News ArticlesExcerpts of Key News Articles in Major Media
Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on dozens of engaging topics. And read excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.
Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true. As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations ... inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities. Eight years ago ... the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented. Two-thirds of nearby populated island Ghoramara has also been permanently inundated. Refugees from the vanished Lohachara island and the disappearing Ghoramara island have fled to Sagar, but this island has already lost 7,500 acres of land to the sea. In all, a dozen islands, home to 70,000 people, are in danger of being submerged by the rising seas.
Note: There has been little solid evidence showing that this island was inundated due to global warming. For more on this, see this link.
A sprawling waterfront state park known as Camp Hero [is situated] in Montauk on Long Island. Conspiracy theorists have long claimed that the park has been the site of sci-fi worthy events, including rifts in the time-space continuum [and] mind-control experiments. Such unsubstantiated reports were in large part ignited by a 1992 book, “The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time,” by Preston B. Nichols with Peter Moon.. “All of the rumors, that’s part of why we came here,” said Patrick Wenk, 26, of Stony Brook, N.Y., who was visiting one chilly autumn afternoon. His girlfriend, Sarah Holub, 25, [said] it was her friends who piqued her initial interest in the park by telling her about the conspiracy theories and rumors of paranormal occurrences. A search on Google revealed several Web sites that elaborated on the theories and suggested that Camp Hero was the site of time-travel experiments that picked up where the Philadelphia Experiment — in which a 1940s Navy ship and crew were said to have been made invisible and teleported from Philadelphia to Norfolk, Va. — left off. when Ms. Holub shared a story about her friends being in Camp Hero at night only to have all their flashlights go dead simultaneously, we both laughed. Yet I was experiencing some technical difficulties of my own. My reliable digital camera was on the fritz. I changed the batteries. I played with the lens. It would not take a photograph. I slipped it into my coat pocket to fiddle with later and continued my hike.
Note: Though it's difficult to find reliable information on these matters, those with an open mind and a desire to know might appreciate spending some time exploring the links above.
Farmers and ranchers won't be forced to register their cows, pigs and chickens in a nationwide database aimed at helping track the outbreak of disease, the Bush administration said Wednesday. Hoping to dampen widespread opposition to the animal tracking program, the Agriculture Department has decided it should remain voluntary. First promised in response to the discovery of mad cow disease in this country, the tracking system would pinpoint an animal's movements within 48 hours after a disease was discovered. Investigators never found all 80 of the cattle that came to the U.S. from Canada with the infected dairy cow that became the country's first case of mad cow disease in 2003. Many cattle ranchers are wary of the program because they want records kept confidential and don't want to pay for the system. The industry estimates it could cost more than $100 million annually.
Israel is using nanotechnology to try to create a robot no bigger than a hornet that would be able to chase, photograph and kill its targets, an Israeli newspaper reported on Friday. The flying robot, nicknamed the "bionic hornet," would be able to navigate its way down narrow alleyways to target otherwise unreachable enemies such as rocket launchers. It is one of several weapons being developed by scientists to combat militants. Others include super gloves that would give the user the strength of a "bionic man" and miniature sensors to detect suicide bombers. Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres [said] "The war in Lebanon proved that we need smaller weaponry. It's illogical to send a plane worth $100 million against a suicidal terrorist. So we are building futuristic weapons." Prototypes for the new weapons are expected within three years, he said.
Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces. And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Mr. Bowen’s supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip. An obscure provision...terminates his federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. The clause was inserted by the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee. It has generated surprise and some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea it was in the final legislation. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who followed the bill closely as chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, says that she still does not know how the provision made its way into what is called the conference report, which reconciles differences between House and Senate versions of a bill. Neither the House nor the Senate version contained such a termination clause before the conference, all involved agree. Mr. Bowen’s office has 55 auditors and inspectors in Iraq and about 300 reports and investigations already to its credit, far outstripping any other oversight agency in the country.
After an avalanche of panicked inquiries from patients across the country who claim to have been stricken with a mysterious skin disease, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is preparing to begin a full investigation. The patients ... describe symptoms that include sores that are slow to heal, a sensation of things crawling through their skin, joint pain and persistent fatigue. Many say they believe they have Morgellons disease, a diagnosis that has received wide attention on the Internet but is viewed skeptically by some doctors. Morgellons disease joins a growing list of symptom clusters that public health officials have been forced to examine closely in part because of the organizing power and unprecedented reach of the Internet. Morgellons was brought to public attention by ... Mary Leitao, who in 2001 created a Web site describing the mysterious sores and bizarre threadlike extrusions that afflicted her young son. She said she had tried for years to find a medical explanation for his illness. Ultimately, she said, doctors accused her of staging it. After creating the Web site...she was inundated with e-mail messages from people who said they also had the disease. Many of the people who visit her site have been told by doctors that their symptoms are delusional. Several mothers...told her that they had lost custody of their children after doctors decided the youngsters’ symptoms were contrived. Doctors themselves are divided over whether Morgellons is a medical or a psychiatric illness. The patients are clearly suffering from something; it is just not clear what that something is. “I think it’s a real disease,” said Dr. Rafael Stricker, a physician in San Francisco who sees many patients claiming to have Morgellons. Many patients also test positive for Lyme disease.
Scientists are boldly going where only fiction has gone before to develop a Cloak of Invisibility. It isn't quite ready to hide a Romulan space ship from Capt. James T. Kirk or to disguise Harry Potter, but it is a significant start and could show the way to more sophisticated designs. In this first successful experiment, researchers from the United States and England were able to cloak a copper cylinder. It's like a mirage, where heat causes the bending of light rays and cloaks the road ahead behind an image of the sky. "We have built an artificial mirage that can hide something from would-be observers in any direction," said cloak designer David Schurig, a research associate in Duke University's electrical and computer engineering department. Cloaking used special materials to deflect radar or light or other waves around an object, like water flowing around a smooth rock in a stream. The new work points the way for an improved version that could hide people and objects from visible light. Conceptually, the chance of adapting the concept to visible light is good, Schurig said in a telephone interview. But, he added, "From an engineering point of view it is very challenging." The cloaking of a cylinder from microwaves comes just five months after Schurig and colleagues published their theory that it should be possible. In an ideal situation, the cloak and the item it is hiding would be invisible. An observer would see whatever is beyond them, with no evidence the cloaked item exists.
Note: Remember that technologies developed in top-secret military, intelligence, and other government projects are generally at the very least 10 years in advance of anything being developed in the public domain.
Witold Bialokur...can run 10 kilometers, or 6.2 miles, in less than 44 minutes. While Mr. Bialokur’s performance would be the envy of most young men, he is not young. Mr. Bialokur is 71. It is one of the persistent mysteries of aging, researchers say. Why would one person, like Mr. Bialokur, remain so hale and hearty while another, who had seemed just as healthy, start to weaken and slow down? Rigorous studies are now showing that seeing, or hearing, gloomy nostrums about what it is like to be old can make people walk more slowly, hear and remember less well, and even affect their cardiovascular systems. Positive images of aging have the opposite effects. The constant message that old people are expected to be slow and weak and forgetful is not a reason for the full-blown frailty syndrome. But it may help push people along that path.
Physicists in Denmark have teleported information from light to matter bringing quantum communication and computing closer to reality. Until now scientists have teleported similar objects such as light or single atoms over short distances from one spot to another in a split second. But Professor Eugene Polzik and his team at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University in Denmark have made a breakthrough by using both light and matter. "It is one step further because for the first time it involves teleportation between light and matter, two different objects. One is the carrier of information and the other one is the storage medium," Polzik explained in an interview on Wednesday. The experiment involved for the first time a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms. They...teleported the information a distance of half a meter but believe it can be extended further. "Teleportation between two single atoms had been done two years ago by two teams, but this was done at a distance of a fraction of a millimeter," Polzik, of the Danish National Research Foundation Center for Quantum Optics, explained. "Our method allows teleportation to be taken over longer distances because it involves light as the carrier of entanglement." Quantum entanglement involves entwining two or more particles without physical contact.
Roman Catholic bishops in England and Wales rejected as false and misleading a BBC documentary about what it said was a cover-up of child sexual abuse under a system enforced by Pope Benedict XVI in his previous job. The documentary [examined] a secret document written in 1962 that sets out a procedure for dealing with child sex abuse within the Catholic Church. The document, called "Crimen Sollicitationis," imposes an oath of secrecy on the child victim, the priest dealing with the allegation and any witness. Breaking that oath would result in excommunication, the BBC said. "The man in charge of enforcing it for 20 years was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the man made Pope last year," reporter Colm O'Gorman said in the program "Sex Crimes and the Vatican." The Vatican...had no immediate comment. The existence of the document is not new. It first surfaced publicly in 2003, when it was widely reported in the U.S. media. American lawyers representing alleged victims of sexual abuse by priests at the time used it in law suits against some American dioceses. Responding to the documentary, Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Birmingham, central England, said the BBC should be "ashamed of the standard of the journalism used to create this unwarranted attack on Pope Benedict XVI." The public broadcaster defended its documentary. "The protection of children is clearly an issue of the strongest public interest," it said in a statement, responding to the bishops' criticism. "The BBC stands by tonight's 'Panorama' program, and invites viewers to make up their own minds once they've seen it."
Note: To watch this highly revealing BBC documentary free online and decide for yourself, see http://informationclearinghouse.info/article15190.htm. For government involvement in sexual abuse of children, see the Discovery Channel documentary at http://www.WantToKnow.info/060501conspiracyofsilence
The Ministry of Defence went to extraordinary lengths to cover up its true involvement in investigating UFOs, according to secret documents revealed under the Freedom of Information Act. The files show that officials attempted to expunge information from documents released to the Public Records Office under the "30-year rule" that would have revealed the extent of the MoD's interest in UFO sightings. The ministry wanted to cover up the operation of a secret unit dedicated to UFO investigations within the Defence Intelligence Staff. The files were made public following FOI requests by David Clarke, a lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hallam University and his colleague Andy Roberts. "These documents don't tell us anything about UFOs but they do show how desperate the MoD have been to conceal the interest which the intelligence services had in the subject," said Dr Clarke. A [1976] note from the UFO desk to the MoD's head of security [states] "It is undesirable that even a hint of this should become public and we are currently consulting...on ways of expurgating the official records against the time when they qualify for disclosure." In a note dated April 28 1993 from DI55 to the public UFO desk the unnamed author argued the unit's involvement should be excised from records due to be released under the 30-year rule.
Note: For a riveting two-page summary of reliable information on UFOs: http://www.WantToKnow.info/ufocover-up
The U.S. military has created a global network of overseas prisons...keeping 14,000 detainees beyond the reach of established law. Disclosures of torture and long-term arbitrary detentions have won rebuke from leading voices including the U.N. secretary-general and the U.S. Supreme Court. Tens of thousands now have passed through U.S. detention. Many say they were caught up in U.S. military sweeps, often interrogated around the clock, then released months or years later without apology, compensation or any word on why they were taken. Seventy to 90 percent of the Iraq detentions in 2003 were "mistakes," U.S. officers once told the international Red Cross. The detention system often is unjust and hurts the war on terror by inflaming anti-Americanism in Iraq and elsewhere. Human rights groups count dozens of detainee deaths for which no one has been punished or that were never explained. The new manual banning torture doesn't cover CIA interrogators. Thousands of people still languish in a limbo, deprived of one of common law's oldest rights, habeas corpus, the right to know why you are imprisoned. The U.S. government has contended it can hold detainees until the "war on terror" ends. [Inmates] have been held without charge for three to four years. [Guantanamo's] population today...stands at 455. Only 10 of the Guantanamo inmates have been charged with crimes. In only 14 of 34 cases has anyone been punished for the confirmed or suspected killings of detainees. The stiffest sentence in a torture-related death has been five months in jail. In almost half of 98 detainee deaths, the cause was either never announced or reported as undetermined.
Attention still must be paid...to the many questions about 9/11 that remain unanswered...such as why the Pentagon held back so much information about air defense deficiencies from the 9/11 commission that Chairmen Kean and Hamilton came close to asking the Justice Department to launch a criminal investigation; such as why the Able Danger intelligence program...was ignored and closed down; such as why Osama bin Laden was allowed to escape from Afghanistan when cornered in Tora Bora. There is little doubt that that the 9/11 commission report has become the Warren commission report of our time. Chairman Thomas Kean's recent paid involvement with ABC's fictitious "historical" docudrama is but the latest reminder that the 9/11 tragedy has yet to be investigated fully or fairly. Both Kean and his Democratic Party counterpart Lee Hamilton now acknowledge...that they and their fellow commissioners bowed to political pressure when they didn't fully question New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani about his management decisions and emergency responses. Other commissioners complained repeatedly about White House obstacles put in their path. The commissioners also allowed the president and vice president to testify together (and not under oath) and went along with other administration demands, such as the one that only a minority of the commissioners could see a minority of the documents requested - and even then had to vet their notes with the White House before sharing them with the full Commission! We must continue to "press for truth" in connection with the events of September 11, 2001.
Note: The author is the executive director of the stunning new documentary 9/11: Press for the Truth. To watch this powerful, inspiring documentary which is available for free viewing, click here. And for an excellent new list of top officials who have publicly slammed the 9/11 Commission Report, click here.
What we still don't know about 9/11 could kill us. The public that has been kept in the dark for five years by a president who may know the truth but has chosen to ignore it. The belated release of the Senate Intelligence Committee's second report...concluded that there not only was zero connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, but that Iraq was the one country in the region where Osama bin Laden could not operate. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, and yet there has been no serious investigation of the extended Royal family's roll in the recruitment of bin Laden's "soldiers" and the ease with which they secured legal visas to enter the United States. Last week, Bush conceded that there were indeed secret CIA prisons. Some [key 9/11 witnesses] have been interrogated in secret for up to five years. After five years of official deceit, it is not too difficult to believe that the isolation of those prisoners was done less for reasons of learning the truth about 9/11 and more in an effort to politically manage the narrative released to the public. There is glaring evidence that the latter was the case. The 9/11 Commission report contains a disclaimer box on page 146, in which it is stated that the report's account of what happened on 9/11 was in considerable measure based on what those key witnesses allegedly told interrogators, and that the commissioners were not allowed to meet the witnesses or their interrogators. In short, the most cited source that we have on what happened on 9/11, the much celebrated 9/11 Commission Report, was stage-managed by the Bush administration, just as it has controlled and distorted so much other information.
Note: Robert Scheer frequently writes for the Los Angeles Times, though this article did not appear there.
The level of nicotine that smokers typically consume per cigarette has risen 10 percent in the past six years, making it harder to quit and easier to be addicted, said a report that the Massachusetts Department of Health released on Tuesday. The study shows a steady increase in the amount of nicotine delivered to the smokers? lungs regardless of brand, with overall yields increasing 10 percent. Massachusetts is one of three states to require tobacco companies to submit information on nicotine testing to its specifications and is the sole state with data as far back as 1998. The study found that the three most popular brands with young smokers, Marlboro, Newport and Camel, delivered significantly more nicotine than they did six years ago. Nicotine consumed in Kool, a popular menthol brand, rose 20 percent.
A special report in The New Yorker says the Bush administration was closely involved in the planning of Israel's retaliatory attacks against Hizbullah in Lebanon, and US officials hoped that by helping Israel destroy or disarm the militant Islamic group, it would make it easier for the US to launch a preemptive attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. The report, written by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who also helped break the story about abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison and in the 70s broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, alleges Israeli officials travelled to Washington to talk to US officials, in particular Vice President Dick Cheney, about the plan. A Pentagon consultant said that the Bush White House "has been agitating for some time to find a reason for a pre-emptive blow against Hezbollah." CBS News reports that Israeli officials "fiercely denied" that it had sought a "greenlight" from Washington, and that it had no advance plan to attack Hizbullah. Yesterday Mr Hersh told CNN: "July was a pretext for a major offensive that had been in the works for a long time. They really want to go after Iran." Last month the San Francisco Chronicle reported that "Israel's military response...was unfolding according to a plan finalized more than a year ago". The report said that a senior Israeli army officer had been briefing diplomats, journalists and think-tanks for more than a year about the plan. It quoted Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at [Israel's] Bar-Ilan University, who said: "Of all of Israel's wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared."
Kill anything that moves. Moments later, the 19 villagers lay dead or dying. Back home in California, Henry published an account of the slaughter. Yet he and other Vietnam veterans who spoke out about war crimes were branded traitors and fabricators. No one was ever prosecuted. Now, nearly 40 years later, declassified Army files show that Henry was telling the truth. The files are part of a once-secret archive ... that shows that confirmed atrocities by U.S. forces in Vietnam were more extensive than was previously known. The Times...obtained copies of about 3,000 pages -- about a third of the total -- before government officials removed them from the public shelves, saying they contained personal information that was exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. The documents detail 320 alleged incidents that were substantiated by Army investigators. Many war crimes did not make it into the archive. The archive ... includes investigative files, sworn statements by witnesses and status reports for top military brass. The records describe recurrent attacks on ordinary Vietnamese. Hundreds of soldiers ... described a violent minority who murdered, raped and tortured with impunity. Abuses ... were uncovered in every Army division that operated in Vietnam. Ultimately, 57 [soldiers] were court-martialed and just ... fourteen received prison sentences ranging from six months to 20 years, but most won significant reductions on appeal. The stiffest sentence went to a military intelligence interrogator. He served seven months of a 20-year term. Many substantiated cases were closed with a letter of reprimand, a fine or, in more than half the cases, no action at all.
For the second time in two months, The Journal of the American Medical Association says it was misled by researchers who failed to reveal financial ties to drug companies. The latest incident, disclosed in letters to the editor and a correction in Wednesday's journal, involves a study showing that pregnant women who stop taking antidepressants risk slipping back into depression. Most of the 13 authors have financial ties to drug companies including antidepressant makers, but only two of them revealed their ties when the study was published in February.
Note: To understand how the drug companies manipulate results and even exert tremendous influence over the U.S. Congress, see http://www.WantToKnow.info/healthcoverup
Northfield Lab's experimental blood substitute Polyheme is currently in randomized phase III clinical trials recruiting patients without informed consent all over the country. At one point, it was being tested in as many as 27 cities; it is still being tested in 23 hospitals in 20 cities. With the FDA's approval, Northfield Lab has recruited hospitals to participate in the trial study with exemption from informed consent requirements on study participants. Although Northfield Lab claims that extensive information on the study has been made public, a vast majority of the general public has never heard of the trial.
The Central Intelligence Agency has closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, intelligence officials confirmed Monday. The unit, known as Alec Station, was disbanded late last year and its analysts reassigned within the C.I.A. Counterterrorist Center, the officials said. The decision is a milestone for the agency, which formed the unit before Osama bin Laden became a household name and bolstered its ranks after the Sept. 11 attacks, when President Bush pledged to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice "dead or alive." "The efforts to find Osama bin Laden are as strong as ever," said Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, a C.I.A. spokeswoman. "This is an agile agency, and the decision was made to ensure greater reach and focus." Michael Scheuer, a former senior C.I.A. official who was the first head of the unit, said the move reflected a view within the agency that Mr. bin Laden was no longer the threat he once was. Mr. Scheuer said that view was mistaken. "This will clearly denigrate our operations against Al Qaeda," he said.
Note: They disband the unit to capture the man on the most wanted list? What's up with that?
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.