Thursday, August 13, 2015

The Guardian UK:
"At least 3,500 Americans have been detained inside a Chicago police warehouse described by some of its arrestees as a secretive interrogation facility, newly uncovered records reveal.

Of the thousands held in the facility known as Homan Square over a decade, 82% were black. Only three received documented visits from an attorney, according to a cache of documents obtained when the Guardian sued the police.

Despite repeated denials from the Chicago police department that the warehouse is a secretive, off-the-books anomaly, the Homan Square files begin to show how the city’s most vulnerable people get lost in its criminal justice system. ... Documents indicate the detainees are a group of disproportionately minority citizens, many accused of low-level drug crimes, faced with incriminating themselves before their arrests appeared in a booking system by which their families and attorneys might find them."

-->82% are Blacks, held in secret detention center and denied their basic rights. The NYT isn't interested, and didn't cover this story. 

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Common Dreams:
"Over a dozen protesters on Tuesday converged at the Detroit mayor's publicly-funded mansion and 'liberated' his water supply, in a creative direct action highlighting the inequities that underlie the city's mass water shutoffs and resultant humanitarian crisis. ...

Tawana Petty, organizer with Detroiters Resisting Emergency Managers, said: 'We estimate that about 20,000 homes, at least 40,000 people, are currently without water. They are aiming for an additional 2,000 to 3,000 water shutoffs per week.'

The Detroit Water and Sewerage Department is turning off the taps despite mass resistance in Detroit and rebuke from United Nations experts, who said last year that Detroit's water shutoffs are condemning residents to 
'lives without dignity,' violating human rights on a large scale, and disproportionately impacting African-Americans."

-->The NYT isn't interested in the 20,000, mostly Black families in Detroit, trying to live without water. It didn't print this racist assault on people of color.  

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Center of Constitutional Rights:
"On Thursday, a federal judge handed a stinging rebuke to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in its attempt to have Prof. Steven Salaita’s case thrown out. Steven was fired from a tenured position based on his personal tweets criticizing Israel’s military assault on Gaza last summer. ...

Hours after the ruling, University of Illinois Chancellor Phyllis Wise, who last year fired Steven, announced her resignation. ... 

Last week’s ruling follows a June state court decision ordering the university to turn over emails related to the firing that it had refused to divulge, as well as a vote by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) to censure the university. Earlier this year, the AAUP also issued a report that concluded UIUC had violated academic freedom and due process. The university’s leadership has faced sustained criticism and an ever-growing boycott across the academic world."

-->The Associated Press covered this important story of Zionist pressure to fire a professor for his statements on Gaza. However, The NYT didn't think this story of academic freedom newsworthy enough to print.

Wednesday, August 05, 2015

The Guardian UK:
"The overstretched US military has hired hundreds of private-sector contractors to the heart of its drone operations to analyse top-secret video feeds and help track suspected terrorist leaders, an investigation has found.

Contracts unearthed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reveal a secretive industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars, placing a corporate workforce alongside uniformed personnel analysing intelligence from areas of interest.

While it has long been known that US defence firms supply billions of dollars’ worth of equipment for drone operations, the role of the private sector in supplying analysts for combing through intelligence material has remained almost entirely unknown until now."

-->Interesting secrets about the US drone wars. Looks like the private sector may be very interested in keeping them going. Readers of The NYT, however, did not get to read this story. 

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Aljazeera:
"The Israeli army indiscriminately and deliberately targeted civilians during a brutal 2014 assault known as "Black Friday", according to a new report on last summer's Gaza war. The joint study by Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture, released on Wednesday, cites "strong evidence" of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity on August 1, 2014, as Israeli forces bombarded residential areas in Rafah in retaliation for the capture of one of its soldiers.

"There is overwhelming evidence that Israeli forces committed disproportionate, or otherwise indiscriminate, attacks which killed scores of civilians in their homes, on the streets and in vehicles and injured many more," notes the report.

"This includes repeatedly firing artillery and other imprecise explosive weapons in densely populated civilian areas… In some cases, there are indications that they directly fired at and killed civilians, including people fleeing."

-->The NYT had to report this story, but in the hands of their veteran pro-Israeli journalist, Isabel Kershner, things look quite different. It starts with a picture of an Israeli graveyard being visited by heartbroken parents of a fallen IDF soldier. The first five paragraphs explain Israel's side of the story, without even a pretense of verification. Amnesty International then gets a few paragraphs, with charges always denied by Israeli authorities. One sentence at the very end of the article quotes a Palestinian saying "It was a black day; I cannot think of a worse day." I cannot think of worse coverage; shame on The NYT for this piece of pro-Israel propaganda. 

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The Guardian:
"Hypocrisy on Display as US Lavishes Military Aid on Egypt. In a visit to Cairo, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry pledged that the Egyptian government's atrocities will not prevent increased U.S. backing. ...

The backing comes as al-Sisi oversees an increase in authoritarianism that some analysts warn is the worst the country has seen in 60 years—including during the regime of former U.S.-backed President Hosni Mubarak who was toppled by a popular uprising in 2011.

A report released by Amnesty International in June warned the Egyptian government is funneling an entire generation of young activists, journalists, and even bystanders from the streets into prisons: 'More than a year after he came to power, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s government has shown no sign of easing its repressive rule. The crackdown has seen more than 41,000 people arrested, charged or indicted with a criminal offense, or sentenced after unfair trials, according to the last available estimates by Egyptian human rights activists.'

-->This is the type of imperial hypocrisy that The NYT protects its readers from. Our newspaper of record's headline reads, "Kerry Warns Egypt Human Rights Abuses Can Hurt Fight Against Terrorism." Of course, the NYT focuses on talk about human rights rather than the billions in arms being sent to another dictator in the Middle East.

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

The Intercept:
"The Department of Homeland Security has been monitoring the Black Lives Matter movement since anti-police protests erupted in Ferguson, Missouri last summer, according to hundreds of documents obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The documents, released by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Operations Coordination, indicate that the department frequently collects information, including location data, on Black Lives Matter activities from public social media accounts, including on Facebook, Twitter, and Vine, even for events expected to be peaceful. The reports confirm social media surveillance of the protest movement and ostensibly related events in the cities of Ferguson, Baltimore, Washington, DC, and New York. ...

The tracking of domestic protest groups and peaceful gatherings raises questions over whether DHS is chilling the exercise of First Amendment rights, and over whether the department, created in large part to combat terrorism, has allowed its mission to creep beyond the bounds of useful security activities as its annual budget has grown beyond $60 billion."

-->Homeland Security monitoring peaceful protests? Threats to First Amendment rights? The NYT didn't cover this story.

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The NYT:
"Is This the End of Christianity in the Middle East? ISIS and other extremist movements across the region are enslaving, killing and uprooting Christians, with no aid in sight."

-->The NYT printed a long article about the terror and suffering of Christian groups in the Middle East. One 60 year and particularly grievous example is purposefully left out, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Christians by apartheid Israel. 

The article is a Pentagon wish list of "bad guys" in the Middle East that the US is gearing up to attack. Emotional articles like this are needed to fire up American citizens for another war, this time against ISIS. Never content to cover up the truth, our newspaper of record often indulges in this type of blatant warmongering. In fact, the Pentagon probably paid for the article. 

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Common Dreams:
"In addition to Wall Street and the fossil fuel industry, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is turning to lobbyists for the two biggest private prison companies in the country, Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group, to raise money for her 2016 presidential candidacy.

Lee Fang of The Intercept made the discovery after examining Clinton's list of lobbyists who are bundlers for her presidential bid, released last week. Bundlers are people who raise money for campaigns by organizing and collecting contributions from other donors. ...

'The future of both criminal justice reform and immigration are critical for private prison firms,' notes Fang. 'The Geo Group, in a disclosure statement for its investors, notes that its business could be adversely affected by changes in existing criminal or immigration laws, crime rates in jurisdictions in which we operate, the relaxation of criminal or immigration enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction, sentencing or deportation practices, and the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by criminal laws or the loosening of immigration laws.' "


-->Will Hillary be the agent of change for our racist criminal justice system? Not when she is collecting boatloads of cash from the private prison lobby. The NYT didn't print this story of how corporations pay their way into sleazy politicians' hearts. 

Thursday, July 23, 2015

Common Dreams:
"With several key promises of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act still unfulfilled, 'Americans cannot be comforted that Wall Street will not wreak havoc again,' according to a new report from the watchdog group Public Citizen.

'Five years after President Barack Obama signed this legislation, Dodd-Frank remains largely incomplete,' said Bartlett Naylor, Public Citizen’s financial policy advocate and author of the report, Dodd-Frank is Five: And Still Not Allowed Out of the House (pdf), published Tuesday.

'Major portions of the law have yet to be codified into specific rules,' Naylor explained. 'Many enforcement dates are set well into the future, and certain rules are not yet being implemented and enforced to the fullest extent of the law.' "

-->The failure of this administration to enforce Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms threatens all of us with another catastrophic meltdown of our economy. But the robber barons in the banking industry like it that way, and so does The NYT, which didn't print this story.

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Guardian UK:
"EU foreign ministers have called on Israel to halt plans for the 'forced transfer of population and demolition of Palestinian housing' in the West Bank village of Khirbet Susiya amid growing concerns that it may be knocked down in the coming days.

In a statement, the European foreign ministers echoed a warning delivered by the US government over the fate of the community of 350 in the south Hebron Hills. Last week, John Kirby, a US State Department spokesman, warned that any demolition or evictions would be 'harmful and provocative'. He said: 'We’re closely following developments and we strongly urge the Israeli authorities to refrain from carrying out any demolitions in the village.' ...

The case of Khirbet Susiya, which has been fighting a 20-year-long battle for survival, has become an international cause celebre, not least because of the financial support from European countries – including the UK – to the villagers."

-->The last time The NYT covered the story of Khirbet Susiya was in 2008. Most news critical of Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is simply left out of our newspaper of record.

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Common Dreams:
"Affirming what environmentalists have long charged, a new study finds that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, may be polluting the air, water, and wildlife in California—and scientists say state leaders are not doing enough to protect residents from the toxic side effects of the controversial drilling practice.

The California Council on Science and Technology on Thursday released its long-awaited final assessment on well stimulation in the state, which found that a lack of adequate testing and data have made it nearly impossible for regulatory agencies to understand what effects fracking has on the environment. The council is an independent body that advises the state government.

'The toxicity and biodegradability of more than half the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing remains uninvestigated, unmeasured, and unknown. Basic information about how these chemicals would move through the environment does not exist,' the report states. 'We lack information to determine if these chemicals would present a threat to human health or the environment if released to groundwater or other environmental media.' "

-->The NYT omitted this story about fracking and threats to the environment. Like stories about Israel's apartheid, The NYT often avoids bad news about the fracking industry. 

Wednesday, July 08, 2015

FAIR:
"After the Senate joined the House of Representatives in granting President Barack Obama fast-track authority to negotiate trade agreements, National Public Radio aired one report on the legislative action that paves the way for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and other corporate-friendly international deals. The report, by correspondent Yuki Noguchi, had three sources:

Business Roundtable president John Engler, 'president of the Business Roundtable, which represents more than 200 member companies who took to Capitol Hill armed with data.' National Retail Federation vice president Jonathan Gold. National Association of Manufacturers vice president Linda Dempsey, who says the 1993 US/Mexico/Canada trade agreement 'NAFTA has actually made US manufacturing overall much stronger and much more competitive.' "

-->NPR didn't bother presenting any experts besides the ones who lobbied for fast-track. The US media, including NPR, reports what corporate America wants us to hear about trade deals. NPR, like Obama himself, is bought and paid for by billionaire corporate interests. FAIR reports that "Fully three out of every four trustees of the top NPR affiliates belong to the corporate elite."

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Common Dreams:
"TISA Exposed: 'Holy Grail' of Leaks Reveals Detailed Plot for Corporate Takeover. Days ahead of another round of secret international negotiations, WikiLeaks on Wednesday released what it described as 'a modern journalistic holy grail: the secret Core Text for the largest trade deal in history.' ...

'There is deep irony whenever governments make commitments to transparency in contemporary pro-corporate treaties that are negotiated under conditions of extraordinary secrecy,' the WikiLeaks analysis reads. ...

Referencing the Trade Promotion Authority bill signed by President Barack Obama on Monday—which will allow Obama to ram the TISA, TPP, and TTIP through Congress with minimal input from lawmakers—[Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America] added: 'Today's leaks...reveal once again how dangerous Fast Track authority is when it comes to protecting citizen rights vs. corporate rights. This TISA text again favors privatization over public services, limits governmental action on issues ranging from safety to the environment using trade as a smokescreen to limit citizen rights... TISA is as big a blow to our rights and freedom as the Trans Pacific Partnership and in both cases our governments secrecy is the key enabler.' "

-->US news reporting has been an unfortunate accomplice in this secret process. We see that WikiLeaks is infinitely more trustworthy than most of our national media.

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Common Dreams:
"After failing to criminally prosecute any of the financial firms responsible for the market collapse in 2008, former Attorney General Eric Holder is returning to Covington & Burling, a corporate law firm known for serving Wall Street clients.
The move completes one of the more troubling trips through the revolving door for a cabinet secretary. Holder worked at Covington from 2001 right up to being sworn in as attorney general in Feburary 2009. And Covington literally kept an office empty for him, awaiting his return.

The Covington & Burling client list has included four of the largest banks, including Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo. Lobbying records show that Wells Fargo is still a client of Covington. Covington recently represented Citigroup over a civil lawsuit relating to the bank’s role in Libor manipulation. ...

The Department of Justice under Holder not only failed to pursue criminal prosecutions of the banks responsible for the mortage meltdown, but in fact de-prioritized investigations of mortgage fraud, making it the 'lowest-ranked criminal threat,' according to an inspector general report."

-->The NYT decided to cover Holder's return a little differently: "His Justice Department wrested huge fines from banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Barclays and Citigroup." Nothing about his failure to prosecute the criminal behavior of the big banks. In fact, no mention of any "revolving door."

Wednesday, July 01, 2015

Common Dreams:
"Remember that recent blog post you read about the popularity of genetically modified foods? Or the economics expert on the news who questioned if paying the price of organic food was 'worth it'? According to a new report, these views were very likely the product of a public relations blitz by Big Food and Big Ag firms, that are actively working to spread misinformation about the safety of industrial agriculture practices and discredit the value of organic food in the face of growing popular demand.

At the same time the sale of organic products has skyrocketed—jumping to more than $35 billion in 2013—the country's largest food and chemical companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to combat this trend. In 2013, Monsanto alone spent $95 million on marketing.

'Rather than respond to changing market demands by shifting the way they do business, many large food and agrochemical companies are using tobacco-style PR tactics to mislead the public and attack the organic food industry to try to win back skeptical consumers' states environmental watchdog Friends of the Earth in a new study published on Tuesday."

-->The NYT is one of the biggest supporters of iMonsanto. Our newspaper of record didn't print this story.

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Times Warp:
"Now, with the seizure of a Swedish boat in international waters, The New York Times can no longer ignore Flotilla III, the latest attempt to break Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza. ...

Times readers learned nothing of the Marianne and her three companion vessels as the international organizers of the flotilla announced their plans and gathered crews throughout the spring. Even when one of the boats was sabotaged last week or when a Palestinian member of the Knesset announced that he was joining the group, none of these events appeared in the Times. ...

Moreover, [NYT reporter] Hadid’s piece gives precedence to Israeli spin, allowing official excuses for the brutal siege of Gaza to stand as fact. Thus, she writes that Israel maintains a naval blockade of the strip 'because militants have tried to smuggle in weapons and attack Israel by sea.'

United Nations investigations have provided very different takes on these two issues: A 2010 fact-finding mission, for instance, declared that Israel has imposed the blockade (by land and sea) out of 'a desire to punish the people of the Gaza Strip for having elected Hamas. The combination of this motive and the effect of the restrictions on the Gaza Strip leave no doubt that Israel’s actions amount to collective punishment as defined by international law.' "

-->Times Warp is new blog that focuses on The NYT's misleading articles about Israel/Palestine. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of such articles to expose. 

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The NYT:
Eager to portray the passage of "Fast Track" as a victory for working people, The NYT White House correspondent Peter Baker describes its passage as holding "special meaning for a president eager to change the world. It [is] a way to leave behind a positive legacy abroad, one that could be measured, [Obama] hope[s], by the number of lives improved rather than [as with his military actions in the Middle East] by the number of bodies left behind.”

-->Now if Peter Baker and The NYT were honest, "Fast Track" and the TPP would have been covered like it was in Counterpunch. "The real thrust and significance of the TPP is about strengthening corporations’ ability to protect and extend their intellectual property rights (drug patents, movie rights, and the like) and to guarantee that they will be compensated by governments for any profits they might lose from having to meet decent public labor and environmental (and other) standards, something certain to discourage the enactment and enforce of such standards." -Paul Street


Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Guardian UK:
"A Catholic bishop in Britain has issued an unusually strong condemnation of last week’s arson attack on the biblically symbolic Church of the Multiplication of Loaves and Fish in Israel, referring to 'Jewish zealots' and demanding the Israeli authorities act against religious bigotry. ...

Lang’s comments follow a report from the official Vatican news service describing the attack on the church as 'yet another episode in the long series of desecrations and acts of intimidation committed by groups of extremist Jewish settlers to the detriment of monasteries, churches and Christian cemeteries since February 2012'. The report also referred to attacks on mosques by 'militant extremist groups close to the settler movement'. ...

There have been dozens of attacks on Christian sites in the Holy Land in recent years. .... A surge of anti-Christian graffiti – such as 'Death to Christians', 'We will crucify you' and 'Jesus is a monkey' – preceded Pope Francis’s visit to the Holy Land last year. The Church of the Multiplication was also attacked in April, when perpetrators destroyed crosses in an outdoor prayer area and threw stones at worshippers.

-->Isabel Kershner's story in The NYT left out this reaction from Catholic Church authorities and the Vatican. Of course, Kershner's husband works for the Institute of National Security Studies (INSS), an Israeli funded organization dedicated to creating a positive image of Israel. A review of articles that Kershner has written since 2009 reveals that she overwhelmingly relies on the INSS for think tank analysis. Conflict of interest anyone?

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Guardian UK:
"Terrorism, at least in our national imagination, springs from an ideology of insurgence. Terrorism is radical. It seeks to upset and overturn a society, and to shake it to its foundations. But in America, there are few ideologies less insurgent than the doctrine of white supremacy. ...

Roof’s alleged acts were, by all indications, driven by a violent and extremist interpretation of an ideology that is as old as America itself. The murder of nine innocent black people because of their race doesn’t cut against the American grain in the same way that the spectre of Islamist terrorism does – it rides the grain all the way to its logical conclusion. ...

That’s terrorism any way you slice it – but in the long view of American history, it’s certainly not insurgent, revolutionary or new. Using the word 'terrorism' to describe violence exclusively against America’s non-white people is a historical first, but the terror visited exclusively upon America’s non-white people is not."

-->Straight talk about terrorism against African Americans. Too bad the US media can't bring itself to say these things. The Daily Show's Jon Stewart came about the closest.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/19/daily-shows-jon-stewart-on-charleston-shooting-this-was-a-terrorist-attack

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Guardian UK:
"A United Nations inquiry into the 2014 Gaza war has accused Israeli and Palestinian factions of multiple potential violations of international law including suspected war crimes.

Calling on Israel to 'break with its lamentable track record' and hold wrongdoers responsible, the hard-hitting report commissioned by the UN human rights council lays most of the blame for Israel’s suspected violations at the feet of the country’s political and military leadership.

The commission – chaired by a former New York supreme court judge, Mary McGowan Davis – says leaders should have been aware as the war progressed that their failure to change course was leading to mounting civilian casualties.
'Those responsible for suspected violations of international law at all levels of the political and military establishments must be brought to justice,' it says.

-->Things are reported a little bit differently in the pro-Israel NYT. In an article entitled, "U.N. Report on Gaza Finds Evidence of War Crimes by Israel and by Palestinian Militants," Jodi Rudoren does her best to equate the murder of 500 Palestinian children to the one Israeli child killed in an indiscriminate rocket attack. A study of the Times’ coverage of various international reports on human rights violations by Israelis and by Palestinians found "that the Times covered reports condemning Israeli human rights violations at a rate only one-twentieth the rate that it covered reports condemning Palestinian human rights violations." 

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