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For Modern Kids, 'Philanthropy' Is No Grown-Up Word
2007-12-30, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/29/AR20071229018...

In lieu of presents at her 12th birthday party this year, Maddie Freed of Potomac asked her friends to bring money, and she raised $800 for Children's Hospital. Eight-year-old Jenny Hoekman saves a third of what she makes walking dogs, and this month the Takoma Park girl donated it to help her Brownie troop sponsor an immigrant family. And in Club Penguin, a popular online game club for the elementary school set, more than 2.5 million kids gave their virtual earnings to charities in a contest this month. In response, the site's founders are giving $1 million to charities based on the children's preferences. Young children and teenagers across the nation are getting involved in philanthropy more than ever, according to research and nonprofit experts, who credit new technologies with the rise of the trend. As young people increasingly become exposed to and connected with the problems of the world via the Internet and television, experts said, parents are finding new ways to instill in their children the value of giving. At the same time, technology is democratizing philanthropy so giving is not only easier for people of all ages and means, but also trendier. And children are starting to organize at the grass-roots level to give. "We've globalized technology, we've globalized commerce, but we haven't globalized compassion," said Craig Kielburger, founder of Free the Children, a nonprofit network of kids helping kids. "But we're seeing a generation of kids, ages 10 to 15, who are aware of global problems, and they're really searching to help. The next step is to help kids move from that awareness to action." Eileen Barber, 10, of Charlottesville said she gave her Club Penguin coins to the World Wildlife Fund to help animals. "It sort of seemed like they have a lot more needs than us," Barber said. "With global warming and stuff, I figured it would be nicer to look beyond just myself."

FBI Prepares Vast Database Of Biometrics
2007-12-22, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/21/AR20071221025...

The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world's largest computer database of peoples' physical characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad. Digital images of faces, fingerprints and palm patterns are already flowing into FBI systems. Next month, the FBI intends to award a 10-year contract that would significantly expand the amount and kinds of biometric information it receives. And in the coming years, law enforcement authorities around the world will be able to rely on iris patterns, face-shape data, scars and perhaps even the unique ways people walk and talk, to ... identify [people]. The increasing use of biometrics for identification is raising questions about the ability of Americans to avoid unwanted scrutiny. It is drawing criticism from those who worry that people's bodies will become de facto national identification cards. "It's going to be an essential component of tracking," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. "It's enabling the Always On Surveillance Society." The FBI's biometric database ... communicates with the Terrorist Screening Center's database of suspects and the National Crime Information Center database, which is the FBI's master criminal database of felons, fugitives and terrorism suspects. At the West Virginia University Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR) ... researchers are working on capturing images of people's irises at distances of up to 15 feet, and of faces from as far away as 200 yards. Soon, those researchers will do biometric research for the FBI. Covert iris- and face-image capture is several years away, but it is of great interest to government agencies.

Note: For many important major-media reports on threats to privacy, click here.

Senator Reveals Secret Bush Legal Opinions
2007-12-07, CBS News
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/12/07/politics/main3591448.shtml

A member of the Senate Intelligence Committee said ... President Bush is standing by "feverish legal theories" to justify actions which are unconstitutional. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., made the comments on the Senate floor during debate. Whitehouse said that ... he had examined "highly classified secret legal opinions" issued by the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel [OLC]. Whitehouse recounted that, "Sitting in that secure room, as a lawyer, as a former U.S. Attorney, legal counsel to Rhode Island’s Governor, and State Attorney General, I was increasingly dismayed and amazed as I read on." Whitehouse related three OLC legal opinions which he got declassified: "An executive order cannot limit a President. There is no constitutional requirement for a President to issue a new executive order whenever he wishes to depart from the terms of a previous executive order."; ... "The President ... can determine whether an action is a lawful exercise of the President’s authority"; [and] "The Department of Justice is bound by the President’s legal determinations." "Imagine a general counsel to a major U.S. corporation telling his board of directors, 'In this company the counsel’s office is bound by the CEO’s legal determinations,'" Whitehouse said. "The board ought to throw that lawyer out - it’s malpractice, probably even unethical." We are a nation of laws, not of men. This nation was founded in rejection of the royalist principles that ... 'The King can do no wrong'."

Note: To hear the revealing Senate speech on this vital topic by Senator Whitehouse, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, click here. For Whitehouse's comments on this topic on his Senate website, click here.

A way to squeeze oil and gas from just about anything
2007-12-00, Popular Science magazine
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/flat/bown/2007/innovator_2.html

Everything that goes into Frank Pringle’s recycling machine — a piece of tire, a rock, a plastic cup — turns to oil and natural gas seconds later. “I’ve been told the oil companies might try to assassinate me,” Pringle says without sarcasm. The machine is a microwave emitter that extracts the petroleum and gas hidden inside everyday objects. Every hour, the first commercial version will turn 10 tons of auto waste — tires, plastic, vinyl — into enough natural gas to produce 17 million BTUs of energy (it will use 956,000 of those BTUs to keep itself running). Pringle created the machine about 10 years ago after he drove by a massive tire fire and thought about the energy being released. He went home and threw bits of a tire in a microwave emitter he’d been working with for another project. It turned to what looked like ash, but a few hours later, he returned and found a black puddle on the floor of the unheated workshop. Somehow, he’d struck oil. Or rather, he had extracted it. Petroleum is composed of strings of hydrocarbon molecules. When microwaves hit the tire, they crack the molecular chains and break it into its component parts: carbon black (an ash-like raw material) and hydrocarbon gases, which can be burned or condensed into liquid fuel. If the process worked on tires, he thought, it should work on anything with hydrocarbons. The trick was in finding the optimum microwave frequency for each material. In 2004 he teamed up with engineer pal Hawk Hogan to take the machine commercial. Their first order is under construction in Rockford, Illinois. It’s a $5.1-million microwave machine the size of small bus called the Hawk, bound for an auto-recycler in Long Island, New York. Oil companies are looking to the machines to gasify petroleum trapped in shale.

Note: For many exciting breakthroughs in new energy technologies, click here.

Eighth wonder of the world?
2007-11-22, Daily Mail (Britain's second largest circulation daily newspaper)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article...

Nestling in the foothills of the Alps in northern Italy ... lies the valley of Valchiusella. Weaving their way underneath the hillside are nine ornate temples, on five levels, whose scale and opulence take the breath away. They are linked by hundreds of metres of richly decorated tunnels. The 'Temples of Damanhur' are ... the work of ... 57-year-old [Oberto Airaudi] who, inspired by a childhood vision, began digging into the rock. From an early age, he claims to have experienced visions of what he believed to be a past life, in which there were amazing temples. Around these he [saw] there lived a highly evolved community who enjoyed an idyllic existence in which all the people worked for the common good. Oberto appeared to have ... the gift of "remote viewing" - the ability to travel in his mind's eye. Oberto - who prefers to use the name 'Falco' ... selected a remote hillside where he felt the hard rock would sustain the structures he had in mind. A house was built on the hillside and Falco moved in with several friends who shared his vision. Using hammers and picks, they began their dig to create the temples of Damanhur ... in August 1978. Volunteers, who flocked from around the world, worked ... for the next 16 years with no formal plans other than Falco's sketches and visions. By 1991, several of the nine chambers were almost complete with stunning murals, mosaics, statues, secret doors and stained glass windows. Esperide Ananas ... has written a new book called Damanhur, Temples Of Humankind. Today the 'Damanhurians' even have their own university, schools, organic supermarkets, vineyards, farms, bakeries and award-winning eco homes. They do not worship a spiritual leader, though their temples have become the focus for group meditation. 'They are to remind people that we are all capable of much more than we realise and that hidden treasures can be found within every one of us once you know how to access them,' says Falco.

Note: Click on the article link above to see many exquisite color photos of the amazing interiors of the Damanhur temples.

Get kids vaccinated or go to jail?
2007-11-17, USA Today/Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-11-17-vaccines-school_N.htm

Scores of grumbling parents facing a threat of jail lined up at a courthouse Saturday to either prove that their school-age kids already had their required vaccinations or see that the youngsters submitted to the needle. The get-tough policy in the Washington suburbs of Prince George's County was one of the strongest efforts made by any U.S. school system to ensure its youngsters receive their required immunizations. Two months into the school year, school officials realized that more than 2,000 students in the county still didn't have the vaccinations they were supposed to have before attending class. So Circuit Court Judge C. Philip Nichols ordered parents in a letter to appear at the courthouse Saturday and either get their children vaccinated on the spot or risk up to 10 days in jail. They could also provide proof of vaccination or an explanation why their kids didn't have them. "It was very heavy handed," [school mom Aloma Martin] said of the county's action. "From that letter, it sounded like they were going to start putting us in jail." Any children who still lack immunizations could be expelled. Their parents could then be brought up on truancy charges, which can result in a 10-day jail sentence for a first offense and 30 days for a second. Maryland, like all states, requires children to be immunized against several childhood illnesses including polio, mumps and measles. In recent years, it also has required that students up to high school age be vaccinated against hepatitis B and chicken pox. Several organizations opposed to mass vaccinations demonstrated outside the courthouse. While the medical consensus is that vaccines are safe and effective, some people blame immunizations for a rise in autism and other medical problems. "People should have a choice" in getting their children immunized, said Charles Frohman, representing a physicians' group opposed to vaccines.

Note: For more revealing major media reports on the complex issues surrounding vaccinations, click here.

Symington: I saw a UFO in the Arizona sky
2007-11-09, CNN
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/11/09/simington.ufocommentary/

In 1997, during my second term as governor of Arizona, I saw something that defied logic and challenged my reality. I witnessed a massive delta-shaped craft silently navigate over Squaw Peak, a mountain range in Phoenix, Arizona. It was truly breathtaking. As a pilot and a former Air Force Officer, I can definitively say that this craft did not resemble any man-made object I'd ever seen. The incident was witnessed by hundreds -- if not thousands -- of people in Arizona, and my office was besieged with phone calls from very concerned Arizonians. The growing hysteria intensified when the story broke nationally. I decided to lighten the mood of the state by calling a press conference where my chief of staff arrived in an alien costume. We managed to lessen the sense of panic but, at the same time, upset many of my constituents. I would now like to set the record straight. I never meant to ridicule anyone. My office did make inquiries as to the origin of the craft, but to this day they remain unanswered. Eventually the Air Force claimed responsibility stating that they dropped flares. This is indicative of the attitude from official channels. We get explanations that fly in the face of the facts. Explanations like weather balloons, swamp gas and military flares. I was never happy with the Air Force's silly explanation. I now know that I am not alone. There are many high-ranking military, aviation and government officials who share my concerns. While on active duty, they have either witnessed a UFO incident or have conducted an official investigation into UFO cases relevant to aviation safety and national security. By speaking out with me, these people are putting their reputations on the line. Investigations need to be re-opened, documents need to be unsealed and the idea of an open dialogue can no longer be shunned.

Note: For a two-page summary of UFO testimony by top government and military officials, click here.

Plan 9 from outer space
2007-11-03, Sydney Morning Herald (Australia's leading newspaper)
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/plan-9-from-outer-space/2007/11/02/119361914...

In January 1979, The New York Times reported that despite repeated, feverish denials, the CIA had indeed investigated the UFO phenomenon. The report is said to have so upset the then CIA director, Stansfield Turner, that he reportedly asked his staff: "Are we in UFOs?" The answer was yes. This year a raft of newly unclassified CIA documents revealed that the remote possibility of alien invasion elicited greater fear than the threat of a Soviet nuclear attack. The subject of UFOs ... not only focused the attention of the US government elite for 50 years, but of some of the greatest scientific and military minds of the era. The CIA documents show that despite decades of repeated public denials, behind the scenes there raged a series of inter-agency feuds that involved the highest levels of the US government. UFO files cover everything from "flying saucers over Belgian Congo uranium mines" to Nazi "flying saucers". A 1953 memo shows that the physicist John Wheeler, while critically involved with Edward Teller in the creation of the hydrogen bomb, was available to the "CIA attack on the flying saucer" problem. A secret 1995 report was titled: CIA's role in the study of UFOs 1947-90: a diehard issue. Written by Gerald Haines, the CIA's National Reconnaissance Office historian, its detailed summary of CIA involvement inadvertently undermined its "UFOs-don't-exist" conclusion. Although the air force was the agency given the task of investigating UFOs from 1948 onwards, the CIA remained deeply involved. Some of their highlights, quoting directly from the documents, include: "[Since] 1947 there have been about 1500 official reports of sightings and [of these] the air force carries 20 per cent as unexplained."

Note: For a concise summary of UFO evidence from highly-respected former US government and military officials, click here.

U.S. Medical Schools, Drug Makers Share Strong Ties
2007-10-16, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/16/AR20071016014...

More than half of department chairs at U.S. medical schools and teaching hospitals have financial ties with the drug industry, a new study finds. "There is not a single aspect of medicine in which the drug companies do not have substantial and deep relationships, [including] doctors-in-training, resident physicians, researchers, physicians-in-practice, the people who review drugs for the federal government and the people who review studies," said lead researcher Eric Campbell, associate professor at the Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. "Drug companies have relationships with everyone," he continued. "They're involved in every aspect of medicine. Someone has to decide which of these is OK." The study, the first to examine the extent of these institutional relationships, is published in the Oct. 17 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. "I think the paper is a very valuable contribution, in that it provides what's probably the first comprehensive documentation of the extent of relationships that involve department chairs, and department chairs are certainly the key agents of overseeing and maintaining the day-to-day operations of a medical school or teaching hospital," said Dr. David Korn ... at the Association of American Medical Colleges in Washington, D.C. The issue of medicine's ties to industry has been a hot one of late. One study found that third-year medical students get, on average, one gift or attend one activity sponsored by a drug maker each week. "Now it's up to the policymakers and people who run medical schools," said Campbell. "They need to come up with some rules and they need to be new rules. I believe there's very little reasonable justification for why drug companies should be involved in the education of medical students."

Note: For a powerful overview of medical corruption, click here.

CIA director investigating watchdog
2007-10-12, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/10/12/MNP1SOQI9.DTL

CIA Director Michael Hayden has mounted a highly unusual challenge to his agency's chief watchdog, ordering an internal investigation of an inspector general who has issued a series of reports sharply critical of top CIA officials. Hayden is seeking to rein in an inspector general who has used the office to bring ... scrutiny upon CIA figures from former Director George Tenet to undercover operatives running secret overseas prison sites. The investigation is focused on ... CIA Inspector General John Helgerson and his office, particularly whether they were fair and impartial in their scrutiny of the agency's terrorist detention and interrogation programs. Officials said that the investigation also will span other subjects and that it already has expanded since its start months ago. U.S. intelligence officials concerned about the inquiry said it is unprecedented and could threaten the independence of the inspector general position. The investigation "could at least lead to appearances he's trying to interfere with the IG, or intimidate the IG, or get the IG to back off," one U.S. official familiar with the investigation said. Frederick Hitz, who served as the CIA's inspector general from 1990 to 1998, said the move will be perceived as an attempt by Hayden "to call off the dogs." "What it would lead to is an undercutting of the inspector general's authority and his ability to investigate allegations of wrongdoing," Hitz said. "The rank and file will become aware of it, and it will undercut the inspector general's ability to get the truth from them." Hayden has been a staunch defender of the Bush administration's counterterrorism programs.

Note: What does it say about an agency when they accuse their own internal investigator of being corrupt?

New revelations in attack on American spy ship
2007-10-02, Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/services/newspaper/printedition/tuesday/chi-lib...

Bryce Lockwood, Marine staff sergeant, Russian-language expert, recipient of the Silver Star for heroism, ordained Baptist minister, is shouting into the phone. "I'm angry! I'm seething with anger! Forty years, and I'm seething with anger!" Lockwood was aboard the USS Liberty, a super-secret spy ship on station in the eastern Mediterranean, when four Israeli fighter jets flew out of the afternoon sun to strafe and bomb the virtually defenseless vessel on June 8, 1967, the fourth day of what would become known as the Six-Day War. Four decades later, many of the more than two dozen Liberty survivors located and interviewed by The Tribune cannot talk about the attack without shouting or weeping. Their anger has been stoked by the declassification of government documents and the recollections of former military personnel, including some quoted in this article for the first time, which strengthen doubts about the U.S. National Security Agency's position that it never intercepted the communications of the attacking Israeli pilots -- communications, according to those who remember seeing them, that showed the Israelis knew they were attacking an American naval vessel. The documents also suggest that the U.S. government, anxious to spare Israel's reputation and preserve its alliance with the U.S., closed the case with what even some of its participants now say was a hasty and seriously flawed investigation. In declassifying the most recent and largest batch of materials last June 8, the 40th anniversary of the attack, the NSA, this country's chief U.S. electronic-intelligence-gatherer and code-breaker, acknowledged that the attack had "become the center of considerable controversy and debate." It was not the agency's intention, it said, "to prove or disprove any one set of conclusions, many of which can be drawn from a thorough review of this material," available at http://www.nsa.gov/liberty.

Note: For photos, a BBC documentary, and more excellent information on this major cover-up, click here.

Report Assails F.D.A. Oversight of Clinical Trials
2007-09-27, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/28/health/policy/28fda.html?ex=1348632000&en=d...

The Food and Drug Administration does very little to ensure the safety of the millions of people who participate in clinical trials, a federal investigator has found. The inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, Daniel R. Levinson, said federal health officials did not know how many clinical trials were being conducted, audited fewer than 1 percent of the testing sites and, on the rare occasions when inspectors did appear, generally showed up long after the tests had been completed. The F.D.A. has 200 inspectors, some of whom audit clinical trials part time, to police an estimated 350,000 testing sites. Even when those inspectors found serious problems in human trials, top drug officials in Washington downgraded their findings 68 percent of the time, the report found. Among the remaining cases, the agency almost never followed up with inspections to determine whether the corrective actions that the agency demanded had occurred. “In many ways, rats and mice get greater protection as research subjects in the United States than do humans,” said Arthur L. Caplan, chairman of the department of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania. Animal research centers have to register with the federal government, keep track of subject numbers, have unannounced spot inspections and address problems speedily or risk closing, none of which is true in human research, Mr. Caplan said. Because no one collects the data systematically, there is no way to tell how safe the nation’s clinical research is or ever has been. The drug agency oversees just the safety of trials by companies seeking approval to sell drugs or devices. Using an entirely different set of rules, the Office for Human Research Protections oversees trials financed by the federal government. Privately financed noncommercial trials have no federal oversight.

Note: For further information on corruption in the health care industry, click here.

It's all Friedman's doing
2007-09-09, Toronto Star (Toronto's leading newspaper)
http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/254550

[Naomi Klein in her new book The Shock Doctrine] argues persuasively that over the last 40 years, no single thinker has shaped the economic and political policies of corporate CEOs, military dictators, presidents, prime ministers and bankers more than [Milton] Friedman. His thesis was simple: The job of governments is to facilitate the free flow of capital across national borders by removing any impediments to trade [and establishing] a drastic regimen of market deregulation, free trade treaties, spending cuts to social programs, the breaking of labour unions and mass privatization of publicly owned resources and industries ... chiefly through the careful manipulation of collective crises such as wars, military coups, natural disasters and economic recessions and depressions. For Friedman's ideas to be implemented, a nation's existing economy and civic society must first be reduced to a state of tabula rasa before being rebuilt according to the [Chicago School] model. [Klein contends] that this capitalist doctrine also has its roots in a series of mind-control experiments performed on often unwilling patients by psychiatrist Ewan Cameron, working out of McGill University in the late 1950s. He imposed a sustained regimen of sensory deprivation, isolation, enforced sleep and a cocktail of LSD, PCP, insulin and barbiturates [and] a barrage of electroshock therapy. The CIA, which paid for Cameron's experiments, modified these techniques for use in prisoner-interrogation sessions. The results were so good that the CIA taught the methods to the Latin American security forces in charge of reprogramming anyone who dared resist the devastating free market "reforms" that swept through South and Central America after Augusto Pinochet's successful, Chicago-School inspired (and CIA-sponsored) coup of populist leader Salvador Allende in 1973.

Special Note: For an incredibly revealing interview on the role of the Milton Friedman and the Chicago school of economists in promoting radical change against democracy by using states of public shock to push through unwanted changes, don't miss the powerful talk with Naomi Klein available here.

The 50% MPG Gain That Detroit Won't Touch
2007-08-26, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/23/AR20070823016...

Gerald Rowley keeps his dreams in his garage. There ... he stores an aging Mazda 626 sedan [specially outfitted with a] one-gallon steel box in the trunk connected to fuel lines leading to a gasoline vaporizing device under the hood. The steel box holds one gallon of regular unleaded gasoline. The device beneath the hood is called the VFS, Vaporizing Fuel System. I came here to drive Rowley's VFS-equipped car. For years, I had spurned the invitations of homespun inventors worldwide to travel to distant points to witness first-hand machines that could deliver 100 miles per gallon or 200 miles per gallon. The claims sounded too incredible to believe -- ridiculous, in fact. If such devices really worked, really did what their inventors said they did, why would they still be sitting on shelves in anonymous workshops -- ignored by the driving public and all of the vehicle manufacturers who serve them? What automobile manufacturer in its right mind, especially with rising concerns about future oil availability and with gasoline prices escalating worldwide, would not jump at the opportunity to acquire a device that delivered 100 miles per gallon? Rowley's patented device is nothing new. It's just the latest iteration of an idea already developed by others -- the notion that you could get more miles per gallon out of a traditional gasoline engine if you pre-heated the fuel to about 350 degrees Fahrenheit, thus turning it into a vapor before it enters the combustion chamber. Vaporized fuel, when properly mixed with air, burns more efficiently, saves fuel and emits fewer tailpipe pollutants than traditional fuel-air mixtures in which gasoline is sprayed into a combustion chamber in tiny droplets and then mixed with air before burning. All car companies know this.

Note: Why won't the car manufacturers develop this amazing, proven technology? For a possible answer, click here. And for a treasure trove of exciting reports on new energy developments, click here.

For this club, life begins at 50 (%)
2007-07-29, Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/business/globe/articles/2007/07/29/for_this_club_life_b...

When David Ludlow's wife died in a climbing accident 11 years ago, her death transformed him into a multimillionaire: He inherited Vanda Sendzimir's share of her family fortune, a $5 million trust that generates an annual interest of about $300,000. Then a freelance photographer with a passion for social justice issues, the Jamaica Plain man was plunged into a swirl of shock, guilt, and confusion. "I've always been very left-wing politically and all of a sudden I was living incredible inequality," said Ludlow, 64. "Suddenly I was in the upper 1 percent of the population in terms of wealth, and I felt terrible about that for a long time." So he did something radical, and something that many people might consider insane: He decided to give away half his annual income. In doing so, Ludlow joined a small, unusual, and growing community: The 50% League, an Arlington-based group of people who contribute at least half their income, business profits, or net worth to charity. Members from across the country have been welcomed into an elite circle of givers and asked to share their stories publicly, even if anonymously, to inspire other givers. Their motivations are manifold: Some give out of a sense of fairness, personal satisfaction or a desire for simplicity; others are driven by religious faith or dedication to a cause. Many are anonymous philanthropists, and not all of them have great wealth: Some are members of the middle class, but have chosen to survive on less so they can give more. Above all, they aim to stand as role models, and to encourage others of all income levels to think about their giving potential. "I feel incredibly privileged, and I still feel guilty about that," said Ludlow, who has used much of the money he inherited from his late wife ... to fund grass-roots groups led by low-income people of color. "But it's given me tremendous meaning in my life to give as much as I can away."

Note: The wonderful man featured in this article, David Ludlow, is a major supporter of our work in the form of a large monthly donation (http://www.peerservice.org/donations#monthly). This is a powerful example of how one inspired individual can make a big difference in the world. Let us all do our best to use our money in support of personal and global transformation to the best of our ability. We also invite you to make a difference by donating to support our empowering work at http://www.peerservice.org/donations. For two inspiring media clips of David and this great organization, click here and here.

1934: The Plot Against America
2007-07-28, Harper's magazine
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/07/hbc-90000651

In November 1934, federal investigators uncovered an amazing plot involving some two dozen senior businessmen, a good many of them Wall Street financiers, to topple the government of the United States and install a fascist dictatorship. An alert FDR shut it down but stopped short of retaliatory measures against the plotters. A key element of the plot involved [Smedley Butler,] a retired prominent general who was to have raised a private army of 500,000 men from unemployed veterans and who blew the whistle when he learned more of what the plot entailed. The plot was heavily funded and well developed and had strong links with fascist forces abroad. A story in the New York Times and several other newspapers reported on it, and a special Congressional committee was created to conduct an investigation. The records of this committee were scrubbed and sealed away in the National Archives, where they have only recently been made available. The Congressional committee kept the names of many of the participants under wraps and no criminal action was ever brought against them. But a few names have leaked out. And one is Prescott Bush, the grandfather of the incumbent president. Prescott Bush was ... deep into the business of the Hamburg-America Lines, and had tight relations throughout this period with the new Government that had come to power in Germany a year earlier under Chancellor Adolph Hitler. It appears that Bush was to have formed a key liaison for the group with the new German government. The role of the most powerful political dynastic family in the nation’s history in this whole affair is shocking.

Note: You can listen to the BBC Radio broadcast on Bush/Nazi ties by clicking here. And to watch a History Channel documentary on the coup plot, click here. U.S. Marine Corps General Smedley Butler was the author of "War is a Racket," summarized here.

Are UFOs Real?
2007-07-13, CNN
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0707/13/lkl.02.html

LARRY KING: A return to Roswell, New Mexico, where the UFO controversy began 60 years ago with the man who says his father showed him debris from an alien spacecraft. Dr. Jesse Marcel ... was shown UFO debris by his father, Major Jesse Marcel. Tell us about your dad. DR. JESSE MARCEL, JR.: He was the base intelligence officer for the 509th Bomb Group, which is the bomb group that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan that won the war. KING: They were based at Roswell? MARCEL: They were. As the intelligence officer, his job was to investigate unusual events. He found a large area of strange looking debris. This was not remains of a weather balloon. He picked up a certain representative portion of the debris, brought it in to Roswell. KING: Julie Shuster ... your father was ... Walter Haut. He was public information officer. JULIE SHUSTER: My father ... issued the press release [which] basically said ... we have in our possession a flying saucer. And he used the words "not of this Earth." KING: Julie, did your father go to his grave believing? SHUSTER: Yes. He was very firm in the fact that he said it was not of this Earth. FIFE SYMINGTON, FORMER GOVERNOR OF ARIZONA: I saw the Phoenix Lights along with hundreds if not thousands of people. To my astonishment this large sort of delta-shaped, wedge-shaped, craft moved silently over the valley ... dramatically large, very distinctive leading edge with some enormous lights. I was absolutely stunned. It was definitely not an airplane. And it was certainly not high-altitude flares because flares don't fly in formation. We have a lot of evidence, a lot of photographs, a lot of news media coverage of it. You can't just [say] everybody in Phoenix was hallucinating.

Note: Isn't it interesting that Roswell happened to be the military base for what at the time was the only nuclear-equipped jet squadron in the world? For Dr. Marcel's book The Roswell Legacy, click here. This interview also includes Dr. Stanton Friedman, a nuclear physicist who has spent many years studying Roswell and has little doubt that the military covered up the incident. Note that CNN fails to mention in the entire interview that Friedman is a respected nuclear physicist who worked numerous years with top corporations in this capacity. For lots more reliable, verifiable information on this intriguing topic, see our UFO Information Center.

Who Runs the CIA? Outsiders for Hire.
2007-07-08, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/06/AR20070706019...

The most intriguing secrets of the "war on terror" have nothing to do with al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers. They're about the mammoth private spying industry that all but runs U.S. intelligence operations today. In April, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell was poised to publicize a year-long examination of outsourcing by U.S. intelligence agencies. But the report was inexplicably delayed -- and suddenly classified a national secret. What McConnell doesn't want you to know is that the private spy industry has succeeded where no foreign government has: It has penetrated the CIA and is running the show. Over the past five years (some say almost a decade), there has been a revolution in the intelligence community toward wide-scale outsourcing. Private companies now perform key intelligence-agency functions, to the tune ... of more than $42 billion a year. Intelligence professionals [say] that more than 50 percent of the National Clandestine Service (NCS) -- the heart, brains and soul of the CIA -- has been outsourced to private firms such as Abraxas, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. These firms recruit spies, create non-official cover identities and control the movements of CIA case officers. They also provide case officers and watch officers at crisis centers and regional desk officers who control clandestine operations worldwide. As The Los Angeles Times first reported last October, more than half the workforce in two key CIA stations -- Baghdad and Islamabad, Pakistan -- is made up of industrial contractors, or "green badgers," in CIA parlance. Intelligence insiders say that entire branches of the NCS have been outsourced to private industry.

Judges OK warrantless monitoring of Web use
2007-07-07, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/07/07/BAGMNQSJDA1.DTL

Federal agents do not need a search warrant to monitor a suspect's computer use and determine the e-mail addresses and Web pages the suspect is contacting, a federal appeals court ruled Friday. In a drug case from San Diego County, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco likened computer surveillance to the "pen register" devices that officers use to pinpoint the phone numbers a suspect dials, without listening to the phone calls themselves. In Friday's ruling, the court said computer users should know that they lose privacy protections with e-mail and Web site addresses when they are communicated to the company whose equipment carries the messages. The search is no more intrusive than officers' examination of a list of phone numbers or the outside of a mailed package, neither of which requires a warrant, Judge Raymond Fisher said in the 3-0 ruling. Defense lawyer Michael Crowley disagreed. His client, Dennis Alba, was sentenced to 30 years in prison after being convicted of operating a laboratory in Escondido that manufactured the drug ecstasy. Some of the evidence against Alba came from agents' tracking of his computer use. The court upheld his conviction and sentence. Expert evidence in Alba's case showed that the Web addresses obtained by federal agents included page numbers that allowed the agents to determine what someone read online, Crowley said. The ruling "further erodes our privacy," the attorney said. "The great political marketplace of ideas is the Internet, and the government has unbridled access to it."

Note: So now every email you send and read can be monitored legally. Why didn't this make news headlines?

Psychiatrists Top List in Drug Maker Gifts
2007-06-27, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/health/psychology/27doctors.html?ex=1340596...

As states begin to require that drug companies disclose their payments to doctors for lectures and other services, a pattern has emerged: psychiatrists earn more money from drug makers than doctors in any other specialty. How this money may be influencing psychiatrists and other doctors has become one of the most contentious issues in health care. For instance, the more psychiatrists have earned from drug makers, the more they have prescribed a new class of powerful medicines known as atypical antipsychotics to children, for whom the drugs are especially risky and mostly unapproved. Vermont officials disclosed Tuesday that drug company payments to psychiatrists in the state more than doubled last year, to an average of $45,692 each from $20,835 in 2005. Antipsychotic medicines are among the largest expenses for the state’s Medicaid program. Over all last year, drug makers spent $2.25 million on marketing payments, fees and travel expenses to Vermont doctors, hospitals and universities, a 2.3 percent increase over the prior year, the state said. The number most likely represents a small fraction of drug makers’ total marketing expenditures to doctors since it does not include the costs of free drug samples or the salaries of sales representatives and their staff members. According to their income statements, drug makers generally spend twice as much to market drugs as they do to research them. Endocrinologists received the second largest amount, according to the Vermont analysis, earning an average of $33,730. Since the state identified the specialties of only the top 100 earners, these averages represent the money earned by only some of the state’s specialists. There were 11 psychiatrists and 5 endocrinologists in that top group of 100.

Note: For much more reliable, verifiable information on corruption in the pharmaceutical industry, click here.

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