Project Censored's top 25 stories profiled Mondays

Project Censored's top 25 stories profiled Mondays
September 1999

Every Monday at 12:10, WUFT-FM (Classic 89) is broadcasting a five minute profile of one of the top 25 censored stories of 1998. The brief radio pieces are produced by Project Censored, which every year identifies the top stories censored stories from the mainstream media. In March, 1999 they identified the top censored stories of 1998. The stories included:

1. Secret International Trade Agreement Undermines the Sovereignty of Nations. The Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) threatens to undermine the sovereignty of nations as it reassigns cultural, environmental and human rights to foreign corporations.

2.Pharmaceutical companies are profiting from breast cancer by selling known carcinogens on the one hand, and then the "cures" for the resulting cancers on the other.

3. The USDA patent gives back 5 percent royalties of its net sales to the government agency when the seed is commercialized.

4. U.S. government regulatory agencies and the radioactive scrap metal industry are calling for a relaxation in present standards for "decontaminated" radioactive metal which already are lax enough to allow low levels of radioactivity in items as intimate as spoons, dental fillings and IUDs.

5. U. S. Weapons of Mass Destruction Linked to the Deaths of a Half a Million Children. The U.S. war against Iraq is taking its toll not on its leader but on its people. Sanctions are causing critical shortages, abandoned depleted uranium weapons are causing sharp rises in birth defects and cancer, and, as it turns out, U.S. firms supplied some of the very biological material now being sought by U.N. inspection teams.

6. United States Nuclear Program Subverts U.N.'s Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. U.S. "virtual" testing of nuclear weapons spurs on the continued development of new weapons, stalling the drive toward world-wide disarmament.

7. Gene Transfers Linked to Dangerous New Diseases. Genetic engineering is becoming increasingly suspect as a cause in the resurgence and emergence of life threatening diseases.

8. Catholic Hospital Mergers Threaten Reproductive Rights for Women. Mergers with secular hospitals have made the Catholic Church the largest private health care provider in the nation, restricting or eliminating in vitro fertilization, fetal tissue experimentation, assisted suicide, and women's access to reproductive health care in communities throughout the United States.

9. U. S. Tax Dollars Support Death Squads in Chiapas. Mexican paramilitary units trained in the United States by Special Forces and the CIA with drug-war money are committing "gross human rights violations" in their drive to suppress democratic Mexican resistance fighters.

10. Environmental Student Activists Gunned Down on Chevron Oil Facility in Nigeria. Nigerian soldiers, helicoptered by Chevron employees, gunned down student demonstrators gathered to peacefully oppose Chevron's environmental destruction of the Niger Delta wetlands.