This infographic created by Jason at Frugal Dad shows that almost all media comes from the same six sources.

That's consolidated from 50 companies back in 1983.

NOTE: This infographic is from last year and is missing some key transactions. GE does not own NBC (or Comcast or any media) anymore. So that 6th company is now Comcast. And Time Warner doesn't own AOL, so Huffington Post isn't affiliated with them.

London, United Kingdom - This is a tale of two countries. One of them, Iceland, has a population of around 320,000 people. That's about as many people as live in Lubbock, Texas. The other, the Republic of Ireland, is a fair bit bigger, with a population of 4.6 million. That's about as many as live in South Carolina.

In the years before 2008, both countries had been hosts to unsustainable real estate and consumer booms. And in both countries a lightly regulated financial sector ran out of control. Iceland's big three banks - Glitnir, Kaupthing and Landsbanki - had lent out more than US $200 billion, eleven times the country's GDP. Ireland's banks were holding assets of around seven times GDP on their books. Much of the money had been lent abroad.

When the financial crisis hit in the last months of 2008 the two countries reacted very differently. Iceland's former prime minister, Davio Oddsson, explained that the recently privatised banks had been 'a little heedless' and the state wasn't going to bail them out. Domestic deposits were protected but the government refused to take responsibility for vast bulk of the losses. In Ireland, on the other hand, the government transformed a banking crisis into a sovereign debt crisis. Politicians decided that the banks were too big to fail and spared no expense in their efforts to save them.

A chart we found on Reddit.com today shows that most products we buy are controlled by just a few companies. It's called "The Illusion of Choice."

Ever wonder why you can't get a Coke at Taco Bell? It's because Yum! Brands was created as a spin-off of Pepsi--and has a lifetime contract with the soda-maker.

The media have been too passive when it comes to Syrian opposition sources, without scrutinising their backgrounds and their political connections. Time for a closer look ...

A nightmare is unfolding across Syria, in the homes of al-Heffa and the streets of Houla. And we all know how the story ends: with thousands of soldiers and civilians killed, towns and families destroyed, and President Assad beaten to death in a ditch.

This is the story of the Syrian war, but there is another story to be told. A tale less bloody, but nevertheless important. This is a story about the storytellers: the spokespeople, the "experts on Syria", the "democracy activists". The statement makers. The people who "urge" and "warn" and "call for action".

It's a tale about some of the most quoted members of the Syrian opposition and their connection to the Anglo-American opposition creation business. The mainstream news media have, in the main, been remarkably passive when it comes to Syrian sources: billing them simply as "official spokesmen" or "pro-democracy campaigners" without, for the most part, scrutinising their statements, their backgrounds or their political connections.

Protesters threw tomatoes and shoes at Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's motorcade on Sunday during her first visit to Egypt since the election of Islamist President Mohamed Mursi. A tomato struck an Egyptian official in the face, and shoes and a water bottle landed near the armored cars carrying Clinton's delegation in the port city of Alexandria after she gave a speech on democratic rights.

A senior U.S. official said neither Clinton nor her vehicle, which was around the corner from the incident, were hit by the projectiles, which were thrown as U.S. officials and reporters walked to the motorcade after her speech.

Protesters chanted "Monica, Monica," a reference to the extra-marital affair conducted by Clinton's husband, former President Bill Clinton, while in the White House. Others earlier chanted "leave, Clinton" an Egyptian security official said.

When there's money, there's a house, and when there's a settlement, there's a land, recalled the Israeli government and quietly granted more subsidies to build over 500 new homes in the West Bank.

­This is how Tel Aviv secretly backtracked earlier this year on a promise to deny these incentives to the settlements, as the Associated Press has found out.

The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying, quite clearly, to ensure the support of the settlers, but the move may well backfire on him. The planned construction has infuriated the Palestinians and it could cloud the visit by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who arrived in Israel late on Sunday to try to revive the Middle East peace efforts.

We condition the poor and the working class to go to war. We promise them honor, status, glory, and adventure. We promise boys they will become men. We hold these promises up against the dead-end jobs of small-town life, the financial dislocations, credit card debt, bad marriages, lack of health insurance, and dread of unemployment. The military is the call of the Sirens, the enticement that has for generations seduced young Americans working in fast food restaurants or behind the counters of Walmarts to fight and die for war profiteers and elites.

The poor embrace the military because every other cul-de-sac in their lives breaks their spirit and their dignity. Pick up Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front or James Jones's From Here to Eternity. Read Henry IV. Turn to the Iliad. The allure of combat is a trap, a ploy, an old, dirty game of deception in which the powerful, who do not go to war, promise a mirage to those who do.

I saw this in my own family. At the age of ten I was given a scholarship to a top New England boarding school. I spent my adolescence in the schizophrenic embrace of the wealthy, on the playing fields and in the dorms and classrooms that condition boys and girls for privilege, and came back to my working-class relations in the depressed former mill towns in Maine. I traveled between two universes: one where everyone got chance after chance after chance, where connections and money and influence almost guaranteed that you would not fail; the other where no one ever got a second try. I learned at an early age that when the poor fall no one picks them up, while the rich stumble and trip their way to the top.

Christine Lagarde and Nicolas Sarkozy were embroiled in a new corruption inquiry on Sunday over the awarding of Legion d'Honneur for political favours.

The pair already face allegations that Miss Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), authorised a £270 million payout to a prominent supporter of the former French president when she was his finance minister.

Now, they face a separate inquiry in a row over the amount of compensation that Mr Sarkozy's government should have paid following the collapse of Itea, an insurance company, in 2009.

A cursory glance at recent media reporting exposes the important issues we Americans are most concerned about - the looming presidential election, our long-suffering economic condition, the Penn State scandal and Tom and Katie's break up. If you're interested in our military's involvement in Afghanistan, our successes and failures, the names of those killed, etc., then you'll have to search more aggressively. The fact is, America's media, and perhaps the American people, have generally lost interest in the decade-long war.

There is however one story about the war that recently made headlines. Time magazine's July 23, 2012 cover read, "ONE A DAY: Every day, one U.S. soldier commits suicide. Why the military can't defeat its most insidious enemy," by Mark Thompson and Nancy Gibbs. Time's story shared the secret, "More U.S. military personnel have died by suicide since the war in Afghanistan began, than those who have died during combat. The rate jumped 80% from 2004 to 2008, and while it leveled off in 2010 and 2011, it has soared 18% this year. Suicide has passed road accidents as the leading non­combat cause of death among U.S. troops."

Compare the rate of suicide among our service members to the national average and you shouldn't be surprised. As reported by FT.com in 2010, an internal U.S. Army report revealed "160 active duty soldiers took their lives in the 2009 fiscal year, putting the Army suicide rate at a record 20.2 per 100,000, exceeding the national average of 19.2..." And that trend isn't new. According to a March 2011 Examiner.com story, "As of 2008, the suicide rate in the military has surpassed that of the civilian population, and it has steadily increased since that time. Before the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts began in 2001, the rate was rarely over 10 per 100,000."

But here is the part that may surprise you. As the Time article continued, "[n]early a third of the suicides from 2005 to 2010 were among troops who had never been deployed; 43% had deployed only once. Only 8.5% had deployed three or four times." This is of course sad and tragic. And as this information suggests, we can't just write off these suicides as a post-traumatic stress-induced epidemic. No, there's something else here.

A wide-ranging surveillance operation by the Food and Drug Administration against a group of its own scientists used an enemies list of sorts as it secretly captured thousands of e-mails that the disgruntled scientists sent privately to members of Congress, lawyers, labor officials, journalists and even President Obama, previously undisclosed records show.

What began as a narrow investigation into the possible leaking of confidential agency information by five scientists quickly grew in mid-2010 into a much broader campaign to counter outside critics of the agency's medical review process, according to the cache of more than 80,000 pages of computer documents generated by the surveillance effort.

Moving to quell what one memorandum called the "collaboration" of the F.D.A.'s opponents, the surveillance operation identified 21 agency employees, Congressional officials, outside medical researchers and journalists thought to be working together to put out negative and "defamatory" information about the agency.

F.D.A. officials defended the surveillance operation, saying that the computer monitoring was limited to the five scientists suspected of leaking confidential information about the safety and design of medical devices.