Media ArticlesExcerpts of Key Media Articles in Major Media
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.
For months, companies have been sitting on the sidelines with record piles of cash. Now they're starting to deploy some of that money - not to hire workers or build factories, but to prop up their share prices. Sitting on these unprecedented levels of cash, U.S. companies are buying back their own stock in droves. So far this year, firms have announced they will purchase $273 billion of their own shares, more than five times as much compared with this time last year, according to Birinyi Associates, a stock market research firm. But the rise in buybacks signals that many companies [do not plan to] spend their cash on the job-generating activities that could produce economic growth. "They don't know what they want to do with all the cash they're sitting on," said Zachary Karabell, president of RiverTwice Research. Historically low interest rates are also prompting some companies to borrow to repurchase shares. Microsoft, for instance, borrowed $4.75 billion last month by issuing new bonds at rock-bottom interest rates and announced it would use some of that money to buy back shares. The company already has nearly $37 billion in cash. A share buyback is a quick way to make a stock more attractive to Wall Street. It improves a closely watched metric known as earnings per share, which divides a company's profit by the total number of shares on the market. Such a move can produce a sudden burst of interest in a stock, improving its price.
Note: For lots more from reliable sources on the massive profiteering by corporate recipients of government financial largesse, click here.
A US terror alert issued this week about al-Qaida plots to attack targets in western Europe was politically motivated and not based on credible new information, senior Pakistani diplomats and European intelligence officials have told the Guardian. The non-specific US warning ... was an attempt to justify a recent escalation in US drone and helicopter attacks inside Pakistan that have "set the country on fire", said Wajid Shamsul Hasan, the high commissioner to Britain. Hasan ... suggested the Obama administration was playing politics with the terror threat before next month's midterm congressional elections. "I will not deny the fact that there may be internal political dynamics, including the forthcoming midterm American elections," Hasan said. European intelligence officials also pointed the finger at the US, and specifically at the White House. "To stitch together [the terror plot claims] in a seamless narrative is nonsensical," said one well-placed official. By making it clear that the US drone strikes were pre-emptive, and were not in any way combating an imminent threat, European officials raised fresh questions ... about the legality of the attacks, which could be viewed as assassinations. They said Washington was the "driver" behind claims about a series of "commando-style" plots and that the CIA – perhaps because it was worried about provoking unwelcome attention to its drone strikes – was also extremely annoyed by the publicity given to them.
Note: For highly revealing reports from major media sources on the hidden realities of the "Global War on Terror," click here.
Nearly a million workers won't get a consumer protection in the U.S. health reform law meant to cap insurance costs because the government exempted their employers. Thirty companies and organizations, including McDonald's and Jack in the Box, won't be required to raise the minimum annual benefit included in low-cost health plans, which are often used to cover part-time or low-wage employees. The Department of Health and Human Services, which provided a list of exemptions, said it granted waivers in late September so workers with such plans wouldn't lose coverage from employers who might choose instead to drop health insurance altogether. Without waivers, companies would have had to provide a minimum of $750,000 in coverage next year, increasing to $1.25 million in 2012, $2 million in 2013 and unlimited in 2014.
Note: For lots more on corporate and government corruption from reliable sources, click here and here.
Most investors, when sizing up a company, ask a simple question: "Will this company make me money?" But John Grafer, a principal with Satori Capital, likes to ask a question most traditional investors never think of: "Does your receptionist have an equity stake in your company?" Grafer is one of a growing breed of investors who look beyond the bottom line and ask what a company is doing to help society. It's called impact investing, and its supporters say it combines the shrewdness of the for-profit marketplace with an earnest desire to do good. "It's the opposite of a quick flip," Grafer said. "While there might not be a short-term return, you get a larger long-term return." The companies that make up Satori's $175 million fund all have to meet strict financial and social benchmarks. Grafer said he focuses on ownership, the environment, civic involvement and respectful relationships with customers. A report by Hope Consulting indicates that investors were willing to spend as much as $120 billion on companies that promise social and financial return, if the right product were available. Four social market funds are well on their way to reaching $100 million. And attendance at this year's conference was double what it was when the conference began just three years ago. Organizers say the trend toward socially conscious investing has been spurred by the downturn in the economy. "The traditional market failed," said Kevin Jones, of San Francisco's Good Capital and a conference organizer. "This kind of stuff works without creating a bubble."
Note: For an excellent example of investing for social good while still make a return on your investing, check out our excellent piece on microlending at this link.
Government scientists wanted to tell Americans early on how bad the BP oil spill could get, but the White House denied their request to make the worst-case models public, a report by the staff of the national panel investigating the spill said Wednesday. Although not a final report, it could raise questions over whether the Obama administration tried to minimize the extent of the BP oil spill, the worst man-made environmental disaster in U.S. history. The staff paper said that underestimating the flow rates "undermined public confidence in the federal government's response" by creating the impression that the government was either incompetent or untrustworthy. The paper said that the loss of trust "fuels public fears." In a separate report, the commission's staff concluded that despite the Coast Guard's insistence that it was always responding to the worst-case scenario, the failure to have an accurate flow rate slowed the response and lulled Obama administration officials into a false belief that the spill would be controlled easily. The first report said that the "decision to withhold worst-case discharge figures" may have been made at a high level. It said that in late April or early May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration "wanted to make public some of its long-term, worst-case discharge models for the Deepwater Horizon spill, and requested approval to do so from the White House's Office of Management and Budget. Staff was told that the Office of Management and Budget denied NOAA's request."
Note: For key reports on government corruption, click here.
The White House is going solar after all - a home improvement that carries modest energy benefits but much larger symbolic importance. It isn't the first time the White House has used solar energy. President Jimmy Carter put 32 solar panels on the roof in the late 1970s, but President Ronald Reagan removed them in 1986. Two grass-roots campaigns have recently been lobbying President Obama to restore them as a sign of his commitment to renewable energy. The roof of the White House residence will get solar panels and a solar water heater, Energy Secretary Steven Chu and the White House Council on Environmental Quality's chair, Nancy Sutley. A campaign launched by Oakland, Calif.-based Sungevity called Solar on the White House and another by 350.org founder Bill McKibben tried to get Obama to reinstall solar panels. "The White House did the right thing, and for the right reasons: They listened to the Americans who asked for solar on their roof, and they listened to the scientists and engineers who told them this is the path to the future," McKibben said in a statement. "If it has anything like the effect of the White House garden, it could be a trigger for a wave of solar installations across the country and around the world," he said.
Like nearly all of the residents on this island in Penobscot Bay, Art Lindgren and his wife, Cheryl, celebrated the arrival of three giant wind turbines late last year. That was before they were turned on. “In the first 10 minutes, our jaws dropped to the ground,” Mr. Lindgren said. “Nobody in the area could believe it. They were so loud.” Now, the Lindgrens, along with a dozen or so neighbors living less than a mile from the $15 million wind facility here, say the industrial whoosh-and-whoop of the 123-foot blades is making life in this otherwise tranquil corner of the island unbearable. They are among a ... growing number of families and homeowners across the country who say they have learned the hard way that wind power ... is not without emissions of its own. Lawsuits and complaints about turbine noise, vibrations and subsequent lost property value have [been brought] in Illinois, Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Massachusetts, among other states. “The quality of life that we came here for was quiet,” Mrs. Lindgren said. “You don’t live in a place where you have to take an hour-and-15-minute ferry ride to live next to an industrial park. And that’s where we are right now. The wind industry has long been dogged by ... complaints about turbines, [including] that they have direct physiological impacts like rapid heart beat, nausea and blurred vision caused by the ultra-low-frequency sound and vibrations from the machines.
Note: National Wind Watch is a clearinghouse for information on industrial wind energy. The Society for Wind Vigilance is an international group of physicians, engineers and other professionals who are promoting guidelines for appropriate siting of industrial wind turbines and independent third-party research to mitigate risks to public health.
Monsanto, the giant of agricultural biotechnology, has been buffeted by setbacks this year that have prompted analysts to question whether its winning streak of creating ever more expensive genetically engineered crops is coming to an end. The latest blow came last week, when early returns from this year’s harvest showed that Monsanto’s newest product, SmartStax corn, which contains eight inserted genes, was providing yields no higher than the company’s less expensive corn, which contains only three foreign genes. Monsanto has already been forced to sharply cut prices on SmartStax and on its newest soybean seeds, called Roundup Ready 2 Yield, as sales fell below projections. Sales of Monsanto’s Roundup, the widely used herbicide, has collapsed this year under an onslaught of low-priced generics made in China. Weeds are growing resistant to Roundup, dimming the future of the entire Roundup Ready crop franchise. And the Justice Department is investigating Monsanto for possible antitrust violations. Until now, Monsanto’s main challenge has come from opponents of genetically modified crops, who have slowed their adoption in Europe and some other regions. Now, however, the skeptics also include farmers and investors who were once in Monsanto’s camp.
Note: For those who are not aware of how Monsanto executives are quite consciously endangering your health, click here.
A document obtained and witnesses interviewed by Fox News raise new questions over whether there was an effort by the Defense Department to cover up a pre-9/11 military intelligence program known as "Able Danger." At least five witnesses questioned by the Defense Department's Inspector General told Fox News that their statements were distorted by investigators in the final IG's report -- or it left out key information, backing up assertions that lead hijacker Mohammed Atta was identified a year before 9/11. Lt. Col Tony Shaffer, an operative involved with Able Danger [and author of Operation Dark Heart, a recent book which discussed the Able Danger operation, and all copies of which were destroyed by the Pentagon] said, "My last interview was very, very hostile." When asked why the IG's report was so aggressive in its denials of his claims and those of other witnesses -- that the data mining project had identified Atta as a threat to the U.S. before 9/11 -- Shaffer said [the] Defense Department was worried about taking some of the blame for 9/11. Specifically, the Defense Intelligence Agency ... wanted the removal of references to a meeting between Shaffer and the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, Philip Zelikow, removed. Shaffer alleges that in that meeting, which took place in Afghanistan, the commission was told about Able Danger and the identification of Atta before the attacks. Shaffer, who was undercover at the time, said there was "stunned silence" at the meeting. No mention of this was made in the final 9/11 Commission report.
Note: Able Danger was the program which identified Mohamed Atta and three other alleged 9/11 hijackers as a potential terror threat before 9/11. To read major media reports on the intense controversy around this program (which is likely why Shaffer's book is being burned by the Pentagon), click here. For a highly revealing Fox News interview with Col. Shaffer on these major deceptions, click here.
The world's wealthiest people have responded to economic worries by buying gold by the bar -- and sometimes by the ton -- and by moving assets out of the financial system, bankers catering to the very rich said [today]. Fears of a double-dip downturn have boosted the appetite for physical bullion as well as for mining company shares and exchange-traded funds, UBS executive Josef Stadler told the Reuters Global Private Banking Summit. "They don't only buy ETFs or futures; they buy physical gold," said Stadler, who runs the Swiss bank's services for clients with assets of at least $50 million to invest. UBS is recommending top-tier clients hold 7-10 percent of their assets in precious metals like gold, which is on course for its tenth consecutive yearly gain and traded at around $1,314.50 an ounce [today], near the record level reached last week. Julius Baer's chief investment officer for Asia is also recommending that wealthy investors park some of their assets in gold as a defensive stance following a string of lackluster U.S. data and amid concerns about currency weakness.
Note: Gold has increased from under $300/oz at the time of 9/11 to over $1,300 in Oct. 2010. Is it a bubble, or a sign that our economy could be collapsing?
U.S. companies are rebounding quickly from the recession and posting near-historic profits, the result of aggressively re-tooling their operations to cope with lower revenue and an uncertain outlook. An analysis by The Wall Street Journal found that companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index posted second-quarter profits of $189 billion, up 38% from a year earlier and their sixth-highest quarterly total ever, without adjustment for inflation. For all U.S. companies, the Commerce Department estimates second-quarter after-tax profits rose to an annual rate of $1.208 trillion, up 3.9% from the first quarter and up 26.5% from a year earlier. That annual rate is the highest on record, though it doesn't account for inflation. As a percentage of national income, after-tax profits were the third-highest since 1947, surpassed only by two quarters in 2006, near the peak of the last economic expansion. The data indicate that big companies are recovering from the downturn faster and more strongly than the overall economy, helping send stock prices higher this year. To achieve that performance, companies laid off hundreds of thousands of workers, closed less-profitable units, shifted work to cheaper regions and streamlined processes. Despite the hefty profits, executives aren't expected to boost spending on new employees, products and equipment anytime soon. "We've focused on permanent changes that won't have to be undone as sales improve," said John Riccitiello, chief executive of Electronic Arts.
Note: For highly revealing reports on income inequality, click here.
About a week ago, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared to the United Nations that most people in the world believe the United States was behind the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Surveys show that a majority of the world does not in fact believe that the U.S. orchestrated the attacks. However, the belief persists strongly among a minority, even with U.S. allies like Turkey or in the U.S. itself. A 2006 survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that significant majorities in Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan and Turkey ... said they did not believe Arabs carried out the attacks. Such beliefs have currency even in the United States. In 2006, a Scripps Howard poll of 1,010 Americans found 36 percent thought it somewhat or very likely that U.S. officials either participated in the attacks or took no action to stop them. Tod Fletcher of [WantToKnow.info] has worked as an assistant to David Ray Griffin, on books that question the Sept. 11 record. He was cautious about the Iranian president's comments about conspiracy theories, suggesting Ahmadinejad may have been politically motivated by his enmity with the U.S. government. "It seems like it's the sort of thing that could lead to further vilification of people who criticize the official account here in the United States," Fletcher said.
Note: To listen to Tod Fletcher's commentary on WantToKnow team member David Ray Griffin's recent book, Cognitive Infiltration: an Obama Appointee's Plan to Undermine the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory, about the latest attempts by the US government to vilify 9/11 truth movement members as "extremist," "violent" and "likely to resort to terrorism", click here.
[Excerpts from transcript of video] Is there a connection between vaccines and autism? Thousands of families with autistic kids think there is. But the Centers for Disease Control has always maintained that no research supports a link. Now one famous pediatrician, who has written a book about vaccines, charges the government's studies on vaccines are woefully inadequate. Dr. Bob Sears is the author of The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for Your Child: [Q]: The government says they have studied vaccines and they do not cause autism. But has the government ever studied the amount of vaccines that our children get in one sitting? [Sears]: There is a CDC report that says that ... simultaneous vaccination has not been completely studied for safety and that's what we're worried about. Babies get as many as six or seven vaccines altogether ... and the CDC is admitting that they aren't always researched that way. The prime example is the flu vaccine. They've researched the flu vaccine in great detail when given alone, but the CDC has never researched it when given in conjunction with all the other shots. I think the CDC is just assuming that they are safe. But I want to know that these large combinations are safe. And what I do as a pediatrician, is I spread the vaccines out. I give no more than two vaccines at a time to any babies in my office. It takes longer to vaccinate them that way but I think it's a safer way to go.
Note: For key reports from major media sources on the risks of autism due to vaccines, click here.
The astounding revelation that U.S. medical researchers intentionally gave Guatemalans gonorrhea and syphilis more than 60 years ago is so horrifying that we want to believe that what happened then could never happen today. A report from the United States Department of Health and Human Services noted that roughly 80 percent of drug approvals in 2008 were based in part on data from outside the U.S. Susan Reverby, a distinguished historian at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, has ... long researched the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the experiment where poor, black men in rural Alabama were deliberately left untreated for syphilis by government researchers. The study, somehow, was allowed to run from 1932 to 1972. More recently, Reverby came across documents that showed that Dr. John C. Cutler, a physician who would later be one of the researchers involved in the Tuskegee study, was involved in a completely unethical research study much earlier in Guatemala. Cutler, who went to his grave defending the Tuskegee experiment, directly inoculated unknowing prisoners in Guatemala with syphilis and also encouraged them to have sex with diseased prostitutes for his research from 1946-48. His work was sponsored by lauded organizations such as the United States Public Health Service, the National Institutes of Health with collaboration of the Pan American Health Sanitary Bureau (now the Pan American Health Organization), and the Guatemalan government.
Note: The author of this commentary is Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. For many other examples of government-sponsored experimentation on human guinea pigs, click here.
The United States apologized Friday for a 1946-1948 research study in which people in Guatemala were intentionally infected with sexually transmitted diseases. A statement by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius called the action "reprehensible." President Barack Obama called his Guatemalan counterpart Friday "offering profound apologies and asking pardon for the deeds of the 1940s," President Alvaro Colom told CNN. "Though it happened 64 years ago, it really is a profound violation of human rights," said Colom. The U.S. Public Health Service Sexually Transmitted Disease Inoculation Study of 1946-1948 aimed at determining the effectiveness of penicillin in treating or preventing syphilis after subjects were exposed to the disease. Gonorrhea and chancres were also studied. The tests were carried out on female commercial sex workers, prisoners in the national penitentiary, patients in the national mental hospital and soldiers. According to the study, more than 1,600 people were infected: 696 with syphilis, 772 with gonorrhea and 142 with chancres. The published literature contains more than 40 other U.S.-based studies "where intentional infection was carried out with what we could now consider to be completely inadequate consent in the United States." Many of those studies were funded by the Public Health Service.
Note: Read about the long history of humans being used as guinea pigs in unethical experiments. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable major media sources.
Cars and trucks averaging 62 miles per gallon? Seems extraordinary now, but ... automakers could be required to build lineups like that by 2025, making today's high-mileage hybrids seem conventional and turning gas guzzlers into mere relics. By a decade and a half from now, in 2025, a carmaker's fleet of new vehicles may need to meet a standard somewhere from 47 mpg to 62 mpg, the Transportation Department and Environmental Protection Agency said. Those mileage gains that would be the equivalent of an annual decrease in carbon dioxide emissions per mile of 3 to 6 percent. The government envisions gas-electric hybrids making up about half the lineup of new vehicles under the most aggressive standards, while electrics and plug-ins would comprise about 10 percent of the fleet. After little progress during the past three decades, rules adopted earlier this year will lift the new vehicle fleet average to 35.5 mpg by 2016, an increase of more than 40 percent over current standards.Fuel efficiency standards are designed to improve gas mileage across each automaker's lineup and across the nation's entire fleet of new vehicles. Vehicles must meet differing standards based on their dimensions. Compact cars must get better mileage than sport utility vehicles, for example, but requirements for all types of vehicles will go up.
Note: Despite rampant government claims of wanting independence from foreign oil, fuel efficiency has almost always been largely determined by congressional mandates which the oil companies have consistently fought against. For more on this, click here. For lots more on new energy technologies, click here.
UC Davis just announced a seminar for the public on "men's health." That title notwithstanding, the program appears to be entirely about prostate cancer and in particular about the prostate specific antigen screening test. Many possible screening programs turn out not to do any good - and in fact some tests like PSA cause harm. That's why virtually all expert public health panels do not recommend the PSA test. A blood test that isn't accurate can fail to find disease that's present, leading to false reassurance. It can also report disease when it's not really there, leading to unnecessary use of other tests (like biopsy) that are not so benign. Perhaps most concerning, the PSA test frequently identifies something that qualifies as cancer under a microscope but acts nothing like cancer in real life. That is to say, the large majority of PSA-discovered "cancers" would never cause any problem whatsoever if they went undetected. Finding something through screening invariably leads to treating it. Most of the men so treated would have been just fine if they never knew about the cancer. But when they're treated ... the majority suffer really life-affecting effects, such as impotence and/or incontinence. That's why both of the two very large trials of PSA screening published in 2009 found no (or at most a tiny) benefit, but a great deal of harm.
Note: This article was written by Michael Wilkes, a professor of medicine at UC Davis, and Jerome Hoffman, a professor of emergency medicine at the University of Southern California. Both are researchers/consultants for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Former investigative reporter Cheri Seymour, a San Diego County resident, has written a non-fiction thriller to end all thrillers. The Last Circle is ripped from the headlines of one of our era’s most controversial murder scandals: the killing of investigative journalist Danny Casolaro, whose discoveries about a shadowy organization that he dubbed “The Octopus” reached into the Mafia, the Cali Drug Cartel, and even the U.S. Department of Justice. Casolaro, a Washington D.C. journalist, began his probe with an investigation into the theft of a revolutionary new software program that was actually the forerunner of artificial intelligence. It was called PROMIS. Casolaro worked closely with Bill Hamilton, owner and developer of the PROMIS software, to locate and identify the persons responsible for illegally modifying the software, installing a backdoor or Trojan Horse in the program, and selling it worldwide to foreign countries -— thus allowing the U.S. government to secretly monitor intelligence operations in those countries. In August 1991, Casolaro filled his briefcase with documents and headed out to Martinsburg, Virginia to “bring back the head of the Octopus,” according to his closest friends who said he was “ecstatic” about something he had recently uncovered. He never returned. He was found dead at a Martinsburg hotel on August 10, 1991. The coroner ruled his death a suicide, but all his documents and briefcase were missing from the hotel room and never recovered. Three months after Casolaro’s death, Seymour jumped on the investigative trail he left behind, and 18 years later, his story and Seymour’s are revealed in this riveting book.
Note: For more on Danny Casolaro, click here.
A federal court yesterday struck down an Ohio ban on dairy products whose labels say they're made from milk that's free of hormones that increase cows' milk production. That means companies that want to say their products are "rbGH free" and "rbST free" and "artificial hormone free" are now free to do so. The ruling challenges the FDA's 17-year-old finding that there's "no significant difference" between the milk of cows given growth hormone and those that aren't. Just that sort of distinction ... is part of the ongoing debate about how to label genetically engineered salmon. The Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit said there is a "compositional difference" between milk from cows given growth hormones and those without. The court gave three reasons they're different: * Increased levels of the hormone IGF-1; * A period of milk with lower nutritional quality during each lactation; and * Increased somatic cell counts (i.e. more pus in the milk). But the FDA concluded in 1993 when it approved the growth hormone that the milk shows "no significant difference" in milk from untreated cows.
Note: To learn more about how your health has been endangered by previous media and government decisions, click here. For a stunning 10-minute video clip showing how crazy this can get, click here.
The goal of this project is to improve the quality of vaccination programs by improving the quality of physician adverse vaccine event detection and reporting to the national Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). Restructuring at CDC and consequent delays in terms of decision making have made it challenging despite best efforts to move forward. Adverse events from drugs and vaccines are common, but underreported. Although 25% of ambulatory patients experience an adverse drug event, less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Likewise, fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported. Low reporting rates preclude or slow the identification of "problem" drugs and vaccines that endanger public health. New surveillance methods for drug and vaccine adverse effects are needed. Barriers to reporting include a lack of clinician awareness, uncertainty about when and what to report, as well as the burdens of reporting: reporting is not part of clinicians' usual workflow, takes time, and is duplicative. Unfortunately, there was never an opportunity to perform system performance assessments because the necessary CDC contacts were no longer available and the CDC consultants responsible for receiving data were no longer responsive to our multiple requests to proceed with testing and evaluation.
Note: The U.S. government here is admitting that less than 1% of vaccine injuries are reported. What does this say about the safety of vaccines in general? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on vaccines from reliable major media sources.
Important 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.