News ArticlesExcerpts of Key News Articles in Major Media
Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on dozens of engaging topics. And read excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.
Billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, Russia’s 14th-richest person, and his wife, Elena Rybolovleva, have been brawling for almost five years in at least seven countries over his $9.5 billion fortune. In a divorce complaint originated in Geneva in 2008, Rybolovleva accused her husband of using a “multitude of third parties” to create a network of offshore holding companies and trusts to place assets -- including about $500 million in art, $36 million in jewelry and an $80 million yacht -- beyond her reach. She has brought legal action against the 48-year-old Rybolovlev in the British Virgin Islands, England, Wales, the U.S., Cyprus, Singapore and Switzerland, and is seeking $6 billion. The suits provide a window into the offshore structures and secrecy jurisdictions the world’s richest people use to manage, preserve and conceal their assets. According to Tax Justice Network, a U.K.-based organization that campaigns for transparency in the financial system, wealthy individuals were hiding as much as $32 trillion offshore at the end of 2010. Fewer than 100,000 people own $9.8 trillion of offshore assets. More than 30 percent of the world’s 200 richest people, who have a $2.8 trillion collective net worth ...control part of their personal fortune through an offshore holding company or other domestic entity where the assets are held indirectly. These structures often hide assets from tax authorities or provide legal protection from government seizure and lawsuits.
Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on failure of governments to regulate great accumulations of wealth, click here.
Conspiracy theorists of the world, ... we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The world is a rigged game. The world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything. You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which ... perhaps as many as 16 ... banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process [manipulating] the prices of upward of $500 trillion ... worth of financial instruments. Now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world's largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps. Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. [It's] a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget. It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks – including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland – that serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates.
Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on the criminal practices of the financial industry, click here.
Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) is sometimes referred to as “sustainable”, “socially conscious”, “mission,” “green” or “ethical” investing. Socially responsible investors are looking to promote concepts and ideals that they feel strongly about. They accomplish this in 3 ways: 1-Investment in companies and governments that the investor believes best hold to values of importance to the investor. These include the environment, consumer protection, religious beliefs, employees’ rights as well as human rights, among others. 2-Shareholder advocacy; socially responsible investors proactively influencing corporate decisions that could otherwise have a large detrimental impact on society ... through various means including dialogue, filing resolutions for shareholders’ vote, educating the public and attracting media attention to the issue. 3-Community investing has become the fastest growing segment within SRI, with some $61.4 billion in managed assets. With community investing, investors’ capital is directed to those communities, in the U.S. and abroad, which are under served by more traditional financial lending institutions and gives recipients of low-interest loans access to not just investment capital and income but provides valuable community services that include healthcare, housing, education and child care. Over the last two years, SRI investing has grown by more than 22% to $3.74 trillion in total managed assets, suggesting that investors are investing with their heart, as well as their head.
Note: Interested in investing to reduce inequality? Check out the inspiring microcredit movement.
Two U.S. officials say Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving suspect [in the Boston Marathon bombings], was unarmed when police captured him hiding inside a boat in a neighborhood back yard. Authorities originally said they had exchanged gunfire with Dzhokhar for more than one hour Friday evening before they were able to subdue him. The officials tell The Associated Press that no gun was found in the boat. Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis said earlier that shots were fired from inside the boat. Investigators also believe the brothers helped finance their plot through drug sales. Sources say Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was unemployed, made money selling marijuana. Police think the brothers killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus police officer for his weapon while they were the subjects of last week's massive manhunt. The brothers only had one real gun and one pellet gun when they were on the run Thursday. Investigators now believe that Officer Sean Collier was killed Thursday because the two bombing suspects wanted to take his gun. Investigators believe because the officer's holster had a locking system, they apparently couldn't get the gun out. Collier was shot in the head execution-style while sitting in his patrol car. In his questioning in the hospital, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev said they were self-taught and self-radicalized.
Note: Don't these details released by investigators sound odd? If Dzhokhar was not armed, why did authorities say they exchanged gunfire for an hour? And previous reports claimed Dzhokhar was shot in the throat, so that he could not speak about his version of what happened. High strangeness here. For powerful evidence from a respected researcher that the uncle of the Boston bombers was a top CIA official, click here. This is evidence supporting the theory that the brothers may have been CIA-controlled Manchurian Candidates. For more on this, click here.
Remember the Roller Babies craze in 2009? That Evian video has been viewed more than 65 million times. Now, Evian Natural Spring Water has just launched a follow-up video, Baby & Me, and it's already got nearly 30 million views on YouTube. The new video, which features adults walking on a busy street when they suddenly see their "inner babies" in a storefront window reflection, launched simultaneously in 14 countries on Friday. The adult characters interact with their baby selves, mostly through dance. "You can't not smile watching this," said GMA anchor Lara Spencer this morning during a piece on the video. "This type of commercial is about happiness and energy," the ad's director, Remi Babinet, told GMA. Produced by creative agency BETC, and directed by We are from LA, the Baby & Me video is remixed by electronic music producer, Yuksek, notes Evian in a release about the ad. And the music? The '90s dance hit Here comes the Hotstepper serves as the soundtrack.
Note: Click on the link above to watch the video. For a video diving deeper into this by ABC, click here. For a treasure trove of great news articles which will inspire you to make a difference, click here.
There are few cases that better illustrate why the military needs to create an independent office to investigate rape than that of Lt. Col. James Wilkerson. Wilkerson, a fighter pilot, was sentenced to a year in prison and dismissed from military service after being found guilty of aggravated sexual assault by a jury of his peers. His commanding officer then threw out the conviction and reinstated Wilkerson at full rank. Under the military code of justice ... the commanding officer's discretion and bias may overrule legal decisions. In this case, Lt. Gen. Craig Franklin, the commander of the 3rd Air Force, declined to approve Wilkerson's conviction by a jury of senior officers, all men. His decision suggests the Air Force doesn't take sexual assault seriously. Yet, an estimated 19,000 rapes or sexual assaults occur each year in the military, although just 8 percent of sexual assaults are referred to military court, according to a Department of Defense survey of active-duty members. That compares with 40 percent in the civilian court system. Rep. Jackie Speier, D-[CA], last week reintroduced legislation that calls for overhauling how the military justice system handles rape and sexual assault by taking prosecution, reporting, oversight, investigation and victim care out of the chain of command and putting it in an autonomous office housed in the military but staffed by both civilian and military personnel. "Victims of rape and sexual assault should not have to choose between career-ending retaliation and seeking judicial action against their attackers," said Speier.
Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on sexual abuse scandals, click here.
One of the two ethnic Chechens suspected by U.S. officials of being behind the Boston Marathon bombings had been under FBI surveillance for at least three years, his mother said. Zubeidat Tsarnaeva told the English-language Russia Today state television station in a phone interview, a recording of which was obtained by Reuters, that she believed her sons were innocent and had been framed. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed in a shootout with police and his 19-year-old brother Dzhokhar was captured after a day-long manhunt. "He (Tamerlan) was controlled by the FBI, like, for three to five years," she said, speaking in English. "They knew what my son was doing, they knew what sites on the Internet he was going to," she said. Tsarnaeva echoed the boys' father, Anzor, who said ... that he believed they had been framed. Tsarnaeva suggested FBI officers had visited her home when she still lived in the United States and told her that Tamerlan "was really an extremist leader and that they were afraid of him. It is really, really a hard thing to hear. And being a mother, what I can say is that I am really sure, I am, like, 100 percent sure, that this is a set-up," she said. U.S. government officials have said the brothers were not under surveillance as possible militants. But the FBI said in a statement on Friday that in 2011 it interviewed Tamerlan at the request of a foreign government, which it did not identify. The FBI statement was the first evidence that the family had come to security officials' attention after they emigrated to the United States from Dagestan about a decade ago.
Note: For a sharp analysis of unanswered questions raised by the official account of the bombings in Boston, click here. For the local NBC station report that bomb-sniffing dogs were present at the finish line of the Boston Marathon before the bombs exploded, watch this video clip. And for a Washington Times article raising more questions on the bombing, including government agents seen at the scene with suspicious backpacks, click here.
I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial. Last month, on March 15, I was sick in the prison hospital and refused to be fed. A team from the E.R.F. (Extreme Reaction Force), a squad of eight military police officers in riot gear, burst in. They tied my hands and feet to the bed. They forcibly inserted an IV into my hand. I spent 26 hours in this state, tied to the bed. During this time I was not permitted to go to the toilet. They inserted a catheter, which was painful, degrading and unnecessary. I was not even permitted to pray. I will never forget the first time they passed the feeding tube up my nose. I can’t describe how painful it is to be force-fed this way. As it was thrust in, it made me feel like throwing up. I wanted to vomit, but I couldn’t. There was agony in my chest, throat and stomach. I had never experienced such pain before. I would not wish this cruel punishment upon anyone. I am still being force-fed. Two times a day they tie me to a chair in my cell. My arms, legs and head are strapped down. When they come to force me into the chair, if I refuse to be tied up, they call the E.R.F. team. So I have a choice. Either I can exercise my right to protest my detention, and be beaten up, or I can submit to painful force-feeding. The only reason I am still here is that President Obama refuses to send any detainees back to Yemen. This makes no sense. I am a human being ... and I deserve to be treated like one.
Note: Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, has been a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay since 2002. For an illuminating analysis of this situation by the Washington Post, click here.
Fourteen years ago, Blanca Cecilia Lopez began combing the streets of [Bogota, Colombia] in search of sellable articles to feed her family. She typically earned only a few dollars a day scavenging bottles, cans, paper and any other reusable items that she could find. Two years ago, however, her life changed dramatically thanks to a grassroots organization that found her a position at a city recycling center with a monthly salary and health benefits. The 50-year-old mother of seven owes her new life to Nohra Padilla, who began organizing waste pickers like Lopez in 1990 into the Bogota Recyclers' Association. For her work, Padilla is one of six recipients of the [2013] Goldman Environmental Prize. Over the years, the association, which has 2,000 members, has battled city officials and private sanitation companies vying to monopolize trash collection from Bogota's 8 million inhabitants. In the 1980s and 1990s, Padilla and other organizers were threatened by right-wing paramilitaries who regarded organizing the poor as subversive. Several waste pickers were murdered in what the militias called "social cleansing." A talent for organizing and motivating others emerged, turning Padilla into a leader of an estimated 17,000 waste pickers who are a common sight on Bogota streets pushing hand carts or riding on horse carts piled high with scavenged trash. "If she (Padilla) weren't around, the recyclers would have to compete with the big trash companies," said Federico Parra, regional coordinator for a global nonprofit that helps improve conditions for the working poor.
Note: For a treasure trove of great news articles which will inspire you to make a difference, click here.
Europe needs to recapitalise, restructure or shut down its banks as part of a vital clean-up of the industry, International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde said as she warned that the threat from world’s biggest lenders was “more dangerous than ever”. Speaking in New York ahead of next week’s IMF Spring meeting, Ms Lagarde launched a broadside against the financial services industry for resisting urgent reform. “In too many cases – from the United States in 2008 to Cyprus today – we have seen what happens when a banking sector chooses the quick buck ..., backing a business model that ultimately destabilizes the economy. We simply cannot have pre-crisis banking in a post-crisis world. We need reform, even in the face of intense pushback from an industry sometimes reluctant to abandon lucrative lines of business.” Almost five years since Lehman Brothers collapsed, she claimed: “The 'oversize banking’ model of too-big-to-fail is more dangerous than ever. We must get to the root of the problem with comprehensive and clear regulation.” Regulators have forced banks to increase significantly their loss-absorbing capital buffers since the crisis, but are still working on "resolution" mechanisms that will allow giant lenders to fail without hitting the taxpayer and threatening financial stability. Regulators must also work together, she added, amid evidence that some countries are caving into pressure from the banking lobby.
Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on financial corruption, click here.
The secret records obtained by ICIJ [International Consortium of Investigative Journalists] lay bare an extraordinary range of people using offshore hideaways. They include ... families of despots, Wall Street swindlers, eastern European and Indonesian billionaires, Russian executives, [and] international arms dealers. The leaks illustrate how offshore financial secrecy has aggressively spread around the globe. The records detail offshore holdings in more than 170 territories; this represents the biggest stockpile of inside information about the offshore system ever obtained by a media organisation. Eighty-six journalists from 46 countries used both hi-tech data crunching and traditional reporting to sift through emails and account ledgers covering nearly 30 years. "Everything is much more geared toward business," David Marchant, publisher of OffshoreAlert, an online journal, said. "If you're dishonest, you can take advantage of that in a bad way." ICIJ's 15-month investigation found that ... the secrecy and lax oversight offered by the offshore world appears to allow fraud, tax-dodging and political corruption to thrive. A study by James S Henry, former chief economist at McKinsey & Company [and a board member of the Tax Justice Network], estimates that wealthy individuals have $21-$32tn tucked away in offshore havens – roughly equivalent to the size of the US and Japanese economies combined.
Note: To learn more about how all of this incredibly revealing data was obtained and processed, click here. For a powerfully revealing documentary showing how huge corporations park profits offshore to avoid taxes, click here.
Millions of internal records have leaked from Britain's offshore financial industry, exposing for the first time the identities of thousands of holders of anonymous wealth from around the world, from presidents to plutocrats, the daughter of a notorious dictator and a British millionaire accused of concealing assets from his ex-wife. The leak of 2m emails and other documents, mainly from the offshore haven of the British Virgin Islands, has the potential to cause a seismic shock worldwide to the booming offshore trade. The naming project may be extremely damaging for confidence among the world's wealthiest people, no longer certain that the size of their fortunes remains hidden from governments and from their neighbours. As well as Britons hiding wealth offshore, an extraordinary array of government officials and rich families across the world are identified, from Canada, the US, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Iran, China, Thailand and former communist states. The Caribbean micro-state has incorporated more than a million such offshore entities since it began marketing itself worldwide in the 1980s. Owners' true identities are never revealed. Even the island's official financial regulators normally have no idea who is behind them. The British Foreign Office depends on the BVI's company licensing revenue to subsidise this residual outpost of empire, while lawyers and accountants in the City of London benefit from a lucrative trade as intermediaries.
Note: For profiles of a few leading secret account holders, click here. For a powerfully revealing documentary showing how huge corporations park profits offshore to avoid taxes, click here.
Silver [tooth] fillings, commonly called dental amalgam, contribute mercury pollution to the environment. Recent developments suggest momentum is building against silver fillings based on environmental concerns: Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Japan and Finland have either banned dental amalgam or restricted its use within the last five years. Twelve states have mandatory dental amalgam reduction programs. About half the mercury entering municipal wastewater treatment plants, or about 3.7 tons annually, comes from dental amalgam waste. While treatment plants capture about 90 percent of amalgam, some mercury settles into sewage sludge that is deposited in landfills, incinerated, applied as fertilizer or flushed into waterways. Once in water, it can transform into methylmercury, a neurotoxin that builds up in fish, shellfish and animals that eat fish, including humans. Several studies have linked methylmercury to health and developmental problems, especially in pregnant women, fetuses, infants and children. High exposure to methylmercury has been linked to permanent damage in children's brains and nervous systems and to increased risk of kidney problems in adults. Research shows that the human body absorbs mercury vapor released from dental amalgam. Numerous studies raise concerns about mercury exposure from amalgam. In toxic doses, elemental mercury breathed in as vapor can cause symptoms including tremors, mood swings, neuromuscular changes and cognitive deficits.
Note: For a great report by Dr. Mercola and Dr. Oz on the risks of mercury-based dental amalgam, click here.
Forget about gangsters and bank robbers, the most popular document in old FBI case files has to do with UFOs. At "the vault," the FBI's digital reading-room, anyone can go online and view the bureau's most notorious cases. "Since we opened the vault, it's been this memo about flying disks or flying saucers, and it relates to an allegation that we heard from a third-hand, saying that the Air Force had found a couple of saucers out in the New Mexico desert," John Fox, FBI historian, said. The memo's all of two paragraphs. Agent Guy Hottel, then head of the FBI's Washington Field Office, writes that an Air Force investigator "...stated that three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico. They were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50-feet in diameter. ... Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only 3 feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of a very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed flyers and test pilots." It's not just the Guy Hottel memo that's a favorite. There are hundreds of other pages of memos and files in the FBI vault - in the "unexplained phenomenon" section, all about alien and UFO sightings - that are more popular online than the FBI's files on Bonnie and Clyde, serial killer Ted Bundy and other famous cases that have become part of FBI lore.
Note: For a three-minute CNN video of this amazing news, click here. You can view the declassified memorandum described above on the FBI website at this link. Or download this revealing document and view it on our website at this link. For lots more reliable information suggesting a major cover-up of the reality of ET visitation, click here.
According to a new report, most of the 30 companies listed on the Dow Jones industrial average are paying a far lower proportion of their profits in federal taxes - at a time when the Dow is reaching new highs - than they have in past decades. The main reason: not so much those yawning tax loopholes, but the multinationals' ability to stash more of their money overseas, where it's taxed at a lower rate and the feds can't touch it. Hewlett-Packard, according to the analysis, experienced the steepest percentage reduction in federal taxes - 47 percent since 1969. Intel's share of income paid in taxes has fallen by 29.6 percent since 1973, and Cisco Systems by 24.7 percent since 1989. U.S. multinationals ... often pay far less than the standard 35 percent corporate tax rate - a rate many of these companies are pushing to have significantly lowered. In its year-end report, Intel recorded $13 billion in profit - a record - and said its tax rate was approximately 29 percent. In 2010 HP paid $1.75 billion in income taxes on $9.4 billion of pretax income, a tax rate of 18.6 percent. As a share of the nation's GDP, U.S. corporate income tax has fallen by more than half, from 5.5 percent in 1946 to 2.6 percent in 2011.
Note: The statement about corporate income tax falling from 5.5 percent of GDP in 1946 to 2.6 percent in 2011 is quite misleading, making it appear that corporate taxes are a small percentage of total income. It is much more accurate to compare the total annual amount of corporate taxes to individuals' taxes. As this historical tax chart clearly shows, in 1946 corporate income tax receipts were 74% of the amount received from individual income taxes. By 2011, corporate taxes dropped to less than 17% of the amount paid in individual income taxes. That is a huge percentage drop in corporate taxes.
Widely used pesticides have been found in new research to block a part of the brain that bees use for learning, rendering some of them unable to perform the essential task of associating scents with food. Bees exposed to two kinds of pesticide were slower to learn or completely forgot links between floral scents and nectar. These effects could make it harder for bees to forage among flowers for food, thereby threatening their survival and reducing the pollination of crops and wild plants. The findings add to existing research that neonicotinoid pesticides are contributing to the decline in bee populations. The new findings on the effect of pesticides on bee brains showed that within 20 minutes of exposure to neonicotinoids the neurons in the major learning centre of the brain stopped firing. Christopher Connolly at the University of Dundee, who led the peer-reviewed work published in the online journal Nature Communications, said it was the first to show the pesticides had a direct impact on pollinator brain physiology. A parallel peer-reviewed study on the behaviour of bees subjected to the same insecticides found the bees were slower to learn or completely forgot important associations between floral scent and food rewards. "Disruption in this important function has profound implications for honeybee colony survival, because bees that cannot learn will not be able to find food," said Dr Geraldine Wright, at Newcastle University, who led the work.
Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on GMOs, click here.
Enough films about human trafficking have been made in recent years that the outlines of “Eden” should be painfully familiar. But that familiarity doesn’t cushion this movie’s excruciating vision of under-age women conscripted into sexual slavery by a criminal enterprise from which there is seemingly no escape. The movie, directed by Megan Griffiths, is loosely based on the true story of Chong Kim, who was born in South Korea and moved to the United States as a toddler. As a teenager in the mid-1990s, she became a captive of the domestic sex trade. She eventually survived her ordeal and has become a crusader against human trafficking. In the film she is a Korean-American teenager named Hyun Jae (Jamie Chung), who works in her parents’ New Mexico gift shop. She is picked up in a bar by a handsome, friendly young firefighter who offers her a ride home. Along the way, he makes a stop and exits the vehicle. Moments later she is kidnapped and drugged and has her identification and possessions confiscated. Renamed Eden, she soon finds herself in a regiment of sex slaves, most of them immigrants, imprisoned under close guard in a converted storage facility. The women are suspended from the ceiling and whipped. After an incident in which Eden ... desperately tries to flee, she is handcuffed and thrown into a bathtub filled with ice cubes. We learn late in the film that the babies of the girls who become pregnant are sold. And it is suggested that by the age of 20, when a girl is considered to have outlived her commercial shelf life, she faces execution and burial in the desert.
Note: If you are ready to see how investigations into a massive child sex abuse ring have led to the highest levels of government, watch the suppressed Discovery Channel documentary "Conspiracy of Silence," available here.
One of the major governmental abuses denounced by the 1976 final report of the Church Committee was the FBI's domestic counter intelligence programs (COINTELPRO). Under that program, the FBI targeted political groups and individuals it deemed subversive and dangerous ... and infiltrated them with agents who, among other things, attempted to manipulate members into agreeing to commit criminal acts so that the FBI could arrest and prosecute them. What made the program so controversial was that the FBI was attempting to create and encourage crimes rather than find actual criminals - all in order to punish those whose constitutionally protected political activism the US government found threatening. Over the past decade, US Muslims have been routinely targeted with precisely this same tactic of preemptive or anticipatory prosecution. It's all designed to take people engaged in political and religious advocacy which the US government dislikes ... and use paid informants to trick them into saying just enough to turn them into criminals who are then prosecuted and imprisoned for decades. The same pattern repeats itself over and over. The FBI ensnares some random Muslim in a garden-variety criminal investigation involving financial fraud or drugs. Rather than prosecute him, the FBI puts the Muslim criminal suspect on its payroll, sending him into Muslim communities and mosques in order not only to spy on American Muslims, but to befriend them and then actively manipulate them into saying just enough to make their prosecution possible.
Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on illegal activities of intelligence agencies, click here.
It's beyond dispute that Jorge Mario Bergoglio, [the new Pope], failed to openly confront the 1976-1983 military junta as it kidnapped and killed thousands of people in a "dirty war" to eliminate leftist opponents. But human rights activists differ on how much responsibility Pope Francis personally deserves for the Argentine church's dark history of supporting the murderous dictatorship. Some leading Argentine human rights activists agree that Bergoglio, now 76, doesn't deserve to be lumped together with other church figures who were closely aligned with the dictatorship. "Perhaps he didn't have the courage of other priests, but he never collaborated with the dictatorship," Adolfo Perez Esquivel, who won the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize for documenting the junta's atrocities, said. But others say Bergoglio's rise through the Argentine church since then has put him in many positions of power where he could have done more to atone for the sins of Catholic officials who did actively conspire with the dictators. Some priests even worked inside torture centers, and blessed those doing the killing. Bergoglio twice invoked his right under Argentine law to refuse to appear in open court in trials involving torture and murder inside the feared Navy Mechanics School and the theft of babies from detainees.
Note: An entire edition of Democracy Now! was devoted to the record of Bergoglio, including an interview with the Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky. For more analysis, click here, here and here.
Last month a three-year-long federal prosecution of Blackwater collapsed. The government’s 15-felony indictment—on such charges as conspiring to hide purchases of automatic rifles and other weapons from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives—could have led to years of jail time for Blackwater personnel. In the end, however, the government got only misdemeanor guilty pleas by two former executives, each of whom were sentenced to four months of house arrest, three years’ probation, and a fine of $5,000. Prosecutors dropped charges against three other executives named in the suit and abandoned the felony charges altogether. But the most noteworthy thing about the largely failed prosecution wasn’t the outcome. It was the tens of thousands of pages of documents—some declassified—that the litigation left in its wake. These documents illuminate Blackwater’s defense strategy: to defeat the charges it was facing, Blackwater built a case not only that it worked with the CIA—which was already widely known—but that it was in many ways an extension of the agency itself. [CEO Erik] Prince [said] recently, “Blackwater’s work with the CIA began when we provided specialized instructors and facilities that the Agency lacked. In the years that followed, the company became a virtual extension of the CIA because we were asked time and again to carry out dangerous missions, which the Agency either could not or would not do in-house.”
Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on the growing privatization of intelligence agency functions, click here.
Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key 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.