Please donate here to support this vital work.
Revealing News For a Better World

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.


Civil liberties: Outrage at New York police plan to track vehicles
2008-08-14, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/14/usa.humanrights

The Big Apple is turning into Big Brother, civil liberties groups have warned in response to a new plan from New York city's police chiefs to photograph every vehicle entering Manhattan and hold the details on a massive database. As well as placing cameras at all tunnels and bridges into Manhattan, the 36-page plan, called Operation Sentinel, calls for a security ring to be erected at Ground Zero and for a 50-mile buffer zone around the city within which mobile units would search for nuclear or "dirty" bombs. [The] 3,000 cameras that could be mounted as a result of the plans of the New York police ... have provoked outrage in the United States. Donna Lieberman, director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said the idea of tracking the movements of millions of people was "an assault on the country's historical respect for the right to privacy and the freedom to be left alone". The NYCLU is pressing the New York police to release further details of its intentions under freedom of information laws. The toughest element of the scheme relates to preparations to secure Ground Zero once the six-hectare site is rebuilt and open to the public again. Those measures include moveable roadblocks, security cameras across lower Manhattan and an underground bomb-screening centre through which all delivery vehicles would have to pass. The plan to video the number plates of every vehicle would be applied to all points of entry into Manhattan, including the main Brooklyn-Battery, Holland, Lincoln and Midtown tunnels and Brooklyn, Manhattan and other bridges.

Note: For lots more on threats to privacy from major media sources, click here.


Spy tales: a TV chef, Oscar winner, JFK adviser
2008-08-14, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/14/AR20080814002...

Where do you look when you want to recruit spies? Just about everywhere, judging from the formerly top-secret records of the World War II agency that became today's CIA. There was the young woman who became TV chef Julia Child. And labor lawyer Arthur Goldberg who became a Supreme Court justice. And young scholar Arthur Schlesinger who became a presidential adviser. Names and details on nearly 24,000 one-time intelligence workers are included among 750,000 formerly top-secret government records released Thursday by the National Archives. The documents describe a worldwide spy network during World War II managed by the Office of Strategic Services, the intelligence outfit that later became the CIA. The personnel files, long withheld from the public, provide insights into young agents now known for other careers. Julia McWilliams, later the ebullient chef, ... was hired in the summer of 1942 for clerical work with the intelligence agency and later worked directly for OSS Director William Donovan, the personnel records show. Some of the others: Acclaimed movie director John Ford, whose skill as a videographer qualified him to manage wartime spy photography. Chicago lawyer Goldberg, whose early legal work with labor unions made him an attractive spy candidate to rally European labor unions to help with the war effort, years before President Kennedy appointed him to the Supreme Court. And Schlesinger, who spent much of his time with OSS working in London as an intelligence officer and writer on the political staff, producing reports on political activities.

Note: To examine the newly-released OSS personnel files at the National Archives, start here. For many revealing articles on government secrecy from verifiable sources, click here.


FBI plans to loosen post-Watergate FBI rules
2008-08-13, Minneapolis Star-Tribune/McClatchy News Service
http://www.startribune.com/nation/26935044.html?elr=KArksi8cyaiUBP7hUiD3aPc:_...

Attorney General Michael Mukasey confirmed plans ... to loosen post-Watergate restrictions on the FBI's national security and criminal investigations. Mukasey said he expected criticism of the new rules because "they expressly authorize the FBI to engage in intelligence collection inside the United States." The Justice Department ... is expected to publicly release the final version within several more weeks. Even then, portions are expected to remain classified for national security reasons. Nonetheless, Mukasey provided enough detail Wednesday to alarm civil libertarians. Michael German, a former veteran FBI agent who is now policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said if Mukasey moves ahead with the new rules as he describes them, he'll be weakening restrictions originally put in place after the Watergate scandal to rein in the FBI's domestic Counter Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO. "I'm concerned with the way the attorney general frames the problem," German said. "He talks about 'arbitrary or irrelevant differences' between criminal and national security investigations but these were corrections originally designed to prevent the type of overreach the FBI engaged in for years." German said recent events demonstrated that Mukasey needed to strengthen the FBI's guidelines, not "water them down. ... What the attorney general is doing is expanding the bureau's intelligence collection without addressing the mismanagement within the FBI. If you have an agency collecting more with less oversight, it's only going to get worse."

Note: For many disturbing reports on increasing threats to civil liberties from reliable sources, click here.


'Gitmo On The Platte' Set As Holding Cell For DNC
2008-08-13, CBS4 TV (Denver CBS affiliate)
http://cbs4denver.com/denver2008/denver.protesters.arrested.2.793930.html

CBS4 News has learned if mass arrests happen at the Democratic Convention, those taken into custody will be jailed in a warehouse owned by the City of Denver. Protesters have already given this place a name: "Gitmo on the Platte." Inside are dozens are metal cages. They are made out of chain link fence material and topped by rolls of barbed wire. In past conventions, mass arrests have taken place. Each of the fenced areas is about 5 yards by 5 yards and there is a lock on the door. A sign on the wall reads "Warning! Electric stun devices used in this facility." CBS4 showed its video to leaders of groups that plan to demonstrate during the convention. "Very bare bones and very reminiscent of a political prisoner camp or a concentration camp," said Zoe Williams of Code Pink. "That's how you treat cattle," said Adam Jung of the group Tent State University. "You showed the sign where it said stun gun in use and you just change the word gun for bolt and it's a meat processing plant." The American Civil Liberties Union is asking the City of Denver how prisoners will get access to food and water, bathrooms, telephones, plus medical care, and if there will be a place to meet with attorneys.

Note: For many reliable and verifiable reports on threats to a free and fair electoral process in the U.S., click here.


Brain will be battlefield of future, warns US intelligence report
2008-08-13, The Guardian (One of the U.K.�s leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/aug/13/military.neuroscience

Rapid advances in neuroscience could have a dramatic impact on national security and the way in which future wars are fought, US intelligence officials have been told. In a report commissioned by the Defense Intelligence Agency, leading scientists were asked to examine how a greater understanding of the brain over the next 20 years is likely to drive the development of new medicines and technologies. They found several areas in which progress could have a profound impact, including behaviour-altering drugs, scanners that can interpret a person's state of mind and devices capable of boosting senses such as hearing and vision. On the battlefield, bullets may be replaced with "pharmacological land mines" that release drugs to incapacitate soldiers on contact, while scanners and other electronic devices could be developed to identify suspects from their brain activity and even disrupt their ability to tell lies when questioned, the report says. "The concept of torture could also be altered by products in this market. It is possible that some day there could be a technique developed to extract information from a prisoner that does not have any lasting side effects," the report states. The report highlights one electronic technique, called transcranial direct current stimulation, which involves using electrical pulses to interfere with the firing of neurons in the brain and has been shown to delay a person's ability to tell a lie.

Note: This is the public report, for little-known information relating what has already been going on, click here.


Police Turn to Secret Weapon: GPS Device
2008-08-13, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/12/AR20080812032...

Across the country, police are using GPS devices to snare [criminal suspects], often without a warrant or court order. Privacy advocates said tracking suspects electronically constitutes illegal search and seizure, violating Fourth Amendment rights of protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, and is another step toward George Orwell's Big Brother society. With the ... ever-declining cost of the technology, many analysts believe that police will increasingly rely on GPS ... and that the public will hear little about it. "I've seen them in cases from New York City to small towns -- whoever can afford to get the equipment and plant it on a car," said John Wesley Hall, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. "And of course, it's easy to do. You can sneak up on a car and plant it at any time." Details on how police use GPS usually become public when the use of the device is challenged in court. Leibig said GPS should be held to a different standard because it provides greater detail. "While it may be true that police can conduct surveillance of people on a public street without violating their rights, tracking a person everywhere they go and keeping a computer record of it for days and days without that person knowing is a completely different type of intrusion," he said. Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's technology and liberty program, considers GPS monitoring, along with license plate readers, toll transponders and video cameras with face-recognition technology, part of the same trend toward "an always-on, surveillance society."

Note: For lots more on threats to privacy from major media sources, click here.


Many Firms Didn't Pay Taxes
2008-08-12, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/11/AR20080811023...

About two-thirds of corporations operating in the United States did not pay taxes annually from 1998 to 2005, according to a [report] from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. In 2005, after collectively making $2.5 trillion in sales, corporations gave a variety of reasons on their tax returns to account for the absence of taxable revenue. The most frequently listed included the cost of producing their goods, salary expenses and interest payments on their debt, the report said. Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) called the findings "a shocking indictment of the current tax system." "It's shameful that so many corporations make big profits and pay nothing to support our country," he said. "The tax system that allows this wholesale tax avoidance is an embarrassment and unfair to hardworking Americans who pay their fair share of taxes. We need to plug these tax loopholes and put these corporations back on the tax rolls." In 2005, about 28 percent of large corporations paid no taxes. Of the 1.3 million corporations included in the study, 998 were categorized as "large." Dorgan and Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) requested the report out of concern that some corporations were using "transfer pricing" to reduce their tax bills. The practice allows multi-national companies to transfer goods and assets between internal divisions so they can record income in a jurisdiction with low tax rates. Levin said: "This report makes clear that too many corporations are using tax trickery to send their profits overseas and avoid paying their fair share in the United States."

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


Most companies in US avoid federal income taxes
2008-08-12, Business Week/Associated Press
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D92GQ1982.htm

Unlike the rest of us, most U.S. corporations and foreign companies doing business in the United States pay no federal income tax, according to a new report from Congress. The study by the Government Accountability Office ... said two-thirds of U.S. corporations paid no federal income taxes between 1998 and 2005, and about 68 percent of foreign companies doing business in the U.S. avoided corporate taxes over the same period. Collectively, the companies reported trillions of dollars in sales, according to GAO's estimate. "It's shameful that so many corporations make big profits and pay nothing to support our country," said Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., who asked for the GAO study. The GAO study did not investigate why corporations weren't paying federal income taxes or corporate taxes and it did not identify any corporations by name. More than 38,000 foreign corporations had no tax liability in 2005 and 1.2 million U.S. companies paid no income tax, the GAO said. Combined, the companies had $2.5 trillion in sales. About 25 percent of the U.S. corporations not paying corporate taxes were considered large corporations, meaning they had at least $250 million in assets or $50 million in receipts. The GAO said it analyzed data from the Internal Revenue Service, examining samples of corporate returns for the years 1998 through 2005. For 2005, for example, it reviewed 110,003 tax returns from among more than 1.2 million corporations doing business in the U.S. "It's time for the big corporations to pay their fair share," Dorgan said.

Note: For many revealing reports on corporate corruption from reliable, verifiable sources, click here.


Bush wants some endangered species rules extinct
2008-08-12, San Francisco Chronicle/Associated Press
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/08/11/national/w141651D...

[The Bush] administration is ... proposing changes that would allow federal agencies to decide for themselves whether subdivisions, dams, highways and other projects have the potential to harm endangered animals and plants. Agencies also could not consider a project's contribution to global warming in their analysis. Environmentalists complained the proposals would gut protections for endangered animals and plants. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne [said] the revisions ... were needed to ensure that the Endangered Species Act would not be used as a "back door" to regulate the gases blamed for global warming. In May, the polar bear became the first species declared as threatened because of climate change. Warming temperatures are expected to melt the sea ice the bear depends on for survival. The rule changes ... would apply to any project a federal agency would fund, build or authorize that the agency itself determines is unlikely to harm endangered wildlife and their habitat. Government wildlife experts currently participate in tens of thousands of such reviews each year. The revisions also would limit which effects can be considered harmful and set a 60-day deadline for wildlife experts to evaluate a project. If no decision is made within 60 days, the project can move ahead. "If adopted, these changes would seriously weaken the safety net of habitat protections that we have relied upon to protect and recover endangered fish, wildlife and plants for the past 35 years," said John Kostyack, executive director of the National Wildlife Federation's Wildlife Conservation and Global Warming initiative.

Note: For many important reports on global warming from major media sources, click here.


US boasts of laser weapon's 'plausible deniability'
2008-08-12, New Scientist magazine
http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn14520-us-boasts-of-laser-weapons...

An airborne laser weapon dubbed the "long-range blowtorch" has the added benefit that the US could convincingly deny any involvement with the destruction it causes, say senior officials of the US Air Force (USAF). The Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL) is to be mounted on a Hercules military transport plane. Boeing announced the first test firing of the laser, from a plane on the ground, earlier this summer. Cynthia Kaiser, chief engineer of the US Air Force Research Laboratory's Directed Energy Directorate, used the phrase "plausible deniability" to describe the weapon's benefits in a briefing ... on laser weapons to the New Mexico Optics Industry Association in June. As the term suggests, "plausible deniability" is used to describe situations where those responsible for an event could plausibly claim to have had no involvement in it. John Pike, analyst with defence think-tank Global Security, based in Virginia, says the implications are clear. "The target would never know what hit them," says Pike. "Further, there would be no munition fragments that could be used to identify the source of the strike." A laser beam is silent and invisible. An ATL can deliver the heat of a blowtorch with a range of 20 kilometres, depending on conditions. That range is great enough that the aircraft carrying it might not be seen, especially at night. With no previous examples for comparison, it may be difficult to discern whether damage to a vehicle or person was the result of a laser strike.

Note: For lots more on war and weaponry, click here.


Sovereign Funds Become Big Speculators
2008-08-12, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/11/AR20080811024...

Sovereign wealth funds, the massive investment pools run by foreign governments, are now among the biggest speculators in the trading of oil and other vital goods like corn and cotton in the United States, according to interviews with brokers who handle their investments at leading Wall Street banks, veteran traders and congressional investigators. Some lawmakers say the unregulated activity of sovereign wealth funds and other speculators such as hedge funds has contributed to the dramatic swing in oil prices in recent months. The agency regulating the market said it had not picked up on this activity by sovereign wealth funds. In a June letter, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission told lawmakers that its monitoring showed that these funds were not a significant factor in commodity trading. But the CFTC is not detecting the growing influence of foreign funds because they invest through Wall Street brokers known as "swap dealers" who often operate on unregulated markets. For this reason, the extent of their activities may be known only to the swap dealers at investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley, which handle such transactions. The foreign funds involved in commodity trading are ... mainly from countries ... in Asia that do not already make money from producing oil. While it is difficult to quantify how large foreign funds have become, they now represent 12 percent or more of the overall commodity business for some of the largest investment banks, said an industry veteran who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Note: For many revealing reports on corporate corruption from reliable, verifiable sources, click here.


Prince Charles warns GM crops risk causing the biggest-ever environmental disaster
2008-08-12, The Telegraph (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/08/12/eacharles11...

The mass development of genetically modified crops risks causing the world's worst environmental disaster, the Prince of Wales has warned. In his most outspoken intervention on the issue of GM food, the Prince said that multi-national companies were conducting a "gigantic experiment ... with nature and the whole of humanity which has gone seriously wrong". The Prince ... also expressed the fear that food would run out because of the damage being wreaked on the earth's soil by scientists' research. Relying on "gigantic corporations" for food, he said, would result in "absolute disaster. That would be the absolute destruction of everything... and the classic way of ensuring there is no food in the future," he said. "What we should be talking about is food security not food production. And if they think its somehow going to work because they are going to have one form of clever genetic engineering after another then again count me out, because that will be guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally of all time." Small farmers, in particular, would be the victims of [large corporations] taking over the mass production of food. "I think it's heading for real disaster," he said. "We [will] end up with millions of small farmers all over the world being driven off their land into unsustainable, unmanageable, degraded and dysfunctional conurbations of unmentionable awfulness." The Prince of Wales's forthright comments will reopen the whole debate about GM food.

Note: To watch a video of the Prince's exclusive interview with The Telegraph, click on the link above. For an excellent overview of the many risks associated with genetically modified foods, click here.


Clinical trials test potential of hallucinogenic drugs to help patients with terminal illnesses
2008-08-12, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/aug/12/medicalresearch.drugs

Scientists are exploring the use of psychedelic drugs such as LSD to treat a range of ailments from depression to cluster headaches and obsessive compulsive disorder. The first clinical trial using LSD since the 1970s began in Switzerland in June. It aims to use "psychedelic psychotherapy" to help patients with terminal illnesses come to terms with their imminent mortality and so improve their quality of life. Another psychedelic substance, psilocybin, has shown promising results in trials for treating symptoms of terminal cancer patients. In the Swiss trial eight subjects will receive a dose of 200 microgrammes of LSD. This is enough to induce a powerful psychedelic experience. A further four subjects will receive a dose of 20 microgrammes. Every participant will know they have received some LSD, but neither the subjects nor the researchers observing them will know for certain who received the full dose. During the course of therapy researchers will assess the patients' anxiety levels, quality of life and pain levels. Before hallucinogenic drugs became popular with the counter culture, they were at the forefront of brain science. They were used to help scientists understand the nature of consciousness and how the brain works and as treatments for a range of conditions. Dr Rick Doblin is president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in California, a nonprofit organisation which funds clinical studies into psychedelic drugs, including the Swiss LSD trial. "These drugs, these experiences are not for the mystic who wants to sit on the mountain top and meditate. They are not for the counter-culture rebel. They are for everybody," he said.


New Unit of DIA Will Take the Offensive On Counterintelligence
2008-08-12, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/17/AR20080817022...

The Defense Intelligence Agency's newly created Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center is going to have an office authorized for the first time to carry out "strategic offensive counterintelligence operations," according to Mike Pick, who will direct the program. Such covert offensive operations are carried out at home and abroad against people known or suspected to be foreign intelligence officers or connected to foreign intelligence or international terrorist activities. The investigative branches of the three services -- the Army's Counterintelligence Corps, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service -- have done secret offensive counterintelligence operations for years, and now DIA has been given the authority. Two years ago, the DIA asked then-Undersecretary of Defense Stephen A. Cambone for authority to run offensive operations along with a newer Pentagon intelligence agency, the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA). Cambone agreed to a two-year trial. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates recently approved the merger of CIFA into the new DIA center. Senior Defense Department officials and the combat commanders overseas will now decide what to do with the DIA's new offensive operational authority.

Note: For penetrating reports on the realities of the "war on terror" from major media sources, click here.


Some Web Firms Say They Track Behavior Without Explicit Consent
2008-08-12, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/11/AR20080811022...

Several Internet and broadband companies have acknowledged using targeted-advertising technology without explicitly informing customers, according to letters released yesterday by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The revelations came in response to a bipartisan inquiry of how more than 30 Internet companies might have gathered data to target customers. Some privacy advocates and lawmakers said the disclosures help build a case for an overarching online-privacy law. "Increasingly, there are no limits technologically as to what a company can do in terms of collecting information . . . and then selling it as a commodity to other providers," said committee member Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.). "Our responsibility is to make sure that we create a law that, regardless of the technology, includes a set of legal guarantees that consumers have with respect to their information." Markey said he and his colleagues plan to introduce legislation next year, a sort of online-privacy Bill of Rights, that would require that consumers must opt in to the tracking of their online behavior and the collection and sharing of their personal data. Ari Schwartz, vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, said lawmakers are beginning to understand the convergence across platforms. "People are starting to see: 'Oh, we have these different industries that are collecting the same types of information to profile individuals and the devices they use on the network," he said. "Internet. Cellphones. Cable. Any way you tap into the network, concerns are raised."

Note: For lots more on increasing threats to privacy from reliable sources, click here.


Gardasil vaccine doubts grow
2008-08-11, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-gardasil11-2008aug11,0,2921629.s...

Sandra Levy wants to do everything she can to safeguard the health of her 11-year-old daughter -- and that, of course, includes cancer prevention. She has had her child inoculated with one shot of Gardasil, the human papilloma virus vaccine that may prevent cervical cancer. But now, she says, she has serious reservations about going ahead with the next two injections of the course. Though most medical organizations strongly advocate using the HPV vaccine, some doctors and parents, like Levy, are asking whether the vaccine's benefits really outweigh its costs. A report released in June stirred up more doubts. Although cause and effect were not proved, the report listed serious events -- such as seizures, spontaneous abortions and even deaths -- among teens, preteens and young women who had earlier had Gardasil shots. [The] analysis, released June 30 by the Washington, D.C.-based public interest group Judicial Watch, [has] raised [these] red flags. Judicial Watch obtained records from the FDA's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a voluntary system used by doctors, patients and drug companies to report side effects with vaccines to the federal agency. The report revealed that since the vaccine's 2006 approval, when girls began getting it, nearly 9,000 had bad health events after receiving Gardasil. The incidents included 10 miscarriages, 78 severe outbreaks of genital warts and six cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune disorder that can result in paralysis. There were also 18 reported deaths.

Note: For many key reports on the problems with vaccines from reliable sources, click here.


Use of Iraq Contractors Costs Billions, Report Says
2008-08-11, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/washington/12contractors.html?partner=rssus...

The United States this year will have spent [at least] $100 billion on contractors in Iraq since the invasion in 2003, a milestone that reflects the Bush administration’s unprecedented level of dependence on private firms for help in the war, according to a government report to be released [on August 12]. The report, by the Congressional Budget Office ... will say that one out of every five dollars spent on the war in Iraq has gone to contractors for the United States military and other government agencies. The Pentagon’s reliance on outside contractors in Iraq is proportionately far larger than in any previous conflict, and it has fueled charges that this outsourcing has led to overbilling, fraud and shoddy and unsafe work that has endangered and even killed American troops. The role of armed security contractors has also raised new legal and political questions about whether the United States has become too dependent on private armed forces on the 21st-century battlefield. The budget office’s report found that from 2003 to 2007, the government awarded contracts in Iraq worth about $85 billion, and that the administration was now awarding contracts at a rate of $15 billion to $20 billion a year. At that pace, contracting costs will surge past the $100 billion mark before the end of the year. Through 2007, spending on outside contractors accounted for 20 percent of the total costs of the war, the budget office found. The dependence on private companies to support the war effort has led to questions about whether political favoritism has played a role in the awarding of multibillion-dollar contracts.

Note: For many disturbing reports on the realities of the Afghan and Iraq wars from major media sources, click here.


Scientists stop the ageing process
2008-08-11, Australian Broadcasting Corporation
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2008/08/11/2331197.htm

Scientists have stopped the ageing process in an entire organ for the first time, a study released today says. Researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine ... also say the older organs function as well as they did when the host animal was younger. The researchers, led by Associate Professor Ana Maria Cuervo, blocked the ageing process in mice livers by stopping the build-up of harmful proteins inside the organ's cells. As people age their cells become less efficient at getting rid of damaged protein resulting in a build-up of toxic material that is especially pronounced in Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other neurodegenerative disorders. The researchers say the findings suggest that therapies for boosting protein clearance might help stave off some of the declines in function that accompanies old age. In experiments, livers in genetically modified mice 22 to 26 months old ... cleaned blood as efficiently as those in animals a quarter their age. The benefits of restoring the cleaning mechanisms found inside all cells could extend far beyond a single organ, says Cuervo. "Our findings are particularly relevant for neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's," she says. "Many of these diseases are due to 'misbehaving' or damaged proteins that accumulate in neurons. By preventing this decline in protein clearance, we may be able to keep these people free of symptoms for a longer time." If the body's ability to dispose of cell debris within the cell were enhanced across a wider range of tissues, she says, it could extend life as well.

Note: For many key reports on health issues from reliable, verifiable sources, click here.


Ford's records show 2 on Warren panel had doubts in JFK killing
2008-08-10, Washington Post/Associated Press
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/09/AR20080809007...

Former President Gerald Ford secretly advised the FBI that two of his fellow members on the Warren Commission doubted the FBI's conclusion that John F. Kennedy was shot from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas. The new details were included in 500 pages of the FBI's large file on Ford, released in part this past week in response to requests under the Freedom of Information Act that The Associated Press and others made on the day Ford died in December 2006. That Ford served as the FBI's eyes and ears inside the commission has been known for years. Long ago, the government released a 1963 FBI memo that said Ford ... had volunteered to keep the FBI informed about the panel's private deliberations, but only if that relationship remained confidential. The bureau agreed. It was also well-known Ford was an outspoken proponent of the bureau's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy while acting alone. [Assistant FBI Director Cartha "Deke"] DeLoach wrote [a memorandum] on Dec. 17, 1963, to outline what Ford told him ... about the commission meeting the day before. "Two members of the commission brought up the fact that they still were not convinced that the President had been shot from the sixth floor window of the Texas Book Depository. ... These members failed to understand the trajectory of the slugs that killed the President. [Ford] stated he felt this point would be discussed further but, of course, would represent no problem." There was no explanation of what Ford meant by "no problem."

Note: For many revealing reports on major assassinations from major media sources, click here.


Anthony J. Russo, 71; Rand staffer helped leak Pentagon Papers
2008-08-08, Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-russo8-2008aug08,0,3350490.story

Anthony J. Russo, a Rand researcher in the late 1960s who encouraged Daniel Ellsberg to leak the Pentagon Papers and stood trial with him in the Vietnam War-era case that triggered debates over freedom of the press and hastened the fall of a president, has died. In 1971, Russo helped Ellsberg copy a classified government history of the Vietnam War that Ellsberg later supplied to the New York Times, ... dubbed the Pentagon Papers. The secret study provided evidence of lying by government officials, including several presidents, about the scope and purposes of the war. "I explained [to Ellsberg] how the so-called enemy, the Viet Cong, and the North Vietnamese, were actually the legitimate parties and how the U.S. presence was illegal, immoral and unwise. I supplied him with reams of documentation," Russo later wrote. He was fired from Rand a short time later. Russo said that when he heard about the fabrication of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, he urged Ellsberg to "turn that over to the newspapers." Publication of the first installments in June [1971] sparked an FBI manhunt for Ellsberg. Russo was harassed by police and placed under surveillance. When he was subpoenaed by a grand jury, he refused to testify against Ellsberg and was jailed for 45 days. A few days before Christmas 1971, both men were indicted on charges of conspiracy, theft and espionage. "I will be eternally grateful to Tony for his courage and partnership," Ellsberg said. "He set an example of willingness to risk everything for his country and for the Vietnam that he loved that very few, unfortunately, have emulated."

Note: For background information on "false-flag operations" like the Gulf of Tonkin incident, click here.


Important 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.

Kindly donate here to support this inspiring work.

Subscribe to our free email list of underreported news.

newsarticles.media is a PEERS empowerment website

"Dedicated to the greatest good of all who share our beautiful world"