News StoriesExcerpts of Key News Stories in Major Media
Note: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.
The World Bank has been accused of publishing false accounts and wasting money on ineffective medicines in its malaria treatment programme. A Lancet paper claims the bank faked figures, boosting the success of its malaria projects, and reneged on a pledge to invest $300-500m in Africa. It also claims the bank funded obsolete treatments - against expert advice. The claims against the bank [were] made by 13 international public health experts headed by Amir Attaran, of Canada's University of Ottawa. They quote the bank saying that it reduced deaths from malaria in the Indian states of Gujarat by 58%, Maharashtra by 98% and Rajasthan by 79%. According to India's Directorate of National Vector Borne Disease Control Programme, deaths from malaria rose in all three states in the 2002-3 period in question. "Our investigations suggest that the bank wasted money and lives on ineffective medicines." It accuses the bank of supplying India with an anti-malarial drug, called chloroquine, at a cost of $1.8m, which it says is unsuitable for the type of malaria seen there and against World Health Organisation guidelines.
Every psychiatric expert involved in writing the standard diagnostic criteria for disorders such as depression and schizophrenia has had financial ties to drug companies that sell medications for those illnesses, a new analysis has found. Of the 170 experts in all who contributed to the manual that defines disorders from personality problems to drug addiction, more than half had such ties, including 100 percent of the experts who served on work groups on mood disorders and psychotic disorders. "I don't think the public is aware of how egregious the financial ties are in the field of psychiatry," said Lisa Cosgrove, a clinical psychologist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. The analysis comes at a time of growing debate over the rising use of medication as the primary or sole treatment for many psychiatric disorders, a trend driven in part by definitions of mental disorders in the psychiatric manual. Cosgrove said she began her research after discovering that five of six panel members studying whether certain premenstrual problems are a psychiatric disorder had ties to Eli Lilly & Co., which was seeking to market its drug Prozac to treat those symptoms. The process of defining such disorders is far from scientific, Cosgrove added: "You would be dismayed at how political the process can be."
We have heard various individual cases of overcharging and fraud by American firms in the reconstruction of Iraq. A year ago, an audit by the inspector general found no evidence of work done or goods delivered on 154 of 198 contracts. Sixty cases of potential swindles are under investigation. Halliburton and its hundreds of millions of dollars of overcharges or baseless costs are well known. But millions more were taken by companies that promised to build or restore libraries or police facilities, or deliver trucks and construction equipment. US government investigators can account for only a third of the $1.5 billion given by the CPA to the interim government and it appears that a substantial portion of the $8 billion given to Iraqi ministries went to "ghost employees." Because of the way the United States set things up after the invasion, contractors are immune from prosecution by Iraqis. This is robbery, not reconstruction. It has been three years and all Iraq has become is a "free-fraud zone," according to one of the attorneys for whistleblowers in Iraqi swindles. Recently, the Army found that Halliburton had $263 million of exaggerated or unexplainable costs on a $2.4 billion no-bid contract, yet still paid Halliburton $253 million of the $263 million.
The National Archives signed a secret agreement in 2001 with the Central Intelligence Agency permitting the spy agency to withdraw from public access records it considered to have been improperly declassified, the head of the archives, Allen Weinstein, disclosed on Monday. Mr. Weinstein, who began work as archivist of the United States last year, said he learned of the agreement with the C.I.A. on Thursday and was putting a stop to such secret reclassification arrangements, which he described as incompatible with the mission of the archives. The disclosure of the secret agreements provides at least a partial explanation for the removal since 1999 of more than 55,000 pages of historical documents from access to researchers at the archives. The removal of documents, including many dating to the 1950's, was discovered by a group of historians this year and reported by The New York Times in February. In a brief interview, Mr. Weinstein said he was particularly disturbed that the archives had agreed not to tell researchers why documents were unavailable. The C.I.A. agreement said archives employees would "not attribute to C.I.A. any part of the review or the withholding of documents."
Millionaires and middle-class Americans now pay taxes at almost the same rates. Lower tax rates have contributed to huge increases in the wealth of the wealthy, but so far most people haven't seen significant economic improvement. [The] latest three-year examination of family finances found that average family income fell by 2% between 2001 and 2004. In the previous three-year period, average family income grew by 17%. Thanks to more credit card debt and borrowing against their homes, the 25% of Americans at the bottom of the wealth scale had negative net worth in 2004. The first federal tax code specified a maximum rate of 7%, but after the U.S. entered the war in 1917, Congress boosted the top rate to 77%. The 1986 tax overhaul brought the top rate to 28% in 1988, its lowest level since 1931. President Bush has achieved something close to the flat-rate structure by cutting tax rates on earned income and particularly on dividends and investment profits. Although the top tax rate is 35%, nobody pays that percentage. People with income between $500,000 and $1 million owed the same share of their income... -- 22% -- as did taxpayers reporting at least $1 million in income. Taxpayers in the $100,000 to $200,000 range paid nearly the same rate, 20.6%. Those in the $50,000 to $75,000 range paid 17.4%; taxpayers in the $40,000 to $50,000 range paid 15.8%. During the previous seven economic expansions before the current one, employee compensation rose four times faster than corporate profits. In the current expansion, profits have risen three times faster than compensation.
We learned last week that a dubious program in which thousands of pages of once-classified historical documents were removed from public view was protected by an agreement in which the National Archives and Records Administration covertly helped the Air Force, the CIA and other agencies to pull the documents and cover up the reclassification effort. That the keepers of the nation's archival history would secretly collude with military and spy agencies to lock away selected parts of that history is, by itself, cause for concern. But the program, which began in 1999 and was dramatically accelerated after 9/11, went far beyond reversing genuine mistakes in declassification. The program apparently...morphed into a license for spies and diplomats to whitewash some of the agencies' most dubious and embarrassing acts. Historical CYA, in short. Cover Your Asininities. How else to explain the sheer volume of the vacuuming - more than 55,000 pages within 10,000 documents, mostly from the 1940s and '50s?
The above link is not a news article, but rather a fascinating 12-minute video demonstrating inspiring new energy technologies. I have seen the longer, full video, which is one of the best videos available covering this exciting field. For more on the full video, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/resources#free. For an excellent two-page summary of the new energy field, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/newenergysources.
Note: The Guardian also had an article on this amazing technology last year. See the link below:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1481009,00.html
According to reports published today...healthy people are being turned into patients by drug firms which publicise mental and sexual problems and promote little-known conditions only then to reveal the medicines they say will treat them.The studies, published in a respected medical journal, accuse the pharmaceutical industry of "disease mongering" - a practice in which the market for a drug is inflated by convincing people they are sick and in need of medical treatment. The "corporate-sponsored creation of disease" wastes resources and may even harm people because of the medication they turn to, the researchers add. In 11 papers in the journal Public Library of Science Medicine, experts from Britain, the US and elsewhere argue that new diseases are being defined by specialists who are often funded by the drug industry.According to the researchers, the campaigns boost drug sales by medicalising aspects of normal life.
Note: For more on how the pharmaceutical companies can negatively impact your health and your wallet:
http://www.WantToKnow.info/healthcoverup
[April 10, 2006] The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have...helped the Bush administration tie the war to...Sept. 11. Although Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq have conducted deadly bombing attacks, they remain "a very small part of the actual numbers," [said] Col. Derek Harvey, who...was one of the top officers handling Iraq intelligence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature...made him more important than he really is." One briefing slide about U.S. "strategic communications" in Iraq, prepared for Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, describes the "home audience" as one of six major targets of the American side of the war. There were direct military efforts to use the U.S. media to affect views of the war. One slide in the same briefing, for example, noted that a "selective leak" about Zarqawi was made to Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter. Filkins's resulting article...ran on the Times front page. U.S. propaganda efforts in Iraq in 2004 cost $24 million. "Villainize Zarqawi" one U.S. military briefing from 2004 stated. It listed..."PSYOP," the U.S. military term for propaganda work. One internal briefing, produced by the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, said..."The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date."
A Brigham Young University physicist said he now believes an incendiary substance called thermite, bolstered by sulfur, was used to generate exceptionally hot fires at the World Trade Center on 9/11, causing the structural steel to fail and the buildings to collapse. "It looks like thermite with sulfur added," Steven Jones, professor of physics at BYU, told a meeting of the Utah Academy of Science, Arts and Letters. Jones is co-chairman, with James H. Fetzer, a distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, a group of college faculty members who believe conspirators other than pilots of the planes were directly involved in bringing down New York's Trade Towers. The group, which Jones said has 200 members, maintains a Web site at www.st911.org. A 40-page paper by Jones, along with other peer-reviewed and non-reviewed academic papers, are posted on the site. Last year, Jones presented various arguments for his theory that explosives or incendiary devices were planted in the Trade Towers, and in WTC 7, a smaller building in the Trade Center complex, and that those materials, not planes crashing into the buildings, caused the buildings to collapse. Jones said his studies are confined to physical causes of the collapses, and he doesn't like to speculate about who might have entered the buildings and placed thermite and sulfur.
Note: For lots more reliable, verifiable information suggesting a 9/11 cover-up:
http://www.WantToKnow.info/9-11cover-up
How far should a soldier go when interrogating a prisoner? Is torture OK? What if the prisoner knew where Saddam Hussein was hiding? How far is too far? That was the dilemma facing Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer while interrogating an Iraqi major general, among the most important prisoners of the time. During interrogation, the general died. Welshofer says he thought Mowhoush might know where Saddam was hiding. Welshofer questioned Mowhoush, didn’t lay a hand on him, and got nothing out of him. So...Welshofer got creative. He remembered that years before...he helped stuff American soldiers into oil drums to induce claustrophobia and panic. In Iraq, Welshofer did much the same thing, this time, with a sleeping bag. Mowhoush...was 56 years old and not in good shape. Welshofer took an electrical cord, wrapped it around Mowhoush’s middle to hold the bag in place. Then he straddled him. But when Mowhoush didn’t give him the answers he was looking for, Welshofer says he put his hand over his mouth. "I saw that the water pooled in his mouth, and it was at that point that I realized...the general’s dead," Welshofer recalls. It happened in Abu Ghraib. It happened in Afghanistan. It happened in Guantanamo Bay. When you see this across three different arenas and in many different places, it is no longer just a few guys got it in their head to do this. It is coming from somewhere else. And it’s got to come from above.
About the same time that President Bush was condemning the abuse of prisoners in Iraq as un-American, a year-long inquiry began into the mistreatment of prisoners at home. More than 2.1 million people are in jail in the US at any one time; that is about one in 140 Americans. One of the biggest drivers of the expanding population are the tough policies brought in over the last 20 years ... like the "three strikes" laws that hand out long, mandatory sentences to repeat offenders. Bland, bureaucratic phrases like management control or secured housing unit describe regimes where solitary confinement is an almost permanent way of life, with prisoners locked in spartan cells for at least 23 hours each day. Gary Harkins, is an officer at the maximum security Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem, and also a member of Corrections USA, a group which represents about 120,000 prison guards and opposes the growing number of private prisons. The roots of the problem may be closer to home, as suggested by words attributed to former Pennsylvania prison guard Charles Graner - ringleader of the Abu Ghraib abuses - which came out during court testimony. "The Christian in me says it's wrong, but the corrections officer in me says, 'I love to make a grown man piss himself.'"
Note: This article neglects to mention that prisons are a major industry bringing huge profits to government contractors. When profits are a driving force, the decisions made often do not reflect what is best for all involved.
For 2,000 years Judas has been reviled for betraying Jesus. Now a newly translated ancient document seeks to tell his side of the story. The "Gospel of Judas"...portrays Judas as a favored disciple who was given special knowledge by Jesus -- and who turned him in at Jesus' request. The text, one of several ancient documents found in the Egyptian desert in 1970, was preserved and translated by a team of scholars. It was made public in an English translation by the National Geographic Society. A "Gospel of Judas" was first mentioned around 180 A.D. by Bishop Irenaeus of Lyon, in what is now France. The bishop denounced the manuscript as heresy because it differed from mainstream Christianity. The actual text had been thought lost until this discovery. Christianity in the ancient world was much more diverse than it is now, with a number of gospels circulating in addition to the four that were finally collected into the New Testament, noted Bart Ehrman, chairman of religious studies at the University of North Carolina. Eventually, one point of view prevailed and the others were declared heresy, he said, including the Gnostics who believed that salvation depended on secret knowledge that Jesus imparted. The newly translated document's text begins: "The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot."
Thirty-eight years after he was assassinated on a motel balcony, photographs, recordings and police files that describe the death of Martin Luther King Jr. have been placed on the internet. On yesterday's anniversary of Dr King's death, the Shelby County Register’s office in Memphis, Tennessee, made available hours of tapes, including hurried police calls from the scene of the crime, hundreds of photographs and thousands of pages of files and transcripts of the trial of James Earl Ray, the man found guilty of the shooting. Dr King was...in the city, and under police surveillance, trying to lead a peaceful protest of sanitation workers. The subsequent hour of calls, edited to 18 minutes on the website, show the rapid pace of events that later became the US Government's case against Ray, who first admitted shooting Dr King before recanting and insisting for the rest of his life, with the support of the King family, that he was framed for the crime. Ray...died in jail in 1998 after four investigations, including a review by the Department of Justice, failed to find evidence to support a theory that Dr King was shot on the orders of a Memphis bar-owner.
Note: This article fails to mention a key fact. At a 1999 court trial held in Memphis, the family of Rev. King accused elements of the U.S. government of complicity in King's death. After one month of hearings from 70 witnesses, a jury composed of six white and six black jurors took only one hour to find the U.S. government, the state of Tennessee, the city of Memphis, the Memphis police, and several individuals guilty of murdering King. Yet the mainstream media completely boycotted this trial. Thankfully, CBC (Canada's PBS) gave it some coverage. To see a six-minute CBC clip of this highly revealing trial, click here.
Federal spending is outstripping economic growth at a rate unseen in more than half a century, provoking some conservatives to complain that government under Republican control has gotten too big. The federal government is currently spending 20.8 cents of every $1 the economy generates, up from 18.5 cents in 2001, White House budget documents show. That's the most rapid growth during one administration since Franklin Roosevelt. There are no signs that the trend is about to turn around. This week, the House is scheduled to debate the $2.8 trillion budget for 2007, which projects an additional $3 trillion of debt in the next five years. "You take anything, and we've grown it big," says Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., a leading critic of the spending spurt. "When you're in control of the presidency and both houses of Congress, there's just no stop on it." The spending spike contrasts with the mid-1990s, when Republicans gained control of Congress and compromised with President Clinton on spending cuts that led to a $236 billion budget surplus in 2000. "Republicans have gotten the sense that they're going to get elected by passing out money to people," says former Republican House Budget Committee chairman John Kasich.
When David Ray Griffin, noted theologian and professor emeritus at the Claremont School of Theology, first heard someone say that Sept. 11 was an inside job, he scoffed. [But later] Griffin began to delve into 9/11 conspiracy theories after looking at a time line of the events of Sept. 11, 2001...on the Internet. He found himself swayed by the catalog of inconsistencies and strange coincidences. Griffin points to historical evidence that the U.S. government would be capable of such a thing. Operation Northwoods, a plan concocted by the Pentagon in the '60s as a way of taking Castro from power, included ideas about how a terrorist attack on U.S. soil could provide a pretext for military action. While many conspiracy theories have been passed around, it's been very easy to dismiss many of the theorists as...crazy. But Griffin comes to his controversial conclusions with lucidity and calm. He even sees a connection between his long-standing work as a theologian and his new position as a political writer. "In both cases, the concern is for the good of the world as a whole."
The long-held belief that moderate drinking reduces your risk of a heart attack or dying is based on flawed data and is most likely wrong, according to a study released today. A couple glasses of wine aren't going to hurt you...but they aren't going to help you much either. Heavy drinking, of course, is unquestionably bad for you. Dr. A. G. Shaper...observed that many people who abstained from alcohol did so because of advancing age, serious illness or the use of drugs whose effects were altered by alcohol. He warned...that counting such people as abstainers in alcohol studies would bias the results. Fillmore's team identified 54 published reports that examined the health effects of drinking. They found that the majority of the papers included significant numbers of people who had recently quit drinking...among the group who abstained from alcohol. Seven of the 54 studies included only long-term abstainers -- people who had never consumed alcohol or who had stopped drinking years earlier for reasons unrelated to their current health. All seven of those studies showed no benefit from moderate drinking.
A Pentagon test at a Nevada site this June will likely create the first mushroom cloud seen in the state since the United States ceased above-ground nuclear testing in 1963. Mushroom clouds are commonly associated with nuclear blasts, but this cloud will come from the detonation of a 700-ton explosive charge designed to test new bunker-busting technologies. Most Nevada residents, however, will never see the cloud because the test will take place in the desert -- far away from population centers. The closest city, Las Vegas, is about 90 miles away from test site. Regardless, the military will put out the word to Las Vegas residents that they shouldn't be alarmed in the unlikely chance that they see a mushroom cloud on the horizon. Mountains surround the flat Nevada site where the test will be conducted. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency hopes the test -- called Divine Strake -- will help with the effort to develop weapons that can destroy deep underground bunkers storing nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. The yet-to-be built Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator has raised opposition from some members of Congress who worry the technology will open the door to a new generation of nuclear weapons.
Frustrated government auditors pleaded, cajoled and finally threatened Halliburton Co. executives who repeatedly failed to comply with government reporting requirements under a key Iraq contract with a $1.2-billion potential price tag. The 15-page report cites findings by auditors that Halliburton overcharged -- "apparently intentionally" -- on the contract by using hidden calculations, and attempted in one instance to bill the government for $26 million in costs it did not incur. The report blamed the Department of Defense for awarding the contract despite warnings from auditors that Halliburton's cost estimating system had "significant deficiencies." Although federal officials have criticized the company and threatened to cancel its contracts, Halliburton remains the largest private contractor in Iraq. The contract, awarded in January 2004, was one of three Iraq pacts for the company once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. Although the other two agreements...have faced heavy criticism as no-bid contracts...Tuesday's report was the first to focus on the third Halliburton contract. "You are hereby notified that the government considers that you have universally failed to provide adequate cost information as required under the subject contract," a U.S. contracting officer wrote in an Aug. 28, 2004, letter to an executive of KBR, the Halliburton unit formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root.
The line between living organisms and machines has just become a whole lot blurrier. European researchers have developed "neuro-chips" in which living brain cells and silicon circuits are coupled together. The achievement could one day enable...the development of organic computers that crunch numbers using living neurons. To create the neuro-chip, researchers squeezed more than 16,000 electronic transistors and hundreds of capacitors onto a silicon chip just 1 millimeter square in size. They used special proteins found in the brain to glue brain cells, called neurons, onto the chip. However, the proteins acted as more than just a simple adhesive. "They also provided the link between ionic channels of the neurons and semiconductor material in a way that neural electrical signals could be passed to the silicon chip," said study team member Stefano Vassanelli from the University of Padua in Italy. The proteins allowed the neuro-chip's electronic components and its living cells to communicate with each other.
Note: For lots more on microchip implants, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/microchipimplants
Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.