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Louis Armstrong and the spy: how the CIA used him as a ‘trojan horse’ in Congo
2021-09-12, The Guardian (One of the UK's Leading Newspapers)
Posted: 2024-02-04 21:11:52
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/sep/12/louis-armstrong-and-the-spy-how...

Louis Armstrong, his wife and a diplomat from the US embassy were out for dinner in a restaurant in what was still Léopoldville, capital of the newly independent Congo. The [musician] was in the middle of a tour of Africa ... organised and sponsored by the State Department. What Armstrong did not know was that his host that night in November 1960 was not the political attaché as described, but the head of the CIA in Congo. “Armstrong was basically a Trojan horse for the CIA,” said Susan Williams ... author of White Malice, a new book which exposes the astonishing extent of the CIA’s activities across central and west Africa. Armstrong's host, CIA station chief Larry Devlin, and other US intelligence officers posted to Congo used the cover of the musicians’s visit to get access to the strategically important and very wealthy province of Katanga, which had recently seceded. There was much of interest to the CIA in Katanga, ranging from senior officials with whom they could not otherwise meet to crucial mining infrastructure, with 1,500 tons of uranium and vast potential to procure more. The CIA in the Congo, led by Devlin, was trying to kill the Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister, 35-year-old Patrice Lumumba, fearful that he would lead the country into the Soviet camp. A mile or so from where Armstrong and Devlin had dined, the charismatic Lumumba was being held prisoner ... by soldiers loyal to Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, the young military chief with a close working relationship with the CIA, who had effectively seized power some weeks earlier. Within two months of Armstrong’s tour, Lumumba was murdered in Katanga. Devlin later claimed that the CIA was responsible, telling a US Congressional investigation “that the coup of Mobutu … was arranged and supported, and indeed, managed, by the CIA”.

Note: Read how the CIA used modern art and other cultural figures as weapons during the Cold War in our Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.


Can a Big Village Full of Tiny Homes Ease Homelessness in Austin?
2024-01-08, New York Times
Posted: 2024-02-04 21:09:29
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/08/headway/homelessness-tiny-home-austin.html

On the outskirts of Austin, Texas, what began as a fringe experiment has quickly become central to the city’s efforts to reduce homelessness. To Justin Tyler Jr., it is home. Mr. Tyler, 41, lives in Community First! Village, which aims to be a model of permanent affordable housing for people who are chronically homeless. In the fall of 2022, he joined nearly 400 residents of the village, moving into one of its typical digs: a 200-square-foot, one-room tiny house furnished with a kitchenette, a bed and a recliner. Eclectic tiny homes are clustered around shared outdoor kitchens, and neat rows of recreational vehicles and manufactured homes line looping cul-de-sacs. There are chicken coops, two vegetable gardens, a convenience store ... art and jewelry studios, a medical clinic and a chapel. In the next few years, Community First is poised to grow to nearly 2,000 homes across three locations, which would make it by far the nation’s largest project of this kind, big enough to permanently house about half of Austin’s chronically homeless population. Many residents have jobs in the village, created to offer residents flexible opportunities to earn some income. Last year, they earned a combined $1.5 million working as gardeners, landscapers, custodians, artists, jewelry makers and more. Ute Dittemer, 66, faced a daily struggle for survival during a decade on the streets before moving into Community First five years ago with her husband. Now she supports herself by painting and molding figures out of clay at the village art house. A few years ago, a clay chess set she made sold for $10,000 at an auction. She used the money to buy her first car.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.


Banking the Most Valuable Currency: Time
2024-01-12, Reasons to be Cheerful
Posted: 2024-02-04 21:05:30
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/time-banks-valuable-currency-aging-communit...

A time bank does with time what other banks do with money: It stores and trades it. “Time banking means that for every hour you give to your community, you receive an hour credit,” explains Krista Wyatt, executive director of the DC-based nonprofit TimeBanks.Org, which helps volunteers establish local time banks all over the world. Thousands of time banks with several hundred thousand members have been established in at least 37 countries, including China, Malaysia, Japan, Senegal, Argentina, Brazil and in Europe, with over 3.2 million exchanges. There are probably more than 40,000 members in over 500 time banks in the US. Many time banks are volunteer community projects, but the one in Sebastopol, [CA] is funded by the city. “Every volunteer hour is valued around $29,” Wyatt calculates. “Now think about the thousands of dollars a city saves when hundreds of citizens serve their community for free.” The Sebastopol time bank has banked more than 8,000 hours since its launch in 2016. Five core principles ... guide time banks to this day: First, everyone has something to contribute. Second, valuing volunteering as “work.” Third, reciprocity or a “pay-it-forward” ethos. Fourth, community building, and fifth, mutual accountability and respect. “What captured me is that people are doing things out of their own good heart,” Wyatt says. “Many years ago, a woman ... said to [civil rights lawyer] Edgar Cahn, ‘I have nothing to give.’ Edgar Cahn listened and finally responded, ‘You have love to give.’ And the whole room just went silent.” Every hour of service is valued the same, no matter how much skill and expertise a task takes, whether it’s an hour keeping someone company, helping them file their taxes or repair a roof. Through a simple online platform, every member can offer and request services and then register the hours they served or received. Especially during and since the Covid pandemic, the bank has also been an antidote to the epidemic of loneliness.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.


Colorado Becomes One of the First to Employ an Incarcerated Professor
2024-01-07, ScheerPost
Posted: 2024-02-04 21:03:50
https://scheerpost.com/2024/01/07/colorado-becomes-one-of-the-first-to-employ...

On a late-November afternoon, at the head of a cramped classroom, David Carrillo stood at a small podium and quizzed 17 students on macroeconomic terminology. For the two-hour class, Carrillo, the adjunct professor teaching for Adams State University, mostly kept his hands in his pockets as he lectured students in green uniforms. Like his students at the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility, Carrillo, 49, also wears green. He holds a position that is extremely rare in prison: He’s an incarcerated professor teaching in a prison bachelor’s degree program. A new initiative at Adams State — one of the first of its kind in the country — focuses on employing incarcerated people with graduate degrees as college professors, rather than bringing in instructors from the outside. Most people in Colorado prisons only make 80 cents a day, so it would take them around 17 years to earn the $3,600 that Carrillo gets for a single class. Higher wages help incarcerated individuals build savings to help cover their basic needs when they are released. Poverty can often be a driver of decisions that land people back in prison. Adams State hopes to eventually employ more graduates of their own programs in the future. Currently ... around 100 people in prisons across the country are working towards their MBA through Adams State like Carrillo did. The 36-credit print-based MBA correspondence program costs $350 per credit for a total of $12,600, plus textbooks.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.


Getting On the Dance Floor Will Shred Pounds in Overweight People, Improve Blood Pressure and Mental Health
2024-01-23, Good News Network
Posted: 2024-02-02 11:24:36
https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/getting-on-dance-floor-will-shred-pounds-in-o...

Boogying the night away produces meaningful improvements in one's body mass and waist circumference in people who are overweight or obese, a new study found. Dancing was also seen to improve blood pressure, insulin sensitivity, physical fitness, cognitive disorders, hypertension, cardiovascular ailments, diabetes, and mental health—in other words, all the root causes of the non-communicable diseases that kill most people in the West. The researchers believed that dance would be a more ideal form of exercise because it is sustainable—it's a sociable, entertaining way of exercising that participants will enjoy, rather than a drudgery they have to push themselves through. “Dance is effective on fat loss in people overweight and obese and has a significant improvement on body composition and morphology,” said Zhang Yaya, a Ph.D. student at Hunan University, China. To get their results, published in the journal PLoS ONE, the team studied data from 646 participants who were overweight and obese across ten different studies. They found that dance is very effective for improving body composition and showed that more creative dance types had the most pronounced body composition improvement when compared with traditional dance. Improvements were also found in overweight children and patients with Parkinson’s disease.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.


‘It only takes one to be real and it changes humanity for ever’: what if we’ve been lied to about UFOs?
2024-01-14, The Guardian (One of the UK's Leading Newspapers)
Posted: 2024-01-29 14:26:00
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/jan/14/what-happens-if-we-have-been-...

At the end of last year, a US government bill that would have mandated the controlled release of all classified documents and artifacts relating to UFOs was significantly watered down at the last minute so that it would get through Congress. Interest in unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), the new term for UFOs, reignited in June 2023 when ex-US intelligence agency whistleblower David Grusch told the Debrief website that during his official duties he had discovered the US had indeed been retrieving spacecraft of non-human origin for decades. The prospect of alien spacecraft raises serious issues that go beyond whether we’re alone in the universe. Lots of scientific work is under way not only to look for signs of extraterrestrial life, but more recently to ask what it would mean psychologically for us if aliens really do exist, and – potentially worse – if the authorities have been lying to us about what they know. What happens if [someone] uncovers irrefutable proof that non-human intelligences have visited or are visiting Earth? Physicist John Priestland ... found himself wondering what this would mean to us as individuals. “There are a lot of people who will be affected. There isn’t an entity out there, as far as I can see, that is putting people first,” he says. So he set up Unhidden, a charity dedicated to decreasing the stigma associated with discussing UAPs, non-human intelligences, and the possibility that evidence is being covered up by governments.

Note: Read the riveting testimonies of 60 government and military witnesses of UFO phenomenon, which include astronauts, generals, admirals, and other top government and military officials. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on UFO disclosure from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our UFO Information Center.


While Inflation Beat The Post-Pandemic Economy, Billionaires Beat Inflation 3 Times Over
2024-01-15, Huffington Post
Posted: 2024-01-29 14:23:57
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/inflation-economy-2023-billionaires-in...

All billionaires’ wealth has grown three times faster than the rate of inflation since before the Covid pandemic, according to a new report. That means they’re 34% richer than they were in 2020, the anti-poverty charity Oxfam International has claimed. Meanwhile, the cost of living crisis for the majority of the global population has risen due to inflation, food prices around the world increasing by 21% to 50% between 2022 and 2023. The five richest men in the world have seen their personal wealth double in three years – all while five billion people around the world found themselves getting poorer. The richest 1% own 43% of all global financial assets, according to Oxfam’s findings. In the UK, the richest 1% own 33% of all financial assets. Seven out of 10 of the world’s biggest corporations also have a billionaire as CEO or principle shareholder. The worth of these companies exceeds the combined GDPs of all countries in Africa and Latin America. In the last three years, the poorest 60% (close to five billion people) around the world have lost money – a figure calculated from the UBS Global Wealth Report and the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Data book 2019. Average real wages for nearly 800 million workers have fallen across 52 countries in the same time frame the billionaires have been building on their personal wealth. Governments worldwide are making deliberate political choices that enable and encourage this distorted concentration of wealth.

Note: The COVID pandemic was extremely profitable for billionaires. At least 75 federal lawmakers were financially invested in COVID vaccines, treatments, and tests. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on income inequality from reliable major media sources.


OpenAI Quietly Deletes Ban On Using ChatGPT For “Military And Warfare”
2024-01-12, The Intercept
Posted: 2024-01-29 14:20:03
https://theintercept.com/2024/01/12/open-ai-military-ban-chatgpt/

OpenAI this week quietly deleted language expressly prohibiting the use of its technology for military purposes. Up until January 10, OpenAI’s “usage policies” page included a ban on “activity that has high risk of physical harm, including,” specifically, “weapons development” and “military and warfare.” That plainly worded prohibition against military applications would seemingly rule out any official, and extremely lucrative, use by the Department of Defense or any other state military. The new policy retains an injunction not to “use our service to harm yourself or others” and gives “develop or use weapons” as an example, but the blanket ban on “military and warfare” use has vanished. OpenAI spokesperson Niko ... Felix [said] that OpenAI wanted to pursue certain “national security use cases that align with our mission,” citing a plan to create “cybersecurity tools” with DARPA, and that “the goal with our policy update is to provide clarity and the ability to have these discussions.” The real-world consequences of the policy are unclear. Last year, The Intercept reported that OpenAI was unwilling to say whether it would enforce its own clear “military and warfare” ban in the face of increasing interest from the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence community. “Given the use of AI systems in the targeting of civilians in Gaza, it’s a notable moment to make the decision to remove the words ‘military and warfare’ from OpenAI’s permissible use policy,” said [former AI policy analyst] Sarah Myers West.

Note: Learn more about emerging warfare technology in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption from reliable major media sources.


‘Different rules’: special policies keep US supplying weapons to Israel despite alleged abuses
2024-01-18, The Guardian (One of the UK's Leading Newspapers)
Posted: 2024-01-29 14:12:04
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/18/us-supply-weapons-israel-allege...

Top US officials quietly reviewed more than a dozen incidents of alleged gross violations of human rights by Israeli security forces since 2020, but have gone to great lengths to preserve continued access to US weapons for the units responsible for the alleged violations, contributing ... to the sense of impunity with which Israel has approached its war in Gaza. An estimated 24,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed by Israeli forces since Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel. Special mechanisms have been used over the last few years to shield Israel from US human rights laws, even as other allies’ military units who receive US support – including, sources say, Ukraine – have privately been sanctioned and faced consequences for committing human rights violations. Under the Leahy law ... a foreign military unit is granted US military assistance or training after it is vetted by the state department for any reported human rights violations. The law prohibits the Department of State and the Department of Defense from providing funds, assistance or training to foreign security force units where there is “credible information” that the forces have committed a gross violation of human rights. In the case of at least three countries – Israel, Ukraine and Egypt – the scale of foreign assistance is so great that US military assistance can be difficult to track, and the US often has no knowledge of where specific weapons end up or how they are used.

Note: Learn more about the dysfunctional nature of the US war machine in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.


Open the Congo files and face up to what the CIA did
2023-10-24, Washington Post
Posted: 2024-01-29 14:10:04
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/24/congo-lumumba-cia-amends/

Never in its 63 years of independence has Congo experienced a peaceful and democratic transfer of power. On June 30, 1960, after 75 years of Belgian rule, Congo became an independent country. At the helm as prime minister was Patrice Lumumba. On Aug. 18, 1960, Dwight D. Eisenhower became the first U.S. president known to order the assassination of a sitting foreign leader. During a National Security Council meeting, an official note taker ... recalled, President Eisenhower said “something — I can no longer remember his words— that came across to me as an order for the assassination of Lumumba.” The CIA’s top chemist procured a poison to kill Lumumba, flew it to Congo, and instructed the CIA station chief there, Larry Devlin, to put it in the prime minister’s food or toothpaste. But by that time, Lumumba had been removed from office and put under house arrest, so the plot fizzled. Lumumba was flown to the breakaway province of Katanga and shot dead ... by Congolese soldiers commanded by Belgian officers and answering to the separatist government. The CIA ... had blood on its hands for the death of Lumumba. It played a role in every event leading to his downfall. As part of what came to be known as “Project Wizard,” the CIA subsidized at least two opposition senators, and the agency received White House authorization to pay the president as well. CIA cash also paid for anti-Lumumba radio propaganda and street protests.

Note: Learn more about the rise of the CIA in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.


Moderna Surveillance Operation Targeted Independent Media Voices
2024-01-16, Lee Fang on Substack
Posted: 2024-01-29 14:07:54
https://www.leefang.com/p/moderna-surveillance-operation-targeted

Finances at the vaccine manufacturer Moderna began to fall almost as quickly as they had risen, as most Americans resisted getting yet another COVID booster shot. In a September call aimed at shoring up investors, Moderna’s then-chief commercial officer, Arpa Garay, attributed some of the hesitancy pummeling Moderna's numbers to uninformed vaccine skeptics. What Garay hinted at during the call, but didn’t disclose, was that Moderna already had a sprawling media operation in place aimed at identifying and responding to critics of vaccine policy and the drug industry. Internal company reports and communications ... show that Moderna has worked with former law enforcement and public health officials and a drug industry-funded non-governmental organization called The Public Good Projects (PGP) to confront the “root cause of vaccine hesitancy” by rapidly identifying and “shutting down misinformation.” Part of this effort includes providing talking points to some 45,000 healthcare professionals “on how to respond when vaccine misinformation goes mainstream.” PGP routinely sent Excel lists of accounts to amplify on Twitter and others to de-platform, including populist voices such as ZeroHedge. The messages also suggested emerging narratives to remove from the platform. The growing network these efforts rely on shows the growth of what has been called the censorship industrial complex.

Note: Learn more about Moderna's misinformation department. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on pharmaceutical industry corruption and media manipulation from reliable sources.


The Military-Industrial Complex Is the Winner (Not You)
2024-01-17, ScheerPost
Posted: 2024-01-29 14:05:32
https://scheerpost.com/2024/01/17/the-military-industrial-complex-is-the-winn...

2023 was a year marked by devastating conflicts from Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine to Hamas’s horrific terror attacks on Israel, from that country’s indiscriminate mass slaughter in Gaza to a devastating civil war in Sudan. And there’s a distinct risk of even worse to come this year. Still, there was one clear winner in this avalanche of violence, suffering, and war: the U.S. military-industrial complex. In December, President Biden signed a record authorization of $886 billion in “national defense” spending for 2024, including funds for the Pentagon proper and work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. Add to that tens of billions of dollars more in likely emergency military aid for Ukraine and Israel, and such spending could well top $900 billion for the first time. Annual spending on the costly, dysfunctional F-35 combat aircraft alone is greater than the entire budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2020, Lockheed Martin’s contracts with the Pentagon were worth more than the budgets of the State Department and the Agency for International Development combined, and its arms-related revenues continue to rival the government’s entire investment in diplomacy. One $13 billion aircraft carrier costs more than the annual budget of the Environmental Protection Agency. Before investing ever more tax dollars ... the military strategy of the United States in the current global environment should be seriously debated.

Note: Learn more about unaccountable military spending in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.


Face Recognition Technology Follows a Long Analog History of Surveillance and Control Based on Identifying Physical Features
2024-01-22, ScheerPost
Posted: 2024-01-29 14:02:37
https://scheerpost.com/2024/01/22/face-recognition-technology-follows-a-long-...

American Amara Majeed was accused of terrorism by the Sri Lankan police in 2019. Robert Williams was arrested outside his house in Detroit and detained in jail for 18 hours for allegedly stealing watches in 2020. Randal Reid spent six days in jail in 2022 for supposedly using stolen credit cards in a state he’d never even visited. In all three cases, the authorities had the wrong people. In all three, it was face recognition technology that told them they were right. Law enforcement officers in many U.S. states are not required to reveal that they used face recognition technology to identify suspects. Surveillance is predicated on the idea that people need to be tracked and their movements limited and controlled in a trade-off between privacy and security. The assumption that less privacy leads to more security is built in. That may be the case for some, but not for the people disproportionately targeted by face recognition technology. As of 2019, face recognition technology misidentified Black and Asian people at up to 100 times the rate of white people. In 2018 ... 28 members of the U.S. Congress ... were falsely matched with mug shots on file using Amazon’s Rekognition tool. Much early research into face recognition software was funded by the CIA for the purposes of border surveillance. More recently, private companies have adopted data harvesting techniques, including face recognition, as part of a long practice of leveraging personal data for profit.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on police corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.


The Secret History of Facial Recognition
2020-01-21, Wired
Posted: 2024-01-29 13:59:00
https://www.wired.com/story/secret-history-facial-recognition/

Facial recognition has become a security feature of choice for phones, laptops, passports, and payment apps. Yet it is also, increasingly, a tool of state oppression and corporate surveillance. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the FBI have deployed the technology as a digital dragnet, searching for suspects among millions of faces in state driver’s license databases, sometimes without first seeking a court order. In early 1963, [Woody Bledsoe] proposed to conduct “a study to determine the feasibility of a simplified facial recognition machine.” A recently declassified history of the CIA’s Office of Research and Development mentions just such a project in 1965; that same year, Woody sent a letter on facial recognition to John W. Kuipers, the division’s chief of analysis. In 1967 ... Woody took on one last assignment that involved recognizing patterns in the human face. The purpose of the experiment was to help law enforcement agencies quickly sift through databases of mug shots and portraits, looking for matches. As before, funding for the project appears to have come from the US government. A 1967 document declassified by the CIA in 2005 mentions an “external contract” for a facial-recognition system that would reduce search time by a hundredfold. Woody’s work set an ethical tone for research on facial recognition that has been enduring and problematic. The potential abuses of facial-recognition technology were apparent almost from its birth.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.


Titan’s Surface Organics Surpass Oil Reserves on Earth
2008-02-13, NASA
Posted: 2024-01-29 13:52:09
https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/planets/saturn/saturn-moons/titans-surf...

Saturn's orange moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to new data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes. The new findings from the study led by Ralph Lorenz, Cassini radar team member from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md., are reported in ... the Geophysical Research Letters. "Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material -- it's a giant factory of organic chemicals," said Lorenz. "This vast carbon inventory is an important window into the geology and climate history of Titan." At a balmy minus 179 degrees Celsius (minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit), Titan is a far cry from Earth. Instead of water, liquid hydrocarbons in the form of methane and ethane are present on the moon's surface. Cassini has mapped about 20 percent of Titan's surface with radar. Several hundred lakes and seas have been observed, with each of several dozen estimated to contain more hydrocarbon liquid than Earth's oil and gas reserves. Proven reserves of natural gas on Earth total 130 billion tons, enough to provide 300 times the amount of energy the entire United States uses annually for residential heating, cooling and lighting. Dozens of Titan's lakes individually have the equivalent of at least this much energy in the form of methane and ethane.

Note: Weren’t we taught that oil and gas come from fossils? Yet the many who have shown evidence otherwise have been dismissed and ridiculed. Why is this? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the mysterious nature of reality from reliable major media sources.


'Dead' Man Jolted Back to Life by the Intolerable Bumps of India’s Potholes
2024-01-15, Good News Network
Posted: 2024-01-29 13:50:14
https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/dead-man-jolted-back-to-life-by-the-intolerab...

India’s famous potholes actually saved a life on Friday. The ‘late’ Darshan Singh Brar was being transported to the Indian version of a wake after his untimely death from a chest infection at the age of 80. Family, relatives, and friends had already gathered for a banquet and cremation, when the ambulance he was being caried in received a nasty jolt from a pothole on the roads in Nising, in far-Northern India’ Haryana state. It was then that Mr. Brar’s grandson who was onboard the ambulance at the time noticed his hand moving. Checking his pulse and finding—to his great shock—there was one, he notified the driver to immediately turn toward the nearest hospital. He was declared alive and savable, and was referred to the Rawal Hospital in the city of Karnal. “It is a miracle. Now we are hoping that my grandfather recovers soon,” said Balwan Singh, another of Mr. Brar’s grandsons. “Everyone who had gathered to mourn his death congratulated us, and we requested them to have the food we had arranged. It is God’s grace that he is now breathing and we are hoping he will get better.” Doctors at Rawal Hospital said that the grandfather is breathing without the aid of a ventilator and his heartbeat has normalized. They can’t say for certain why the other hospital declared him dead, but speculated it may have been a technical error. The next time you are planning to go to town hall or the council about the potholes on your street, consider the story of Darshan Singh Brar.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.


Scientists invent dirt-fuelled power source that ‘lasts forever’
2024-01-16, The Independent (One of the UK's Leading Newspapers)
Posted: 2024-01-29 13:48:42
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/battery-fuel-cell-forever-power-b2479535.html

Scientists have developed a new type of fuel cell that can provide endless power through electricity harvested from dirt. A team from Northwestern University in the US say the book-sized unit could be used to power sensors used in farming, as well as remote devices in the Internet of Things (IoT). The technology works by generating electricity from naturally-occurring bacteria within the soil, offering a sustainable and renewable alternative to toxic and flammable batteries. “These microbes are ubiquitous; they already live in soil everywhere,” said George Wells ... at Northwestern University. “We can use very simple engineered systems to capture their electricity. We’re not going to power entire cities with this energy. But we can capture minute amounts of energy to fuel practical, low-power applications.” The soil-based microbial fuel cell (MFC) is based on a 113-year-old technology first developed by British botanist Michael Cressé Potter, who was the first person to successfully generate electricity from microorganisms. It took until the 21st century for the first commercial applications to be proposed, with Foster’s Brewing using a prototype to convert the yeast in brewery wastewater into electricity. The latest fuel cell was tested in wet and dry conditions to power sensors measuring soil moisture and detecting touch, outlasting the power of similar technologies by 120 per cent.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.


A school in Jerusalem brings Arab and Jewish kids together to boost understanding
2024-01-23, NPR
Posted: 2024-01-29 13:46:53
https://www.npr.org/2024/01/23/1221957556/israel-schools-arabs-jews-gaza-war

When the bell rings at Jerusalem's Hand in Hand school, you hear something that's not common in Israel: the sound of young people's voices rising together in laughter and conversation in both Hebrew and Arabic. Israeli society is largely segregated. The separation begins at kindergarten, when Jewish and Arab children are sent to different schools and experience completely separate education "tracks" or systems. "Arabs go to Arab schools in their neighborhoods and Jews go to Jewish schools in the areas where they live," says Nour Younis, events manager for Hand in Hand. Hand in Hand [was] founded in 1998 by a group of parents who wanted their children to grow up differently. What began as two kindergarten classes in Jerusalem and Galilee has now become six campuses nationwide, with some 2,000 students. The school's eventual goal is to create a fifth track of education within the Israeli school system. Today there are four options: Arab schools and three Jewish tracks — secular, religious and ultra-Orthodox. The students at Hand in Hand campuses are around 60% Arab and 40% Jewish. There is a waiting list of Arab children who would like to attend. Since Oct. 7 ... this school has become a rare oasis of freedom for Palestinians who say they can be harassed or worse for expressing their anguish over the war. "For our students, this is a safe place, a safe environment," says [school vice principal Engie] Wattad.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.


Panel members for new psychiatric ‘bible’ received over $14m from industry
2024-01-10, The BMJ (Formerly British Medical Journal)
Posted: 2024-01-22 14:50:10
https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/panel-members-for-new-psychiatric-bible-...

Sixty percent of US physicians serving as panel and task force members for the American Psychiatric Association’s official manual of psychiatric disorders received payments from industry totalling $14.24m, finds a study published by The BMJ. Because of the enormous influence of diagnostic and treatment guidelines, the researchers say their findings “raise questions about the editorial independence of this diagnostic manual.” Often referred to as the ‘bible’ of psychiatric disorders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition, text revision (DSM-5-TR) is the latest edition of the guide that doctors use to diagnose and treat patients. It is thus critical that authors of this psychiatric taxonomy should be free of industry ties. But until the development of Open Payments ... it wasn't possible to determine the amount of monies received by authors of diagnostic and clinical practice guidelines. Their analysis included 92 physicians based in the US who served as members of either a panel (86) or task force (6) on the DSM-5-TR from 2016-19. Of these 92 individuals, 55 (60%) received payments from industry. Collectively, these panel members received a total of $14.24m (£11.21m; €12.96m). The most common types of payment were for food and beverages (91%), followed by travel (69%) and consulting (69%). The greatest proportion of compensation by category of payment was for research funding (70%). To ensure unbiased, evidence based mental health practice, there should be a rebuttable presumption of prohibiting financial conflicts of interest among the panel and task force members.

Note: A recent study found that 80% of the global population will be treated for mental illness at some point in their lives, and that their lives are worse in many ways after receiving diagnosis and treatment. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on health and Big Pharma profiteering from reliable major media sources.


US did not properly track more than $1 billion worth of weapons sent to Ukraine, watchdog report finds
2024-01-11, CNN News
Posted: 2024-01-22 14:48:26
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/11/politics/pentagon-tracking-weapons-ukraine-rep...

The Pentagon did not properly track $1 billion worth of military equipment sent to Ukraine, according to a watchdog report. The report from the Pentagon Inspector General says that while the Defense Department has improved its ability to track military aid sent to Ukraine, it “did not fully comply” with requirements and much of the equipment sent is “delinquent,” meaning it’s not possible to complete an inventory of everything sent. Among the items that are designated for enhanced end-use monitoring (EEUM) are weapons like Javelin and Stinger missiles, night-vision devices, AIM-9X missiles, and Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles. According to the IG report, roughly $1.005 billion of the total $1.699 billion of equipment subject to end-use monitoring was not inventoried as of June 2023. The new report comes at a critical moment for Ukraine aid, as Congress debates whether to authorize a supplemental package of more than $60 billion in aid. While delinquency could suggest weapons had been stolen or diverted away from Ukrainian forces, the inspector general said it was outside the scope of its probe to determine what had happened to the weapons that were not properly tracked. “The DoD OIG now has personnel stationed in Ukraine,” the report says, “and the DoD OIG’s Defense Criminal Investigative Service continues to investigate allegations of criminal conduct with regard to U.S. security assistance to Ukraine.”

Note: Learn more about unaccountable military spending in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.


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