Thursday, April 14, 2016

Popular Resistance:
"Exclusive: Mainstream U.S. journalism and propaganda are getting hard to tell apart, as with the flurry of 'corruption' stories aimed at Russia’s Putin and other demonized foreign leaders, writes Robert Parry.

Sadly, some important duties of journalism, such as applying evenhanded standards on human rights abuses and financial corruption, have been so corrupted by the demands of government propaganda – and the careerism of too many writers – that I now become suspicious whenever the mainstream media trumpets some sensational story aimed at some 'designated villain.'

Far too often, this sort of 'journalism' is just a forerunner to the next 'regime change' scheme, dirtying up or delegitimizing a foreign leader before the inevitable advent of a 'color revolution' organized by 'democracy-promoting' NGOs often with money from the U.S. government’s National Endowment for Democracy or some neoliberal financier like George Soros." 

-->The NYT is busy doing the empire's work, using the “Panama Papers” to demonize leaders in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, all members of the BRICS economic system now challenging the dominance of the G-7 and the International Monetary Fund. Is Hillary any less corrupted by the millions flowing in from Wall St?

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The Guardian UK:
"As night fell over Paris, thousands of people sat cross-legged in the vast square at Place de la République, taking turns to pass round a microphone and denounce everything from the dominance of Google to tax evasion or inequality on housing estates.

The debating continued into the early hours of the morning, with soup and sandwiches on hand in the canteen tent and a protest choir singing revolutionary songs. A handful of protesters in tents then bedded down to 'occupy' the square for the night before being asked to move on by police just before dawn. But the next morning they returned to set up their protest camp again.

For more than a week, these vast nocturnal protest gatherings – from parents with babies to students, workers, artists and pensioners – have spread across France, rising in number, and are beginning to panic the government. Called Nuit debout, which loosely means 'rise up at night', the protest movement is increasingly being likened to the Occupy initiative that mobilised hundreds of thousands of people in 2011 or Spain’s Indignados."

-->The NYT just hates movements like this that discomfort the 1%. It hasn't printed a story on this French movement yet, although an AP story can be found on the NYT website. 

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RT USA:
"The continued operation of the 'decaying' 40-year-old Indian Point nuclear power plant up the Hudson River from New York City 'makes no sense,' said Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders two weeks before the New York State presidential primary.

The two, 1970s-era Indian Point nuclear reactors, situated about 25 miles (40 km) north of New York City and within 50 miles of 20 million residents, have come under increased scrutiny of late as the facility has experienced nine occurrences of technical problems in the past year or so. Four of them were serious enough to shut down the plant, RT's Alexey Yaroshevsky reported in February. ...

'Even in a perfect world where energy companies didn’t make mistakes, nuclear power is and always has been a dangerous idea because there is no good way to store nuclear waste,' [Bernie] Sanders said. 'That is why the United States must lead the world in transforming our energy system away from nuclear power and fossil fuels.' "

-->Bernie's statement on Indian Point never made it into our newspaper of record, or into most of our other national, corporate controlled media. It did appear in some local papers and on WAMC.

Wednesday, April 06, 2016

Common Dreams:
"Across a narrow swath cut by bulldozers and chainsaws through the woods of Westchester County, New York, triangular yellow flags are clotheslined between pairs of trees. The flags trace the eventual path of the gas pipeline that the energy giant Spectra is building through the area, escorted at times by police and harried by local residents worried by its proximity to a decaying nuclear power plant.
If that pipeline leaks or breaks, say experts, its contents could detonate and destroy the switchyard that sits 400ft from the gas line. Entergy, which runs the Indian Point power station, said the plant could be quickly shut down in such an event. Nuclear engineer Paul Blanch is not so sure. Blanch, who has previously consulted for Entergy and now assists an organization calling for the pipeline to be stopped, said that assertion is a best-case scenario. In the worst case, he said, the reactors could melt down. And he believes Entergy and Spectra have not fully considered that worst-case scenario. 'I’m not anti-nuke or anything like that. I’ve been in the business for 50 years and I’ve never seen anything as egregious as this,' he said.

Entergy’s assessment itself also has some experts worried. The safety of the pipeline is addressed in an eight-page document that includes a hand-drawn diagram of the property. Its brevity has some worried that risks have been overlooked. " 

-->The NYT is the original "what, me worry" about the nuclear industry including Indian Point. It reported opposition to the pipeline, but left out the worse case scenario feared by experts. No mention of the hand-drawn diagram that was part of Entergy's safety assessment.  

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Common Dreams:
"A study published Tuesday has found that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, had a 'clear impact' on the groundwater in Pavillion, Wyoming, raising new concerns over the drilling method.

'This is a wake-up call,' said Dominic DiGiulio, lead author of the Stanford University study, published in Environmental Science and Technology. 'It's perfectly legal to inject stimulation fluids into underground drinking water resources. This may be causing widespread impacts on drinking water resources.'

Residents of Pavillion, an oil and gas boom town, first began complaining of tainted water in the 1990s after fossil fuel companies began conducting more than 180 drilling operations in the state's Wind River Basin. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a draft study in 2011 which found that oil and gas activities may have contaminated the town's water supply, but the agency shut down its preliminary research in 2013 after criticism from the industry and the state's fossil fuel regulators."

-->No wake-up call for readers of the NYT. This study never saw the light of day in our nation's "premier newspaper," which has long been a supporter of fracking. Bernie, of course, just said "no" to fracking.
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Quartz:
"Reddit’s big hint that the government is watching you is a missing 'warrant canary.' The canary in Reddit’s coal mine has stopped singing. 

Reddit published its annual transparency report yesterday (Mar. 31) and the report usually contains a section known as a “warrant canary,” a series of statements that say the company hasn’t received a secret order for information from US intelligence agencies. If the canary stops singing, it’s a strong indicator that a secret surveillance order has been received. ...

The orders Reddit refers to allow the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) or the National Security Agency (NSA) to obtain a user’s name, address, and communications records, according to the Electronic Frontier Federation. It can also mean the company’s data is part of NSA bulk data-collection programs including PRISM, the secret program revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Under PRISM, the NSA had direct access to the private communications of users of services from Google, Microsoft, and others."

-->The NYT didn't cover this story of how Reddit informs their Internet users that the NSA is stealing their data. Our newspaper of record almost always supports massive government snooping.

Thursday, March 31, 2016

Common Dreams:
"Bernie Sanders claimed three resounding victories on Saturday as caucus-goers in Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington overwhelmingly backed the Vermont senator, proving that his campaign has the 'momentum' to battle Democratic rival Hillary Clinton all the way to the convention.

While Sanders was predicted to win in Alaska and Washington, as CNN reports, 'the real news is in the sheer size of his victory.'

Indeed, Sanders bested Clinton by more than sixty points in Alaska, where he took 81.6 percent to her 18.4 percent. In Hawaii, he won 70.6 percent to 29.2 percent and in the delegate-heavy Washington, Sanders beat Clinton 72.7 percent to 27.1 percent." 

-->The NYT didn't report these victories at all, preferring to run more stories about Donald Trump. Our newspaper of record just prints what Wall Street wants it to, and Bernie is scaring the billionaires. You can tell that from the NYT's failure to even cover the Sanders campaign. 

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Guardian UK:
"CIA photographed detainees naked before sending them to be tortured. Classified pictures showing CIA captives bruised, blindfolded and bound raise new questions about US’s willingness to use ‘sexual humiliation’ on suspects

A former US official who had seen some of the photographs described them as 'very gruesome'. The naked imagery of CIA captives raises new questions about the seeming willingness of the US to use what one medical and human rights expert called 'sexual humiliation' in its post-9/11 captivity of terrorism suspects. Some human rights campaigners described the act of naked photography on unwilling detainees as a potential war crime.

Unlike video evidence of CIA torture at its undocumented 'black site' prisons that were destroyed in 2005 by a senior official, the CIA is said to retain the photographs.
In some of the photos, which remain classified, CIA captives are blindfolded, bound and show visible bruises. Some photographs also show people believed to be CIA officials or contractors alongside the naked detainees."

-->The NYT, to its shame, has not printed this article. Is it just me, or is the NYT becoming a second rate paper, willing to sell out quite easily to the National Security State. Of course, no other major news outlet in the US covered this story either. What a sorry state our corporate media is in.

———

Common Dreams:
"What is privacy and what is an individual's right to it? 

That is the question that renowned linguist and MIT professor Noam Chomsky, National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden, and Intercept co-founding editor Glenn Greenwald sought to answer on Friday evening as the three (virtually) shared a stage for a panel discussion at the University of Arizona in Tuscon.

Coming amid the FBI's public battle against Apple as well as days after the bombings in Brussels last week, which have spurred another round of calls for heightened security and surveillance, the conversation challenged the rhetoric that national security requires that governments can access individual communications.

'Should our government be omniscient?' asked Snowden, who took part in the discussion via satellite from Russia. 'That has value, of course, in thwarting nefarious and criminal behavior. But the public has a right to know if the government is going to be omniscient. As it stands, this decision has been made by a few people behind closed doors. That is the problem.' "

-->The NYT joined almost all of the mainstream media in avoiding this discussion by some of our nation's most important intellectuals. One has to read alternative media in the US to know what our government is really up to. It takes some intellectual curiosity, of course, but the truth is relatively easy to find on the Internet. If you don't look, however, you are sure to remain ignorant.

Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Common Dreams:
"With Tax Plan, Sanders Beats Both Clinton and Trump by Double Digits.

Beating out all other contenders from both major parties by double-digit margins, according to a new survey WalletHub/Survey Monkey published Monday, Sanders' plan was supported by 23 percent of respondents. In comparison, only 13 percent liked the plan of Hillary Clinton best, giving her a slight edge over the 12 percent who chose Donald Trump's plan. Taking the fourth and fifth spots respectively, Sen. Ted Cruz nabbed 8 percent support while Gov. John Kasich (R-Ohio) got 5 percent.

With the most progressive tax policy of any candidate, Sanders would dramatically increase taxes for the very wealthy and high-income earners (as well as moderate increases for the middle- and upper-middle classes) in order to pay for key planks of his social agenda including tuition-free public college, a Medicare for All healthcare program, massive infrastructure spending, and paid family leave for all workers." 

-->The NYT spends its time trying to belittle anything that Sanders has to say about economic fairness. Our newspaper of record is right up there with the monied interests supporting Hillary; it didn't print this survey about what the American people want.

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Salon:
"New York Times busted for anti-Bernie bias: The iconic, Clinton-endorsing newspaper slyly edits article to smear Sanders. As the media is slammed for anti-Sanders bias, the NYT changes a piece on Bernie's impressive legislative record. 

Media critics have for months blown the whistle on bias against Bernie Sanders. Progressive media watchdog FAIR has thoroughly documented how slanted the U.S. corporate media has been in favor of Wall Street-backed, corporate-friendly candidates like Hillary Clinton.

Studies have even shown that Donald Trump gets 23 times as much coverage as Sanders, even though the Vermont senator is more popular among Americans.
A case study in how this media bias works was exposed this week, in none other than the U.S. newspaper of record.

An anonymous user on the blogging website Medium revealed how the New York Times substantially edited an article about Sanders’ long history of legislative victories, excising the more positive facts and comments."

-->The NYT is at it again, secretly changing a news story to make Hillary look better. 

———

Common Dreams:
"Another member of Berta Cáceres' Indigenous rights group was brutally murdered by unidentified assailants on Tuesday, following a violent eviction of Indigenous people from their land. Nelson Garcia, a father of five and community leader, was shot four times in the face—'gunned down in his home,' the Nation reported. His assassination occurred less than two weeks after Cáceres', and only days following her funeral.

Local reports say that his death occurred shortly after the Honduran government's dispatching of riot police and bulldozers to evict 150 Indigenous people from their homes in Rio Chiquito, where they had occupied ancestral land for two years in protest of the Agua Zarca megadam project. ...

The megadam is to be built on the Gualcarque River, ancestral territory of the Lenca tribe—of which Cáceres was a member—and a critical water source for the Indigenous people. ... Garcia's death 'brings to 14 the number of COPINH members who have been murdered since the group was founded in 1993,' observed fellow activist Beverly Bell."

-->The NYT only carried one very short article about this assassination, written by the Associated Press. Almost all the above information is left out of the AP article: the riot police evicting 150 indigenous people, the megadam project on territory of the Lenca tribe, and the number of rights workers who have been murdered in the recent past. Most importantly The NYT leaves out the role of Hillary Clinton in establishing the bloody Honduran dictatorship.

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Common Dreams:
"On the five-year anniversary of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan, the U.S. has failed to learn from that accident and put in place the necessary prevention and evacuation guidelines, nuclear experts warn.

'Not only is there no Plan B for what to do if and when a Fukushima-style disaster happens in the U.S., there is no Plan A to prevent one either,' said Cindy Folkers, radiation and health specialist at the anti-nuke advocacy organization Beyond Nuclear. Public health is woefully under-protected, she added.

In the U.S., there are 30 GE boiling water reactors 'identical in design to those at Fukushima' still in operation, the group said, noting that the GE model is the kind most vulnerable to risk. The reactors are known as Mark I and Mark II. Despite the risk, industry lobbyists have blockaded efforts by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to require installation of radiation filters that would improve public safety in the case of a power plant disaster." 

-->The NYT has always had a soft spot for nuclear energy and the very powerful business interests that have profited from unsafe power plants. The newspaper didn't carry this story of a catastrophe waiting to happen on the Hudson River.

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MacCNN:
"In a television interview, former CIA Director James Woolsey has said that Apple is 'generally in the right' in its arguments against being compelled to weaken security on the iPhone, as demanded by a magistrate judge and the FBI. While saying that he has 'a great deal of admiration' for the agency, Woolsey acknowledged Apple's contention - which the FBI and Attorney General Loretta Lynch have variously claimed - that the request amounts to forcing Apple to build a 'back door' into its products.

Asked about the case on CNBC's Squawk Box program, Woolsey said that he has looked into the case 'with care,' and felt personally that the FBI was attempting to force Apple to 'restructure' its operating system to weaken the security of it, and that - whether intentional or not - the government was in fact asking Apple to hack into its own operating system, which would invariably lead to smartphone security among all makes and models being compromised for any and all types of investigations, even speculative ones."

-->The NYT didn't print this story. Isn't it news when a former CIA director worries about government intrusion on privacy, and the resultant security risks faced by consumers and businesses? 

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Common Dreams:
"A striking new analysis published this weekend found that federal prosecutors failed to pursue civil rights complaints against police officers a full 96 percent of the time.

The investigation, conducted by Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporters Brian Bowling and Andrew Conte, examined 3 million federal records regarding criminal complaints against law enforcement from 1995 through 2015. The findings come against a backdrop of increased attention on police misconduct, including evidence of racial discrimination, unlawful shootings, surveillance, imprisonment, and torture. ...
Craig Futterman, a law professor who founded the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project at the University of Chicago, told the Tribune that 'the failure to aggressively bring those cases has allowed too many abusive officers to believe that they can operate without fear of punishment.' "

-->One would think that a national study on the failure of federal prosecutors to pursue civil rights abuses by police officers would make it into The NYT. But the police violence directed at the Occupy encampments was never covered either. All the news that fits the establishment.

Thursday, March 10, 2016

Guardian UK:
"Barack Obama has rescheduled a trip to Buenos Aires following criticism over his planned presence in the Argentinian capital on 24 March, the 40th anniversary of the brutal 1976 coup that installed a military dictatorship, which the US initially supported. ... A military junta imposed martial law on 24 March 1976 and began the killing of thousands of mostly young opponents of a regime that continued until democracy was restored in 1983.

Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, who won the Nobel peace prize for his human rights work during the dictatorship, had warned that Obama’s arrival would coincide with huge marches in commemoration of the victims of the coup, and could even provoke confrontations.

'Obama represents a country that was responsible for various military coups in Latin America, including those in Chile and Argentina,' he told the Guardian." 

-->The NYT didn't carry this story in its print edition, and only had a toned down Associated Press report of it on the NYT website. Our newspaper of record has always sanitized the empire when it comes to overthrowing elected governments in the rest of the world. No wonder most US citizens think that American foreign policy is based on human rights.

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Mondoweiss:
"While Europe may think of itself as part of an enlightened West, using aid to defend Palestinians’ rights, the reality is less reassuring. The aid may actually be making things significantly worse. Shir Hever, an Israeli economist who has spent years piecing together the murky economics of the occupation, recently published a report that makes shocking reading.

Like others, he believes international aid has allowed Israel to avoid footing the bill for its decades-old occuption. But he goes further. His astonishing conclusion – one that may surprise Israel’s settlers – is that at least 78 per cent of humanitarian aid intended for Palestinians ends up in Israel’s coffers.

The sums involved are huge. The Palestinians under occupation are among the most aid-dependent in the world, receiving more than $2bn from the international community a year. According to Hever, donors could be directly subsidising up to a third of the occupation’s costs."

-->The NYT didn't print this story. It certainly sheds light on the pervasive corruption of Israel's occupation, but that is news that our newspaper of record goes out of its way to avoid.

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Guardian UK:
"Officials in Honduras have refused to allow the only witness to the murder of environmental activist Berta Cáceres to leave the country and return to his native Mexico. Gustavo Castro Soto, coordinator of Friends of the Earth Mexico and director of the NGO Otros Mundos, was shot twice during the attack on Cáceres on Thursday morning, and only survived by playing dead.

Officials are treating him as a protected witness, according to the Associated Press, but activists say that the Honduran attorney general’s office has issued a 30-day immigration alert against him, preventing him from leaving the country. ...

Cáceres’s nephew, Silvio Carrillo, said that Soto was not allowed to sleep or change out of his bloodied clothes after the attack. 'The treatment [Castro] received for three days was tantamount to abuse,' he said. In an open letter published by Honduran newspapers, Castro alleged the crime scene was altered, while he was only offered medical attention three days after the attack."

-->No mention of the witness, Gustavo Soto, by The NYT. And certainly no mention of the support the US gave for overthrowing the elected President of Honduras, leading to yet another bloody dictatorship in Central America. Hillary Clinton was behind the US coup, and that was omitted from the story as well.

Thursday, March 03, 2016

TimesWarp:
"The New York Times serves as Benjamin Netanyahu’s stenographer in a story this week that reports his latest rant against critics of Israeli policy, repeating his claims at length but making no attempt to verify or even question the distortions in his response.

The Israeli prime minister was reacting to comments by British Prime Minister David Cameron, who criticized Israel’s settlement construction in and around East Jerusalem during a session in parliament Wednesday, saying that he found the situation 'genuinely shocking.' The Times, which made no mention of Cameron’s remarks at the time, now presents us with an article by Isabel Kershner framed around the official Israeli response.

Her story, 'Benjamin Netanyahu Rebukes David Cameron for Criticizing Israel,' gives much space to the prime minister’s assertions and allows him the final word. It also quotes Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat and lets the comments of both men to stand without challenge." 

-->This isn't really news, but The NYT has long employed Israeli propagandists to write news about Israel and Palestine. Read more about Isabel Kershner's distortion of the news on TimesWarp.

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Mother Jones:
"Hillary Clinton Oversaw US Arms Deals to Clinton Foundation Donors. An investigation finds that countries that gave to the foundation saw an increase in State Department-approved arms sales.

In 2011, the State Department cleared an enormous arms deal: Led by Boeing, a consortium of American defense contractors would deliver $29 billion worth of advanced fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, despite concerns over the kingdom's troublesome human rights record. In the years before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, Saudi Arabia had contributed $10 million to the Clinton Foundation, and just two months before the jet deal was finalized, Boeing donated $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation, according to an International Business Times investigation released Tuesday.

The Saudi transaction is just one example of nations and companies that had donated to the Clinton Foundation seeing an increase in arms deals while Hillary Clinton oversaw the State Department. IBT found that between October 2010 and September 2012, State approved $165 billion in commercial arms sales to 20 nations that had donated to the foundation, plus another $151 billion worth of Pentagon-brokered arms deals to 16 of those countries—a 143 percent increase over the same time frame under the Bush Administration. The sales boosted the military power of authoritarian regimes such as Qatar, Algeria, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman, which, like Saudi Arabia, had been criticized by the department for human rights abuses."

-->Our newspaper of record somehow missed this story of the gross corruption that fattened Hillary's war chest. Weapons sales for campaign contributions is a big story, and one we will all hear from Trump during the general election. That is why Hillary's candidacy is taylor made for an outsider willing to expose the Washington's corrupt oligarchy. 

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Common Dreams:
"A new Reuters/Ipsos poll shows Bernie Sanders ahead of Hillary Clinton by six points nationwide, his biggest lead in the presidential race so far. The survey, released Tuesday [Feb 27], shows Sanders polling at 41.7 percent among 998 likely Democratic voters, while Clinton got 35.5 percent.

As Salon points out, Reuters' daily tracking feature 'illustrates that Sanders has led Clinton nationally for a majority of days in February.'

The figures come just ahead of the Democratic primary in South Carolina on February 27, where Sanders is still trailing the former secretary of state. According to Bloomberg, the senator has 200 paid staffers on the ground in South Carolina, making it his biggest state operation thus far."

-->No mention of this poll by The NYT, and the newspaper used its "Opinion Blog" to bury a Fox poll severals days before that showed Sanders ahead of Clinton nationwide. The "liberal" NYT? Not when it comes to endangering Wall Street or US weapons makers, Hillary's major sources of campaign funding.
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