News ArticlesExcerpts of Key News Articles in Major Media
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In April 1971, CIA officer John Seabury Thomson paddled his aluminum canoe across the Potomac on his daily commute from his home in Maryland to CIA headquarters in Langley. When he reached the Virginia shore, he noticed a milky substance clouding the waters around Pulp Run. A fierce environmentalist, Thomson traced the pollution to its source: his employer. The murky white discharge was a chemical mash, the residue of thousands of liquefied secrets that the agency had been quietly disposing of in his beloved river. He single-handedly brought the practice to a halt. Nearly four decades later, though, that trickle of secrets would be a tsunami that would capsize Thomson's small craft. Today the nation's obsession with secrecy is redefining public and private institutions and taking a toll on the lives of ordinary citizens. Excessive secrecy is at the root of multiple scandals -- the phantom weapons of mass destruction, the collapse of Enron, the tragedies traced to Firestone tires and the arthritis drug Vioxx, and more. In this self-proclaimed "Information Age," our country is on the brink of becoming a secretocracy, a place where the right to know is being replaced by the need to know. [There] is a confluence of causes behind it, among them the chill wrought by 9/11, industry deregulation, the long dominance of a single political party, fear of litigation and liability and the threat of the Internet. But perhaps most alarming [is] the public's increasing tolerance of secrecy. Without timely information, citizens are reduced to mere residents, and representative government atrophies into a representational image of democracy as illusory as a hologram.
Note: The author of this superb article is Ted Gup. He is a journalism professor at Case Western Reserve University and author of Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life.
If you pop a vitamin C tablet in your mouth, it's a good bet it came from China. Indeed, many of the world's vitamins are now made in China. In less than a decade, China has captured 90 percent of the U.S. market for vitamin C, driving almost everyone else out of business. Chinese pharmaceutical companies also have taken over much of the world market in the production of antibiotics, analgesics, enzymes and primary amino acids. According to an industry group, China makes 70 percent of the world's penicillin, 50 percent of its aspirin and 35 percent of its [Tylenol], as well as the bulk of vitamins A, B12, C and E. In the wake of a pet-food scandal, in which adulterated wheat gluten from China led to the deaths of thousands of pets in North America, and other instances of food and toothpaste tampering, China's vitamin producers are reaching out to reassure U.S. consumers that their vitamins are safe. Whether that's true isn't clear, however. Foreign food-safety experts say China's larger companies have reputations to protect. The question is how they maintain quality control. Since U.S. laws don't require food and drug sellers to label products with the country of origin of ingredients, it's impossible for consumers to know where food or supplements are coming from, not to mention what factory produced them.
Powerful governments and armed groups are spreading fear to divert attention from human rights abuses ... Amnesty International said yesterday in its annual assessment of rights worldwide. "The politics of fear is fueling a downward spiral of human rights abuse in which no right is sacrosanct and no person is safe," said Irene Khan, secretary general of the human rights watchdog. Governments are undermining the rule of law and human rights with "short-sighted fear-mongering and divisive policies." The United States is "the leading country using fear to justify the unjustifiable," said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA. "The U.S. used to be in a position to speak out effectively against torture and military tribunals. We can't do that now because we are carrying out some of the same practices," he said. The organization urged the new U.S. Congress to take the lead in restoring respect for humane standards and practices at home and abroad. Citizens in many countries are being manipulated by fear, the group said. Amnesty applauded civil society for its "courage and commitment" in the face of abuses. Marches, petitions, blogs and armbands "may not seem much by themselves," the report said, "but by bringing people together they unleash an energy for change that should not be underestimated. People power will change the face of human rights in the 21st century."
Pediatrician Rupin Thakkar's first inkling that the pharmaceutical industry was peering over his shoulder ... came in a letter from a drug representative about the generic drops Thakkar prescribes to treat infectious pinkeye. In the letter, the salesperson wrote that Thakkar was causing his patients to miss more days of school than they would if he put them on Vigamox, a more expensive brand-name medicine made by Alcon Laboratories. "My initial thought was 'How does she know what I'm prescribing?' " Thakkar said. "It feels intrusive ... I just feel strongly that medical encounters need to be private." He is not alone. Many doctors object to drugmakers' common practice of contracting with data-mining companies to track exactly which medicines physicians prescribe and in what quantities -- information marketers and salespeople use to fine-tune their efforts. The concerns are not merely about privacy. Proponents say using such detailed data for drug marketing serves mainly to influence physicians to prescribe more expensive medicines, not necessarily to provide the best treatment. "We don't like the practice, and we want it to stop," said Jean Silver-Isenstadt, executive director of the National Physicians Alliance. (Thakkar is on the group's board of directors.) "We think it's a contaminant to the doctor-patient relationship, and it's driving up costs." The American Medical Association makes millions of dollars each year by helping data-mining companies link prescribing data to individual physicians. It does so by licensing access to the AMA Physician Masterfile, a database containing names, birth dates, educational background, specialties and addresses for more than 800,000 doctors.
Note: For more reliable, verifiable information about major corruption in the drug industry, click here.
Senior government and military officials and other experts, organized by a joint Stanford-Harvard program called the Preventive Defense Project, met behind closed doors in Washington for a day-long workshop called "The Day After." The organizers of the nonpartisan project, Stanford's William Perry, a secretary of defense in the Clinton administration, and Harvard's Ashton Carter, a senior Defense Department official during the Clinton years, assumed the detonation of a bomb similar in size to the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima in World War II. A paper [they] are writing ... urges local governments and individuals to build underground bomb shelters; encourages authorities who survive to prevent evacuation of at least some of the areas attacked for three days ... and proposes suspending regulations on radiation exposure so that first responders would be able to act, even if that caused higher cancer rates. "The public at large will expect that their government had thought through this possibility and to have planned for it," Carter said in an interview. "This kind of an event would be unprecedented. We have had glimpses of something like this with Hiroshima, and glimpses with 9/11 and with Katrina. But those are only glimpses. If one bomb goes off, there are likely to be more to follow," Carter said. "This fact, that nuclear terrorism will appear as a syndrome rather than a single episode, has major consequences." It would, he added, require powerful government intervention to force people to do something many may resist -- staying put.
Note: Ashton Carter was co-author, with Philip Zelikow (later Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission) and John Deutch (former CIA Director), of a 1998 Foreign Affairs article, "Catastrophic Terrorism: Tackling the New Danger," which warned of a possible catastrophic attack on the World Trade Center and accurately described the governmental aftermath of 9/11.
Three days after learning that he won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics, George Smoot was talking about the universe. Sitting across from him ... was Saul Perlmutter, a fellow cosmologist. Smoot’s and Perlmutter’s work is part of a revolution that has forced their colleagues to confront a universe wholly unlike any they have ever known, one that is made of only 4 percent of the kind of matter we have always assumed it to be. The rest — 96 percent of the universe — is ... “Dark.” This is not “dark” as in distant or invisible. This is “dark” as in unknown. It lies ... beyond the entire electromagnetic spectrum. The motions of galaxies don’t make sense unless we infer the existence of dark matter. Understanding dark energy ... seems to really require understanding and using both [general relativity and quantum mechanics] theories at the same time. “It’s been so hard that we’re even willing to consider listening to string theorists,” Perlmutter says, referring to work that posits numerous dimensions beyond the traditional (one of time and three of space). According to quantum theory, particles can pop into and out of existence. In that case, maybe the universe itself was born in one such quantum pop. And ... why not many universes? This is just one of a number of theories that have been popping into existence ... in the past few years: parallel universes, intersecting universes or, in the case of Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog just last summer, a superposition of universes.
Note: Many scientists today claim that the universe is about 13.7 billion years old with an uncertainty of 200 million years. Yet in the late 1800's, scientists were convinced that the age of the Earth was less than 100 million years old. In the early 1700's, Isaac Newton and his contemporaries believed the universe to be about 6,000 years old plus or minus a few hundred years. So in the last 300 years, the "scientific" age of our universe has increased by billions of years! What will it be in another 100 or 200 years?
More than 200 years after Mayer Amschel Rothschild founded the family dynasty that offered discreet counsel and investment wisdom to kings, queens, emperors and industrial titans, his 35-year-old direct descendant, Nathaniel, has emerged as a kingmaker in his own right and an investor who some say may become the richest Rothschild of them all. In five short years, the man in line to be the fifth Baron Rothschild is close to becoming a billionaire. The ascent of Mr. Rothschild is a vivid illustration of how the still glittering, if somewhat faded, prestige and wealth of Europe’s most storied banking family has been reinvigorated from bold bets in this era’s new-money investment vehicles. Like his forebears, he prefers that his influence remain unseen. Mr. Rothschild is a principal adviser to Oleg Deripaska, one of the richest oligarchs in Russia and the owner of the aluminum giant Rusal, which recently merged with two other companies to create the world’s largest aluminum company. Mr. Rothschild received no public credit despite having played a crucial role in getting the deal done. He ... would not be interviewed for this article, yet he allowed his lushly renovated town house in Greenwich Village to be featured in Men’s Vogue magazine. With his mix of Old World politesse, a racy appreciation for fast times and the brute force of his accumulating wealth, Mr. Rothschild has become friend and adviser to many — including Russian billionaires, Indian steel magnates and a long list of people who have helped him out during his ascent. “There is a lot of power behind him, and like all the Rothschilds they use their power with discretion,” said Guy Wyser-Pratte, who has invested with Mr. Rothschild. “I expect him to uphold the family tradition.”
Note: For more on secret societies and groups in which the Rothschilds are suspected to play a large role, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here. For an index of all articles ever published by the New York Times on the Rothschilds family, click here.
A few small companies and maverick university laboratories, including ... one at U.C.L.A. run by Seth Putterman, a professor of physics, are pursuing quixotic solutions for future energy, trying to tap the power of the Sun — hot nuclear fusion — in devices that fit on a tabletop. Dr. Putterman’s approach is to use sound waves, called sonofusion or bubble fusion, to expand and collapse tiny bubbles, generating ultrahot temperatures. At temperatures hot enough, atoms can literally fuse and release even more energy than when they split in nuclear fission, now used in nuclear power plants and weapons. Furthermore, fusion is clean in that it does not produce long-lived nuclear waste. Dr. Putterman has not achieved fusion in his experiments. He and other scientists form a small but devoted cadre interested in turning small-scale desktop fusion into usable systems. Although success is far away, the principles seem sound. Achieving nuclear fusion, even in a desktop device, is not particularly difficult. But building a fusion reactor that generates more energy than it consumes is far more challenging. Impulse Devices, a small company in the small town of Grass Valley, Calif., is exploring the same sound-driven fusion as Dr. Putterman, pushing forward with venture capital financing. Its president, Ross Tessien, concedes that Impulse is a high-risk investment, but the potential payoffs would be many. “You solve the world’s pollution problems,” Mr. Tessien said. “You eliminate the need for wars. You eliminate scarcity of fuel. And it happens to be a very valuable market. So from a commercial point of view, there’s every incentive. From a moral point of view, there’s every incentive. And it’s fun and it’s exciting work.”
Note: To read about a wide array of revolutionary energy technologies, click here.
Cities should close schools for up to three months in the event of a severe flu outbreak, ball games and movies should be canceled ... the federal government advised today in issuing new pandemic flu guidelines to states and cities. Health officials acknowledged that such measures would hugely disrupt public life, but they argued that these measure would buy the time needed to produce vaccines and would save lives. “We have to be prepared for a Category 5 pandemic,” said Dr. Martin Cetron, director of global migration and quarantine for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “It’s not easy. The only thing that’s harder is facing the consequences.” The new guidelines also advocate having sick people and all their families' even apparently healthy members stay home for 7 to 10 days. Any pandemic is expected to move faster than a new vaccine can be produced. Current experimental vaccines against H5N1 avian flu are in short supply and based on strains isolated in 2004 or 2005. Although the government is creating a $4 billion stockpile of the antiviral drug Tamiflu, it is only useful when taken within the first 48 hours, and Tamiflu-resistant flu strains have already been found. The historian John Barry, author of “The Great Influenza,” a history of the 1918 flu, questioned an idea underpinning the study’s conclusions. There is evidence, he said, that some cities with low sickness and death rates in 1918 ... were hit by a milder spring wave of the virus. That would have, in effect, inoculated their citizens against the more severe fall wave and might have been more important than their public health measures.
Note: Why is it that government officials seem to want us to be afraid? Could it be that when we live in fear, we are more willing to give up our freedoms and money and allow them to be in control? For more, click here. And why would the government spend billions on stockpiling drugs of questionable use? For an answer, click here.
In 1983, I opened the White Dog Cafe as a coffee and muffin take-out shop on the first floor of my house, where I have now lived for 35 years. Today the White Dog is a full-service restaurant occupying three of the brownstone row-houses. Our gift shop, the Black Cat, sells local and fair-trade crafts, books, and novelties. The other row houses are home to other restaurants, a coffeeshop, real estate office, newspaper and magazine shop, and a hair salon. By living above the shop on Sansom Street, I ... grew to understand first hand how the wonderful diversity of people added to the vitality of my neighborhood and to the success of my business. Living and working in the same community has not only given me a stronger sense of place, but a different business outlook. There's a short distance between me as the business decision-maker and those affected by my decisions—a basic principle of the local living economy movement. I am more likely to make decisions from the heart, not just from the head. [For me] business is about relationships with everyone we buy from, sell to, and work with. As a society, we are taught that economic growth benefits everyone and success is measured by material gain. Yet continual growth is destroying the planet, using up more natural resources than can be regenerated. And it is the rich who are getting richer, while the share of wealth for everyone else is declining. I made a conscious decision to stay small and learned to grow in other ways besides the physical. As the Earth Charter says, “After basic needs are met, it's about being more, not having more.”
Note: For a treasure trove of great news articles which will inspire you to make a difference, click here.
The genocide in Rwanda 12 years ago was the most efficient ever carried out. 800,000 people were slaughtered in 100 days. One incredible and inspiring survivor’s tale has come to light only recently. It took Immaculee Ilibagiza, a college-educated young woman from a remote village, many years before she could confront the horrors she lived through. She is speaking out now, she says, to prevent further atrocities. It was extremely low tech ... just machetes, spears and knives, wielded by Hutus, the majority tribe as they tried to wipe out the minority Tutsis. [They] were slaughtered in their tracks, wherever they were found. When it was over, three out of every four Tutsis in Rwanda had been killed. When it began, Immaculee's father told her to run to a minister’s house three miles away, and to beg him to hide her. The minister was a Hutu. [He] put Immaculee and six other women in a tiny, rarely used bathroom in a remote corner of the house. Seven women were huddled in a bathroom measuring three feet by four feet, for 91 days. They took turns standing and stretching. "They were searching. They were there all the time," Immaculee remembers. She lost 40 pounds – one third of herself. What prompted the genocide? The Hutus had long-standing resentments against the Tutsis, who formed the nation's elite. There are things you can point to, but ... what could possibly explain what happened? Immaculee knows Rwandans can never forget but believes they must forgive. Revenge ... only prolongs the pain. Now she's a woman on a mission to spread the story ... hoping it can prevent future atrocities. She has giving lectures; she has written a book; and she is determined to stop the inevitable revisionists who claim the genocide never happened.
Note: An intense video clip of this story is available at the CBS link above. This article fails to mention the key fact that top officials in developing nations knew very well of the mass murder as it was happening, yet refused to send help. This is graphically portrayed in the powerful movie Hotel Rwanda. Immacullee's amazing book, Left to Tell, has been an huge inspiration to many people around the world.
When Mexican president Vicente Fox leaves office this week and Felipe Calderon takes his place, President Bush will be the last of the so-called three amigos. Bush, Fox, and, of course, Canadian prime minister Paul Martin were the originators of the so-called Security and Prosperity Partnership, which critics call nothing more than a North American [U]nion. It means open borders, commerce of all [kinds] ... without the approval of either American voters or the U.S. Congress. An effort, the governments say, to harmonize regulation and increase cooperation between three very different countries. A new Canadian prime minister [is] joining the discussions as this North American partnership barrels ahead, with departments and ministries of all three governments working quickly to integrate North America by 2010. Now Mexico's new president, Felipe Calderon, [is] widely expected to keep the progress moving. Critics, though, say there's too little transparency and no congressional oversight. [Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch says] "There's nothing wrong with neighboring governments talking to each other, synchronizing their watches to make sure they're all on the same page in the cases of emergency or on trade issues or even on the flows of goods and people. But if policies are being made that the American people might oppose, or that are contrary to the law ... they're doing something a bit more nefarious." [Fitton] points to SPP documents urging the free flow of goods and people across borders and a wish list from business interests that borders remain open during a flu pandemic. Worse, critics say foreign policy elites are promoting a European-style union, erasing borders between the three countries and eventually moving to a single North American currency called the [Amero].
Note: To view the CNN broadcast of the above, click here. The Canadian TV network CNBC also carried a two-minute report on one of the supposed outcomes of the SPP, the Amero, which is a new common currency being planned for use by Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. To watch this news report, click here.
There is [a] painful six-minute video that has suddenly spread all over the world. It shows part of what happened in front of students who had been studying in the UCLA library when an Iranian-American student reportedly did not show any ID to campus police. The excruciating video clip [shows] enraged students screaming at police; police yelling back and using strong force trying to get students under control. "Here's your Patriot Act!" shouts a student, using profanity after screaming out in anguished pain from the electric jolts of a police Taser. "Stand up or you'll get Tasered again!" the police shout back. Appalled fellow students crowd in, some demanding the badge numbers of the police. To watch the video, click here. Police Department Assistant Chief Jeff Young [said] "He had refused to identify himself; he had refused to leave the library, and...he went limp, which is a form of resistance." Some students saw it differently. "Tabatabainejad was also stunned with the Taser when he was already handcuffed," complained third-year student Carlos Zaragoza. Tasers are increasingly controversial — a powerful means of control for police that is apparently sometimes too powerful. While it is often referred to as a "non-lethal" weapon [a study] found that since 1999, 84 people in the United States and Canada have died after being shocked by a Taser. Four of UCLA's nearly 60 full-time police officers recently won "Taser Awards," given by the manufacturers of the electronic shock device.
Note: For lots more reliable information on "non-lethal weapons," click here.
Father Charles Morris spends many afternoons on the roof of the rectory where he sounds more like an electrical engineer than a man of the cloth. He has taken his rectory in Wyandotte, Mich. off the power grid and installed high-efficiency light-bulbs and special sun-blocking screens over the windows of his church. "What we have right here are eight 80 watt Kyocera solar panels. And a 400 watt Southwest air wind turbine," he told Sunday Morning correspondent Russ Mitchell. "We estimate that we are saving about $20,000 a year in terms of utility bills." Whether it's because of high fuel prices, or worries about global warming, environmentalism seems to be going mainstream. Wyandotte is a Detroit suburb of 28,000 – not the most likely place for a green revolution. But Wyandotte, like a lot of places, is beginning to change. It's long-term thinking that motivates Father Morris. "We, as 5 percent of the world's population, use up 28 percent of the world's resources," Father Morris said. "That's not, there's something really out of kilter here. Is that what Jesus would have us do?" Father Morris isn't putting in solar and wind power just to save money. It's spiritual for him too. His church has joined 2000 congregations of all faiths across the country in an organization called "Interfaith Power and Light," dedicated to the environment. "We are part of creation not apart from creation," he said. "And as a consequence everything else follows. And we forget that at our own peril."
On Sept. 11, 2006, the fifth anniversary of the terror attacks that devastated our nation, a man crashed his car into a building in Davenport, Iowa, hoping to blow it up and kill himself in the fire. No national newspaper, magazine or network newscast reported this attempted suicide bombing, though an AP wire story was available. Cable news (save for MSNBC's Keith Olbermann) was silent about this latest act of terrorism in America. Had the criminal, David McMenemy, been Arab or Muslim, this would have been headline news for weeks. But since his target was the Edgerton Women's Health Center...media have not called this terrorism - even after three decades of extreme violence by anti-abortion fanatics. Abortion providers and activists received 77 letters threatening anthrax attacks before 9/11, yet the media never considered anthrax threats as terrorism until after 9/11, when such letters were delivered to journalists' offices and members of Congress. Is McMenemy a lone nutcase, or a member of that network of violent extremists? We don't know, because journalists haven't investigated. Nor have they reported that just last year, nearly one in five abortion clinics experienced gunfire, arson, bombings, chemical attacks, assaults, stalking, death threats and blockades. The feds have taken over McMenemy's case, charging him with arson against a business affecting interstate commerce. Yet as of Oct. 5, no news outlet on Nexis reported this, despite a second AP story. As we continue national debates on how to keep America safe from terrorism, journalists do us...no good pretending that the threats come only from radical Muslims outside our borders.
Note: MSNBC's prime time news anchor Keith Olbermann recently received a threatening letter with white powder, yet this received virtually no coverage. Could it be because Olbermann has been quite critical of the current administration lately? For one of the very few articles on this, click here. For MSNBC article, click here
Members of the Sept. 11 commission said today that they were alarmed that they were told nothing about a White House meeting in July 2001 at which George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, is reported to have warned Condoleezza Rice...about an imminent Al Qaeda attack and failed to persuade her to take action. Details of the previously undisclosed meeting on July 10, 2001, two months before the Sept. 11 terror attacks, were first reported last week in a new book by the journalist Bob Woodward. The final report from the Sept. 11 commission made no mention of the meeting nor did it suggest there had been such an encounter between Mr. Tenet and Ms. Rice. Although passages of the book suggest that Mr. Tenet was a major source for Mr. Woodward, the former intelligence director has refused to comment on the book. The disclosures took members of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission by surprise. Some questioned whether information about the July 10 meeting was intentionally withheld from the panel. [A] Democratic commissioner, former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, said that the staff of the Sept. 11 commission was polled in recent days on the disclosures in Mr. Woodward’s book and agreed that the meeting “was never mentioned to us.” Philip D. Zelikow, the executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and now a top aide to Ms. Rice at the State Department, agreed that no witness before the commission had drawn attention to a July 10 meeting at the White House, nor described the sort of encounter portrayed in Mr. Woodward’s book.
Note: Isn't it interested that the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, Mr. Zelikow, co-authored a book with Condaleeza Rice prior to 9/11 and is now a top aide of hers. As executive director, Mr. Zelikow had more say than anyone else over who was interviewed and what went into the final report. Do you think he might have had some bias? Is it possible he's not telling the truth here?
[Congressman] Foley's obsession with 16- and 17-year-old male pages has been known to Republicans on Capitol Hill for at least five years. But other than issue a warning, little else seems to have been done about the congressman. A former page has come forward to tell ABC News warnings were issued about Foley to the pages in 2001. Internet messages [were] sent by Foley to three different pages after that warning. Two of them were sent to pages in the 2001-2002 class, with sexually explicit messages, most too graphic to be broadcast, from Foley using the screen name Maf54. "Maf54: To be honest, I am a little to interested in you. So that's why I need to back off a little. Teen: Ya, slow things down a little im still young…like under 18. don't want to do anything illegal…im not 18. Maf54: cool..dont forget to measure for me." [This last sentence was] a reference to his request that the page provide the measurements of his sexual organ, a request he repeatedly made to another page as well. Former pages tell ABC News the pages involved with Foley were afraid to offend the powerful Republican congressman. It's possible Foley could end up being prosecuted under laws he helped to enact as the co-chairman of the House caucus on Missing and Exploited Children.
Note: If you want to know the degree of sexual corruption which reaches to the highest levels in government, see the incredibly well done Discovery Channel documentary Conspiracy of Silence available free online at http://www.WantToKnow.info/060501conspiracyofsilence
A hundred years ago, one of the most ambitious of research projects was launched. Its purpose was to discover whether living humans could talk to dead ones. The scholars involved included William James, the famed American psychologist and philosopher, and Oliver Lodge, the British physicist and radio pioneer. They saw evidence for the supernatural. In one instance they made a request to an American medium while she was in a trance. The request was in Latin, a language the medium did not speak. The instructions included a proposal that she "send" a symbol to a British medium. During her next trance session, the American began asking about whether an "arrow" had been received. During the American's first trance, the English psychic had suddenly begun scribbling arrows. Could any study produce results more provocative? For many, the dismissal of such Victorian research represents a triumph of modern science over superstition. But—and I admit that this is an unusual position for a mainstream science writer—it may instead represent a missed opportunity, a lost chance to better understand ourselves and our world. Curiosity about the supernatural has not diminished. The last few years have, in fact, seen a surge. On the radio, "Coast to Coast AM with George Noory" focuses on supernatural issues and boasts 2.5 million listeners. Paranormal organizations, schools for mediums and practicing psychics flourish. What has diminished is the interest of academic researchers on a par with James and his colleagues. [James] worried about a time when people would become "indifferent to science because science is so callously indifferent to their experiences." He worried that a close-minded community of science could become a kind of cult itself, devoted to its own beliefs and no more.
Familiar, disturbing images from five years ago flash by in "9/11: Press for Truth." But the 86-minute documentary, directed by Ray Nowosielski of Indianapolis, also asks what warnings top government officials received before the terrorist attacks, and why so many questions remain unanswered. The limited-run movie, opening in 27 cities, premieres tonight in Manhattan. It will show in Indianapolis Friday through Monday. Nowosielski, 25, and co-producer John Duffy got the idea for the movie in 2003, during their last semester of film school at Columbia College Chicago. It was there they learned of Paul Thompson's "The Complete 9/11 Timeline," and went online to read the researcher's compilation detailing the events surrounding that fateful day. "We ended up reading until the sun came up," said Nowosielski, who recently opened a Massachusetts Avenue office. Nowosielski said he double-checked whatever they used. "We did everything we could" to ensure accuracy. The documentary prominently features Thompson; Bob McIlvaine, whose son died in the World Trade Center attack; and several 9/11 widows who became known as "the Jersey Girls." McIlvaine, after screening a rough version of the film, sent Nowosielski an e-mail signed "Forever grateful," thanking the filmmakers and saying, "Every high school, college and university should have a copy of this documentary."
Note: Don't miss this amazing, moving 9/11 documentary (86 minutes) now available for free viewing on Google video at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1016720641536424083. The film is also available for purchase at http://cooperativeresearch.org/911_press_for_truth.html.
You don't like hanging chads? Get ready for cheating chips and doctored drives. I am a computer scientist. I own seven Macintosh computers, one Windows machine and a Palm Treo 700p. So why am I advocating the use of 17th-century technology for voting in the 21st century? The 2000 debacle in Florida spurred a rush to computerize voting. While computers are very proficient...we should not rely on computers alone to count votes in public elections. The people who program them make mistakes. They are more vulnerable to manipulation than most people realize. Even an event as common as a power glitch could cause a hard disk to fail or a magnetic card that holds votes to permanently lose its data. In a 2003 election in Boone County, Ind., DREs recorded 144,000 votes in one precinct populated with fewer than 6,000 registered voters. Consider one simple mode of attack...called overwriting the boot loader. In overwriting it an attacker can, for example, make the machine count every fifth Republican vote as a Democratic vote, swap the vote outcome at the end of the election or produce a completely fabricated result. To stage this attack, a night janitor at the polling place would need only a few seconds' worth of access to the computer's memory card slot. DREs have a transparency problem: You can't easily discover if they've been tinkered with. It's one thing to suspect that officials have miscounted hanging chads, but something else entirely for people to wonder whether a corrupt programmer working behind the scenes has rigged a computer to help his side.
Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key 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.