News ArticlesExcerpts of Key News Articles in Major Media
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More than a dozen U.S. veterans who say they were raped or assaulted by comrades filed a class-action suit in federal court [on February 15] attempting to force the Pentagon to change how it handles such cases. The current and former service members - 15 women and two men - describe circumstances in which servicemen allegedly got away with rape and other sexual abuse while their victims were ordered to continue to serve with them. The alleged attackers in the lawsuit include an Army criminal investigator and an Army National Guard commander. The abuse alleged ranges from obscene verbal abuse to gang rape. "The problem of rape in the military is not only service members getting raped, but it's the entire way that the military as a whole is dealing with it," said Panayiota Bertzikis, who is a plaintiff in the lawsuit and claims she was raped in 2006. "From survivors having to be involuntarily discharged from service, the constant verbal abuse, once a survivor does come forward your entire unit is known to turn their back on you. The entire culture needs to be changed."
The noise never really ends; peace is at a premium in Alabama's toughest lockup. Despite a history of violence at the William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility ... the prison outside Birmingham [Alabama] has become the model for a meditation program that officials say helps inmates learn the self control and social skills they never got in the outside world. Warden Gary Hetzel doesn't fully understand how the program called Vipassana ... can transform violent inmates into calm men using contemplative Buddhist practices. But Hetzel knows one thing. "It works. We see a difference in the men and in the prison. It's calmer," he said of the course that about 10 percent of the prison's inmates have completed. The word Vipassana means "to see things as they really are," which is also the goal of the intense 10-day program using the meditative technique that dates back 2,500 years. Vipassana courses are held four times a year in a prison gymnasium, where as many as 40 inmates meditate 10 hours a day. Convicted murderer Grady Bankhead said the hours of meditation forced him to accept responsibility for his crime and helped him find inner peace. Bankhead, who's serving life without parole, radiates calm. "I've been here for 25 years and this statement is going to sound crazy, but I consider myself the luckiest man in the world," Bankhead, 60, said last month after the latest course at Donaldson.
The United States continues to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on "good governance" initiatives [in Afghanistan]. This $760 million program, to strengthen government agencies, was America's single largest nonmilitary expense in Afghanistan over the past year. All of it was money thrown away. Last year, the U.S. Agency for International Development began promoting what it calls "Afghanization of aid." Well, in Afghanistan, government leaders have only one use for foreign aid. They stuff the cash into suitcases and fly it to secret bank accounts in Dubai. Afghanistan remains the world's largest grower of opium poppies. It supplies 90 percent of the world's heroin. Many thousands of its citizens are addicts. Earlier this month, the United Nations put out its annual "Afghanistan Opium Survey" and found that, even after the United States has spent more than $2 billion on drug enforcement there, "the total area under cultivation" during 2010 "and the number of families growing opium poppy, remained the same as in 2009" - but for one thing. The U.N. found "an alarming increase of 97 percent" in opium-poppy cultivation among northeastern provinces that are not traditional poppy-growing areas.
Note: For shocking stories by two award-winning journalists suggesting direct involvement by government agencies in the drug trade, click here. And for key reports from reliable sources on government corruption, click here.
Turning grandmothers into solar engineers is one of Sanjit "Bunker" Roy's favorite jobs. Roy is the social entrepreneur and founder of the Barefoot College and has been championing a bottom-up approach to education and empowering rural poor since 1972. It is now a global enterprise with roots in India. Roy recruits women from around the world to install and maintain solar lighting and power in their home villages. The United Nations estimates that around 1.5 billion people still live without electricity. "The way to go about this is not a centralized grid system, which brings in power from hundreds of miles away," he says. "It is to bring in basic light right down to the level of basic household wherein they take ownership and control over that technology." Women are the focus for the solar power projects that the Barefoot College runs because men "were very untrainable," says Roy. "(Men) were restless, compulsively mobile, and they all want a certificate and the moment you give them a certificate they leave the village and go to the cities looking for jobs. So why not invest in women, older women, mature women, gutsy women who have roots in the village and train them." Coming from countries across the world, the women are trained for six months before returning home. Many of the women have previously never left their villages before.
A mock city roughly the size of downtown San Diego has risen in a remote Southern California desert to train military forces to fight in urban environments. The $170 million urban training center was unveiled [on January 25] at the Twentynine Palms military base, 170 miles northeast of San Diego. The 1,560-building facility will allow troops to practice and refine skills that can be used around the world, the Marine Corps said. The military has been opening a slew of mock Afghan villages at bases across the country to prepare troops for battle before they are deployed. The new training center is one of the largest and most elaborate. Seven separate mock city districts spread across 274 acres of desert. The facility has almost 1,900 feet of underground tunnels, a manmade riverbed and dozens of courtyards and compounds. More than 15,000 Marines and sailors can train simultaneously in the massive simulator to experience the difficulties they will face during deployments. The new center expanded a similar training program called Mojave Viper that launched in 2005 to prepare troops for the Iraq war. In November, the Marine Corps unveiled a $30 million expansion of its mock Afghan village at Camp Pendleton that nearly quadrupled its size. Similar immersion training facilities are slated to open this year at Marine Corps bases in North Carolina, Hawaii and Okinawa.
Note: With the US national debt spiraling out of control and education and welfare being cut, why is the military spending $170 million on this?
The suspect's house, just west of this city, sat on a hilltop at the end of a steep, exposed driveway. Agents with the Texas Department of Public Safety believed the man inside had a large stash of drugs and a cache of weapons. The Texas agents did what no state or local law enforcement agency had done before in a high-risk operation: They launched a drone. A bird-size device called a Wasp floated hundreds of feet into the sky and instantly beamed live video to agents on the ground. The SWAT team stormed the house and arrested the suspect. "The nice thing is it's covert," said Bill C. Nabors Jr., chief pilot with the Texas DPS, "You don't hear it, and unless you know what you're looking for, you can't see it." The drone technology that has revolutionized warfare in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan is entering the national airspace. The operation outside Austin presaged what could prove to be one of the most far-reaching and potentially controversial uses of drones: as a new and relatively cheap surveillance tool in domestic law enforcement. By 2013, the FAA expects to have formulated new rules that would allow police across the country to routinely fly lightweight, unarmed drones up to 400 feet above the ground - high enough for them to be largely invisible eyes in the sky. Such technology could allow police to record the activities of the public below with high-resolution, infrared and thermal-imaging cameras.
Note: For lots more from reliable sources on government and corporate threats to privacy, click here.
Christopher Drew is a 60-year-old artist and teacher who wears a gray ponytail and lives on the North Side [of Chicago]. Tiawanda Moore, 20, a former stripper, lives on the South Side and dreams of going back to school and starting a new life. About the only thing these strangers have in common is the prospect that by spring, they could each be sent to prison for up to 15 years. The crime they are accused of is eavesdropping. The authorities say that Mr. Drew and Ms. Moore audio-recorded their separate nonviolent encounters with Chicago police officers without the officers’ permission, a Class 1 felony in Illinois, which, along with Massachusetts and Oregon, has one of the country’s toughest, if rarely prosecuted, eavesdropping laws. “Before they arrested me for it,” Ms. Moore said, “I didn’t even know there was a law about eavesdropping. I wasn’t trying to sue anybody. I just wanted somebody to know what had happened to me.” Ms. Moore ... is accused of using her Blackberry to record two Internal Affairs investigators who spoke to her inside Police Headquarters while she filed a sexual harassment complaint last August against another police officer. Mr. Drew was charged with using a digital recorder to capture his Dec. 2, 2009, arrest for selling art without a permit on North State Street in the Loop. Both cases illustrate the increasingly busy and confusing intersection of technology and the law, public space and private.
Note: For lots more from major media sources on governmental threats to civil liberties, click here.
A business privacy case that comes before the U.S. Supreme Court today may rekindle a debate among the justices over whether corporations are like people, even to the point of suffering embarrassment. The case ... pits the Obama administration against AT&T Inc. over the release of documents stemming from a government investigation of the company. The question is whether corporations can invoke a Freedom of Information Act provision that protects against invasions of “personal privacy.” In siding with AT&T, a lower court said companies can be embarrassed and stigmatized just like human beings -- a contention the Obama administration scoffed at. The court’s divisions were on display when it considered whether to overturn decades-old restrictions on corporate campaign spending. During arguments in 2009, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that judges “created corporations as persons” and that they might have been wrong to have “imbued a creature of state law with human characteristics.” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that “a corporation, after all, is not endowed by its creator with inalienable rights.” The court majority disagreed, ruling in a 5-4 decision that corporations have the same constitutional right to spend money on campaign ads as individuals do.
Note: For lots more on government and corporate corruption, click here and here.
Today, millions of people on another continent are observing the 50th anniversary of an event few Americans remember, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. The 35-year-old Lumumba was the first democratically chosen leader of the ... Democratic Republic of Congo. Thousands of Belgian officials who lingered on did their best to sabotage things: their code word for Lumumba in military radio transmissions was “Satan.” Shortly after he took office as prime minister, the C.I.A., with White House approval, ordered his assassination and dispatched an undercover agent with poison. The would-be poisoners could not get close enough to Lumumba to do the job, so instead the United States and Belgium covertly funneled cash and aid to rival politicians who seized power and arrested the prime minister. On Jan. 17, 1961, after being beaten and tortured, he was shot. Stephen R. Weissman, a former staff director of the House Subcommittee on Africa, recently pointed out that Lumumba’s violent end foreshadowed today’s American practice of “extraordinary rendition.” The Congolese politicians who planned Lumumba’s murder checked all their major moves with their Belgian and American backers, and the local C.I.A. station chief made no objection when they told him they were going to turn Lumumba over — render him, in today’s parlance — to the breakaway government of Katanga, which, everyone knew, could be counted on to kill him.
Note: The author of this article, Adam Hochschild, is the author of King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa and the forthcoming To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918.
In between Chase Manhattan Bank and Vinny, who will break your legs if you don't repay your loan, lie new and novel online lenders that act more like dating services than banks. They match people wanting money with others who have money to lend. The two biggest such 'peer-to-peer' lenders, LendingClub.com and Prosper.com, offer borrowers lower rates than banks, and offer investors a better return than they could get from putting their money in a CD. Both companies are headquartered in the San Francisco Bay area, and both are licensed in most states. Rates and rules for the two are similar. While investors' money does not enjoy the FDIC protection it would have at a bank, it enjoys a better than 10% return. Plus, lenders can diversify their risk by dividing their investment, if they want, across hundreds of different loan accounts in increments as small as $25. At LendingClub, a borrower with a good credit rating can expect to pay an interest rate five percentage points lower than at a bank. Since its start in 2007, LendingClub has funded nearly $204 million worth of loans and has paid over $15.6 million to its investors.
Note: For those who want to borrow or loan money free of the banks with excellent rates, check out www.lendingclub.com/ and www.prosper.com.
UFOs have been around on a regular basis from antiquity through modern day. And as 2010 unfolded, the UFO mythology was alive and well. Famed British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, the pope's astronomer, a high-ranking Italian politician and even the late Winston Churchill helped keep UFOs in the news. The longstanding debate over whether or not we should try to make contact with space aliens reared its head during 2010. Astrophysicist Hawking cautioned that any communication with extraterrestrials might pose a huge risk for earthlings. Not all political leaders feel the need to keep alien information secret. Case in point: Italian Northern League party leader Mario Borghezio's crusade this year to convince European Union member nations to release all of their hidden UFO documents. In Great Britain, newly published secret documents alleged that former Prime Minister Churchill believed some UFOs were unearthly and he was concerned that such news would create a public panic. No-nonsense, credible military officers stepped forward and broke their silence at a Washington, D.C., press conference to describe their firsthand encounters with UFOs that they claim had tampered with American nuclear weapons sites.
Note: For impressive testimony on UFOs from many highly-credible government officials and military officers, click here. For lots more reliable, verifiable information on the UFO phenomenon, click here.
Studies at UC Berkeley show that ... generosity for many is driven by a sincere desire to benefit others, said Robb Willer, a UC Berkeley sociologist who researches the ways individuals overcome selfishness to contribute to the social good. He has found that people have varying levels of altruism, depending on such things as their personality, parental influences and experience. "Volunteering your time and giving money to charity tends to make people happier than spending money on themselves," Willer said. But for others, generosity pays. "It makes sense to be generous from a self-interested perspective," said Willer, who studies how people behave in groups. "If you're generous, you receive more respect, you have more influence and people cooperate with you more." Experiments Willer has conducted in five countries show that giving can be contagious. One of Willer's studies focused on users of the website freecycle.org, an online gift-giving community. Freecycle began in 2003 as an e-mail group in Tucson committed to reusing materials that would otherwise end up in landfills. Its only rule was that items be given without reciprocity or compensation. Freecycle has since grown to have more than 7 million members in 85 countries. The feeling of gratitude has driven the success of Freecycle, Willer found. "Giving in this community follows a pattern of contagious generosity, where if you received a gift from somebody else in the world, then you become more likely to give to somebody else in turn," he said.
Last year, Stanford banned its physicians from giving paid promotional talks for pharmaceutical companies. One thing it didn't do was make sure its faculty followed that rule. A ProPublica investigation ["Dollars for Docs"] found that more than a dozen of the school's doctors were paid speakers in apparent violation of Stanford policy - two of them were paid six figures since last year. Conflict-of-interest policies have become increasingly important as academic medical centers worry that promotional talks undermine the credibility not only of the physicians giving them, but also of the institutions they represent. Yet when it comes to enforcing the policies, universities have allowed permissive interpretations and relied on the honor system. That approach isn't working. Many physicians are in apparent violation, and ignorance or confusion about the rules is widespread. As a result, some faculty physicians stay on the industry lecture circuit, where they can net tens of thousands of dollars in additional income. Critics of the practice say delivering talks for drug companies is incompatible with teaching future generations of physicians. That's because drug firms typically pick the topic of the lecture, train the speakers and require them to use company-provided presentation slides.
Note: "Dollars for Docs" is an ongoing investigation into the influence of drug company marketing payments on medical providers. To search for a doctor in the database, click here.
An independent examiner has just recommended stricter ethics rules for managers of the $218.8 billion California Public Employees' Retirement System. According to a suit filed by state Attorney General Jerry Brown, back in 2007, CalPERS board member-turned-investment broker Alfred Villalobos took one of the pension fund's senior investment officers on a private jet ride to New York to attend a Museum of Modern Art fundraiser honoring a client Villalobos was representing. The client, Leon Black, heads the private-equity firm Apollo Global Management, which was seeking a $700 million investment from CalPERS. According to the suit, Villalobos and the investment officer, Leon Shahinian, shared a $1,000-a-night-plus suite at the five-star Mandarin Oriental Hotel. The suit claims Villalobos' firm billed the trip to Apollo. Sometime after, the suit claims, Shahinian touted the $700 million investment to the CalPERS board with nary a mention of the New York trip - and the deal was approved. Shahinian was not named as a defendant in Brown's suit, which is seeking $95 million in penalties against Villalobos and CalPERS' former chief executive, Fred Buenrostro - both of whom have denied any wrongdoing. As for Shahinian, who also maintains he did nothing wrong, he was placed on paid administrative leave over the incident and four months later resigned from CalPERS, where he was earning about $350,000 a year.
Note: For lots more on government and corporate corruption from major media sources, click here and here.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says Tom Flanagan — a former senior adviser to the [Canadian] prime minister — should be charged with incitement to commit murder for calling for Assange's assassination. "It is correct that Mr. Flanagan and the others seriously making these statements should be charged with incitement to commit murder," Assange replied. During a panel interview on the [CBC's "Power & Politics with Evan Solomon" show] Flanagan said U.S. President Barack Obama "should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something." Assange ... disputed the contention of Flanagan and numerous governments that his organization's publishing of secret U.S. diplomatic cables has put people's lives in danger. "WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history," Assange said. "During that time there has been no credible allegation, even by organizations like the Pentagon, that even a single person has come to harm as a result of our activities. This is despite much-attempted manipulation and spin trying to lead people to a counter-factual conclusion. We do not expect any change in this regard."
Note: For lots more from reliable sources on government and corporate secrecy, click here.
Early next year, Julian Assange says, a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out. Tens of thousands of its internal documents will be exposed on Wikileaks.org. The data dump will lay bare the finance firm’s secrets on the Web for every customer, every competitor, every regulator to examine and pass judgment on. When? Which bank? What documents? Cagey as always, Assange won’t say. He compares what he is ready to unleash to the damning e-mails that poured out of the Enron trial: a comprehensive vivisection of corporate bad behavior. “You could call it the ecosystem of corruption,” he says, refusing to characterize the coming release in more detail. Does Assange have unpublished, damaging documents on pharmaceutical companies? Yes, he says. Finance? Yes, many more than the single bank scandal we’ve been discussing. Energy? Plenty, on everything from BP to an Albanian oil firm that he says attempted to sabotage its competitors’ wells. Like informational IEDs, these damaging revelations can be detonated at will. Long gone are the days when Daniel Ellsberg had to photocopy thousands of Vietnam War documents to leak the Pentagon Papers. Modern whistleblowers ... can zip up their troves of incriminating documents on a laptop, USB stick or portable hard drive, spirit them out through personal e-mail accounts or online drop sites—or simply submit them directly to WikiLeaks.
Note: For lots more from reliable sources on government and corporate secrecy, click here.
U.S. State Department documents released by whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks provided candid views of foreign leaders and sensitive information on terrorism and nuclear proliferation, The New York Times reported on [November 28]. The documents show Saudi donors remain chief financiers of militant groups like al Qaeda and that Chinese government operatives have waged a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage targeting the United States and its allies, according to a review of the WikiLeaks documents published in the Times.
Note: Why did so few major media mention this key fact about Saudi financing of Al Qaeda?
An electric sportscar finished a remarkable road trip [on November 16] on the Panamerican Highway, traveling from near the Arctic Circle in Alaska to the world's southernmost city without a single blast of carbon dioxide emissions. Developed by engineers from Imperial College London, the SRZero sportscar ran on lithium iron phosphate batteries powering two electric motors with a peak output of 400 horsepower during its 16,000-mile (26,000-kilometer) journey. Powering up was a joy at times, the team said — such as in Chena Hot Springs, Alaska, where they started their trip July 3 after charging the batteries using geothermal energy. "The SRZero was literally being charged from energy taken straight out of the earth with absolutely zero CO2 emissions," Alex Schey, a mechanical engineer who organized the trip, wrote in his blog that day. Finding places to plug in along the way became a major challenge as the team passed through 14 countries in 70 days of driving. But every time the driver hit the brakes — and there was plenty of that as the team made its way through the Rocky Mountains, Mexico and Central America and then through South America — the car recovered kinetic energy, extending its capacity to drive as much as six hours and more than 400 kilometers (250 miles) on a single charge. This was no clunky science project — all that horsepower enabled the car to reach 60 mph (96 kph) in just seven seconds and reach top controlled speeds of 124 mph (200 kph), the team said.
Note: For many reports from reliable sources on new automotive and energy technologies, click here.
When it comes to the bedroom, Viagra, Cialis and Levitra are all household words, thanks to TV, radio and Internet ads broadcasting information about erectile dysfunction around the clock, on all kinds of programming - even the Super Bowl. So when Rachel Braun Scherl, 45, a Stanford University business school graduate, co-founded Semprae Laboratories, which developed Zestra Essential Arousal Oils, a product described as a botanical aphrodisiac, she thought bringing its message to the airwaves would be a snap. Research had shown that tens of millions of American women had sexual difficulty and no products to remedy it. Scherl, 45, a married mother of two, and company co-founder Mary Jaensch, 58, a married mother of three, thought they had an answer for this unmet need, along with the cash to pay for ads on TV. In an apparent double standard, many networks and some websites have declined the company's ads; a few will air them during the daytime, and others only after midnight. "The most frequent answer we get is, 'We don't advertise your category,' " Scherl said. "To which we say, 'What is the category? Because if it's sexual enjoyment, you clearly cover that category. If it's female enjoyment, you clearly don't.' And when you ask for information as to what we would need to change so they would clear the ad for broadcast, they give you very little direction. ... And yet they have no problem showing ads for Viagra and other men's drugs. Why?"
Note: For highly informative reports from major media sources on health issues, click here.
Research into the possibility of engineering a better climate is progressing at an impressive rate—and meeting strong opposition. Geoengineering is shorthand for the idea of fixing the problem of man-made climate change once the greenhouse gases that cause it have already been emitted into the atmosphere, rather than trying to stop those emissions happening in the first place. Many people think such ideas immoral ... and certain to provoke unintended consequences, to boot. Over the past few years research in the field has boomed. What is sometimes called Plan B seems to be taking shape on the laboratory bench—and seeking to escape outside. Polluting the stratosphere. Liming the oceans. Locking Greenland’s glaciers to its icy mountains. It is easy to see why sceptics balk at geoengineering. And if viewed as a substitute for curbing greenhouse-gas emissions, a cover for business-as-usual into the indefinite future, then it might indeed prove a Faustian bargain. Fertilising the ocean with iron has already been tried—admittedly without much success, but also without perceptible harm being done. The harm done by stopping geoengineering experiments is that the good which might come from them will never be known. Yet even some enthusiastic researchers worry about undue haste. Geoengineering’s growth spurt will need to be matched by some grown-up questioning. Who benefits? Who decides? Who faces the risk?
Note: What this article fails to mention is that geoengineering has already been secretly used over many decades for military purposes as well as weather modification. For reliable information on this, 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.