Manuel Zelaya in 2009 not only brought an end to a democratic government, but it has also turned Honduras into a nightmare, with the highest homicide rate in the world. 
Political repression is among the worst in the hemisphere: journalists, opposition activists, and LGBT activists have been murdered with impunity. Graduates of the SOA, who head state security forces under the illegitimate post-coup regime of Porfirio Lobo, work in complicity with private security forces to repress small farmers and cooperatives from defending the lands that provide their sustenance."
-->The NY Times prints stories about drug crime in Honduras, completely omitting the overthrow of Zelaya and the resulting political repression. To the mainstream media, US troops are there to fight drugs and not to secure another American supported dictatorship. All the news that the Pentagon sees fit to allow.
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Guardian UK:
"Here’s an odd question: Is it possible that the U.S. military is present in more countries and more places now than at the height of the Cold War?  It’s true that the U.S. is reducing its forces and giant bases in Europe and that its troops are out of Iraq (except for that huge, militarized embassy in Baghdad).  On the other hand, there’s that massive ground, air, and naval build-up in the Persian Gulf, the Obama administration’s widely publicized “pivot” to Asia (including troops and ships), those new drone bases in the eastern Indian Ocean region, some movement back into Latin America (including a new base in Chile), and don’t forget Africa, where less than a decade ago, the U.S. had almost no military presence at all.  Now, as Nick Turse writes in 'Obama’s Scramble for Africa,' U.S. special operations forces, regular troops, private contractors, and drones are spreading across the continent with remarkable (if little noticed) rapidity...
So here’s another question: Who decided in 2007 that a U.S. Africa Command should be set up to begin a process of turning that continent into a web of U.S. bases and other operations?  Who decided that every Islamist rebel group in Africa, no matter how local or locally focused, was a threat to the U.S., calling for a military response?  Certainly not the American people, who know nothing about this, who were never asked if expanding the U.S. global military mission to Africa was something they favored, who never heard the slightest debate, or even a single peep from Washington on the subject."
-->The NY Times does little to enlighten the American people about our empire's expansion into Africa. Times readers get the usual double talk about Africom's mission as "training and assisting" democratic forces, "improving HIV awareness," and "removing land mines." 
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The Telegraph UK:
"Concerns are growing about the reliability of oil prices, after a report for the G20 found the market is wide open to 'manipulation or distortion'.
Traders from banks, oil companies or hedge funds have an 'incentive' to distort the market and are likely to try to report false prices, it said.
Politicians and fuel campaigners last night urged the Government to expand its inquiry into the Libor scandal to see whether oil prices have also been falsely pushed up.
They warned any efforts to rig the oil price would affect how much drivers pay at the pump, which soared to a record high of 137p per litre of unleaded earlier this year.
Robert Halfon, who led a group of 100 MPs calling for lower fuel prices, said the matter 'needs to be looked at by the Bank of England urgently'."
-->The NY Times didn't print this potential scandal about oil price rigging by banks, oil companies and hedge funds. Why worry people with more bad news about corporate corruption? 
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Guardian UK:
"How the NYPD overstated its counter-terrorism record.
The NYPD has repeatedly claimed it has thwarted 14 terrorist plots against New York since 9/11. Is it true? In a word, no...
A review of the list shows a much more complicated reality — that the 14 figure overstates both the number of serious, developed terrorist plots against New York and exaggerates the NYPD's role in stopping attacks."
-->Why can't our newspaper of record do this type of investigative reporting about the NYPD overstating its counter-terrorism arrests? Because The NY Times rarely questions official governmental pronouncements when it comes to the so called "war on terror."
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