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.
Aetna Inc. is suing six New Jersey doctors over medical bills it calls “unconscionable,” including $56,980 for a bedside consultation and $59,490 for an ultrasound that typically costs $74. The lawsuits could help determine what pricing limits insurers can impose on ”out-of-network” physicians who don’t have contracts with health plans that spell out how much a service or procedure can cost. One defendant billed $30,000 for a Caesarean birth, and another raised his fee for seeing a critically ill patient in a hospital to $9,000 in 2008 from $500 the year before, the insurer alleges in the suits. Aetna tried in 2007 to impose caps on some out-of-network payments, prompting doctor complaints to the New Jersey Department of Banking and Insurance. The agency sided with the doctors, fined the company $2.5 million, and ordered it to pay out-of-network practitioners enough so that patients wouldn’t be asked to pay balances other than co-pays. In 2009, Aetna, UnitedHealth Group Inc., Cigna Corp. and WellPoint Inc. were accused by the New York attorney general of underpaying out-of-network physicians by manipulating a database used to calculate payments. They paid a total of $90 million in settlements without admitting wrongdoing. UnitedHealthcare agreed that year to pay $350 million to settle a lawsuit by the American Medical Association over the same issues. Similar AMA lawsuits against Aetna, Cigna and Wellpoint are pending.
Note: Is the American health care system out of control? For lots more from reliable sources on corporate corruption, click here.
The "war on drugs" has failed and should be abandoned in favour of evidence-based policies that treat addiction as a health problem, according to prominent public figures including former heads of MI5 and the Crown Prosecution Service. Leading peers – including prominent Tories – say that despite governments worldwide drawing up tough laws against dealers and users over the past 50 years, illegal drugs have become more accessible. Vast amounts of money have been wasted on unsuccessful crackdowns, while criminals have made fortunes importing drugs into this country. The increasing use of the most harmful drugs such as heroin has also led to “enormous health problems”, according to the group. The MPs and members of the House of Lords, who have formed a new All-Party Parliamentary Group on Drug Policy Reform, are calling for new policies to be drawn up on the basis of scientific evidence. It could lead to calls for the British government to decriminalise drugs, or at least for the police and Crown Prosecution Service not to jail people for possession of small amounts of banned substances.
Note: If you examine topics on which the government has declared war, what is being fought against often increases instead of decreasing. Could it be that the best way to deal with serious problems is not to wage war?
South of El Paso, Texas, on Mexico's side of the border, lies Juarez - the most dangerous city in the world. ATF [U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] Special Agent Rene Jaquez has been stationed there for the past year, trying to keep U.S. guns from being trafficked into Mexico. "That's what we do as an agency," Jaquez said. "ATF's primary mission is to make sure that we curtail gun trafficking." That's why Jaquez tells CBS News he was so alarmed to hear his own agency may have done the opposite: encouraged U.S. gun dealers to sell to suspected traffickers for Mexico's drug cartels. Apparently, ATF hoped that letting weapons "walk" onto the street - to see where they'd end up - would help them take down a cartel. Jaquez is so opposed to the strategy, he's speaking out. "You don't let guns walk. I've never let a gun walk." Yet ATF agents told us they were ordered to let thousands of weapons walk. But ATF wasn't working alone on the case known as "Fast and Furious." Documents show ATF had conference calls with "DHS" (Homeland Security). "USMS" (U.S. Marshals) and DEA. An "ICE," or Customs agent, was on ATF's Fast and Furious team. They were advised by an "AUSA," or Assistant U.S. Attorney under the Justice Department. Jaquez says he's left wondering whether runaway violence in Mexico can be partly blamed on the agency tasked with stopping it.
Note: For many reports from reliable sources on government corruption, click here.
U.S. government officials, in private sessions on Capitol Hill [on Friday, March 18], repeatedly declined to give details of radiation measurements at the stricken Japanese nuclear complex, saying the situation is shrouded in a "fog of war." Separately, the Obama administration said ... "miniscule quantities" of radiation from the Japanese nuclear accident were detected Friday at a monitoring station in Sacramento, Calif., a day after similar traces of radiation were detected in Washington state. The administration said the levels of the radioactive isotope xenon 133 were approximately equivalent to one-millionth the dose received from the sun, rocks or other natural sources. The Obama administration's reluctance to detail in public what it is learning from radiation-detection operations around the damaged Fukushima Daiichi complex in Japan ... comes after statements Wednesday by the head of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission that painted a grimmer picture of the nuclear crisis than Japanese officials had offered, and suggested that the U.S. didn't trust the information coming from the Japanese government.
Note: Shouldn't the title be something more like "U.S. Refuses to Give Radiation Details for Fear of Industry Repercussions"? How sad that money often continues to trump public health in matters like this.
This week, the Michigan legislature passed – and the governor signed into law – a bill that would permit Governor Rick Snyder to push aside elected city officials and replace them with emergency financial managers in any municipality or school district facing financial difficulties. The law would include virtually every town and city in the state as those cities that aren’t bankrupt already soon will be once the governor’s proposed budget – which cuts billions in aid to municipalities and school districts – is approved by the legislature. One of the most shocking, Draconian, democracy-destroying measures in the history of this country has became law – and the nation has seemingly slept through it. The new law, described by one of the GOP legislators sponsoring the bill as “financial martial law”, empowers the governor’s appointees [referred to as ‘Emergency Financial Managers’] to fire duly elected local officials, cancel labor contracts and even dissolve entire communities and school districts. This is about so much more than collective bargaining agreements and unions. This law gives an appointee of the governor – which, by the way, may be a corporation – the authority to dismiss any or all of a municipality’s elected government officials.
Note: For a treasure trove of reports by major media sources on the collusion between government and financial powers against the public interest, click here.
Before the Second World War, the Ministry of War confidently predicted what would happen when London was bombed from the air by Nazi planes. There would be, they warned, "a mass outbreak of hysterical neurosis among the civilian population". The same predictions are made about every disaster – that once the lid of a tightly policed civilization is knocked off for a second, humans will become beasts. But the opposite is the case. It sounds grotesque to say we should see reasons for hope as we watch in real time while the earth is shaken six inches on its axis, tsunamis roar, and nuclear power stations teeter on meltdown. But it is true. From this disaster, we can learn something fundamental about our species. The evidence gathered over centuries of disasters, natural and man-made, is overwhelming. The vast majority of people, when a disaster hits, behave in the aftermath as altruists. They organise spontaneously to save their fellow human beings, to share what they have, and to show kindness. They reveal themselves to be better people than they ever expected. When the social scientist Enrico Quarantelli tried to write a thesis on how people descend into chaos and panic after disasters, he concluded: "My God! I can't find any instances of it." On the contrary, he wrote, in disasters "the social order does not break down... Co-operative rather than selfish behaviour predominates".
Note: For a beautiful example of how people come together to help and support each other in the face of a major crisis, read the inspiring "Letter from Sendai" which has gone viral on the Internet at this link.
Behind Japan's escalating nuclear crisis sits a scandal-ridden energy industry in a comfy relationship with government regulators often willing to overlook safety lapses. Leaks of radioactive steam and workers contaminated with radiation are just part of the disturbing catalog of accidents that have occurred over the years and been belatedly reported to the public, if at all. In one case, workers hand-mixed uranium in stainless steel buckets, instead of processing by machine, so the fuel could be reused, exposing hundreds of workers to radiation. Two later died. "Everything is a secret," said Kei Sugaoka, a former nuclear power plant engineer in Japan who now lives in California. "There's not enough transparency in the industry." In 1989 Sugaoka received an order that horrified him: edit out footage showing cracks in plant steam pipes in video being submitted to regulators. Sugaoka alerted his superiors in the Tokyo Electric Power Co., but nothing happened — for years. He decided to go public in 2000. Three Tepco executives lost their jobs. The legacy of scandals and cover-ups over Japan's half-century reliance on nuclear power has strained its credibility with the public. That mistrust has been renewed this past week with the crisis at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant. The vagueness and scarcity of details offered by the government and Tepco — and news that seems to grow worse each day — are fueling public anger and frustration.
Note: For lots more from reliable sources on government and corporate corruption, click here and here.
The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda. A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an "online persona management service" that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world. Critics are likely to complain that it will allow the US military to create a false consensus in online conversations, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother commentaries or reports that do not correspond with its own objectives. The discovery that the US military is developing false online personalities – known to users of social media as "sock puppets" – could also encourage other governments, private companies and non-government organisations to do the same. Once developed, the software could allow US service personnel, working around the clock in one location, to respond to emerging online conversations with any number of co-ordinated messages, blogposts, chatroom posts and other interventions.
Note: The Pentagon claims that the "fake persona" software will not be used on social networks in the United States, because that would break laws against using propaganda on US citizens. How much credence should be given to this assurance?
International police led by a UK team say they shut down the largest internet paedophile ring yet discovered. The global forum had 70,000 followers at its height, leading to 4,000 intelligence reports being sent to police across 30 countries. The operation has so far identified 670 suspects and 230 abused children. Detectives say 184 people have been arrested - 121 of them were in the UK. Some 60 children have been protected in the UK. The three-year investigation, Operation Rescue, was led by investigators from the UK's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop). The members of the network went into a private channel, boylover.net, and then used its secret systems to share films and images of abused children, said Rob Wainwright, director of European police agency Europol. In the UK, the 240 suspects include police officers, teachers and a karate teacher. One of the suspects in the UK is a woman. The internet has proved to be fertile territory for people with a sexual interest in children. Taking advantage of the anonymity modern computer technology provides, paedophiles download and exchange vile images of abuse unaware of the reality of the suffering.
Note: For powerful evidence that this kind of abuse is much more widespread than believed, and even goes to the highest level of government, click here.
Thirty-five years ago, Dale G. Bridenbaugh and two of his colleagues at General Electric resigned from their jobs after becoming increasingly convinced that the nuclear reactor design they were reviewing -- the Mark 1 -- was so flawed it could lead to a devastating accident. Five of the six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which has been wracked since Friday's earthquake with explosions and radiation leaks, are Mark 1s. "The problems we identified in 1975 were that, in doing the design of the containment, they did not take into account the dynamic loads that could be experienced with a loss of coolant," Bridenbaugh [said]. "The impact loads the containment would receive by this very rapid release of energy could tear the containment apart and create an uncontrolled release." Questions persisted for decades about the ability of the Mark 1 to handle the immense pressures that would result if the reactor lost cooling power. In 1986, for instance, Harold Denton, then the director of NRC's Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, spoke critically about the design during an industry conference. Today that design is being put to the ultimate test in Japan.
Note: For lots more from reliable sources on government and corporate corruption, click here and here.
Ten years ago, when Ron Pernick predicted that solar power would be a $23.5 billion industry by the decade's end, skeptics scoffed. After all, worldwide sales of photovoltaic solar equipment in 2000 were just $2.5 billion. Pernick's prediction had to be wrong. It was. The global solar market last year hit $71.2 billion. Pernick is co-founder and managing director of the Clean Edge Inc. market research firm, and for the last 10 years, his outfit has produced annual tallies of alternative energy sales around the world. The latest report, released today, shows a decade of remarkable growth. The market for solar power, wind power and biofuels still pales when compared with that for fossil fuels (Exxon Mobil, for example, made $383.2 billion last year). But clean-energy technology is no longer stuck in a niche. "It went from relative obscurity 10 years ago to being one of the dominant market forces today," said Pernick. Wind power has grown from a $4 billion global market in 2000 to $60.5 billion in 2010. Ten years ago, alternative energy firms received less than 1 percent of the venture capital invested in the United States. Last year, they got 23 percent, with investments totaling $5.1 billion. For biofuels, the report's data only stretch back to 2005. But in that time, the worldwide market for ethanol, biodiesel and other biofuels has grown from $15.7 billion to $56.4 billion.
Note: For many reports from reliable sources on promising new energy technologies, click here.
Three Metropolitan Police officers are under investigation after they were alleged to have inadvertently recorded themselves arranging to falsely arrest a protester during the student fees demonstrations. The officers, who have not been named, are alleged to have conspired to arrest a 20-year-old man who had broken through the police cordon during the protests at Parliament Square in December. The man was chased and caught and, it is alleged, was then struck in the face with a police riot shield which chipped his tooth. The officers are then alleged to have discussed how to arrest the man and are believed to have concocted a story in which they claimed the man had threatened to cause criminal damage to a nearby building. However one of the officers was wearing sound recording equipment which recorded the chase and arrest of the man and the subsequent conversation between the officers. The officers have each been served with letters telling them that they are now being investigated for gross misconduct and criminal matters – believed to be assault and false arrest. A total of 113 complaints were received by the IPCC about police officers behaviour during the four demonstrations. One of them concerns 20-year-old student Alfie Meadows, who needed brain surgery after he was allegedly struck on the head during a protest in December.
Note: For lots more on government corruption, click here.
How could more than 130,000 children be shipped from Britain to Australia and other Commonwealth countries, often without their parents' knowledge, and the world not know about it? [This is] the chilling poser at the heart of Jim Loach's debut film, Oranges and Sunshine, which centres on a policy that saw children from poor and struggling families sent halfway across the world to a promised new life. Instead, many endured virtual slave labour and, in some extreme cases, serial abuse. In the film, we follow Margaret [as] she gradually uncovers the devastating effects that the deportation has had on its victims. In Australia, Margaret's efforts amass evidence that defenceless children, in the care of the Roman Catholic Christian Brotherhood, have been physically and sexually abused by members of the order. However, Margaret is seen as a troublemaker, an outsider stirring up long-forgotten memories. Back in the UK, charities and government officials are refusing to accept responsibility for sending the children abroad. She receives death threats. Margaret eventually finds personal solace as her efforts finally come to fruition. Families are brought back together after decades apart, and the now grown-up children are able to establish their true identities. Finally, in 2009-10, after many years of official denial and vacillation, there are full public apologies from the Australian and British governments. Loach's film intelligently explores a grave injustice. The title, Oranges and Sunshine, refers to the inviting picture of a new life sold to the children in advance of their long journey to the other side of the world. It is a shattering, yet inspiring story.
Note: For more on this huge scandal of child abduction and abuse, click here. For another scandal of major child abuse based in Australia that has yet to be fully exposed, click here. For more on child sexual abuse, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.
What's wrong with this picture: Years have passed since Wall Street's financial meltdown. Due to the crisis, the economy tanked, the mortgage market has yet to recover, and millions of jobs were lost. Many of those jobs losses will be permanent. The only person who went to jail for any of this was Bernie Madoff. When he accepted his Academy Award for the documentary "Inside Job," Berkeley filmmaker Charles Ferguson reminded Americans that the lack of criminal prosecutions for the financial crisis is, simply, "wrong." No matter what kinds of logical, legal explanations that the Justice Department has trotted out to explain why all of these senior financial executives are too big to jail, it's outrageous that there has not been and will not be any comeuppance for the men who plunged the American economy into chaos. The fact that some of these executives have or will receive some financial punishment in civil court is of little consequence - if ruining the economy isn't worth a little jail time, then what is? The Obama administration has not made it a priority to prosecute financial executives. Its reticence to punish was prominently on display last month, when the Justice Department decided not to prosecute Angelo Mozilo, the former CEO of Countrywide Financial. Mozilo left an e-mail trail detailing his feelings about Countrywide's "toxic" mortgage products and negotiated a $67.5 million payout in a civil suit that was brought against him by the Securities and Exchange Commission. If the feds don't go after him, it's unlikely that they'll go after anyone else. It's a bitter contrast to the 1980s savings-and-loan crisis, when the federal government threw enormous resources at criminal prosecutions and sent even well-connected executives, like Charles Keating, to jail.
Note: For other highly revealing major media articles showing just how much control big bankers have over government, click here.
Three weeks after a scathing grand jury report said the Archdiocese of Philadelphia had provided safe haven to as many as 37 priests who were credibly accused of sexual abuse or inappropriate behavior toward minors, most of those priests remain active in the ministry. The possibility that even one predatory priest, not to mention three dozen, might still be serving in parishes — “on duty in the archdiocese today, with open access to new young prey,” as the grand jury put it — has unnerved many Roman Catholics here and sent the church reeling in the latest and one of the most damning episodes in the American church. The situation in Philadelphia is “Boston reborn.” The Boston Archdiocese was engulfed in a scandal starting in 2002 involving widespread sexual abuse by priests and an extensive cover-up that reached as high as the cardinal. The church has not explained directly why these priests ... are still active. Cardinal Justin Rigali initially said there were no active priests with substantiated allegations against them, but six days later, he placed three of the priests ... on administrative leave. Philadelphia is unusual in that the archdiocese has been the subject of not one but two grand jury reports. The first, in 2005, found credible accusations of abuse by 63 priests, whose activities had been covered up by the church. But there were no indictments, mainly because the statute of limitations had expired. “The thing that is significant about Philadelphia is the assumption that the authorities had made changes and the system had been fixed,” said Terence McKiernan, the president of BishopAccountability.org, which archives documents from the abuse scandal in dioceses across the country. “But the headline is that in Philadelphia, the system is still broke.”
Note: For powerful evidence that this kind of abuse is much more widespread than believed, and goes beyond the Catholic Church, click here.
Most Americans operate on the assumption that the U.S. is still No. 1. But is it? Yes, the U.S. remains the world's largest economy, and we have the largest military by far, the most dynamic technology companies and a highly entrepreneurial climate. But ... the decisions that created today's growth — decisions about education, infrastructure and the like — were made decades ago. The following rankings come from various lists, but they all tell the same story. Our 15-year-olds rank 17th in the world in science and 25th in math. We rank 12th among developed countries in college graduation (down from No. 1 for decades). We come in 79th in elementary-school enrollment. Our infrastructure is ranked 23rd in the world, well behind that of every other major advanced economy. American health numbers are stunning for a rich country: based on studies by the OECD and the World Health Organization, we're 27th in life expectancy, 18th in diabetes and first in obesity. Only a few decades ago, the U.S. stood tall in such rankings. No more. There are some areas in which we are still clearly No. 1, but they're not ones we usually brag about. We have the most guns. We have the most crime among rich countries. And, of course, we have by far the largest amount of debt in the world. Reducing funds for things like education, scientific research, air-traffic control, NASA, infrastructure and alternative energy will not produce much in savings, and it will hurt the economy's long-term growth. It would happen at the very moment that countries from Germany to South Korea to China are making large investments in education, science, technology and infrastructure.
Note: In discussing how the U.S. can reduce it's staggering debt, this article, like almost every major media article, fails to even mention the possibility of cutting our huge military budget. For why this is, click here.
Intelligence papers on a reported UFO sighting known as the "Rendlesham incident" have gone missing, files from the National Archives reveal. The missing files relate to a report of mysterious lights from US servicemen at RAF Woodbridge in Suffolk in 1980. The disappearance came to light with the release of 8,000 previously classified documents on UFOs. Officials found a "huge" gap where defence intelligence files relating to the case should be, the papers show. The incident took place near the fence of RAF Woodbridge - at that time being used by the US Air Force. A group of servicemen reported seeing strange lights in the trees near the base and after investigating found marks on the ground and damage to vegetation. The files reveal the MoD received a request for its own records of the incident in 2000, but when officials looked they discovered a "huge" gap where defence intelligence files relating to it should be. But it is not the only gap in the official record. In 2002 the MoD received a request for information from Lord Hill-Norton. He wanted to know about reports of a UFO sighting made by HMS Manchester while on exercise in the 1990s. It emerged in the file that HMS Manchester's log for one of the periods was lost overboard after "a gust of wind".
Note: Something major is missing from this article, too. The servicemen at Rendlesham not only found marks, they saw a craft up close. One man even touched the vehicle. These military men have all gone on record with their experience and all claim a cover-up. For an intriguing documentary on this landmark case, click here. For other key information and documents on the Rendlesham incident, click here. For a two-page summary of testimony from top military and government officials on their personal involvement with UFOs, click here.
Normally, in media accounts, you hear about the Pentagon budget and the war-fighting supplementary funds passed by Congress for our conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. That already gets you into a startling price range -- close to $700 billion for 2012 -- but that's barely more than half of it. If Americans were ever presented with the real bill for the total U.S. national security budget, it would actually add up to more than $1.2 trillion a year. Take that in for a moment. It's true; you won't find that figure in your daily newspaper or on your nightly newscast, but it's no misprint. It's the real thing when it comes to your tax dollars. The simplest way to grasp just how Americans could pay such a staggering amount annually for "security" is to go through what we know about the U.S. national security budget, step by step, and add it all up. [Click here for details] Still, don't for a second think that $1.2 trillion is the actual grand total for what the U.S. government spends on national security. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once famously spoke of the world's "known unknowns." Explaining the phrase this way: "That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know." It's a concept that couldn't apply better to the budget he once oversaw. American taxpayers should know just what they are paying for.
Note: When discussing budget cuts, why is it we never hear about cuts to the massive national security budget? Donald Rumsfeld also once admitted that the Pentagon couldn't track $2.3 trillion in transactions, as reported by CBS News in this video clip. For lots more on the rampant corruption of military funds, click here. And for a top US general revealing how bankers and industry tycoons rake in profits from war, click here.
A Massachusetts biotechnology company says it can produce the fuel that runs Jaguars and jet engines using the same ingredients that make grass grow. Joule Unlimited has invented a genetically-engineered organism that it says simply secretes diesel fuel or ethanol wherever it finds sunlight, water and carbon dioxide. [The] company says it can manipulate the organism to produce the renewable fuels on demand at unprecedented rates, and can do it in facilities large and small at costs comparable to the cheapest fossil fuels. What can it mean? No less than "energy independence," Joule's web site tells the world, even if the world's not quite convinced. "We make some lofty claims, all of which we believe, all which we've validated," said Joule chief executive Bill Sims. Joule was founded in 2007. In the last year, it's roughly doubled its employees to 70, closed a $30 million second round of private funding in April and added John Podesta, former White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton, to its board of directors. The company worked in "stealth mode" for a couple years before it recently began revealing more about what it was doing. This month, it released a peer-reviewed paper it says backs its claims. Joule says its organisms secrete a completed product, already identical to ethanol and the components of diesel fuel, then live on to keep producing it at remarkable rates. Joule claims, for instance, that its cyanobacterium can produce 15,000 gallons of diesel full per acre annually, over four times more than the most efficient algal process for making fuel. And they say they can do it at $30 a barrel. The company plans to break ground on a 10-acre demonstration facility this year, and Sims says they could be operating commercially in less than two years.
Note: For many other fascinating new energy inventions reported in the major media which should be making news headlines, click here. For a powerful two-page summary showing why these amazing inventions get so little attention and are sometimes even suppressed, click here.
The top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan intends to order an investigation into whether a three-star general responsible for training Afghan security forces inappropriately used members of a psychological operations team to influence visiting U.S. senators into providing more funding for the war. The U.S. command in Kabul issued a statement Thursday saying Gen. David H. Petraeus "is preparing to order an investigation to determine the facts and circumstances surrounding the issue." The investigation stems from an article published ... on the Web site of Rolling Stone magazine alleging that Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, the head of the U.S. and NATO training operation for Afghan forces, used an "information operations" team to "manipulate visiting American senators" and other visitors, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen. The article is based on the claims of a lieutenant colonel who served on a psychological operations team in Afghanistan last year and who alleges he was subjected to retribution when he resisted the assignment.
Note: To read Rolling Stone's fascinating report on how the US military used a secret program to pressure Senators to support the war, 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.