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Bold and Daring: The Way Progressive News Should Be
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Kudos to Wal Brasch for winning recognition for his journalistic work.
He's part of an extraordinary editorial team.
Support Opednews, so we can keep doing the work we do. Click here to donate today.
thanks,
rob kall
  Daily Headlines
By Walter Brasch
OEN editor wins major journalism awards An OEN senior editor and columnist won several awards from journalism organizations for his work in 2012.
Officials
in Ohio are warning Buckeye State consumers that "insurers expect the
cost to cover healthcare expenses for consumers will significantly
increase." Never mind that their predictions are based on what insurers
have told them their "costs" will be--not on the actual premiums they
plan to charge.
Edward
Snowden's disclosures, the New York Times reported on Sunday , "have
renewed a longstanding concern: that young Internet aficionados whose
skills the agencies need for counterterrorism and cyberdefense sometimes
bring an anti-authority spirit that does not fit the security
bureaucracy."
It's
depressing that America keeps going around the world fomenting war,
chaos, bloodshed, instability and ruin, bankrupting its own people in
the process while stuffing the pockets of war profiteers. And depressing
too that none of our presidents apparently have the power to stop this
from happening. They are all "hemmed in by circumstances," by the
American military empire.
We're
told that our children are citizens of a great, powerful, and
democratic nation. Their education must be equal to those claims. They
should be prepared to assume the full rights and duties of citizenship,
prepared to determine their society's fate. The System may not want that
kind of education for our children. But we do. That's why we have a
democracy.
By Dave Lefcourt
Snowden's Whistleblowing of NSA Creating "worldwide debate" according to Glenn Greenwald 
Ed
Snowden, the systems administrator who we now know worked for private
contractor Booz Allen Hamilton on a secret NSA surveillance project is
so computer competent his whistleblowing of the NSA's secret data mining
surveillance operations are posing an existential threat to the whole
NSA type surveillance edifice. It's causing worldwide debate & not a
minute too soon.
By Josh Mitteldorf
Invasion of Syria: following a plan laid out in 2001 We are told that America has a "peacekeeping" role in Syria, and that Pres Assad is a rogue criminal. Three things I've read this week suggest that this war was planned and prepared in 2001, that Obama and Bush were both just puppets following through on policies made by a shadow government that took over after 9/11, and that the "news" we hear now is nothing more than PR that is supposed to help us swallow this abomination.
What number of people should we aim for to inhabit Earth? This article argues for a large number, but with a simple caveat...
By Thomas Farrell
What's Wrong with the Cathoic Anti-Abortion Crusade? Peter Steinfels undertakes to reexamine the Catholic anti-abortion crusade in the U.S. He claims to hold that the unborn offspring of human beings constitutes an individual member of the human species that deserve the same protections from harm and destruction that are owed to born humans. But he recognizes that this position "is nowhere near as obvious as many of us who hold it suppose. So what does he propose?
in
a riveting interview, I talk with Scahill about Obama's murders, his
assassination diplomacy, Training troops for repression in foreign
lands, Murder Inc., the more dangerous aspect of the Obama presidency,
Liberals on shaky ground, being killed for what you might become-- a
"grotesque form of pre-crime.
In
1997, Jang reported in Science the anti-cancer effects of Resveratrol,
present in grapes and berries, which then became the focus for interest
as an anti-cancer agent.
The
faces of more than 120 million people are in searchable photo databases
that state officials assembled to prevent driver's-license fraud but
that increasingly are used by police to identify suspects, accomplices
and even innocent bystanders in a wide range of criminal investigations.
As the databases grow larger and increasingly connected across
jurisdictional boundaries, critics warn that authorities are developing
what amounts to a national identification system -- based on the
distinct geography of each human face.
This
article questions the health of the health system. Are we truly
receiving the care we need? Do we need to adapt a new approach, perhaps
a health approach rather than one that is based on sickness? The
article tells a story regarding the author's health in relationship to
alternative health care.
The
results of their study confirm that oceans are good at balancing the
nitrogen cycle on a global scale. But the data also shows that it is a
slow process that may take many centuries, or even millennia, raising
worries about the effects of the scale and speed of current changes in
the ocean.
Consumer Alert: Secret Trade Agreements Threaten Food Safety, Subvert Democracy
If you think the US government is doing a sub-par job of keeping your food safe, brace yourself.You could soon be eating imported seafood, beef or chicken products that don't meet even basic US food safety standards. Under two new trade agreements, currently in negotiation, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) could be powerless to shut down imports of unsafe food or food ingredients. And if it tries, multinational corporations will be able to sue the US government for the loss of anticipated future profits.More frightening? Negotiations for both agreements are taking place behind closed doors, with input allowed almost exclusively from the corporations and industry trade groups that stand to benefit the most. And the Obama Administration intends to push the agreements through Congress without so much as giving lawmakers access to draft texts, much less the opportunity for debate
US
allies have been pushing the US and Obama in particular towards this
decision. Obama has been under pressure domestically as well. In the
past week, former President Clinton's comments describing Obama as a
"fool" if he didn't intervene in Syria really hurt Obama's pride, and
it's possible he made this decision against the background of both
domestic and foreign pressures.
Ecuador's
foreign minister has arrived in Britain for talks with William Hague
over the future of the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, who has been
confined to the Ecuadorean embassy in London for almost a year. Ricardo
Patino met Assange on Sunday and will meet Hague on Monday. On Wednesday
it will be one year since the WikiLeaks founder walked into the embassy
in Knightsbridge in an attempt to avoid extradition to Sweden.
Daniel
Ellsberg, Mark Felt, Jeffrey Wigand, Sherron Watkins, Bradley Manning,
and now" Edward Snowden. (He's just the latest informant caught in the
web of government administrations that view George Orwell's 1984 as an
operations manual.) But while the list of government (and corporate)
whistleblowers continues to grow, their options for leaking continue to
shrink. It is, as one commenter noted, "a dangerous time to be right
when the government is wrong."
Dick
Cheney staunchly defended the NSA surveillance programs started under
his tenure as Vice President, telling Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday
that the programs could have stopped 9/11 had they been in effect, and
that Edward Snowden was a traitor for revealing the information and
fleeing to China. Cheney believes the government was justified in
expanding the scope of surveillance to all phone metadata, even of
people not suspected of crimes, claiming that wartime footing allows
additional national security measures.
Naomi's
unprincipled libel of Edward Snowden, suggesting he might be a 'double
agent' working for the NSA, is as scurrilous as it is moronic, says
TCBH! journalist Dave Lindorff, who says she should apologize and donate
to his defense fund.
Latest Articles Best News Links from the Web
Paul Krugman: Fight the Future
Republicans in Congress have voted 37 times to repeal health care reform, President Obama’s signature policy achievement. Do you really expect those same Republicans to reach a deal with the president over the nation’s fiscal future, which is closely linked to the future of federal health programs? Even if such a deal were somehow reached, do you really believe that the GOP would honor that deal if and when it regained the White House? When will we be ready for a long-run fiscal deal? My answer is, once voters have spoken decisively in favor of one or the other of the rival visions driving our current political polarization. Maybe President Hillary Clinton, fresh off her upset victory in the 2018 midterms, will be able to broker a long-run budget compromise with chastened Republicans; or maybe demoralized Democrats will sign on to President Paul Ryan’s plan to privatize Medicare...
Republicans
in Congress have voted 37 times to repeal health care reform, President
Obama's signature policy achievement. Do you really expect those same
Republicans to reach a deal with the president over the nation's fiscal
future, which is closely linked to the future of federal health
programs? Even if such a deal were somehow reached, do you really
believe that the G.O.P. would honor that deal if and when it regained
the White House?
In
harsh and undiplomatic language, Mr Putin accused the UK and other
Western powers of attempting to arm rebels who "kill their enemies and
eat their organs." When he was asked by British journalists about
comments by Mr Cameron last year -- that those supporting President
Assad had the blood of Syrian children on their hands -- he reacted
angrily. He said: "One does not need to support people who not only kill
their enemies, but open up their bodies, eat their intestines in front
of the public and cameras. Are these the people you want to support?
The
chief architect of Booz Allen's cyberstrategy is Mike McConnell, who
once led the NSA. and pushed the United States into a new era of big
data espionage. Booz Allen is one of many companies that make up the
digital spine of the intelligence world, designing the software and
hardware systems on which the NSA and other military and intelligence
agencies depend. By Friday, shares of Booz Allen had slid nearly 6
percent since Edward Snowden's security leaks. And a new job posting
appeared on its Web site for a systems administrator in Hawaii, "secret
clearance required."
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