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For most, a cancer diagnosis can be devastating. But for John Kanzius it was a call to action. Kanzius isn't a doctor. He doesn't even have a college degree. Yet ... the device he invented has impressed a notable researcher and inspired his hometown, Erie, Pa., to the point where it gave him a key to the city in April. Asked by [a reporter] what made him think he could cure cancer, Kanzius replied with a laugh, "Nobody else was doing it! I envision this treatment taking no more than a couple of minutes or so." Kanzius hopes cancer treatments could work something like this: A patient would be injected with tiny metal nano-particles, which would be carried through the bloodstream by a targeting molecule and attach only to cancerous cells. The patient would then be exposed to an energy field created by radio waves, and feel nothing, while the nano-particles would generate enough heat to destroy their cancerous host cell. Kanzius demonstrated just how easily the nano-particles could be used as receivers. A lab worker injected carbon nano-particles into a specific spot in a piece of liver, which was then placed into an energy field of low frequency radio waves. Within seconds, the areas injected the with nano-particles were heated to the point of actually cooking the liver, while leaving the surrounding meat unscathed. Kanzius' invention has caught the attention of Dr. Steven Curley, a surgical oncologist and cancer researcher at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. "This has the most fascinating potential I've seen in anything in my twenty years of cancer research," Curley [said]. Curley has developed current methods of using radio frequencies to attack cancer, but says he looks forward to one day using a non-invasive approach like the one Kanzius is working on.
Note: For a treasure trove of reliable information about exciting possible cancer cures, click here.
The key piece of material evidence used by prosecutors to implicate Libya in the Lockerbie bombing has emerged as a probable fake. Allegations of international political intrigue and shoddy investigative work are being levelled at the British government, the FBI and the Scottish police as one of the crucial witnesses, Swiss engineer Ulrich Lumpert, has apparently confessed that he lied about the origins of a crucial 'timer' - evidence that helped tie the man convicted of the bombing to the crime. At a trial in the Netherlands in 2001, former Libyan agent Abdulbaset al-Megrahi was jailed for life. Later this month the Scottish Court of Appeal is expected to hear Megrahi's case, after [a ruling] in June that there was enough evidence to suggest a miscarriage of justice. Lumpert's confession, which was given to police in his home city of Zurich last week, will strengthen Megrahi's appeal. Swiss businessman Edwin Bollier, who has spent nearly two decades trying to clear his company's name, is as eager for the appeal as is Megrahi. Bollier's now bankrupt company, Mebo, manufactured the timer switch that prosecutors used to implicate Libya after they said that fragments of it had been found on a Scottish hillside. 'I was shown fragments of a brown circuit board which matched our prototype. But when the MST-13 went into production, the timers contained green boards. I knew that the timers sold to Libya had green boards. I told the investigators this.' In 2001, Bollier spent five days in the witness box at the Lockerbie trial ... in the Netherlands. 'I was a defence witness, but the trial was so skewed to prove Libyan involvement that the details of what I had to say [were] ignored." Few people apart from conspiracy theorists and investigative journalists working on the case were prepared to believe Bollier until the end of last month, when Lumpert ... walked into a Zurich police station and asked to swear an affidavit before a notary.
Note: For a revealing documentary showing a major cover-up involving the Lockerbie bombing, click here.
On a recent run from Boston to Cape Cod, I test drove the 2008 Honda Accord, the latest version of this family favorite. The new Accord boasts an environmental first: a six-cylinder gasoline engine that's cleaner than many hybrid systems. There's only one catch: You can't actually buy this ultra-green Accord, or the four-cylinder version that also produces near-zero pollution. That is, unless you live in California, New York or six other northeast states that follow California's tougher pollution rules. Only there can you buy this Accord, or the roughly two dozen other models that meet so-called Partial Zero Emissions Vehicle standards, PZEV for short. Not only can't you buy one, but the government says it's currently illegal for automakers to sell these green cars outside of the special states. Under terms of the Clean Air Act — in the kind of delicious irony only our government can pull off — anyone (dealer, consumer, automaker) involved in an out-of-bounds PZEV sale could be subject to civil fines of up to $27,500. Volvo sent its dealers a memo alerting them to this fact, noting that its greenest S40 and V50 models were only for the special states. So, just how green is a PZEV machine? Well, if you just cut your lawn with a gas mower, congratulations, you just put out more pollution in one hour than these cars do in 2,000 miles of driving. Grill a single juicy burger, and you've cooked up the same hydrocarbon emissions as a three-hour drive in a Ford Focus PZEV. As the California Air Resources Board has noted, the tailpipe emissions of these cars can be cleaner than the outside air in smoggy cities. PZEV models are already available from Toyota, Ford, Honda, GM, Subaru, Volvo and VW. But chances are, you've never heard of them.
Note: For many exciting articles about new, efficient and clean energy inventions, click here.
"If you told me in the early 1960s that I'd turn into a full-time ufologist, I would have laughed my head off," Stanton T. Friedman, a former nuclear physicist who was honoured with a proclamation this week by the City of Fredericton, says. "I preferred science and people, not science fiction. But how can you not believe?" If not New Brunswick's favourite son, Stan Friedman is certainly among its most famous. For 40 years, Carl Sagan's former classmate at the University of Chicago has lived in Fredericton while trying to convince the world of the existence of invaders from outer space. "I have never seen a flying saucer and I have never seen an alien, but I have talked to people who have," Friedman says. He is 73, has white hair and a white beard and chatters at warp speed. "I am still an optimist." An expert in nuclear aircraft fission, fusion rockets and power plants for space travel, Friedman worked 14 years on advanced and highly classified projects for General Electric, General Motors, Westinghouse, TRW and McDonnell Douglas, among others. He has given lectures on flying saucers at 600 universities over the last four decades, has testified for Congress and spoken at the United Nations twice and has appeared on television shows around the world. Friedman's scientific background, years of navigating through thousands of documents and hundreds of interviews with witnesses led him to the conclusion that aliens are more than a myth. "After a while, you get used to the nasty, noisy negativists and the ancient academics,'' he says. "And years ago, I got angry at the government officials who were lying through their teeth. It got me started on a crusade, in a way. I'm a good detective when I set out to be."
Note: Stanton T. Friedman, Ph.D. is one of the foremost scientists investigating the evidence of UFOs. He has written many books presenting the results of his research. For a two-page summary of witness testimony from top government and military officials on a major cover-up of UFOs, click here.
Twenty years ago today, a 46-year-old former Air Force captain sat down on the tracks in front of a train loaded with bombs at the Concord Naval Weapons Station. The ex-captain's name was S. Brian Willson. He was there to block the train ... to protest U.S. arms shipments to Central America. But nothing was blocked that day. Instead, the train barreled into him at 16 miles an hour, slicing off his legs and one ear and laying open his skull - and igniting what quickly became the nation's biggest anti-war movement in the decades between the Vietnam and Iraq eras. Today, however, there will be more than a memory on those dusty tracks. Willson plans to come back to the spot where he lost his legs to remember and pray for global harmony. It's a different time, with different wars, but he says he feels just as passionate as he did back then. "Maybe we'll have 10 people there, maybe 30, who knows?" Willson said by phone from his home in Arcata (Humboldt County). "I guess it'll be whatever it is. I do know this, though: We have to preserve our history. That's one good reason to be there, as painful as the memories will be for me. I have to look on life as a journey, and all I can say is I'm still on track," said Willson. "Running me over with a train wasn't just criminal, it was stupid. But it has not in any way stopped me. My life is good," he said. "I like the whole idea of pursuing what I call right livelihood, reducing my footprint on Earth. I enjoy it." The protest never truly ended. A couple of times a year, peace groups use the tracks as a setting for small anti-war gatherings - and every Monday, just as he has for the past 20 years, 53-year-old Concord resident Greg Getty, sits at the tracks at 9 a.m. and says a prayer in Willson's name.
Wadded-up tissues littered Rishel Middle School's gym floor as tough teenagers sobbed, hugged their peers and told gut-wrenching stories about their lives during an all-day session intended to break down barriers. One 13-year-old said he was abandoned by his parents and that he lies awake at night scared by sounds of gunshots outside his window. A 15-year-old girl talked about attempting suicide and urged anyone with similar thoughts to reach out for help. And a teacher tearfully warned students about their actions by revealing he was a bully when he was younger – until the person he tormented tried to kill himself. The confessions were shared ... as part of "Challenge Day," a nationally recognized anti-bullying program that travels to schools around the country. Challenge Day promotes self respect and acceptance, and inspires students to become positive leaders. [The] 20-year-old program [was] designed by Yvonne and Rich St. John-Dutra. "We want to create a world where every child feels safe," said Rich St. John-Dutra. The program, which was featured on "The Oprah Winfrey Show." The events combined ice-breaking routines to get students to drop their guards with soul-searching exercises designed to reveal their true selves. Students wept as their troubles tumbled out - from worries about their parents, medical problems within the family, troubles with gangs, and battles with alcohol and drugs. Students later apologized to others who they had put down or teased over the years. "This is going to change people," said Eddie Castillo, 13. "I never knew people had problems with their families and their brothers and drugs. I never saw that sensitive side until now."
Note: For one of the most inspiring video clips ever, watch an incredibly moving 15-minute clip from an Emmy-award winning documentary on Challenge day. Learn more about this amazing program on the Challenge Day website.
The Bush administration ... plans to turn again to a legal tool, the “state secrets” privilege, to try to stop a suit against a Belgian banking cooperative [known as Swift] that secretly supplied millions of private financial records to the United States government. The “state secrets” privilege, allowing the government to shut down litigation on national security grounds, was once rarely used. The Bush administration has turned to it more than 30 times, seeking to end public discussion of cases like the claims of an F.B.I. whistle-blower and the abduction of a German terrorism suspect. Most notably, the administration has sought to use the privilege to kill numerous suits against telecommunications carriers over the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping program. Swift is considered the nerve center of the global banking industry, routing trillions of dollars each day among banks, brokerage houses and other financial institutions. Its partnership with Washington ... gave Central Intelligence Agency and Treasury Department officials access to millions of records on international banking transactions. Months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Swift began turning over large chunks of its database in response to a series of unusually broad subpoenas from the Treasury Department. Two American banking customers ... sued Swift on invasion-of-privacy grounds. [Steven E. Schwarz, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, said the Swift program] “is an Orwellian example of government overreaching and unfettered access to private financial information that is not consistent with the values upon which our country was founded. We’ve seen a real erosion of the ‘state secrets’ privilege in the last year. I think it is from overuse. We’ve seen it used in record numbers, in situations where it was inappropriate, and the courts are starting to recognize that.”
Government secrecy is expanding at an unprecedented clip, despite growing public concern about barriers to information. OpenTheGovernment.org reports that stamping government documents "secret" cost American taxpayers $8.2 billion last year -- a 7.5 percent increase over the year before. The coalition found that for every dollar spent declassifying documents, the federal government spends $185 to conceal government documents. Open-government advocates blame the policies of the Bush administration. "The current administration has increasingly refused to be held accountable to the public," said Patrice McDermott, executive director of the coalition of conservative and liberal groups concerned about government secrecy. "These practices lead to the circumscription of democracy." Among the findings from the report: Businesses enjoyed a no-bid process for 26 percent, or $107.5 billion, of the federal government's business last year. President Bush has issued at least 151 signing statements challenging 1,149 provisions of laws passed by Congress. The Defense Department has more than doubled in real terms the amount it spends on classified weapons acquisitions since 1995. The number of documents [classified in 2006] ballooned to 20.3 million, up by 43 percent. And those figures do not include the untold number of documents that are locked away by federal agencies in categories known as "pseudo-classification." These are unclassified documents that government bureaucrats deem too sensitive for public consumption. The report also found that the Bush administration has invoked a legal tool known as the "state secrets" privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out of civil court.
In an attempt to raise the nation's historically low rate of breast-feeding, federal health officials commissioned an attention-grabbing advertising campaign a few years ago to convince mothers that their babies faced real health risks if they did not breast-feed. It featured striking photos of insulin syringes and asthma inhalers topped with rubber nipples. Plans to run these blunt ads infuriated the politically powerful infant formula industry, which hired a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a former top regulatory official to lobby the Health and Human Services Department. Not long afterward, department political appointees toned down the campaign. The ads ran instead with more friendly images of dandelions and cherry-topped ice cream scoops, to dramatize how breast-feeding could help avert respiratory problems and obesity. In a February 2004 letter (pdf), the lobbyists told then-HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson they were "grateful" for his staff's intervention to stop health officials from "scaring expectant mothers into breast-feeding," and asked for help in scaling back more of the ads. The formula industry's intervention -- which did not block the ads but helped change their content -- is being scrutinized by Congress in the wake of last month's testimony by former surgeon general Richard H. Carmona that the Bush administration repeatedly allowed political considerations to interfere with his efforts to promote public health. "This is a credible allegation of political interference that [may] have had serious public health consequences," said [Rep. Henry] Waxman, a California Democrat. The milder campaign HHS eventually used had no discernible impact on the nation's breast-feeding rate, which lags behind the rate in many European countries.
Pay comparisons almost always leave someone feeling dwarfed, and none more so than the CEO-to-worker pay gap. But even CEOs have reason to feel seriously dwarfed these days, thanks to the outsized paychecks of private equity and hedge fund managers. The average CEO of a large U.S. company made roughly $10.8 million last year, or 364 times that of U.S. full-time and part-time workers, who made an average of $29,544, according to a joint analysis released Wednesday by the liberal Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy. The IPS and UFE pay-gap numbers are also wider than some other measures of CEO-to-worker pay because they count both full-time and part-time workers in their calculations, which effectively lowers workers' average pay due to fewer hours worked. If you just consider the average compensation (wages plus benefits) of full-time year-round workers in non-managerial jobs - roughly $40,000 - CEO pay is more like 270 times bigger than the average Joe's. That's still a far cry from days gone by. In 1989, for instance, U.S. CEOs of large companies earned 71 times more than the average worker, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The top 20 CEOs of U.S. companies made an average of $36.4 million in 2006. The pay gap numbers don't include the value of the many perks CEOs receive, which averaged $438,342, according to the report. Nor do they include the pension benefits CEOs receive. But even including all that, CEO pay can look like chump change next to private equity and hedge fund managers' pay. Those managers made an average of $657.5 million in 2006 - more than 16,000 times what the average full-time worker makes, and roughly 61 times that of the average CEO.
The Defense Department is paying private contractors more than $1 billion in more than 30 separate contracts to collect and analyze intelligence for the four military services and its own Defense Intelligence Agency, according to contract documents and a Pentagon spokesman. The disclosure marks the first time a U.S. intelligence service has made public its outside payments. Intelligence payments to contractors have climbed dramatically since the terror attacks in September 2001, but none had been made public, according to a report filed in April by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Outside contracting ... places critical security tasks and sensitive information in the hands of private parties, says Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy specialist at the Federation of American Scientists, a Washington privacy group. "Private contractors don't have to undergo congressional oversight or justify their budgets to appropriators," Aftergood says. "We're starting to create a new kind of intelligence bureaucracy, one that is both more expensive and less accountable (than government's own intelligence agencies)." Most of the contracts, which extend up to five years, pay for analysis of intelligence data and for related services, such as translation and interpretation of photo and electronic intelligence. A small fraction, which [a Pentagon spokesman] declined to specify, pay for private spies. Private contractors often hire former intelligence officers, sometimes leasing them back at higher salaries to the agencies that first recruited and trained them.
When patients feel they might be having an adverse drug effect, doctors will very often dismiss their concerns, a new study shows. In a survey of 650 patients taking cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins, who reported having adverse drug reactions, many said their physicians denied that the drug could be connected to their symptoms, Dr. Beatrice A. Golomb of the University of California at San Diego ... found. “Physicians seem to commonly dismiss the possibility of a connection,” Golomb [said]. “This seems to occur even for the best-supported adverse effects of the most widely prescribed class of drugs. Clearly there is a need for better physician education about adverse effects, and there is a strong need for patient involvement in adverse event reporting.” The best-known side effects of statins ... are liver damage and muscle problems, although statins have also been tied to changes in memory, concentration and mood. Physician reaction to a potential side effect is crucial because the muscle problems can progress to a rare but potentially fatal condition called rhabdomyolysis if the drug isn’t discontinued. The researchers investigated the response of doctors to statin patients who believed they were having adverse drug reactions. In the great majority of cases, the patient, not the doctor, initiated the discussion. Forty-seven percent of patients with muscle problems or cognitive problems said their doctors dismissed the possibility that their symptoms were statin-related, while 51 percent of patients with peripheral neuropathy, a type of nerve pain affecting the extremities, said their doctors denied a possible connection with statins.
Note: For a hard-hitting overview of medical corruption, click here.
Gerald Rowley keeps his dreams in his garage. There ... he stores an aging Mazda 626 sedan [specially outfitted with a] one-gallon steel box in the trunk connected to fuel lines leading to a gasoline vaporizing device under the hood. The steel box holds one gallon of regular unleaded gasoline. The device beneath the hood is called the VFS, Vaporizing Fuel System. I came here to drive Rowley's VFS-equipped car. For years, I had spurned the invitations of homespun inventors worldwide to travel to distant points to witness first-hand machines that could deliver 100 miles per gallon or 200 miles per gallon. The claims sounded too incredible to believe -- ridiculous, in fact. If such devices really worked, really did what their inventors said they did, why would they still be sitting on shelves in anonymous workshops -- ignored by the driving public and all of the vehicle manufacturers who serve them? What automobile manufacturer in its right mind, especially with rising concerns about future oil availability and with gasoline prices escalating worldwide, would not jump at the opportunity to acquire a device that delivered 100 miles per gallon? Rowley's patented device is nothing new. It's just the latest iteration of an idea already developed by others -- the notion that you could get more miles per gallon out of a traditional gasoline engine if you pre-heated the fuel to about 350 degrees Fahrenheit, thus turning it into a vapor before it enters the combustion chamber. Vaporized fuel, when properly mixed with air, burns more efficiently, saves fuel and emits fewer tailpipe pollutants than traditional fuel-air mixtures in which gasoline is sprayed into a combustion chamber in tiny droplets and then mixed with air before burning. All car companies know this.
Note: Why won't the car manufacturers develop this amazing, proven technology? For a possible answer, click here. And for a treasure trove of exciting reports on new energy developments, click here.
For half a century, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - a low-profile but vital division of the Defense Department - has ... been the force behind dozens of weapons, from the M-16 rifle and night-vision goggles to smart bombs and stealth aircraft. Now, DARPA is planning for a long war in which U.S. troops will be expected to face guerrilla adversaries. And just as during the Cold War, DARPA is counting on high-tech Silicon Valley to give U.S. forces the edge. More than 3,000 scientists, entrepreneurs and military leaders ... gathered in Anaheim ... for the agency's 50th anniversary conference. The agency is operating on a $3.1 billion budget, up 8 percent from fiscal 2006. Virtually every Silicon Valley company, from the obvious candidates like Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space to ... Google, has been touched in some way by DARPA. "Almost every great digital oak has a DARPA acorn at the bottom," said futurist Paul Saffo. During three days in Anaheim, DARPA and Pentagon officials made 60 presentations, painting a picture of a future in which the United States will have to spend $1 million on countermeasures for every dollar shelled out by bomb-building guerrillas like those U.S. forces are encountering in Iraq. But DARPA's high-tech dreams have their critics, who view its "visions" as boondoggles the nation can't afford. "I think it (DARPA) is basically a jobs program," said Chalmers Johnson, a retired University of California political scientist. Thomas Barnett, author of The Pentagon's New Map, one of the treatises that lay out the scenario for these asymmetrical wars that planners expect, [said] "The million-to-one (ratio) is unsustainable."
One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted. Or worse. For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods. He had thought he was doing a good and noble thing when he started telling the FBI about the guns and the land mines and the rocket-launchers — all of them being sold for cash, no receipts necessary, he said. The buyers were Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry employees. The seller, he claimed, was the Iraqi-owned company he worked for, Shield Group Security Co. “It was a Wal-Mart for guns,” he says. “It was all illegal and everyone knew it.” So Vance says he blew the whistle, supplying photos and documents and other intelligence to an FBI agent in his hometown of Chicago because he didn’t know whom to trust in Iraq. For his trouble, he says, he got 97 days in Camp Cropper, an American military prison outside Baghdad. Congress gave more than $30 billion to rebuild Iraq, and at least $8.8 billion of it has disappeared. “If you do it, you will be destroyed,” said William Weaver, professor of political science at the University of Texas-El Paso and senior advisor to the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. “Reconstruction is so rife with corruption. Sometimes people ask me, ‘Should I do this?’ And my answer is no. If they’re married, they’ll lose their family. They will lose their jobs. They will lose everything,” Weaver said.
I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11. I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers – whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C – would snap through at the same time? (They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower – the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 – which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7. Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11. Initial reports of reporters that they heard "explosions" in the towers ... the [FBI's] list of Arab suicide-hijackers, which included three men who were – and still are – very much alive and living in the Middle East. What about the weird letter allegedly written by Mohamed Atta, whose "Islamic" advice to his gruesome comrades – released by the CIA – mystified every Muslim friend I know in the Middle East? Like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic, meretricious "war on terror" which has led us to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East. Bush's happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that "we're an empire now – we create our own reality". True? At least tell us.
Note: Robert Fisk is an award-winning, veteran Middle East reporter for the Independent. For a concise summary of reliable news reports that raise serious questions about what really happened on 9/11, click here
Aaron Russo, who managed Bette Midler and went on to produce such films as "Trading Places," has died. He was 64. Russo died from cancer before dawn on Friday, surrounded by family at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, said Heidi Gregg. Russo had been battling the disease for nearly six years. "He was my best friend for 27 years," said Gregg. "Aaron was a freedom fighter, a film maker and a lover of life." Russo ... began promoting rock and roll shows at a local theater while still in high school. He later ... promoted some of the most successful rock acts of the 1960s including Janis Joplin and The Grateful Dead. In the 1970s, Russo managed Bette Midler, producing the Tony award winning "Clams on the Half-Shell Revue" starring the singer. Russo eventually turned to producing feature films including "The Rose" which starred Midler in 1979 as a self destructive rock star, and later "Trading Places" in 1983 which starred Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd. Russo was also a long time political activist. In 2006, Russo finished work on a documentary titled "America: Freedom to Fascism," which was billed as an expose of the Internal Revenue Service. "He was an absolutely amazing man," said Ilona Urban, his press secretary. "He was pointed and once he knew there was a direction to go, you couldn't get him to turn left or right. He was very committed."
Note: Aaron Russo was one of the few respected film makers who dared to reveal some of the major cover-ups going on behind the scenes in the world of banking and more. To view his highly popular, five-star-rated 2006 documentary on this topic, America: From Freedom to Fascism, click here.
The Bush administration acknowledged for the first time that telecommunications companies assisted the government's warrantless surveillance program and were being sued as a result, an admission some legal experts say could complicate the government's bid to halt numerous lawsuits challenging the program's legality. "[U]nder the president's program, the terrorist surveillance program, the private sector had assisted us," Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell said in an interview with the El Paso Times. His statement could help plaintiffs in dozens of lawsuits against the telecom companies, which allege that the companies participated in a wiretapping program that violated Americans' privacy rights. David Kris, a former Justice Department official, ... said McConnell's admission makes it difficult to argue that the phone companies' cooperation with the government is a state secret. "It's going to be tough to continue to call it 'alleged' when he's just admitted it," Kris said. McConnell has just added to "the list of publicly available facts that are no longer state secrets," increasing the plaintiffs' chances that their cases can proceed, Kris said. McConnell's statement "does serious damage to the government's state secrets claims that are at the heart of its defenses," said Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology. Bruce Fein, an associate deputy attorney general in the Reagan administration, said that McConnell's disclosure shows that "an important element of a program can be discussed publicly and openly without endangering the nation. These Cassandran cries that the earth is going to fall every time you have a discussion simply are not borne out by the facts," he said.
British soldiers in Afghanistan are being supplied with a new "super weapon" to attack Taliban fighters more effectively, defence officials said yesterday. The "enhanced blast" weapon is based on thermobaric technology used in the powerful bombs dropped by the Russians to obliterate Grozny, the Chechen capital, and in US "bunker busters". Defence officials insisted yesterday that the British bombs were different. "They are optimised to create blast [rather than heat]", one said, adding that it would be misleading to call them "thermobaric". So-called thermobaric weapons have been used by the US against suspected al-Qaida and Taliban underground bases. Combined heat and pressure kill people over a wide area by sucking the air out of lungs and destroying internal organs. Defence officials described the new weapon as a shoulder-launched "light anti-structure munition". The new weapons would be more effective against buildings and structures used by the Taliban, they said. Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat leader, described the weapons as a "serious step change" for the British army. He added: "The continuing issue of civilian casualties in Afghanistan has enormous importance in the battle for hearts and minds. If these weapons contribute to the deaths of civilians then a primary purpose of the British deployment is going to be made yet more difficult." The deployment of the weapons should have been announced to MPs, Sir Menzies said. "We need much more transparency."
Nearly two dozen gas station owners in California [have] sued Shell Oil, Chevron (CVX) and Saudi Refining ... claiming the companies conspired to fix prices for 23,000 franchise owners nationwide. The plaintiffs ... say chairmen of the three oil companies met privately nearly every month starting in March 1996 for the "purpose of forming and organizing a combination." The lawsuit alleges executives destroyed documents from the meetings, and a defunct joint venture violated U.S. antitrust laws and caused artificially high wholesale gas prices in nearly every state from 1999 to 2001. The lawsuit hinges on a marketing deal that, plaintiffs say, allowed former rivals to collude on prices starting in 1998, when Shell and Texaco formed Equilon Enterprises [and] Motiva Enterprises LLC. Equilon and Motiva began operating when ... crude oil prices hit their lowest levels since the Great Depression, according to ... lawyer Joseph M. Alioto, who [represents] the plaintiffs. Yet gas prices soared for franchise owners, forcing them to pass on the cost to consumers or cut profit margins. "These executives get together and say, 'OK, we're going to raise Texaco's price to Shell's price, then we're going to raise both of them 50 to 75%, and we're going to do it after we've already had all these cost savings,'" Alioto said. [He] argues wholesale prices were higher by at least 20 cents a gallon and possibly as much as 40 cents per gallon from 1999 to 2001. Station owners had little choice but to pay higher prices. Franchises typically sign long-term contracts with oil suppliers, making it tough to switch to another brand or an independent supplier.
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