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Excerpts of Key Media Articles in Major Media


Below are key excerpts of highly revealing media articles from the major media. Links are provided to the full articles on their media websites. If any link fails to function, read this webpage. These media articles are listed in reverse date order. You can also explore the articles listed by order of importance or by date posted. By choosing to educate ourselves and to spread the word, we can build a brighter future.

Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.


Euro MPs back large-scale fishing reform to save stocks
2013-02-06, BBC News
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-21352617

The European Parliament has voted for sweeping reforms of the controversial EU Common Fisheries Policy [CFP]. The package includes measures to protect endangered stocks and end discards - the practice of throwing unwanted dead fish into the sea. Wasteful discards are reckoned to account for a quarter of total catches under the current quota system. With an estimated 75% of Europe’s stocks overfished, there has been enormous public and media pressure over this latest attempt to shake up the CFP. The BBC's environment analyst Roger Harrabin says the vote is something of a victory for citizen power, following organised lobbying of MEPs by ordinary people, as well as by high-profile celebrity chefs and environmentalists. The reform package was presented to the full parliament in Strasbourg by the German Social Democrat MEP Ulrike Rodust. She said the reforms “will bring an end to the December ritual of fisheries ministers negotiating until 4am, neglecting scientific advice and setting too high fishing quotas. “As of 2015, the principle of maximum sustainable yield shall apply, which means that each year we do not harvest more fish than a stock can reproduce. Our objective is that depleted fish stocks recover by 2020. Not only nature will benefit, but also fishermen: bigger stocks produce higher yields.” MEPs have made some tough choices. For instance, they had an option to vote for maximum sustainable yield - that is taking as much fish as the sea can reproduce annually. They demanded instead that fisheries should be allowed to grow, rather than to stay at their current depleted level.

Note: For a treasure trove of great news articles which will inspire you to make a difference, click here.


More mammograms mean more problems for older women, study finds
2013-02-06, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-too-many-mammograms-older-w...

The American Cancer Society advises all women over 40 to get a mammogram once a year to screen for signs of breast cancer. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a panel of experts that advises the federal government on health matters, says most women need to get mammograms only once every two years, and only when they’re between the ages of 50 and 74. Who’s right? A new study comes down on the side of the task force. Researchers examined records of about 140,000 women ages 66 to 89 who had mammograms between 1999 and 2006. Some of the women had mammograms every year, and some of them had them every other year. It turned out that having annual mammograms did not reduce women’s risk of being diagnosed with an aggressive breast cancer, as might have been expected. When all the numbers were crunched, “the proportion [of women] with adverse tumor characteristics was similar among annual and biennial screeners,” the researchers wrote in a study published [in] the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. But they did find harm. The more times that women were screened, the greater their odds of getting a false positive reading on a mammogram. For example, among women between the ages of 66 and 74 who already had health problems, 48% of those who had annual mammograms had at least one false-positive reading during a 10-year period. But among those who were screened every other year, only 29% had a false-positive result.

Note: You can read a summary of the study online here. For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on health issues, click here.


US newspapers accused of complicity as drone report reopens security debate
2013-02-06, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/feb/06/us-newspapers-accused-complicity-...

[The] New York Times and Washington Post ... are facing accusations of complicity after it emerged that they bowed to pressure from the Obama administration not to disclose the existence of a secret drone base in Saudi Arabia despite knowing about it for a year. Amid renewed scrutiny over the Obama administration's secrecy over its targeted killing programme, media analysts and national security experts said the revelation that some newspapers had co-operated over the drone base had reopened the debate over the balance between freedom of information and national security. One expert described the initial decision not to publish the base's location as "shameful and craven". Dr Jack Lule, a professor of journalism and communication at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, said that the national security implications did not merit holding on to the story. "The decision not to publish is a shameful one. The national security standard has to be very high, perhaps imminent danger," he said. The Obama administration has resisted any effort to open up its targeted killing programme to public scrutiny. The White House legal advice on the assassinations program, including the killing of a US citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, has been withheld from the public and Congress, despite repeated requests to make it public. Lule said that in not publishing the location of the base when it had the information, the newspaper had failed in its responsibility to the public. "It happened at the top ranks of the media, too. They should have been leading the pack in calling for less secrecy. For them to give up that post is terrible."

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on major media coverups, click here.


Lost Votes, Problem Ballots, Long Waits? Flaws Are Widespread, Study Finds
2013-02-06, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/us/politics/us-voting-flaws-are-widespread-...

The flaws in the American election system are deep and widespread, extending beyond isolated voting issues in a few locations and flaring up in states rich and poor, according to a major new study from the Pew Charitable Trusts. The group ranked all 50 states based on more than 15 criteria, including wait times, lost votes and problems with absentee and provisional ballots, and the order often confounds the conventional wisdom. In 2010, for instance, Mississippi ranked last over all. But it was preceded by two surprises: New York and California. “Poor Southern states perform well, and they perform badly,” said Heather K. Gerken, a law professor at Yale and a Pew adviser. “Rich New England states perform well and badly — mostly badly.” A main goal of the exercise, which grew out of Professor’s Gerken’s 2009 book, The Democracy Index, was to shame poor performers into doing better, she said. Some states ... lost very few votes because of shortcomings in voting technology and voter confusion, with the best 10 reporting failure rates of 0.5 percent or less in 2008. In West Virginia, by contrast, the rate was 3.2 percent. The Pew study focused on the 2008 and 2010 elections, the most recent ones for which comprehensive data were available. The study also found wide variation in how easy registering to vote can be. North Dakota does not even require it, and Alabama and Kansas reported rejecting less than 0.05 percent of registration applications in 2008. But Pennsylvania and Indiana each rejected more than half of the registration applications they received in 2010.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on major inadequacies in US electoral procedures, click here.


Waiting Times at Ballot Boxes Draw Scrutiny
2013-02-05, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/us/politics/waiting-times-to-vote-at-polls-...

With studies suggesting that long lines at the polls cost Democrats hundreds of thousands of votes in November, party leaders are beginning a push to make voting and voter registration easier, setting up a likely new conflict with Republicans over a deeply polarizing issue. Democrats in the House and Senate have already introduced bills that would require states to provide online voter registration and allow at least 15 days of early voting, among other things. Fourteen states are also considering whether to expand early voting, including the battlegrounds of Florida, Ohio and Virginia, according to FairVote, a nonprofit group that advocates electoral change. Several recent polls and studies suggest that long waiting times in some places depressed turnout in 2012 and that lines were longest in cities, where Democrats outnumber Republicans. In a New York Times/CBS News poll taken shortly after Election Day, 18 percent of Democrats said they waited at least a half-hour to vote, compared with 11 percent of independents and 9 percent of Republicans. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology analysis determined that blacks and Hispanics waited nearly twice as long in line to vote on average than whites. Florida had the nation’s longest lines, at 45 minutes, followed by the District of Columbia, Maryland, South Carolina and Virginia, according to Charles Stewart III, the political science professor who conducted the analysis. A separate analysis, by an Ohio State University professor and The Orlando Sentinel, concluded that more than 200,000 voters in Florida “gave up in frustration” without voting.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on major inadequacies in US electoral procedures, click here.


Los Angeles Archdiocese Is Accused of Failing to Release All Abuse Records
2013-02-05, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/us/los-angeles-archdiocese-is-accused-of-fa...

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles released 12,000 pages of internal files [on Jan. 31] on priests accused of sexually abusing children, saying that it was finally abiding by a settlement it signed with victims six years ago to make the painful history public. But it now appears that the files the church released with much fanfare are incomplete and many are unaccounted for, according to the abuse victims’ lawyers. In addition, on many documents the names of church supervisors informed of abuse allegations were redacted by the archdiocese, in apparent violation of a judge’s order. Abuse victims had insisted that the Archdiocese of Los Angeles release the records as part of a settlement in 2007, which provided $660 million to more than 500 victims. “We know we have not gotten a complete disclosure,” said Jeff Anderson, who is among the lawyers representing the victims. “It’s more deception, deceit and secrecy.” The Archdiocese of Los Angeles fought for six years all the way to the State Supreme Court to block the release of the documents. Early in January, Judge Emilie H. Elias overturned a previous decision, and ordered the archdiocese to lift the redactions of the names of certain kinds of officials: archbishops and bishops, vicars for clergy members and directors of treatment facilities, as well as pastors, “church agents” or employees who had supervisory responsibility over an accused priest and were made aware of complaints or suspicions about him. But on many pages it appears that the names of supervisors, like pastors in parishes or the supervisors of religious orders, are missing.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on sexual abuse scandals, click here.


CIA rendition: more than a quarter of countries 'offered covert support'
2013-02-05, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/05/cia-rendition-countries-covert-su...

The full extent of the CIA's extraordinary rendition programme has been laid bare with the publication of a report showing there is evidence that more than a quarter of the world's governments covertly offered support. A 213-page report compiled by the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI), a New York-based human rights organisation, says that at least 54 countries co-operated with the global kidnap, detention and torture operation that was mounted after 9/11, many of them in Europe. So widespread and extensive was the participation of governments across the world that it is now clear the CIA could not have operated its programme without their support, according to the OSJI. "Responsibility for these violations does not end with the United States. Secret detention and extraordinary rendition operations, designed to be conducted outside the United States under cover of secrecy, could not have been implemented without the active participation of foreign governments. These governments too must be held accountable." The states identified by the OSJI include those such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt and Jordan where the existence of secret prisons and the use of torture has been well documented for many years. But the OSJI's rendition list also includes states such as Ireland, Iceland and Cyprus, which are accused of granting covert support for the programme by permitting the use of airspace and airports by aircraft involved in rendition flights. Iran and Syria are identified by the OSJI as having participated in the rendition programme.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on the illegal operations that comprise the 'global war on terror', click here.


Sucker Alert? Insider Selling Surges After Dow 14,000
2013-02-05, CNBC
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100435847

Insiders have been pulling out of stocks just as small investors are getting in. Selling by corporate executives has surged recently as the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit 14,000 and retail investors flooded into stocks. The amount of insider selling has usually preceded market selloffs. "In almost perfect coordination with an equity market that was rushing toward new all-time highs, insider sentiment has weakened sharply — falling to its lowest level since late March 2012," wrote David Coleman of the Vickers Weekly Insider report, one of the longest researchers of executive buying and selling on Wall Street. "Insiders are waving the cautionary flag in an increasingly aggressive manner." There have been more than nine insider sales for every one buy over the past week among NYSE stocks, according to Vickers. The last time executives sold their company's stock this aggressively was in early 2012, just before the S&P 500 went on to correct by 10 percent to its low for the year. "Insiders know more than the vast majority of market participants," said Enis Taner, global macro editor for RiskReversal.com. "And they're usually right over a long period of time." "Insiders (are) showing a remarkable ability of late to identify both market peaks and troughs," states the Vickers report. For selling to be big enough that firms like Vickers raise a bearish flag, the bulls may want to take heed.

Note: For more on this, click here.


Small loans big in Bangladesh, Bay Area
2013-02-04, San Francisco Chronicle (SF's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Small-loans-big-in-Bangladesh-Bay-Area...

After five years running her party-supply store out of her Hayward house with the help of her extended family, [Sandra] Rodriguez was finally moving into her own commercial space thanks to a $1,500 loan from Grameen America. Drawing on the same philosophy as Bangladesh's Grameen Bank, which pioneered "microlending" small sums to help impoverished women run their own businesses, Grameen America opened a branch in Oakland last spring. Grameen started its U.S. presence in New York in 2008, and now has offices in Omaha, Neb., Indianapolis, Charlotte, N.C., and Los Angeles, as well as Oakland and New York. Grameen's small walk-up office ... has already made microloans to 600 women for such businesses as operating food carts, making baked goods or other food, cleaning houses, selling merchandise, and renting chairs in hair or nail salons. So far, it has a 100 percent repayment record. While Grameen's loans are small - starting around $1,500 in the U.S. - the impact is big. Studies affirm the effectiveness of microloans in helping people lift themselves out of poverty. Grameen Bank and its founder, economics professor Muhammad Yunus, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Its model has been replicated for millions of people in more than 100 countries. Grameen also helps its members with financial education and requires them to set up a savings account at a commercial bank.

Note: For other excellent articles of the transformative practices of microlending, click here.


Justice Department memo reveals legal case for drone strikes on Americans
2013-02-04, NBC News
http://openchannel.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/04/16843014-exclusive-justice-de...

A confidential Justice Department memo concludes that the U.S. government can order the killing of American citizens if they are believed to be “senior operational leaders” of al-Qaida or “an associated force” -- even if there is no intelligence indicating they are engaged in an active plot to attack the U.S. The 16-page memo ... provides new details about the legal reasoning behind one of the Obama administration’s most secretive and controversial polices: its dramatically increased use of drone strikes against al-Qaida suspects abroad, including those aimed at American citizens. In March, Attorney General Eric Holder specifically endorsed the constitutionality of targeted killings of Americans, saying they could be justified if government officials determine the target poses “an imminent threat of violent attack.” But the confidential Justice Department “white paper” introduces a ... “broader concept of imminence” than actual intelligence about any ongoing plot against the U.S. homeland. “The condition that an operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future,” the memo states. Instead, it says, an “informed, high-level” official of the U.S. government may determine that the targeted American has been “recently” involved in “activities” posing a threat of a violent attack and “there is no evidence suggesting that he has renounced or abandoned such activities.” The memo does not define “recently” or “activities.”

Note: To read the entire 'white paper' on drone strikes on Americans, click here. For detailed analysis by a distinguished lawyer, click here.


Justice Department sues S&P over mortgage bond ratings
2013-02-04, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-sandp-justice-20130205,0,1104883.story

The federal government is ... going after Wall Street's biggest credit rating firm for its role in pumping up the housing bubble. The Justice Department filed a lawsuit [on Feb. 4] against Standard & Poor's Corp. The suit accuses the company's analysts of issuing glowing reviews on troubled mortgage securities whose subsequent failure helped cause the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The action marks the first federal crackdown against a major credit rater, and it signals an untested legal tack after limited success in holding the nation's banks accountable for the part they played in the crisis. The government selected Los Angeles as the venue to file the lawsuit in part because it was one of the regions hardest hit when the bottom fell out of the housing market. Hundreds of thousands of California residents lost their homes to foreclosure, and others saw their wealth evaporate as properties plummeted in value. In addition to the Justice Department, several state attorneys general are investigating the ratings agency. States such as California and New York are expected to pursue their own investigations and legal action, people familiar with the matter said. The federal action does not involve any criminal allegations. Critics have complained that the government has yet to send any senior bankers or Wall Street executives to jail for potential illegal behavior that led to the crisis. But civil actions typically require a much lower burden of proof.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on the criminal practices of the financial industry, click here.


Why Police Lie Under Oath
2013-02-03, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/opinion/sunday/why-police-officers-lie-unde...

Are police officers necessarily more trustworthy than alleged criminals? The police have a special inclination toward confabulation ... because, disturbingly, they have an incentive to lie. In this era of mass incarceration, the police shouldn’t be trusted any more than any other witness, perhaps less so. That may sound harsh, but numerous law enforcement officials have put the matter more bluntly. Peter Keane, a former San Francisco Police commissioner, wrote [that] “Police officer perjury in court to justify illegal dope searches is commonplace. One of the dirty little not-so-secret secrets of the criminal justice system is undercover narcotics officers intentionally lying under oath. It is a perversion of the American justice system that strikes directly at the rule of law. Yet it is the routine way of doing business in courtrooms everywhere in America.” The New York City Police Department is not exempt from this critique. New York City officers have been found to engage in patterns of deceit in cases involving charges as minor as trespass. Jeannette Rucker, the chief of arraignments for the Bronx district attorney, explained in a letter that it had become apparent that the police were arresting people even when there was convincing evidence that they were innocent. To justify the arrests, Ms. Rucker claimed, police officers provided false written statements, and in depositions, the arresting officers gave false testimony.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on police and prisons corruption, click here.


JSOC: Obama's secret assassins
2013-02-03, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/03/jsoc-obama-secret-assassins

The president has a clandestine network targeting a 'kill list' justified by secret laws. How is that different than a death squad? The film Dirty Wars, which premiered at Sundance ... tracks the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), a network of highly-trained, completely unaccountable US assassins, armed with ever-expanding "kill lists". [Narrator Jeremy] Scahill and [director Rick] Rowley track this new model of US warfare that strikes at civilians and insurgents alike – in 70 countries. They interview former JSOC assassins, who are shell-shocked at how the "kill lists" they are given keep expanding, even as they eliminate more and more people. Our conventional forces are subject to international laws of war: they are accountable for crimes in courts martial; and they run according to a clear chain of command. As much as the US military may fall short of these standards at times, it is a model of lawfulness compared with JSOC, which has far greater scope to undertake the commission of extra-legal operations – and unimaginable crimes. JSOC morphs the secretive, unaccountable mercenary model of private military contracting, which Scahill identified in Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, into a hybrid with the firepower and intelligence backup of our full state resources. JSOC operates outside the traditional chain of command; it reports directly to the president of the United States. What does it means for the president to have an unaccountable paramilitary force, which can assassinate anyone anywhere in the world?

Note: For more on JSOC, click here.


Police spies stole identities of dead children
2013-02-03, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/feb/03/police-spies-identities-dead-children

Britain's largest police force stole the identities of an estimated 80 dead children and issued fake passports in their names for use by undercover police officers. The Metropolitan police secretly authorised the practice for covert officers infiltrating protest groups without consulting or informing the children's parents. Over three decades generations of police officers trawled through national birth and death records in search of suitable matches. Undercover officers created aliases based on the details of the dead children and were issued with accompanying identity records such as driving licences and national insurance numbers. Some of the police officers spent up to 10 years pretending to be people who had died. The technique of using dead children as aliases has remained classified intelligence for several decades, although it was fictionalised in Frederick Forsyth's novel The Day of the Jackal. As a result, police have internally nicknamed the process of searching for suitable identities as the "jackal run". One former undercover agent compared an operation on which he was deployed to the methods used by the Stasi. The practice was introduced 40 years ago by police to lend credibility to the backstory of covert operatives spying on protesters, and to guard against the possibility that campaigners would discover their true identities. Since then dozens of SDS [Special Demonstration Squad] officers, including those who posed as anti-capitalists, animal rights activists and violent far-right campaigners, have used the identities of dead children.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on police corruption, click here.


Health Care’s Trick Coin
2013-02-02, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/02/opinion/health-cares-trick-coin.html

This month, Johnson & Johnson is facing more than 10,000 lawsuits over an artificial hip that has been recalled because of a 40 percent failure rate within five years. Mistakes happen in medicine, but internal documents showed that executives had known of flaws with the device for some time, but had failed to make them public. The entire evidence base for medicine has been undermined by [a] lack of transparency. Sometimes this is through a failure to report concerns raised by doctors and internal analyses, as was the case with Johnson & Johnson. More commonly, it involves the suppression of clinical trial results, especially when they show a drug is no good. The best evidence shows that half of all the clinical trials ever conducted and completed on the treatments in use today have never been published in academic journals. Trials with positive or flattering results, unsurprisingly, are about twice as likely to be published — and this is true for both academic research and industry studies. In the worst case, we can be misled into believing that ineffective treatments are worth using; more commonly we are misled about the relative merits of competing treatments, exposing patients to inferior ones. This problem has been documented for three decades, and many in the industry now claim it has been fixed. But every intervention has been full of loopholes, none has been competently implemented and, lastly, with no routine public audit, flaws have taken years to emerge.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on pharmaceutical industry corruption, click here.


Files Show Church Missteps, Evasions With Priests
2013-02-02, New York Times/Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2013/02/02/us/ap-us-california-church-abuse-g...

The Archdiocese of Los Angeles released 12,000 pages of personnel files on sexually abusive priests that Archbishop Jose Gomez described as "brutal and painful reading." While many of the names of the abusers and accusations against them were known, the files reveal previously undisclosed details of how the church transferred priests out of state, sent them to therapists who wouldn't report crimes and suppressed information from reaching the public. As far back as March 1988, then-Archbishop Roger Mahony was warned in a confidential memo that the [Rev. Richard Henry's] behavior around young boys — long embraces, rubbing noses, leading them to the privacy of his room — was unsettling to those who witnessed it. In October that year, Henry was ordered in a letter from a superior, then-Monsignor Thomas Curry, to "not be alone with minors." Henry served prison time for abusing several boys. The church records show the archdiocese maneuvered behind the scenes to avoid a possible lawsuit against a priest over abuse allegations in Los Angeles. In 2007, five former altar boys from Tucson, Ariz., were awarded $1.5 million each as part of the archdiocese's $660 million clergy-abuse settlement. The five said they were abused by the Rev. Kevin Barmasse, who was sent to Arizona during the 1980s after he'd been accused of child molestation in Los Angeles.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on sexual abuse scandals, click here.


Former sex trafficking victim shines light on dark underworld of Super Bowl
2013-02-01, Times-Picayune (New Orleans' leading newspaper)
http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2013/02/former_sex_trafficking_victim.html

Amid the parties and fun of Super Bowl 2013, authorities say, there is a dark underworld of girls and women being forced into the sex trade. Sitting in the festive lobby of a New Orleans hotel, festooned with San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Ravens decorations, Clemmie Greenlee, a former victim of sex trafficking from Nashville, recalled being brought to cities around the South to prostitute for those attending such large-scale events. For Greenlee's pimps, the influx of people provided a massive money-making opportunity. "When they come to these kinds of events, the first thing you're told is how many you're gonna perform a day," she said. "You've got to go through 25 men a day, or you're going through 50 of them. When they give you that number, you better make that number." Having been abducted and gang-raped by her captors at age 12, Greenlee said, she was one of about eight girls controlled by a ring of pimps, men who injected them with heroin and, at times, kept them handcuffed to beds. For trying to run away, she was once stabbed in the back. Now 53, Greenlee works at Eden House in Uptown New Orleans, the first shelter for sex-trafficking victims in Louisiana; the center opened in October 2012. "If you don't make that number [of sex customers], you're going to dearly, dearly, severely pay for it," Greenlee said. "[The victims] are terrified. We already know what power they have shown us. So either you come back to them, or you find out two days later they either got your grandmother or they just broke your little baby's arm.

Note: For more on the tragic impacts suffered by victims of sexual abuse, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.


Catholic cardinal stripped of duties as LA diocese child abuse files released
2013-02-01, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/01/cardinal-duties-child-abuse-files

The Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles has removed a top clergyman linked to efforts to conceal abuse as it released thousands on files of priests accused of molesting children. Archbishop Jose Gomez said he had stripped his predecessor, the retired cardinal Roger Mahony, of all public and administrative duties. "I find these files to be brutal and painful reading. The behaviour described in these files is terribly sad and evil," Gomez said in a statement released by the US's largest Catholic archdiocese. "There is no excuse, no explaining away what happened to these children. The priests involved had the duty to be their spiritual fathers and they failed," he said. Mahony's former top aide, Thomas Curry, also stepped down as bishop of Santa Barbara. The 12,000 pages of files were made public more than a week after church records relating to 14 priests were unsealed as part of a separate civil suit, showing that church officials plotted to conceal the abuse from law enforcement agencies as late as 1987. The documents showed that Mahony, 76, and Curry, 70, both worked to send priests accused of abuse out of the state to shield them from scrutiny. A spokesman for a victims' support group said that the removal of Mahony and Curry was long overdue and a small step after the church spent years fighting to protect them. "Hand-slapping Mahony is a nearly meaningless gesture," said David Clohessy, the director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, or SNAP.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on sexual abuse scandals, click here.


Saudi Arabia focuses on renewable energy
2013-02-01, San Francisco Chronicle (SF's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Saudi-Arabia-focuses-on-renewable-energ...

While the United States still searches for a coherent national energy policy, countries you wouldn't expect are at the forefront of a green transformation. China has concrete plans to shift to renewables on a national scale and is manufacturing solar panels so cheaply it's hard for American companies to compete. Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil producer - led by octogenarians rarely associated with swift societal change - is moving at lightning speed to transform its electricity grid from near zero to 100 percent renewable sources. It's not that the Saudis suddenly have become environmentalists. In September, Citigroup issued a chilling, though not surprising, warning that Saudi Arabia could run out of crude for export by 2030. Even before Citigroup published its analysis, the Saudi government announced that it would spend more than $100 billion to develop 41 gigawatts of solar energy, enough to power one-third of the sun-drenched country, by 2032. In October, Saudi Arabia's 68-year-old Prince Turki Al Faisal told an economic forum in Brazil he would like to see the kingdom go entirely renewable within his lifetime. Saudi Arabia demonstrated its seriousness just a few weeks later by bringing senior executives from 20 U.S. clean-energy companies to Riyadh to explore partnerships. SunPower Corp., a San Jose manufacturer of solar systems already working with the Saudis, was one of the delegation's leaders. In other words: American companies are helping transform Saudi Arabia into a clean-energy haven so that the world's biggest oil producer can keep sending dirty and expensive crude back to gas-guzzling Americans.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on energy developments, click here.


Doubt Is Cast on Firms Hired to Help Banks
2013-01-31, New York Times
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/01/31/doubt-is-cast-on-firms-hired-to-help-b...

Federal authorities are scrutinizing private consultants hired to clean up financial misdeeds like money laundering and foreclosure abuses, taking aim at an industry that is paid billions of dollars by the same banks it is expected to police. The consultants operate with scant supervision and produce mixed results, according to government documents and interviews with prosecutors and regulators. In one case, the consulting firms enabled the wrongdoing. The deficiencies, officials say, can leave consumers vulnerable and allow tainted money to flow through the financial system. The pitfalls were exposed last month when federal regulators halted a broad effort to help millions of homeowners in foreclosure. The regulators reached an $8.5 billion settlement with banks, scuttling a flawed foreclosure review run by eight consulting firms. In the end, borrowers hurt by shoddy practices are likely to receive less money than they deserve, regulators said. Critics concede that regulators have little choice but to hire outsiders for certain responsibilities after they find problems at the banks. The government does not have the resources to ensure that banks follow the rules. Some banks that work with consultants continue to run afoul of the law. At other times, consultants underestimate the extent of the misdeeds or facilitate them, preventing regulators from holding institutions accountable.

Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on the criminal practices of the financial industry, click here.


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