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.
A group of experts advising the nation’s premier cancer research institution has recommended changing the definition of cancer and eliminating the word from some common diagnoses as part of sweeping changes in the nation’s approach to cancer detection and treatment. The recommendations, from a working group of the National Cancer Institute, were published [in] The Journal of the American Medical Association. They say, for instance, that some premalignant conditions, like one that affects the breast called ductal carcinoma in situ, which many doctors agree is not cancer, should be renamed to exclude the word carcinoma so that patients are less frightened and less likely to seek what may be unneeded and potentially harmful treatments that can include the surgical removal of the breast. The group, which includes some of the top scientists in cancer research, also suggested that many lesions detected during breast, prostate, thyroid, lung and other cancer screenings should not be called cancer at all but should instead be reclassified as IDLE conditions, which stands for “indolent lesions of epithelial origin.” The impetus behind the call for change is a growing concern among doctors, scientists and patient advocates that hundreds of thousands of men and women are undergoing needless and sometimes disfiguring and harmful treatments for premalignant and cancerous lesions that are so slow growing they are unlikely to ever cause harm. Once doctors and patients are aware a lesion exists, they typically feel compelled to biopsy, treat and remove it, often at great physical and psychological pain and risk to the patient.
Note: Isn't it interesting that a diagnosis which might not even be accurate can so change a person's life? For more on promising cancer cures which are being suppressed by the medical-industrial complex, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.
We’re coming up on the fifth anniversary of Wall Street’s meltdown. Banks have rarely had it this good. Earnings for financials, the second-biggest group in the S&P 500 after technology, soared 26 percent last quarter, more than any other industry, analyst estimates show. Housing is back. The stock market is at an all-time high. Investors are finally wiring in cash. The 25 financial firms in the S&P 500 that have so far reported second-quarter results posted earnings totaling $31.6 billion, exceeding estimates of $29.1 billion, Bloomberg data show. Finance is on track to surpass tech again as the most profitable industry in the country. First-half revenue at the six biggest U.S. banks climbed for the first time in four years. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo reported $43.3 billion in total first-half profit, the most since 2007. The S&P 500 Financials Index is up 26 percent this year, compared with the S&P 500's 18 percent gain. Flush banks cannot sell their bonds fast enough: Almost 60 percent of high-grade debt sales in the U.S. this month are from banks, the biggest ratio in two years, according to Bloomberg. “Banks are somehow making gigatons of money despite onerous new regulations and capital requirements,” writes HuffPo’s Mark Gongloff. “Why, it’s almost like they’re not telling the truth when they warn, repeatedly, that these new rules will destroy their profits and the economy.”
Note: For more on financial corruption, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.
A British university is delaying the release of an academic paper on how the anti-theft systems of millions of Volkswagen vehicles are at risk of being hacked after the German carmaker took legal action against it. In a statement, the University of Birmingham said it would "defer publication" of the paper — which explains how researchers were able to subvert Volkswagen's security system — after an interim injunction issued by England's High Court. It said it was "disappointed with the judgment which did not uphold the defense of academic freedom and public interest, but respects the decision." The paper ... revealed three ways to bypass a brand of computer chip used by several auto manufacturers to fight vehicle theft. Often referred to as immobilizers, such chips use a secret algorithm to ensure that a car can only be started with the right key, and they've been a mandatory in all new vehicles sold in Britain over the past 15 years. Crucially, the researchers planned to reveal how they were able to reverse-engineer the algorithm — and publish a copy of it in their paper. Volkswagen said that publishing the formula would be "highly damaging" and "facilitate theft of cars," according to a ruling handed down last month by High Court Justice Colin Birss. The judge said that millions of Volkswagen vehicles were issued with the chip, including high-end cars such as Porsches, Audis, Bentleys, and Lamborghinis. The researchers countered that Volkswagen's claim that the paper would be a boon to car thieves was overblown, that they had warned the chip's manufacturer about the vulnerability six months ago, and that a gag order would interfere with their legitimate academic work.
Note: For more on corporate corruption, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.
A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its "widest-reaching" system for developing intelligence from the internet. The files shed light on one of Snowden's most controversial statements, made in his first video interview published by the Guardian on June 10. "I, sitting at my desk," said Snowden, could "wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email". Training materials for XKeyscore detail how analysts can use it and other systems to mine enormous agency databases by filling in a simple on-screen form giving only a broad justification for the search. The request is not reviewed by a court or any NSA personnel before it is processed. One presentation claims the program covers "nearly everything a typical user does on the internet", including the content of emails, websites visited and searches, as well as their metadata. Analysts can also use XKeyscore and other NSA systems to obtain ongoing "real-time" interception of an individual's internet activity. XKeyscore provides the technological capability [to target] US persons for extensive electronic surveillance without a warrant provided that some identifying information, such as their email or IP address, is known to the analyst.
Note: For more on government privacy invasions, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.
Glenn Greenwald – the reporter who broke the story about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs – claimed that those NSA programs allowed even low-level analysts to search the private emails and phone calls of Americans. “The NSA has trillions of telephone calls and emails in their databases that they’ve collected over the last several years,” Greenwald told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos. “All an analyst has to do is enter an email address or an IP address, and [the program] searches that database and lets them listen to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you’ve entered.” Greenwald explained that ... these programs still allow analysts to search through data with little court approval or supervision. Greenwald said "these systems allow analysts to listen to whatever emails they want, whatever telephone calls, browsing histories, Microsoft Word documents. And it’s all done with no need to go to a court, with no need to even get supervisor approval on the part of the analyst,” he added. Greenwald said the existence of these analyst search programs are in line with the claims of Edward Snowden, who first leaked details of the NSA’s surveillance programs last month. “It’s an incredibly powerful and invasive tool, exactly of the type that Mr. Snowden described,” Greenwald said. “NSA officials are going to be testifying before the Senate on Wednesday, and I defy them to deny that these programs work exactly as I just said,” Greenwald said.
Note: For more on government privacy invasions, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.
When it comes to foreign policy, war, assassinations, drones, surveillance, secrecy, and civil liberties, President Obama's most stalwart, enthusiastic defenders are often found among the most radical precincts of the Republican Party. The extraordinary events that took place in the House of Representatives [on July 24] are perhaps the most vivid illustration yet of this dynamic. The House voted on an amendment sponsored by Justin Amash, the young Michigan lawyer elected in 2010 as a Tea Party candidate, and co-sponsored by John Conyers, the 24-term senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. The amendment was simple. It would de-fund one single NSA program: the agency's bulk collection of the telephone records of all Americans. The amendment yesterday was defeated. A majority of House Democrats supported the Amash/Conyers amendment, while a majority of Republicans voted against it. As the New York Times put it in its account of yesterday's vote: "Conservative Republicans leery of what they see as Obama administration abuses of power teamed up with liberal Democrats long opposed to intrusive intelligence programs. The Obama administration made common cause with the House Republican leadership to try to block it." The fate of the amendment was sealed when the Obama White House ... announced its vehement opposition to it, and then sent NSA officials to the House to scare members that barring the NSA from collecting all phone records of all Americans would "Help The Terrorists."
Note: For more on government privacy invasions, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.
A former CIA officer has broken the U.S. silence around the 2003 abduction of a radical Islamist cleric in Italy, charging that the agency inflated the threat the preacher posed and that the United States then allowed Italy to prosecute her and other Americans to shield President George W. Bush and other U.S. officials from responsibility for approving the operation. Confirming for the first time that she worked undercover for the CIA in Milan when the operation took place, Sabrina De Sousa provided new details about the “extraordinary rendition” that led to the only criminal prosecution stemming from the secret Bush administration rendition and detention program launched after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The cleric, Osama Mustapha Hassan Nasr, was snatched from a Milan street by a team of CIA operatives and flown to Egypt, where he was held for the better part of four years without charges and allegedly tortured. An Egyptian court in 2007 ruled that his imprisonment was “unfounded” and ordered him released. Among the allegations made by De Sousa in a series of interviews with McClatchy: – The former CIA station chief in Rome, Jeffrey Castelli, whom she called the mastermind of the operation, exaggerated Nasr's terrorist threat to win approval for the rendition and misled his superiors [to believe] that Italian military intelligence had agreed to the operation. – Senior CIA officials, including then-CIA Director George Tenet, approved the operation even though Nasr wasn’t wanted in Egypt and wasn’t on the U.S. list of top al Qaida terrorists. – Condoleezza Rice, then the White House national security adviser, ... agreed to it and recommended that Bush approve the abduction.
Note: For more on the realities of intelligence agency operations, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.
Oil-field services giant Halliburton has agreed to plead guilty to destroying evidence in connection with the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the Justice Department announced. Halliburton has been charged with one count of destruction of evidence in U.S. District Court in New Orleans. Under a plea agreement that is subject to court approval, Halliburton agreed “to pay the maximum-available statutory fine, to be subject to three years of probation and to continue its cooperation in the government’s ongoing criminal investigation,” the Justice Department said. The April 2010 explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig was the largest offshore oil disaster in U.S. history, killing 11 workers and spewing nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the gulf. The Macondo well was owned by a consortium of energy companies, led by BP. Transocean owned the drilling rig that BP was leasing for the venture. Halliburton was contracted by BP to do the cement work on the well. The plea agreement was the third that the Justice Department has obtained in the criminal investigation of the disaster. Transocean agreed to pay $400 million as part of its criminal plea, and BP, $4 billion. A civil suit against the three companies brought by the Justice Department and others is continuing. The Halliburton plea involves the destruction of results of internal tests the company conducted after the drilling rig sank. The Justice Department said, “In agreeing to plead guilty, Halliburton has accepted criminal responsibility for destroying the aforementioned evidence.”
Note: For more on corporate corruption, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.
As the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington approaches ... where Martin Luther King Jr gave his famous "I have a dream" speech, it is important to recall the extent to which King was targeted by the government. The FBI operation against King is one of the most shameful episodes in the long history of our government's persecution of dissenters. In a heavily redacted, classified FBI memo dated 4 January 1956 – just a little more than a month after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger – stated that an agent "had been assigned ... to find out all he could about Reverend Martin L King, colored minister in Montgomery and leader in the bus boycott … to uncover all the derogatory information he could about King." [FBI] director, J Edgar Hoover ... was deploying the vast resources he controlled against any and all perceived critics of the United States. The far-reaching clandestine surveillance, infiltration and disruption operation Hoover ran was dubbed "COINTELPRO", for counterintelligence program. The FBI's COINTELPRO activities ... were thoroughly investigated in 1975 by the Church Committee, [which] reported that the FBI "conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of first amendment rights of speech and association." Among COINTELPRO's perverse activities was an FBI effort to threaten Martin Luther King Jr with exposure of an alleged extramarital affair, including the suggestion, made by the FBI to King, that he avoid embarrassment by killing himself. Deeply concerned about the crackdown on dissent happening under Obama, scholar Cornel West ... wondered if [King] "would not be invited to the very march in his name."
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.
Nat Rothschild, the financier at the centre of allegations that threaten to engulf the shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, is no stranger to laws which forbid politicians from accepting donations from abroad. Political donations from overseas are also illegal in the US, where John McCain's campaign team is under investigation for allegedly accepting a benefit in kind from two mega-rich British citizens, namely Nat Rothschild and his father, Jacob, the Fourth Baron Rothschild. In April, Mr McCain passed through London and spoke at a fund-raising dinner for expatriate Americans, where seats at the cheapest tables cost Ł500 a head. What caught the eye of Judicial Watch, a Washington-based foundation dedicated to combating corruption, was that the event was held "by kind permission of Lord Rothschild and Hon Nathaniel Rothschild" at the family home in Spencer House, St James's, the only privately owned 17th-century palace in central London. The Rothschild family and politics have been intertwined for generations, ever since Nathan Rothschild, who founded the English branch of the family business, financed Britain's war against Napoleon two centuries ago. Serena Rothschild, Nat Rothschild's mother, was one of the largest individual donors to the Conservative Party last year. She gave Ł190,000. She has also helped fund Mr Osborne's office. When another member of the clan, Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, married the New York businesswoman Lynn Forester, they spent the night of their wedding dinner in the White House as guests of Bill Clinton. Lady Rothschild was a fund-raiser for the Democrats. So it is nothing new for a Rothschild to be mixing with prominent politicians.
Note: For more on secrecy in high places, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.
Evolution does not favour selfish people, according to new research. This challenges a previous theory which suggested it was preferable to put yourself first. Instead, it pays to be co-operative, shown in a model of "the prisoner's dilemma", a scenario of game theory - the study of strategic decision-making. Published in Nature Communications, the team says their work shows that exhibiting only selfish traits would have made us become extinct. The eminent mathematician John Nash showed that the optimum strategy was not to co-operate in the prisoner's dilemma game. "For many years, people have asked that if he [Nash] is right, then why do we see co-operation in the animal kingdom, in the microbial world and in humans," said lead author Christoph Adami of Michigan State University. The answer, he explained, was that communication was not previously taken into account. Prof Andrew Coleman from Leicester University explains that this new work suggests that co-operation helps a group evolve. "The two prisoners that are interrogated are not allowed to talk to each other. If they did they would make a pact and be free within a month. But if they were not talking to each other, the temptation would be to rat the other out. Being mean can give you an advantage on a short timescale but certainly not in the long run - you would go extinct." Crucially, in an evolutionary environment, knowing your opponent's decision would not be advantageous for long because your opponent would evolve the same recognition mechanism to also know you, Dr Adami explained. This is exactly what his team found, that any advantage from [selfishness] was short-lived.
Note: For a treasure trove of great news articles which will inspire you to make a difference, click here.
On May 25, 1948, a former United States Army flier entered the American Embassy in Paris, renounced his American citizenship and, as astonished officials looked on, declared himself a citizen of the world. In the decades that followed ... he remained by choice a stateless man — entering, leaving, being regularly expelled from and frequently arrested in a spate of countries, carrying a passport of his own devising, as the international news media chronicled his every move. His rationale was simple, his aim immense: if there were no nation-states, he believed, there would be no wars. Garry Davis, a longtime peace advocate, former Broadway song-and-dance man and self-declared World Citizen No. 1, who is widely regarded as the dean of the One World movement, a quest to erase national boundaries that today has nearly a million adherents worldwide, died ... in Williston, Vt. He was 91. He continued to occupy the singular limbo between citizen and alien that he had cheerfully inhabited for 65 years. Mr. Davis was not the first person to declare himself a world citizen, but he was inarguably the most visible, most vocal and most indefatigable. The One World model has had its share of prominent adherents, among them Albert Schweitzer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Einstein and E. B. White. But where most advocates have been content to write and lecture, Mr. Davis was no armchair theorist: 60 years ago, he established the World Government of World Citizens, a self-proclaimed international governmental body. To date, more than 2.5 million World Government documents have been issued.
Note: For a treasure trove of great news articles which will inspire you to make a difference, click here.
Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber is ... explaining the raft of education and healthcare reforms he’s pushing. It’s mid-February. The next week, the governor will receive notice that his state is one of six to be awarded a prestigious State Innovation Model grant, worth up to $45 million. Oregon received the grant because of the reforms Kitzhaber’s administration has pushed regarding delivery of medical services. Kitzhaber has particular credibility on these issues: he’s not only a three-time governor but a former legislator and emergency-room doctor. He has earned a national reputation for thinking holistically. Only slightly tongue-in-cheek, Kitzhaber [discussed] his grandiosely named Unified Theory of Everything. For Kitzhaber, poverty and ill health are too often the result of inadequate education; fixing these problems is what he calls the “left side” of his unified theory. On the right side, he talks about the need to invest in clean technologies and renewables, to open routes to prosperity that neither denude the environment nor leave millions unemployed. Over the past two years, Kitzhaber has focused mainly on the left side of his equation, pushing through the Oregon legislature—which was almost evenly split between Republicans and Democrats from 2011 to 2012—an extraordinary raft of reforms. The pathway up is early childhood—making sure that every child arrives at the classroom in kindergarten ready to learn.” Kitzhaber has pushed the legislature to spend more on education in a drive to improve poorly performing schools.
Note: For a treasure trove of great news articles which will inspire you to make a difference, click here.
Bhutan plans to become the first country in the world to turn its agriculture completely organic, banning the sales of pesticides and herbicides and relying on its own animals and farm waste for fertilisers. But rather than accept that this will mean farmers of the small Himalayan kingdom of around 1.2m people ... will be able to grow less food, the government expects them to be able to grow more – and to export increasing amounts of high quality niche foods to neighbouring India, China and other countries. The decision to go organic was both practical and philosophical, said [Pema Gyamtsho, Bhutan's minister of agriculture and forests]. "Ours is a mountainous terrain. When we use chemicals they don't stay where we use them, they impact the water and plants. We say that we need to consider all the environment. Most of our farm practices are traditional farming, so we are largely organic anyway. But we are Buddhists, too, and we believe in living in harmony with nature. Animals have the right to live, we like to to see plants happy and insects happy," he said. Gyamtsho, like most members of the cabinet, is a farmer himself, coming from Bumthang in central Bhutan but studying western farming methods in New Zealand and Switzerland. "Going organic will take time," he said. "We have set no deadline. We cannot do it tomorrow. Instead we will achieve it region by region and crop by crop." Gyamtsho [says] Bhutan's future depends largely on how it responds to interlinked development challenges like climate change, and food and energy security.
Note: Bhutan is also the country which has pioneered Gross National Happiness (GNH) as a more appropriate measure of economic growth than GNP. For more on this, click here. For a treasure trove of great news articles which will inspire you to make a difference, click here.
On Feb. 5, 1971, Edgar Mitchell became the sixth of only 12 men to step on the moon. Of that elite dozen, ... Mitchell is the only one to go on record about his controversial belief in extraterrestrial UFOs -- and of a possible government cover-up. While on active duty as a test pilot for the U.S. Navy, he completed an M.S. in aeronautical engineering at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and a doctorate in aeronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mitchell also served in combat during the Korean War as a fighter pilot. In 1970, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. After retiring from NASA in 1972, he founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences. [Q]: You’re ... known for your views on UFOs. What’s your experience regarding the Roswell, New Mexico, incident of 1947? Mitchell: After my space flight, I was contacted by descendants of the original Roswell observers, including the person who delivered the child-sized coffins to the Air Force [alleged] to contain alien bodies. They all seemed credible with their stories that the bodies found were alien. [Q.]: If that’s the case, why has it been hushed up? Mitchell: Initially I think there was justification in that leadership officials thought people weren’t ready to handle it. But we are well past that now. But it’s not just military. It’s a cabal of organizations primarily for a profit motive. Think of what that could mean in terms of space travel with control of UFO machinery, technology. There’s a lot of money involved.
Note: For Mercury and Gemini astronaut Gordon Cooper on his personal experience with UFOs, click here. Edgar Mitchell wrote The Way of the Explorer to document his experiences with mysticism and space. For a more detailed description of his thoughts on UFOs, click here and here. For other reliable information on UFOs and the related cover-up, see our UFO Information Center available here.
[There is] a growing debate over a little-known but increasingly important piece of equipment buried deep inside a car: the event data recorder, more commonly known as the black box. About 96 percent of all new vehicles sold in the United States have the boxes, and in September 2014, if the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has its way, all will have them. Data stored in the devices is increasingly being used to identify safety problems in cars and as evidence in traffic accidents and criminal cases. And the trove of data inside the boxes has raised privacy concerns, including questions about who owns the information, and what it can be used for, even as critics have raised questions about its reliability. To consumer advocates, the data is only the latest example of governments and companies having too much access to private information. Once gathered, they say, the data can be used against car owners, to find fault in accidents or in criminal investigations. “These cars are equipped with computers that collect massive amounts of data,” said Khaliah Barnes of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based consumer group. “Without protections, it can lead to all kinds of abuse.” In [14] states, lawyers may subpoena the data for criminal investigations and civil lawsuits, making the information accessible to third parties, including law enforcement or insurance companies that could cancel a driver’s policy or raise a driver’s premium based on the recorder’s data.
Note: For more on government and corporate privacy invasions, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.
A video made by 11 year-old Yemeni girl Nada Al-Adhal speaking about child marriage has gone viral. After it was translated and posted on YouTube, over seven million have watched Al-Adhal petition against the widespread practice of forced child marriages which led her to flee her family, and which, according to her powerful appeal, leads to the suicides of children all over Yemen. “Go ahead and marry me off. I’ll kill myself, just like that”, she says in a message to her parents. “I’m better off dead”. Twenty years after the Convention on the Rights of the Child passed through the UN, envisioning a future in which all children have the right to be safeguarded against violence, exploitation and abuse, Al-Adhal’s campaign against child marriage is only one example of children around the world speaking out against continuing violations against their human rights. In 2009 Manan Ansari, a young child labour activist from Jharkhand, [India] spoke at the International Labour Conference about his experiences as a child working in the mica mines of the region, and his work to free children from the dangers of the labour and give them access to school education. Last October Pakistani activist and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Malala Yousafzai made world news when she was shot by the Taliban for championing education for girls. Since her recovery she has been hailed as a hero and an inspiration for her perseverance, telling world leaders in her speech at the United Nations on her 16th birthday; “they thought that the bullet would silence us. But they failed”.
Note: The moving, three-minute video of this brave 11-year-old girl can be viewed at this link.
Exclusive audio obtained by The Nation of a stop-and-frisk carried out by the New York Police Department freshly reveals the discriminatory and unprofessional way in which this controversial policy is being implemented on the city’s streets. On June 3, 2011, three plainclothes New York City Police officers stopped a Harlem teenager named Alvin. Two of the officers questioned and frisked him while the third remained in their unmarked car. Alvin secretly captured the interaction on his cell phone, and the resulting audio is one of the only known recordings of stop-and-frisk in action. In the course of the two-minute recording, the officers give no legally valid reason for the stop, use racially charged language and threaten Alvin with violence. Early in the stop, one of the officers asks, “You want me to smack you?” When Alvin asks why he is being threatened with arrest, the other officer responds, “For being a fucking mutt.” Later in the stop, while holding Alvin’s arm behind his back, the first officer says, “Dude, I’m gonna break your fuckin’ arm, then I’m gonna punch you in the fuckin’ face.” Alvin’s treatment at the hands of the officers may be disturbing but it is not uncommon. According to their own stop-and-frisk data, the NYPD stops more than 1,800 New Yorkers a day. A New York Times analysis recently determined that more than 20 percent of those stops involve the use of force. And these are only the numbers that the Department records. Anecdotal evidence suggests both figures are much higher.
Note: For more on civil liberties issues, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.
CNBC’s BRIAN SULLIVAN: Is there anyone else in the Senate that is a professor? ELIZABETH WARREN: I don't think so. ... We had the big crash in 2008. What does everyone say about it? They say too much concentration in financial services creates too big to fail. It puts us at bigger risk. And what's happened since 2008? The four biggest financial institutions are now 30% bigger than they were in 2008. The central premise behind a 21st century Glass-Steagall is to say if you want to get out there and take risks, go ahead and do it. But ... you can't get access to FDIC insured deposits when you do. That way ... at least one portion of our banking sector stays safe. From 1797 to 1933, the American banking system crashed about every 15 years. In 1933, we put good reforms in place, for which Glass-Steagall was the centerpiece, and from 1933 to the early 1980s, that’s a 50 year period, we didn’t have any of that – none. We kept the system steady and secure. And it was only as we started deregulating, [you hit] the S&L crisis, and what did we do? We deregulated some more. And then you hit long-term capital management at the end of the 90s, and what did we do as a country? This country continued to deregulate more. And then we hit the big crash in 2008. You are not going to defend the proposition that regulation can never work, it did work. SULLIVAN: I didn’t say regulation never worked, Senator. By far and away, and I agree, there were fewer bank failures in that time after Glass-Steagall. ELIZABETH WARREN: “Fewer,” as in, of the big ones, zero.
Note: Sen. Warren is one of the few bright lights in Congress. Watch this interview to see why. To read about later censorship of this interview by NBC, click here.
Dozens of companies, non-profits and trade organizations including Apple, Google, and Facebook sent a letter [on July 18] pushing the Obama administration and Congress for more disclosures on the government's national security-related requests for user data. Together with LinkedIn, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Twitter and many others, the companies asked for more transparency of secret data gathering in the letter. Tech companies have been scrambling to assert their independence after documents leaked last month by former U.S. security contractor Edward Snowden suggested they had given the government direct access to their computers as part of the NSA's secret surveillance program called Prism. The classified nature of the data gathering has barred the participating companies from disclosing even their involvement, let alone the content of the requests. Some companies, including Facebook and Apple, in June struck an agreement with the government to release some information about the number of surveillance requests they receive. But they were limited to disclosing aggregate government requests for data without showing the split between surveillance and criminal requests, and only for a six-month period.
Note: For more on government and corporate privacy invasions, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.
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.