The media and THE real news

Ruling the world
Iran denies that it is pursuing the bomb, and its top authorities state that Islam forbids nuclear weapons. Frequent inspections by the IAEA have not turned up diversion of any nuclear material, though the UN agency says Iran has not yet fully cooperated in clarifying past design issues.
The new task for negotiators will be creating confidence where little exists, and amid tense rhetoric. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) of South Carolina in November explicitly called for the military annihilation of Iran's regime, while Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused the West of "thinking as aggressors," adding, "No embargoes can change the Iranian people."
CSM, 12/6/10
___________________________
On the crash of the Concorde AND the death of Democracy
Before the verdict, FENVAC, a French association that represents victims of accidents that is a civil party in the case, said the court owed it to those who died to determine the truth.
During the trial, it has been "striking and shocking to see how the defendants were determined to avoid or play down any responsibility, citing probabilities, nuances of terminology, failing memory, obscure rules and other means of artifice," the group said in a statement Friday.
________________________________
From a respondent

I'm amazed at all the outrage over a website [WikeLeaks] that simply published the truth.
______________________________

Report on business profits—most on record
According to the Washington Post, recent government indicators show that: *Even as conditions are likely to remain miserable for job seekers for years to come, an extraordinary bounce-back is underway in the nation's corporate sector, with profits rebounding 28 percent over the past year to an all-time high in the third quarter.
The evidence shows that the wealthiest sectors of American society have come out of the recession in an even more advantageous position, while the pain of "structural adjustment" will continue well into the future for the less fortunate sectors of society. In effect, the dubious competence, fraud and mismanagement of Wall Street has resulted in the federal government's bankrolling of the financial sector's return to an obscene level of prosperity in the short-term, creating the impression of a society running amok on corruption. The downside of this "upturn" is long-term damage to the wider society, including a real estate crisis that has yet to manifest its full impact, projections of high levels of unemployment and depressed wages across the wider society and threats to a wide range of services that will further strip the limited social safety net that America provides its beleaguered citizens.
http://www.truth-out.org/revisiting-politics-social-change65550
___________________________
* From a respondent
Median Wage for 2009
It would have been more informative if you had told people the MEDIAN wage for 2009: about $26,200. HALF of the wage earners in the country make less than that and have to get by on that.
Oh, and the professional Democrats have more in common (and make more common cause) with the professional Republicans than they do with the people making less than the median wage.
_____________________

Businesses' spending on compensation for employees, by contrast, rose only 7.6 percent.
*Among the reasons for the strong earnings growth were that financial companies are no longer suffering from massive write-downs on bad investments, as they were in 2008, and profits from U.S. firms doing business overseas have shot up. [2]
And, according to The New York Times:
*The nation's workers may be struggling, but American companies just had their best quarter ever. American businesses earned profits at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion in the third quarter, according to a Commerce Department report released November 23, 2010. That is the highest figure recorded since the government began keeping track over 60 years ago, at least in nominal or noninflation-adjusted terms.[3]
_________________________________

Government purpose—lead the public to serve its purposes
Despite sustained denials by US officials spanning more than a year, US military Special Operations Forces have been conducting offensive operations inside Pakistan, helping direct US drone strikes and conducting joint operations with Pakistani forces against Al Qaeda and Taliban forces in north and south Waziristan and elsewhere in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, according to secret cables released as part of the Wikileaks document dump. According to an October 9, 2009 cable classified by Anne Patterson, the US ambassador to Pakistan, the operations were "almost certainly [conducted] with the personal consent of [Pakistan's] Chief of Army Staff General Kayani." The operations were coordinated with the US Office of the Defense Representative in Pakistan. A US special operations source told The Nation that the US forces described in the cable as "SOC(FWD)-PAK" were "forward operating troops" from the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the most elite force within the US military made up of Navy SEALs, Delta Force and Army Rangers.
The cables also confirm aspects of a Nation story from November 2009, "The Secret US War in Pakistan," which detailed offensive combat operations by JSOC in Pakistan. In response to the Nation story, Pentagon spokesperson Geoff Morrell called it "conspiratorial" and explicitly denied that US special operations forces were doing anything other than "training" in Pakistan.
___________________________