News Articles Excerpts of Key News Articles in Major Media
Below are many highly revealing excerpts of key news articles from the major media. Links are provided to the full articles on their mainstream media websites. If any link fails to function, click here. These articles are listed by order of importance. For the same list by date posted to website, click here. For the list by date of news article, click here. For headlines and links only to key news articles, click here. By choosing to educate ourselves and to spread the word, we can and will build a brighter future.
Note: For an index to revealing excerpts of media articles on several dozen engaging topics, click here.
The Man Behind The Vaccine Mystery 2002-12-12, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/12/12/eveningnews/main532886.shtml It's been a mystery in Washington for weeks. Just before President Bush signed the homeland security bill into law an unknown member of Congress inserted a provision into the legislation that blocks lawsuits against the maker of a controversial vaccine preservative called "thimerosal," used in vaccines that are given to children. Drug giant Eli Lilly and Company makes thimerosal. It's the mercury in the preservative that many parents say causes autism in thousands of children. But nobody in Congress would admit to adding the provision, reports CBS News Correspondent Jim Acosta – until now. House Majority Leader Dick Armey tells CBS News he did it to keep vaccine-makers from going out of business under the weight of mounting lawsuits. "I did it and I'm proud of it," says Armey, R-Texas. "It's a matter of national security," Armey says. Because Armey is retiring at the end of the year, some say the outgoing majority leader is the perfect fall guy to take the heat and shield the White House from embarrassment. Note: Though this is old news, it is very important news showing how beholden the government is to the powerful drug companies.
Parallel Universes 2002-02-14, BBC News http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2001/paralleluni.shtml Everything you're about to read here seems impossible and insane, beyond science fiction. Scientists now believe there may really be a parallel universe - in fact, there may be an infinite number of parallel universes, and we just happen to live in one of them. These other universes contain space, time and strange forms of exotic matter. For years parallel universes were a staple of the Twilight Zone. Science fiction writers loved to speculate on the possible other universes which might exist. Serious scientists dismissed all this speculation as absurd. But now it seems the speculation wasn't absurd enough. It all started when superstring theory, hyperspace and dark matter made physicists [conclude] that the three dimensions we thought described the Universe weren't enough. By the time they had finished they'd come to the conclusion that our Universe is just one bubble among an infinite number of membranous bubbles which ripple as they wobble through the eleventh dimension. Now imagine what might happen if two such bubble universes touched. Neil Turok from Cambridge, Burt Ovrut from the University of Pennsylvania and Paul Steinhardt from Princeton believe that has happened. The result? A very big bang indeed and a new universe was born - our Universe. The idea has shocked the scientific community; it turns the conventional Big Bang theory on its head. It may well be that the Big Bang wasn't really the beginning of everything after all. Time and space all existed before it. In fact Big Bangs may happen all the time.
Note: To watch this mind-boggling program on BCC, click here.
Fearing Harm, bin Laden Kin Fled From U.S. 2001-09-30, New York Times http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60F14F63F590C738FDDA00894D94... In the first days after the terror attacks on New York and Washington, Saudi Arabia supervised the urgent evacuation of 24 members of Osama bin Laden's extended family from the United States, fearing that they might be subjected to violence. Most of Mr. bin Laden's relatives were attending high school and college. They are among the 4,000 Saudi students in the United States. King Fahd, the ailing Saudi ruler, sent an urgent message to his embassy here saying there were "bin Laden children all over America" and ordered, "Take measures to protect the innocents," the ambassador said. The young members of the bin Laden clan were driven or flown under F.B.I. supervision to a secret assembly point in Texas and then to Washington from where they left the country on a private charter plane when airports reopened three days after the attacks. A majority of the men who hijacked four airliners in the attacks carried Saudi passports. Surprisingly, Osama bin Laden was not a stranger even to a royal family member like Prince Bandar. In the early 1980's, bin Laden came to greet the prince and thank him for helping to build the coalition that fought against the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan. Mr. bin Laden is one of 52 children of a Yemeni-born migrant who made a vast fortune building roads and palaces in Saudi Arabia.
Note: Should the above link fail to function, click here. For a Boston Globe article on this key topic, click here. For more detailed information which both the Times and Globe neglected to report, click here.
Blind To Failure 2001-06-18, Time Magazine (Cover story) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1000120.html Scaling Everest requires the enthusiasm and boosterism of a physical-education teacher combined with the survival instinct of a Green Beret. You have to want that summit. Erik Weihenmayer, 33, wasn't just another yuppie trekker. Blind since he was 13 ... he began attacking mountains in his early 20s. For Erik ... excelling as an athlete was the result of accepting his disability rather than denying it." Climbing with Erik isn't that different from climbing with a sighted mountaineer. You wear a bell on your pack, and he follows the sound ... using his custom-made climbing poles to feel his way along the trail. His climbing partners shout out helpful descriptions: "Death fall 2 ft. to your right!" Almost 90% of Everest climbers fail to reach the summit. Many--at least 165 since 1953--never come home at all. When Erik and the team began the final ascent from Camp 4 ... they had been on the mountain for two months ... getting used to the altitude and socking away enough equipment [before they made the final, successful] summit push. "He was the heart and soul of our team," says Eric Alexander. "The guy's spirit won't let you quit." It could be called the most successful Everest expedition ever, and not just because of Erik's participation. A record 19 climbers from the N.F.B. team summited, including the oldest man ever to climb Everest--64-year-old Sherman Bull. Perhaps the point is really that there is no way to put what Erik has done in perspective because no one has ever done anything like it. It is a unique achievement, one that in the truest sense pushes the limits of what man is capable of.
Note: Don't miss the entire inspiring story at the link above. For an inspiring video of Erik in Peru, click here.
What Did the C.I.A. Do to His Father? 2001-04-01, New York Times http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9D02E2DE113CF932A35... For a quarter of a century, [Eric Olson] has believed that the Central Intelligence Agency murdered his father, a United States government scientist. On Nov. 28, 1953, around 2 a.m. [the] night manager at the Statler Hotel ... in New York rushed out the front door ... to find a middle-aged man lying on the sidewalk. The man had fallen from the 10th floor -- apparently after crashing through a closed window. [In late July, 1975] the C.I.A.'s director, William Colby [provided Olson's] family ... declassified documents relating to Frank Olson's death. Olson had not been a civilian employee of the Department of the Army. He had been a C.I.A. employee working at Fort Detrick. Olson's specialty, it turned out, had been the development of aerosols for the delivery of anthrax. The Colby documents were ... full of unexplained terms like the ''Artichoke'' and ''Bluebird'' projects. These turned out to be the precursors of what became known as MK-ULTRA, a C.I.A. project, beginning in the Korean War, to explore the use of drugs like LSD as truth serums, as well as botulism and anthrax, for use in covert assassination. The documents claimed that during a meeting between the C.I.A. and Fort Detrick scientists ... on Nov. 19,1953, Sidney Gottlieb of the C.I.A. slipped LSD into Olson's glass of Cointreau. Olson, a scientist by training, would have known that he was working for a government that had put Nazi scientists on trial at Nuremberg for immoral experiments on human beings. Now, in the late summer of 1953, [Olson] faced up to the possibility that his own government was doing the same thing. Slipping LSD into Olson's Cointreau was ... designed to get him to talk ... to assess what kind of risk he posed and then eliminate him if necessary.
Note: For those interested in this vital, yet disturbing topic, the entire Times article is well worth reading. For further verifiable information on the CIA mind control programs mentioned in this article, click here.
Professor Feels Himself Become Closer to the Machine 1998-09-23, ABC News http://web.archive.org/web/20001109140100/http://more.abcnews.go.com/sections... When Kevin Warwick enters his office building on the campus of Reading University, strange things happen. As Warwick heads down the main hall, lights turn on. When he turns to the right, an office door unbolts and opens. Each step is clocked and recorded. The building knows who he is, where he is, and what he expects to happen. The building [even] says, “Hello Professor Warwick.” The structure knows Warwick because of the electrical fuse-sized “smart card” implanted in his left arm. In Britain, he’s been dubbed “The Cyborg Man,” the first person known to have a microchip implanted in his body for communication with outside machines. Warwick predicts chip implants will one day replace time cards, criminal tracking devices, even credit cards. Capable of carrying huge amounts of data, they may, he says, one day be used to identify individuals by Social Security numbers, blood type, even their banking information. No one knows yet how the body will respond to this type of invasion. Warwick is not blind to the ethical questions of this technology. Implants ostensibly designed to clock workers in and out might be misused to monitor where people are at all times and who they are meeting. Governments could move to use implants instead of I.D. cards and passports, but what would stop them from using this new science to invade privacy? “I feel mentally different. When I am in the building I feel much more closely connected with the computer.
Note: Those who would like to control the public named these implants "smart cards" to encourage us to accept them. For more reliable information on important topic, click here and here.
Bin Laden comes home to roost 1998-08-24, MSNBC News http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3340101 At the CIA, it happens often enough to have a code name: Blowback. Simply defined, this is the term describing an agent, an operative or an operation that has turned on its creators. Osama bin Laden, our new public enemy Number 1, is the personification of blowback. And the fact that he is viewed as a hero by millions in the Islamic world proves again the old adage: Reap what you sow. There are times when the United States, faced with ... moral dilemmas, should have resisted the temptation to act. Arming a multi-national coalition of Islamic extremists in Afghanistan during the 1980s ... was one of those times. Bin Laden is the heir to Saudi construction fortune who ... has used that money to finance countless attacks on U.S. interests. Bin Laden left Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan. By 1984, he was running a front organization known as ... the MAK - which funneled money, arms and fighters from the outside world into the Afghan war. MAK was nurtured by Pakistan’s state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA’s primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow’s occupation. The CIA ... had conclusive evidence by the mid-1980s of the deepening crisis of infrastructure within the Soviet Union. The CIA, as its deputy director Robert Gates acknowledged under congressional questioning in 1992, had decided to keep that evidence from President Reagan and his top advisors and instead continued to grossly exaggerate Soviet military and technological capabilities. Given that context, a decision was made to provide America’s potential enemies with the arms, money - and most importantly - the knowledge of how to run a war of attrition violent and well-organized enough to humble a superpower. That decision is coming home to roost.
Note: The #2 man (who later became #1) at the CIA acknowledges that the CIA deceived the president in order to forward its own confrontational objectives. How often do you think this might happen? Who's really in charge here? For a highly revealing documentary titled "Secrets of the CIA," click here.
Inside the CIA: An interview with former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman 1998-01-00, CNN http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/21/interviews/goodman/ Melvin Goodman was a senior analyst in Soviet affairs at the Central Intelligence Agency, where he worked for two decades (1966-1986). He currently is professor of international studies at the National War College. [In the CIA], not only do you have political assassinations -- attempts at least -- throughout the Fifties and the Sixties ... but you even have assassination attempts against international leaders: the Mongoose operation in Cuba [and] assassination attempts in Chile, where you were dealing with a country that wasn't even in the vital national interests or concerns of the United States. All of these assassination attempts were done with the authorization of the White House. I think the major problem at the CIA -- and it exists to this day -- is that you have two cultures. You have an intelligence or analytical culture that must remain open. The opposite of that is the clandestine side: it's secret, it's a policy branch of the government. The White House basically uses the operational component of the CIA to do its bidding. It's very useful to have a clandestine corps to carry out military or paramilitary actions very cheaply, without the hand of the United States or a particular president being obvious. In many ways, you're getting worst-case assessments, because quite often the contacts of the CIA are people on the CIA payroll, telling the CIA what these people believe the CIA wants to know -- in return for payment. So the whole tradecraft is somewhat suspicious and somewhat corrupt from the very outset.
Note: Melvin Goodman is one of many senior government officials who question the government's 9/11 story. For his comments on this, click here. For other senior officials with similar sentiments, click here.
Canada Will Pay '50s Test Victims 1992-11-19, New York Times http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9E0CE7DD173AF93AA25... Canada has agreed to compensate victims of psychiatric experiments carried out mainly in the 1950s and financed in part by the Central Intelligence Agency. An institute at McGill University in Montreal, headed by Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, a psychiatrist, ... was one of the centers where such experiments were carried out. Now, the Canadian Government says the 80 or so patients who underwent the so-called "psychic driving" treatment in Montreal ... can receive almost $80,000 each. The patients at the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill were put into a drugged sleep for weeks or months, subjected to electroshock therapy until they were "de-patterned," knowing neither who or where they were, and forced to listen repeatedly to recorded messages broadcast from speakers on the wall or under their pillows. Linda Macdonald, 55 years old, an employment counselor now in Vancouver, is one of those who sued for compensation. "I walked through those doors with a husband on one arm and a guitar on the other and was a healthy person and coherent," she said. She spent 86 days in the "sleep room" and was subjected to 109 shock treatments and megadoses of barbiturates and other drugs. When she got out of the experiment, she could not read or write, had to be toilet-trained and could not remember her husband, her five children or any part of the first 26 years of her life. John Marks, a former State Department official whose 1979 book, The Search For the Manchurian Candidate, called attention to the experiments, said that a C.I.A. front called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology funneled more than $60,000 to Dr. Cameron for the studies. Ottawa gave him more than $200,000.
Note: For a concise summary of the CIA's mind control experiments, click here.
Nebraska Inquiry Is Given File on Sex Abuse of Foster Children 1988-12-25, New York Times http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE6D9133DF936A15751C1A96E94... A state file containing reports of physical and sexual abuse of foster children, based on interviews with some of the children and including one instance reminiscent of slave auctions, has been turned over to the Executive Board of the Nebraska Legislature. One of the reports in the file ... is an account by [a] victim who described parties at various places, including Omaha and cities to which she was flown on the East Coast ... including one in which the ... teen-ager was made to stand nude at a party while she was offered at auction to the highest bidder. ''I don't know if they can prove it,'' the source said, ''but if one-tenth of what that girl is saying is true, I'd sure hate to have her talking about me.'' The foster care agency's submission of the file is among the latest developments in a case that began surfacing Nov. 4, when the Government's National Credit Union Administration shut down the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union in Omaha. The agency... subsequently filed suit against Lawrence E. King Jr., Franklin Community's manager and treasurer, charging him with diverting millions of dollars of the institution's money to his own purposes. In all, the agency says, Franklin Community is missing $38 million. Mr. King has not been accused of personally engaging in child sexual abuse. But a number of widening Federal and state investigations into the credit union's collapse are aimed in part at determining whether any of the money he is accused of embezzling was ever used to transport children or to pay them for sex.
Note: This article reveals only a small part of what is known about a sophisticated pedophile ring that reaches to the highest levels of government. For more on this key topic, don't miss excellent, reliable resources and the powerful Discovery Channel documentary available here. Note also the Christmas date of this article. The press often discloses the most deeply revealing information on key cover-ups on holidays when few read the paper.
Who's in Big Brother's Database? 2009-11-05, New York Review of Books http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23231 On a remote edge of Utah's dry and arid high desert ... hard-hatted construction workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build [a] mammoth $2 billion structure. It's being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency ... to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and [electronic data trails of all kinds]. The NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome. Just how much information will be stored in these windowless cybertemples? A recent report prepared by the MITRE Corporation, a Pentagon think tank, [states] "Sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes [10-to-the-24th-power bytes] by 2015." Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite "libraries," the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be — or may one day become — a terrorist. Emerging [after 9/11] as the most powerful chief the spy world has ever known was the director of the NSA. He is in charge of an organization three times the size of the CIA and empowered in 2008 by Congress to spy on Americans to an unprecedented degree. These new centers in Utah, Texas, and possibly elsewhere will likely become the centralized repositories for the data intercepted by the NSA in America's version of the "big brother database."
Note: James Bamford, the author of this review of a new book on the history of the NSA, has himself written three important books on the agency. For many revealing reports from reliable sources on the developing capacity by government and corporate surveillance to construct a "Big Brother" states, click here.
Who’s Afraid of Sibel Edmonds? 2009-11-01, The American Conservative http://amconmag.com/article/2009/nov/01/0000 Sibel Edmonds has a story to tell. She went to work as a Turkish and Farsi translator for the FBI five days after 9/11. She was fired from the FBI in April 2002 after she raised concerns that one of the translators in her section was a member of a Turkish organization that was under investigation for bribing senior government officials and members of Congress, drug trafficking, illegal weapons sales, money laundering, and nuclear proliferation. On Aug. 8, she was finally able to testify under oath in a court case filed in Ohio and agreed to an interview with The American Conservative based on that testimony. PHILIP GIRALDI: You map out a corruption scheme involving U.S. government employees and members of Congress and agents of foreign governments. So the network starts with a person like [Marc] Grossman in the State Department providing information that enables Turkish and Israeli intelligence officers to have access to people in Congress, who then provide classified information that winds up in the foreign embassies? EDMONDS: Absolutely. And we also had Pentagon officials doing the same thing. We were looking at Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. They had a list of individuals in the Pentagon broken down by access to certain types of information. Some of them would be policy related, some of them would be weapons-technology related, some of them would be nuclear-related. Perle and Feith would provide the names of those Americans, officials in the Pentagon, to Grossman, together with highly sensitive personal information: this person is a closet gay; this person has a chronic gambling issue; this person is an alcoholic. The files on the American targets would contain things like the size of their mortgages or whether they were going through divorces.
Note: Sibel Edmonds is the founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. For lots more on her key testimony, click here. Philip Giraldi is a former CIA officer and The American Conservative’s Deep Background columnist. An ever increasing number of people are waking up to the truth of 9/11.
TARP on steroids 2009-10-30, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/30/EDTG1ACEDE.DTL It was 9/29/08 - a moment when a rare blast of populist democracy briefly singed the economic terrorists who hold the Capitol hostage. It had been a dark and stormy month of financial collapse, culminating in an attempted power grab. Pushed by his fellow Wall Street Ponzi schemers, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson - a former Goldman Sachs CEO - was threatening Armageddon unless Congress ratified his ... decree for a no-strings-attached bank bailout. Today, the episode seems merely to have set minimum standards for chicanery. As evidenced by two little-noticed sections of the Obama administration's Wall Street "reform" bill, presidents and their bank benefactors are back to thinking they can pilfer whatever they want by burying their demands in the esoterica of lengthier bills. Finding this latest giveaway means digging all the way down to sections 1109 and 1604 of the White House's mammoth proposal. At a recent hearing, Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Sherman Oaks (Los Angeles County), called the language "TARP on steroids," noting the provisions would deliberately let the executive branch enact even bigger, more unregulated bailouts than ever - and by unilateral fiat. TARP on Steroids includes no specific oversight or executive pay constraints. TARP on Steroids allows taxpayer cash to go only to the behemoths (which, not coincidentally, tend to make the biggest campaign contributions). TARP on Steroids would let [the Treasury Secretary] spend as much as he wants.
Note: For many revealing reports from reliable sources on the continuing Wall Street bailout, click here.
Do-nothing committees at state Capitol 2009-10-12, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/12/EDUN1A3LQ7.DTL It's always interesting to look behind the curtain at the state Capitol and marvel at the California Legislature's ingenuity at spending our money or avoiding accountability. It's just too bad this creative brilliance could not be applied to addressing fiscal crises or solving the state's water problems. The latest little outrage came in the scrutiny of the Legislature's 77 select committees by Chronicle staff writers Wyatt Buchanan and Matthew Yi. What they found was that 32 of these committees have paid staffers, with a combined payroll of $4.3 million. It may not be a lot of money in the context of a state that keeps encountering deficits in the tens of billions, but it does seem to represent a bit of clever accounting. To put it in plain terms: It's a way for elected officials to pad their staffs. For example, state Sen. Lou Correa, D-Santa Ana, has six people working for him who are paid through three select committees. Total number of hearings those committees have held this year: zero. Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, chairs two select committees ... with four paid staff members. Total number of hearings this year: zero. Californians who are not so immersed in the culture of the Legislature might wonder why it needs 77 select committees in addition to the standing committees that are assigned to cover areas such as transportation, energy and myriad other issues. At least 19 of the 32 with paid staff have not met at all this year.
Note: For lots more on government corruption from reliable sources, click here.
In Harsh Reports on S.E.C.’s Fraud Failures, a Watchdog Urges Sweeping Changes 2009-09-30, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/business/30sec.html The Securities and Exchange Commission’s independent watchdog called for a sweeping overhaul of the agency’s investigation and enforcement practices on Tuesday, after a blistering report on the S.E.C.’s failure to detect Bernard L. Madoff’s extensive Ponzi scheme. Two reports, released by the S.E.C.’s inspector general, H. David Kotz, recommended dozens of changes in the way the agency evaluates tips, trains investigators and documents examinations of securities firms. The first report, which covers the S.E.C.’s inspections and examinations office, outlines 37 improvements that would revamp nearly every aspect of the division’s operations, including how investigators follow up on tips and creating step-by-step procedures in identifying potential violations of securities laws. Mr. Kotz also issued 21 recommendations to the S.E.C.’s division of enforcement, including the start of a formal process for handling complaints and improving working relationships within the division. One measure would mandate that tips and complaints be reviewed by at least two individuals experienced in the subject before taking further action. The proposed changes come after Mr. Kotz’s office completed an exhaustive investigation this month of the S.E.C.’s failure to detect the Madoff fraud despite many warnings and a flood of complaints from credible sources. At nearly every turn, the investigation found, the agency had failed to properly examine Mr. Madoff’s firm and had not adequately followed up on tips from as far back as 1992 that could have unearthed the estimated $65 billion scheme.
Note: For a treasure trove of key revelations on the realities behind the Wall Street crash and bailout, click here. Contact your political representatives urging them to support these recommendations.
Health Care Workers Protest Mandatory H1N1 Vaccination 2009-09-29, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/09/29/taking_liberties/entry5349581.shtml Health care workers are planning to take to the streets Tuesday at a rally in front of the Albany, N.Y. state capitol to protest mandatory vaccination. The rally is intended to call for "freedom of choice in vaccination and health care" and to protest mandatory vaccination for influenza and the H1N1 swine flu. "This vaccine has not been clinically tested to the same degree as the regular flu vaccine," Tara Accavallo, a registered nurse on Long Island, told Newsday. "If something happens to me, if I get seriously injured from this vaccine, who's going to help me?" While physicians, nurses, and medical technicians may not be known for their willingness to march on state capitols, a recent New York Department of Health requirement has sparked an unusually intense response. The August 13 regulations say that all health care workers who "could potentially expose patients" must be vaccinated for influenza by November 30 unless it would be "detrimental" to the recipient's health. This raises an obvious and important question: Under what circumstances can government officials order mandatory vaccination? And could the general public be ordered to roll up their sleeves for injections, even if there might be side effects beyond a sore arm or mild fever? The concern in New York also comes as skepticism of vaccination in general seems to be on the rise.
Note: For more on this protest, click here. Note that the U.S. government has granted immunity from lawsuits to the drug companies manufacturing the vaccines. So who will be responsible if there is a repeat of the 1976 swine flu vaccination campaign, where hundreds died and thousands were paralyzed by the vaccines?
State lifts limit on mercury preservative in swine-flu shots 2009-09-25, Seattle Times (Seattle's leading newspaper) http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/health/2009938638_vaccine25m.html In preparation for swine-flu vaccinations next month, Washington's Health Department ... temporarily suspended a rule that limits the amount of a mercury preservative [called Thimerosal] in vaccines given to pregnant women and children under the age of 3. Thimerosal has been eliminated from most vaccines in the United States, but it will be added to the bulk of the swine-flu vaccine. A vocal minority believes the compound could be linked to autism. About 15 percent of the vaccine supply will be mercury-free. Thimerosal will be added to the vaccine because it is being produced in vials that contain enough medication for 10 shots. The mercury compound kills bacteria, lowering the risk that the drug will be contaminated by needles used to withdraw separate doses. "Every time you introduce a needle, you run a risk of introducing a potential contaminant," said Dr. Tony Marfin, state epidemiologist for infectious disease. Mercury-free vaccine will be produced in single-dose vials. Nasal sprays do not contain mercury but are not recommended for children under the age of 2 and pregnant women, because they contain live, weakened virus. The law limiting the mercury preservative will be suspended for six months and applies only to the swine-flu vaccines. Once common in vaccines, thimerosal has been largely phased out in most wealthy nations. Children's vaccines in the United States are almost exclusively mercury-free, single-dose injections. After 1976's mass vaccination against a different swine-flu strain, about 500 people developed a neurological disorder called Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS), and some died. Scientists still haven't figured out why.
Note: To watch a vitally important 10-minute clip from CBS's 60 Minutes revealing government complicity in the deaths of 300 Americans and permanent paralysis of thousands more from the vaccine during the 1976 swine flu scare, click here. This is the most revealing clip by far on the swine flu that we've seen. For much more information on the dangers of thimerosal in vaccines, click here.
Patriot Act Provisions Get Obama Support 2009-09-15, ABC News http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obama-supports-extending-patriot-act/story?id=... The Justice Department has indicated that the Obama administration is in support of renewing [three] controversial sections of the USA Patriot Act that expire later this year. The provisions that will expire in December include Section 206, that allows "roving" wiretaps so FBI agents can tap multiple phones or computers (with court authorization) that a specific person (target) may use. Another expiring provision, Section 215, is the so-called "library provision," which allows investigators to obtain [library, medical, business, banking and other] records with approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. And the final provision which was nicknamed the "Lone Wolf" authorization, allows intelligence gathering of people not suspected of being part of a foreign government or known terrorist organization. Critics of the Patriot Act protested loudly that the FBI could obtain individuals' library records under the legislation. [But] section 215 is much more expansive than reviewing a suspected terrorist's summer reading list. [It] allows the FBI to obtain any business record, "any tangible things," like credit card and bank statements and also allows access to medical and mental health records. The provision has been used to obtain communication and subscriber information to help set up surveillance and monitoring of computers and telephones.
Note: The American Library Association, the national organization of professional librarians, was the first and strongest defender of civil liberties after the passage of the PATRIOT Act. For a discussion of the concerns of professional librarians over this decision by the Obama administration, click here.
Peanut Butter Plan to feed the homeless spreads 2009-09-15, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/15/DD1Q19MDQO.DTL The world is getting better, one peanut butter and jelly sandwich at a time. It's called the Peanut Butter Plan. Like many of the best plans, it's simple: Strangers get together, make peanut butter sandwiches and immediately pass them out to homeless people. No federal subsidy, no foundation, no vouchers. No official sanction from anybody. Just strangers, good will and peanut butter. Jory John, a San Francisco children's book writer, got the idea for the PBJ stealth campaign this spring. John put forth the idea on Facebook and, over the past few months, PBJ handouts have taken place in Los Angeles; Berkeley; Phoenix; Little Rock, Ark.; Grand Rapids, Mich.; Austin, Texas; and London. "People are joining from all over the place," John said. "I thought it was about time to use a social networking site to do some good." The monthly gathering took place the other evening around a conference table inside a publishing house that had donated its office for the cause. Some sandwich-laden volunteers [went] to the Tenderloin and some others to the Haight and South of Market.There was no shortage of people who found the idea of a complimentary peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich to be just the thing. Outside the BART station at 16th and Mission streets, a dozen folks accepted sandwiches. When the sandwiches were gone, [the] sandwich makers retired to a nearby tavern for a beer. The camaraderie of doing something nice, along with the beers, made everyone feel pretty good and some of the strangers exchanged phone numbers. "The smallest actions make the biggest difference," [John] said. "There are some cynics who say it's not really curing hunger, and it isn't curing hunger. But it's curing one person's hunger. There's nothing wrong with that."
Note: Information on the Peanut Butter Plan and its operations in various cities around the U.S. is available at www.peanutbutterplan.org.
Has Osama Bin Laden been dead for seven years - and are the U.S. and Britain covering it up to continue war on terror? 2009-09-11, Daily Mail (One of the UK's largest-circulation newspapers) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1212851/Has-Osama-Bin-Laden-dead-seve... [President] Barack Obama has launched a fresh operation to find [Osama bin Laden]. Working with the Pakistani Army, elite squads of U.S. and British special forces were sent into Waziristan this summer to 'hunt and kill' the shadowy figure intelligence officers still call 'the principal target' of the war on terror. This new offensive is, of course, based on the premise that the 9/11 terrorist is alive. Yet what if he isn't? What if he has been dead for years, and the British and U.S. intelligence services are actually playing a game of double bluff? What if everything we have seen or heard of him on video and audio tapes since the early days after 9/11 is a fake - and that he is being kept 'alive' by the Western allies to stir up support for the war on terror? Incredibly, this is the breathtaking theory that is gaining credence among political commentators, respected academics and even terror experts. Still more questions have been raised with the publication in America and Britain of a book called Osama Bin Laden: Dead or Alive? Written by political analyst and philosopher Professor David Ray Griffin, ... it is provoking shock waves - for it goes into far more detail about his supposed death and suggests there has been a cover-up by the West. The book claims that Bin Laden died of kidney failure, or a linked complaint, on December 13, 2001, while living in Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains close to the border with Waziristan. His burial took place within 24 hours, in line with Muslim religious rules, and in an unmarked grave, which is a Wahhabi custom. The author insists that the many Bin Laden tapes made since that date have been concocted by the West to make the world believe Bin Laden is alive. Could it be that, for years, he's just been smoke and mirrors?
Note: Hundreds of scholars, officials and professionals have raised questions about bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and other aspects of the official conspiracy about the events of 9/11. Click here and here to read their concerns.
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