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Media Articles
Excerpts of Key Media Articles in Major Media


Below are key excerpts of highly revealing media articles from the major media. Links are provided to the full articles on their media websites. If any link fails to function, read this webpage. These media articles are listed in reverse date order. You can also explore the articles listed by order of importance or by date posted. By choosing to educate ourselves and to spread the word, we can build a brighter future.

Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.


Uninsured trauma patients are much more likely to die
2009-11-17, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-trauma-uninsured17-2009...

Patients who lack health insurance are more likely to die from car accidents and other traumatic injuries than people who belong to a health plan -- even though emergency rooms are required to care for all comers regardless of ability to pay. An analysis of 687,091 patients who visited trauma centers nationwide from 2002 to 2006 found that the odds of dying from injuries were almost twice as high for the uninsured than for patients with private insurance, researchers reported in Archives of Surgery. The research team from Harvard University and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston used information from 1,154 U.S. hospitals that contribute to the National Trauma Data Bank. The risk of death was 80% higher for patients without any insurance, the report said. The researchers also did a separate analysis of 209,702 trauma patients ages 18 to 30 because they were less likely to have chronic health conditions that might complicate recovery. Among these younger patients, the risk of death was 89% higher for the uninsured, the study found.

Note: For many highly informative reports on important health issues, click here.


Biotech crops cause big jump in pesticide use
2009-11-17, Reuters News
http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE5AG0QY20091117

The rapid adoption by U.S. farmers of genetically engineered corn, soybeans and cotton has promoted increased use of pesticides, an epidemic of herbicide-resistant weeds and more chemical residues in foods, according to a report ... by health and environmental protection groups. The groups said research showed that herbicide use grew by 383 million pounds from 1996 to 2008, with 46 percent of the total increase occurring in 2007 and 2008. The report was released by nonprofits The Organic Center (TOC), the Union for Concerned Scientists (UCS) and the Center for Food Safety (CFS). The groups said that [there is] a net overall increase on U.S. farm fields of 318 million pounds of pesticides, which includes insecticides and herbicides, over the first 13 years of commercial use. The rise in herbicide use comes as U.S. farmers increasingly adopt corn, soy and cotton that have been engineered with traits that allow them to tolerate dousings of weed killer. The report by the environmental groups states that a key problem resulting from the increase in herbicide use is the emergence of "super weeds," which are difficult to kill because they have become resistant to the herbicides. "This report confirms what we've been saying for years," said Bill Freese, science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety. "The most common type of genetically engineered crops promotes increased use of pesticides, an epidemic of resistant weeds, and more chemical residues in our foods. This may be profitable for the biotech/pesticide companies, but it's bad news for farmers, human health and the environment."

Note: Why did the major media fail to report this Reuters' article? To read the full report, "Impacts of Genetically Engineered Crops on Pesticide Use: The First Thirteen Years", and to view additional information, click here. And for a powerful online lesson on health which has already transformed lives, click here.


Drug Makers Raise Prices in Face of Health Care Reform
2009-11-16, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/business/16drugprices.html

Even as drug makers promise to support Washington's health care overhaul by shaving $8 billion a year off the nation's drug costs after the legislation takes effect, the industry has been raising its prices at the fastest rate in years. In the last year, the industry has raised the wholesale prices of brand-name prescription drugs by about 9 percent, according to industry analysts. That will add more than $10 billion to the nation's drug bill, which is on track to exceed $300 billion this year. By at least one analysis, it is the highest annual rate of inflation for drug prices since 1992. The drug trend is distinctly at odds with the direction of the Consumer Price Index, which has fallen by 1.3 percent in the last year. Critics say the industry is trying to establish a higher price base before Congress passes legislation that tries to curb drug spending in coming years. "When we have major legislation anticipated, we see a run-up in price increases," says Stephen W. Schondelmeyer, a professor of pharmaceutical economics at the University of Minnesota. A Harvard health economist, Joseph P. Newhouse, said he found a similar pattern of unusual price increases after Congress added drug benefits to Medicare a few years ago, giving tens of millions of older Americans federally subsidized drug insurance. Just as the program was taking effect in 2006, the drug industry raised prices by the widest margin in a half-dozen years. "They try to maximize their profits," Mr. Newhouse said.

Note: For lots more from reliable sources on corporate corruption, click here.


Stop Annual Mammograms, Govt. Panel Tells Women Under 50
2009-11-16, ABC News
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/OnCallPlusBreastCancerNews/mammogram-guidelines-...

For the first time in 20 years, a government panel is telling women in their [forties] to stop getting routine mammograms and recommending that a host of other breast cancer screenings slow down. The United States Preventive Service Task Force announced ... that it recommends against annual mammograms for women age 40 to 49 because, they say, the benefits of testing do not outweigh the "harms" and risks. USPSTF still recommends doctors start screening all women over age 50, but with a mammogram once every two years instead of annually. The task force also ... said evidence was insufficient to recommend mammograms for women older than 74. The recommendations announced today, which contradict the American Cancer Society, have already pitted doctors, women, insurers and radiology groups in a fierce debate about who should get a mammogram and when. Many patient advocates wonder if money fueled the decision. However, Dr. Diana Petitti, vice chair of USPSTF, said the task force never looked at costs in their research or their recommendations. Instead, the task force reviewed a number of studies to compile the benefits of mammograms, such as how many cancers were detected and how many lives were saved, and the harms of mammograms, such as how many false positives popped up, how many unnecessary tests were done and how much extra radiation women were exposed to during the false positive testing.

Note: For a powerful article compiling important information and key quotes of doctors and researchers revealing the dangers of mammograms, click here.


Plastic chemicals 'feminise boys'
2009-11-16, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8361863.stm

Chemicals in plastics alter the brains of baby boys, making them "more feminine", say US researchers. Males exposed to high doses in the womb went on to be less likely to play with boys' toys like cars or to join in rough and tumble games, they found. The University of Rochester team's latest work adds to concerns about the safety of phthalates, found in vinyl flooring and PVC shower curtains. The findings are reported in the International Journal of Andrology. Phthalates have the ability to disrupt hormones, and have been banned in toys in the EU for some years. There are many different types and some mimic the female hormone oestrogen. The same researchers have already shown that this can mean boys are born with genital abnormalities. Now they say certain phthalates also impact on the developing brain, by knocking out the action of the male hormone testosterone. Dr Shanna Swan and her team ... found that two phthalates DEHP and DBP can affect play behaviour. Boys exposed to high levels of these in the womb were less likely than other boys to play with cars, trains and guns or engage in "rougher" games like playfighting. Elizabeth Salter-Green, director of the chemicals campaign group CHEM Trust, said the results were worrying. "We now know that phthalates, to which we are all constantly exposed, are extremely worrying from a health perspective, leading to disruption of male reproduction health and, it appears, male behaviour too."

Note: For further reports from reliable sources on important health issues, click here.


New nonprofit uses Web to pressure Chevron
2009-11-16, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/15/BUCM1AJM61.DTL

Retired retail executive Richard Goldman was astonished when he heard about the $27 billion pollution lawsuit against Chevron Corp. in Ecuador. Astonished at the soil and water contamination surrounding Ecuador's oil fields. And astonished that he'd never heard of it before. So Goldman, one of the founders of the Men's Wearhouse clothing chain, has created a nonprofit group that will use social-networking tools to spread word of the case and put pressure on Chevron. The group, Ethos Alliance, will ask visitors to its Web site to tell others about the issue, hoping that viral communication via the Internet will reach people that news stories about the suit haven't. The site will raise money for humanitarian relief projects in Ecuador's oil patch, encouraging visitors to donate $5 apiece to build a water treatment plant and buy medicine for a health clinic. The Web site, www.ethosalliance.org, goes online today. Ethos also will urge Chevron to settle the long-running lawsuit, something the San Ramon company has vowed not to do. Ethos plans to tackle other issues of corporate responsibility in the future, uniting the alliance's online members with businesses willing to join the cause. Ethos is the latest example of social or political causes using social networking to increase their reach. Earlier this year, a one-day fundraising effort organized via Twitter collected $250,000 for drinking water projects in the developing world.


Triumph of a Dreamer
2009-11-15, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/opinion/15kristof.html

Any time anyone tells you that a dream is impossible, any time you're discouraged by impossible challenges, just mutter this mantra: Tererai Trent. Of all the people earning university degrees this year, perhaps the most remarkable story belongs to Tererai, a middle-aged woman. When you hear that foreign-aid groups just squander money or build dependency, remember [her story]. Tererai was born in a village in rural Zimbabwe, probably sometime in 1965, and attended elementary school for less than one year. Her father married her off when she was about 11 to a man who beat her regularly. A dozen years passed. Jo Luck, the head of an aid group called Heifer International, passed through the village and told the women there that they should stand up, nurture dreams, change their lives. Inspired, Tererai ... wrote that she wanted to study abroad, and to earn a B.A., a master's and a doctorate. In 1998 she was accepted to Oklahoma State University. Heifer helped with the plane tickets, Tererai's mother sold a cow, and neighbors sold goats to help raise money. With $4,000 in cash wrapped in a stocking and tied around her waist, Tererai set off for Oklahoma. At one point the university tried to expel Tererai for falling behind on tuition payments. A university official, Ron Beer, intervened on her behalf and rallied the faculty and community behind her with donations and support. "I saw that she had enormous talent," Dr. Beer said. Tererai excelled at school, pursuing a Ph.D at Western Michigan University and writing a dissertation on AIDS prevention in Africa even as she began working for Heifer as a program evaluator.


In House, Many Spoke With One Voice: Lobbyists
2009-11-15, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/us/politics/15health.html

In the official record of the historic House debate on overhauling health care, the speeches of many lawmakers echo with similarities. Often, that was no accident. Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world's largest biotechnology companies. E-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that the lobbyists drafted one statement for Democrats and another for Republicans. The lobbyists ... were remarkably successful in getting the statements printed in the Congressional Record under the names of different members of Congress. Genentech, a subsidiary of the Swiss drug giant Roche, estimates that 42 House members picked up some of its talking points – 22 Republicans and 20 Democrats, an unusual bipartisan coup for lobbyists. In an interview, Representative Bill Pascrell Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, said: "I regret that the language was the same. I did not know it was." He said he got his statement from his staff and "did not know where they got the information from." In recent years, Genentech's political action committee and lobbyists for Roche and Genentech have made campaign contributions to many House members. And company employees have been among the hosts at fund-raisers for some of those lawmakers.

Note: For revealing reports from major media sources on government corruption, click here.


Could This Lump Power the Planet?
2009-11-14, Newsweek magazine
http://www.newsweek.com/id/222792

When I meet [Edward] Moses [at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory], the 60-year-old scientist ... shows me a tiny pellet ... and swears it will provide an endless supply of safe, clean energy. The pellet Moses holds is a model, but the real version will contain a few milligrams of deuterium and tritium, isotopes of hydrogen that can be extracted from water. If you blast the pellet with a powerful laser, you can create a reaction like the one that takes place at the center of the sun. Harness that reaction, and you've created a star on earth, and with the heat from that star you can generate electricity without creating any pollution. Forget about nuke plants, coal, oil, or wind and solar. "This is the real solar power," says Moses. What Moses is talking about is controlled nuclear fusion. Instead of splitting the nucleus of an atom, you're trying to force a deuterium nucleus to merge, or fuse, with a tritium nucleus. When that happens, you produce helium and throw off energy. Scientists have been trying to produce energy with fusion for decades. So far, they keep failing. The joke is that fusion energy is only 40 years away, and will always be only 40 years away. Moses believes, however, that his lab, which is called the National Ignition Facility, or NIF, has cracked the problem. The big challenge fusion has faced is lack of power. NIF's laser ... can produce 60 times more energy than any other laser ever built. Right now it's still being tested. But next year Moses and his scientists will fire it up with a full load of deuterium-tritium fuel, and Moses feels confident it will achieve "ignition," meaning a controlled burn in which you get out more energy than you put in.

Note: For many reports from reliable sources of promising new energy developments, click here and here.


The Lies They Told
2009-11-12, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Heilbrunn-t.html

When Sept. 11, 2001, dawned, the Northeast Air Defense Sector in Rome, N.Y., went on full alert — to prepare for a training exercise that envisioned a sneak attack by Russian planes flying over the North Pole to bomb the United States, a prospect that Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had dismissed as outdated in 1966. Later that morning, ... three F-16 fighter jets were scrambled from Langley Air Force Base to form a combat air patrol over Washington. But degraded radio transmission quality meant that the pilots were left clueless about the nature of their mission. On seeing the Pentagon in flames, the lead fighter pilot later explained, “I reverted to the Russian threat. I’m thinking cruise missile threat from the sea. You know, you look down and see the Pentagon burning, and I thought the bastards snuck one by us. You couldn’t see any airplanes, and no one told us anything.” As senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, [Farmer] investigated the derelict conduct of the national security apparatus. Now that numerous transcripts and tapes have been declassified, [in his book The Ground Truth] Farmer draws on them to assail the government’s official depiction of 9/11 as so much public relations flimflam. Both Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney, Farmer says, provided palpably false versions that touted the military’s readiness to shoot down United 93 before it could hit Washington. Planes were never in place to intercept it. Farmer ... was the attorney general of New Jersey and is the dean of the Rutgers School of Law,

Note: For more on Farmer's book, see a summary of this Time magazine article. For more on this, see concise summaries of deeply revealing 9/11 news articles from reliable major media sources.


Skull and Bones members include some of America's most powerful
2009-11-12, CNN
http://www.edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0911/12/ec.01.html

What really happens behind the padlocked doors of this windowless building, [the home] of Skull and Bones, Yale's oldest secret society? Its members include some of America's most powerful and privileged elite all sworn to secrecy. [CAMPBELL] BROWN: Alexandra Robbins broke through the wall of silence to write Secrets of the Tomb based on clandestine interviews with dozens of bonesmen. Only 15 [Yale students] get picked each year. The society includes at least three U.S. presidents, Supreme Court justices, and too many senators and CEOs to name. In 2004, Bush versus Kerry was the first all-bonesmen presidential election. ALEXANDRA ROBBINS: Skull and Bones' only purpose is to get its members into positions of prominence around the world so that they can elevate other members to similar positions. One of the first activities they participate in is called connubial bliss, where ... each member must spend an evening standing in front of the other 14 bonesmen and recount his or her entire sexual and romantic history. BROWN: According to one ... story, Prescott Bush, George W. Bush's grandfather, was part of a group that broke into the Oklahoma burial place of the Apache chief Geronimo and made off with his skull. Geronimo's grave was disturbed back in 1918, there are photos of skulls inside the "Skull and Bones" tomb. They have their own private retreat. Deer Island off the coast of New York. And a world of ready investors and political contacts in the highest echelons of American society. What has kept the secret society alive for all these years? Good old fashioned networking for the super elite.

Note: To watch the CNN video clip on this Yale secret society, click here. For lots more powerful information on Skull and Bones and other secret societies reported in major media articles, click here.


Swine flu skepticism demands deft response
2009-11-12, Reuters News
http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-SwineFlu/idUSTRE5A52FU20091112

European scientists and health authorities are facing angry questions about why H1N1 flu has not caused death and destruction on the scale first feared, and they need to respond deftly to ensure public support. Accusations are flying in British and French media that the pandemic has been "hyped" by medical researchers to further their own cause, boost research grants and line the pockets of drug companies. Britain's Independent newspaper this week asked "Pandemic? What Pandemic?." France's Le Parisien newspaper ran the headline: "Swine flu: why the French distrust the vaccine" and noted a gap between the predicted impact of H1N1 and the less dramatic reality. "Dangerous liaisons between certain experts, the labs and the government, the obscurity of the contracts between the state and the pharma firms have added to the doubt." In Britain, health authorities' original worst-case scenario -- which said as many as 65,000 could die from H1N1 -- has twice been revised down and the prediction is now for around 1,000 deaths, way below the average annual toll of 4,000 to 8,000 deaths from seasonal winter flu.

Note: It's quite interesting and telling that a thorough Internet seach showed that no major media picked up this article from Reuters News Agency


Jung at Heart
2009-11-12, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/11/AR20091111253...

Starting in 1912, Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), a specialist in the treatment of schizophrenia, began to experience strange dreams and frightening visions. He ... concluded that he had entered what we would now call a midlife crisis, a period in which he was being compelled to reexamine his life and explore his deepest self. To do this, he ... began a remarkable visionary text, illustrated with his own bizarre paintings: The Red Book. This he composed during a state of "active imagination" -- that is, of reverie or waking dream. As he said, he wanted to see what would happen when he "switched off consciousness." When Jung emerged from this period of crisis, he brought with him the first inklings of his most important contributions to psychology -- positing the existence of a collective unconscious common to all human beings. Gradually, Jung also shifted the focus of psychoanalytic therapy. Early on he had speculated that our libidinal energies are either outer-directed or inner-directed, i.e., people are primarily extroverts or introverts. But this was just a beginning. Jung soon directed his clinical attention to the second half of life and to the process he called individuation. According to editor Shamdasani, "The Red Book" presents "the prototype of Jung's conception of the individuation process." In Jung's view a successful life was all about balance, wholeness.

Note: For more on the fascinating book about Jung's hidden life, read the New York Times article available here.


9/11's delayed legacy: cancer for many of the rescue workers
2009-11-11, The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/11/cancer-new-york-rescuers

A spate of recent deaths of New York police and fire officers who took part in the emergency operation at Ground Zero after the 9/11 attacks has heightened fears that it could be the start of a delayed epidemic of cancer-related illness. Five firefighters and police officers, all of whom were involved in the rescue and clear-up at the site of the collapsed Twin Towers, have died of cancer in the past three months, the oldest being 44. Three died last month within a four-day period. Up to 70,000 people took part in the massive operation at Ground Zero, including police, firefighters and construction workers who came to New York voluntarily from all over the US. Many worked for months amid a toxic soup of dust and chemicals. Amid the pollutants within the giant pile of 1.8m tons of debris and the surrounding air were ... about 1,000 tons of asbestos that was used in the construction of the Twin Towers, pulverised lead from computers, mercury and highly carcinogenic by-products from the burning of plastics and chlorinated chemicals. No official tally is available for the number of those who have died as a result of the 9/11 clear-up. The New York state health department has recorded 817 deaths of emergency workers. Claire Calladine, a campaigner who runs the organisation 9/11 Health Now, said the fear was that the recent rise in cancer cases was just the start. "We have only seen the tip of the iceberg. How bad will it get – that is the big question."

Note: To read important questions raised by hundreds of government officials, academics and professionals about what really happened on 9/11, click here and here.


Report: Blackwater Sent $1M Bribe to Iraq
2009-11-11, CBS News/Associated Press
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/11/11/national/main5611339.shtml

[Four] former top executives at Blackwater Worldwide say the U.S. security contractor sent about $1 million to its Iraq office with the intention of paying off officials in the country who were angry about the fatal shootings of 17 civilians by Blackwater employees. Iraqis had long complained about ground operations by the North Carolina-based company, now known as Xe Corp. Then the shooting by Blackwater guards in Baghdad's Nisoor Square in September 2007 left 17 civilians dead, further strained relations between Baghdad and Washington and led U.S. prosecutors to bring charges against the Blackwater contractors involved. The State Department has since turned to DynCorp and another private security firm, Triple Canopy, to handle diplomatic protective services in the country. But Xe continues to provide security for diplomats in other nations, most notably in Afghanistan. The former executives told the [New York Times] that the payments were approved by the company's then-president, Gary Jackson. They did not know if he came up with the idea. Any payments would have been illegal under the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bans bribes to foreign officials. Two of the former executives said they were directly involved in discussions about paying Iraqi officials, and the other two said they were told about the discussions by others at Blackwater.

Note: For lots more from reliable sources on corporate corruption, click here.


A National Disgrace
2009-11-11, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/opinion/11wed1.html

Two courts, one in Italy and one in the United States, ruled recently on the Bush administration’s practice of extraordinary rendition, which is the kidnapping of people and sending them to other countries for interrogation — and torture. The Italian court got it right. The American court got it miserably wrong. In Italy, a judge ruled that a station chief for the Central Intelligence Agency and 22 other Americans broke the law in the 2003 abduction of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, a Muslim cleric who ended up in Egypt, where he said he was tortured. Two days earlier, a federal appeals court in Manhattan brushed off a lawsuit by Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was seized in an American airport by federal agents acting on bad information from Canadian officials. He was held incommunicado and harshly interrogated before being sent to Syria, where he was tortured. He spent almost a year in a grave-size underground cell before the Syrians let him go. It has long been established that Mr. Arar was not guilty of anything. Canada admitted that it had supplied false information to American authorities, and in 2007, it apologized and offered Mr. Arar $10 million in damages. Written by Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs, the 59-page majority opinion held that no civil damages remedy exists for the horrors visited on Mr. Arar. The ruling distorts precedent and the Constitutional separation of powers to deny justice to Mr. Arar and give officials a pass for egregious misconduct. The overt disregard for the central role of judges in policing executive branch excesses has frightening implications for safeguarding civil liberties, as four judges suggested in dissenting opinions.

Note: For many reports from major media sources of growing government threats to civil liberties, click here.


State to 'spy' on every phone call, email and web search
2009-11-10, The Telegraph (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/6534319/State...

Every phone call, text message, email and website visit made by private citizens is to be stored for a year and will be available for monitoring by government bodies. All telecoms companies and internet service providers will be required by law to keep a record of every customer's personal communications, showing who they have contacted, when and where, as well as the websites they have visited. Despite widespread opposition to the increasing amount of surveillance in Britain, 653 public bodies will be given access to the information, including police, local councils, the Financial Services Authority, the ambulance service, fire authorities and even prison governors. They will not require the permission of a judge or a magistrate to obtain the information, but simply the authorisation of a senior police officer or the equivalent of a deputy head of department at a local authority. The Government announced yesterday it was pressing ahead with privately held "Big Brother" databases that opposition leaders said amounted to "state-spying" and a form of "covert surveillance" on the public. It is doing so despite its own consultation showing that it has little public support. The new rules ... will not only force communications companies to keep their records for longer, but to expand the type of data they keep to include details of every website their customers visit.

Note: For many more reports from major media sources on the disturbing trend toward increasing government and corporate surveillance and loss of privacy, click here.


Justice Dept. Asked For News Site's Visitor Lists
2009-11-10, CBS News
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/11/09/taking_liberties/entry5595506.shtml

In a case that raises questions about online journalism and privacy rights, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a formal request to an independent news site ordering it to provide details of all reader visits on a certain day. The grand jury subpoena also required the Philadelphia-based Indymedia.us Web site "not to disclose the existence of this request" unless authorized by the Justice Department, a gag order that presents an unusual quandary for any news organization. Kristina Clair, a 34-year old Linux administrator living in Philadelphia who provides free server space for Indymedia.us, said she was shocked to receive the Justice Department's subpoena. The subpoena ... demanded "all IP traffic to and from www.indymedia.us" on June 25, 2008. It instructed Clair to "include IP addresses, times, and any other identifying information," including e-mail addresses, physical addresses, registered accounts, and Indymedia readers' Social Security Numbers, bank account numbers, [and] credit card numbers. Clair [called] the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, which represented her at no cost. Making this investigation more mysterious is that Indymedia.us is an aggregation site, meaning articles that appear on it were published somewhere else first, and there's no hint about what sparked the criminal probe. Clair, the system administrator, says that no IP (Internet Protocol) addresses are recorded for Indymedia.us, and non-IP address logs are kept for a few weeks and then discarded. "This is the first time we've seen them try to get the IP address of everyone who visited a particular site," [EFF's Kevin] Bankston said. "That it was a news organization was an additional troubling fact that implicates First Amendment rights."

Note: For many reports from major media sources of growing government threats to civil liberties, click here.


Vatican Looks to Heavens for Signs of Alien Life
2009-11-10, ABC News/Associated Press
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=9047492

Four hundred years after it locked up Galileo for challenging the view that the Earth was the center of the universe, the Vatican has called in experts to study the possibility of extraterrestrial alien life and its implication for the Catholic Church. "The questions of life's origins and of whether life exists elsewhere in the universe are very suitable and deserve serious consideration," said the Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, an astronomer and director of the Vatican Observatory. Funes, a Jesuit priest, presented the results ... of a five-day conference that gathered astronomers, physicists, biologists and other experts to discuss the budding field of astrobiology — the study of the origin of life and its existence elsewhere in the cosmos. The Church of Rome's views have shifted radically through the centuries since Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1600 for speculating, among other ideas, that other worlds could be inhabited. Funes told Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano that believing the universe may host aliens, even intelligent ones, does not contradict a faith in God. "How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere? Just as there is a multitude of creatures on Earth, there could be other beings, even intelligent ones, created by God. This does not contradict our faith, because we cannot put limits on God's creative freedom." Funes maintained that if intelligent beings were discovered, they would also be considered "part of creation."


Chrysler drops three electric vehicles despite having touted them to get billions in government bailout cash
2009-11-09, USA Today
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/driveon/post/2009/11/620001133/1

If you believed all the talk from Chrysler about how our tax dollars would help finance its fast-track electric-vehicle future, you're in for a big disappointment. Chrysler has disbanded the engineering team that was trying to bring three electric models to market as a rush job. Chrysler [had] cited its devotion to electric vehicles as one of the key reasons why the Obama administration and Congress needed to give it $12.5 billion in bailout money. The change of heart on electric vehicles has come under Fiat. At a marathon presentation of Chrysler's five-year strategy, CEO Sergio Marchionne talked about just about everything on Chrysler's plate ... except its earlier electric-car plans. With the group's disbanding, Chrysler's electric plans will be melded into Fiat's. Marchionne is apparently no fan of electric power. He says electrics will only make up 1% or 2% of Fiat sales by 2014 and that he doesn't put a lot of faith in the technology until battery developments are pushed forward. As a result, Chrysler won't have an electric car on sale as soon as next year, such as the Dodge Circuit sports car concept it had unveiled. The change has come so fast that Chrysler's website has been still featuring pictures of the electric vehicles. As late as August, Chrysler took $70 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop a test fleet of 220 hybrid pickup trucks and minivans, vehicles now scrapped in the sweeping turnaround plan for Chrysler.

Note: For reports from reliable sources on promising new developments in electric automobile technologies, click here.


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