Media ArticlesExcerpts of Key Media Articles in Major Media
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In mid-December, as negotiations to end Russia's war in Ukraine gathered pace, a group of Ukrainian officials sat in a conference room in New York for a meeting with senior executives at BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager. They had come to discuss a crucial element of a peace plan drafted by Kyiv and Washington: Ukraine's postwar recovery. BlackRock had been enlisted to help build a strategy for what President Volodymyr Zelensky has called an $800 billion "prosperity plan." The meeting, held at BlackRock's headquarters, kick-started work on identifying funding sources and investment priorities. BlackRock's role has generated more questions than answers, as the Trump administration steers plans for rebuilding Ukraine toward American business interests. Seven European and Ukrainian officials ... voiced doubts about BlackRock's ability to attract the enormous investments envisioned. The involvement in the talks of a private firm whose main business is to maximize financial returns has reinforced concerns that the Trump administration views Ukraine's reconstruction as a profit-making opportunity for the U.S. government and American companies, rather than as primarily a humanitarian or security matter. Last year, President Trump pushed for a deal granting the United States a stake in Ukraine's mineral wealth. In peace talks with Kyiv, the president's main negotiators have been real estate developers.
Note: First, Blackrock buys up government bonds used to finance military spending, meaning it directly profits from the debt created by war itself. Then, after the war, Blackrock is set to profit again – this time from reconstruction contracts, land grabs, and privatization efforts. Read about this and more with our Substack, Working Together To End the War On Peace in Ukraine, which challenges the dominant narrative on the Ukraine war, arguing that US and NATO policies, covert intelligence agency operations, media censorship, and corporate profiteering have fueled the conflict while blocking genuine peace efforts.
Helen McCaw, who served as a senior analyst in financial security at The Bank of England, sent a message to the bank with a significant alien warning. The short of it? McCaw wrote to Andrew Bailey, the bank's governor, urging him to prepare for the possibility that the United States, specifically the White House, may confirm the existence of extraterrestrial life. McCaw's overarching concern includes her belief that if the White House were to declare this, it would significantly impact the markets and could ignite bank collapses. She cited the United States appearing to be "partway through a multi-year process to declassify and disclose information" regarding alien life forms. "The United States government appears to be partway through a multi-year process to declassify and disclose information on the existence of a technologically advanced non-human intelligence responsible for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs)," she claimed. The longtime Bank of England employee expanded on the topic, discussing the possibility of a "power or intelligence greater than any government," referencing the "unknown intentions" that would come with it. McCaw added to her belief that the government's leadership and central banks may not be "properly briefed" on the topic of aliens or other life forms. McCaw also mentioned the chance of a "collapse in confidence," assuming people feel uncertain about the market and how to it.
Note: Our 26-minute video UFO Disclosure: Breakthrough Technology and Awakening Human Consciousness features interviews with leading experts along with well-sourced, verifiable information to help you make sense of this fascinating issue and its immense potential to transform our world. For more, explore the comprehensive resources provided in our UFO Information Center.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will launch a study on cellphone radiation, a department spokesman said on Thursday, building on Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr's criticism linking them to neurological damage and cancer. Last year, the department said 22 states had restricted cellphone use in schools to improve the mental and physical health of children under the "Make America Healthy Again" movement. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration also took down old webpages saying cellphones are not dangerous. "The FDA removed webpages with old conclusions about cell phone radiation while HHS undertakes a study on electromagnetic radiation and health research to identify gaps in knowledge, including on new technologies, to ensure safety and efficacy," said HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon. "The study was directed by President Trump's MAHA Commission in its strategy report," Nixon added. However, some webpages of agencies such as the FDA and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continue to say that to date there is no credible evidence pointing to health problems from cellphone radiation. The National Cancer Institute, under the National Institutes of Health, says "evidence to date suggests that cellphone use does not cause brain or other kinds of cancer in humans."
Note: Unlike the US, many countries have regulations in place to protect people from cell phone radiation exposure. Check out this comprehensive list of countries with official recommendations and policies on cell phone radiation exposure. A ProPublica investigation found that the FCC brushed aside findings from other government scientists showing evidence of rare cancers linked to cellphone radiation. In 2011, the World Health Organization's cancer research arm classified wireless radiation as "possibly carcinogenic to humans," and in 2018 a major US government study found "clear evidence" that cellphone radiation caused cancer in laboratory animals. Read more about how Big Wireless made us think cell phones carry no cancer risks.
Fredy Amador is intimately familiar with the financial struggles people face in the current economy. Northern Illinois' skyrocketing energy bills make the situation even tougher. Now, Amador has become an evangelist for something that can provide a modest measure of relief: A community solar project, built on a Superfund site too polluted for much else in the city of Waukegan where he lives, about 40 miles north of Chicago. Residents who subscribe to get energy from the solar farm are guaranteed to see savings on their energy bills, under a state program incentivizing solar in low-income areas. The 9.1-megawatt Yeoman Solar Project, which went online last month, can provide energy for about 1,000 households, as well as the Waukegan school district, which owns the land. Such brownfields are attractive locations for solar installations because of "existing electrical infrastructure, lower-cost land, and community acceptance," noted Paul Curran, CleanCapital's chief development officer. Incentives from the state initiative Illinois Solar for All helped make the project financially viable, even given extra costs incurred from building on a Superfund site. Solar is a good fit for sites that are too polluted for housing or other types of development. Under the terms of the Superfund remediation, residential use is prohibited at the Yeoman Creek site. The company has developed solar on brownfields and landfills in other states, including a new 822-kilowatt site in Maryland.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this on reimagining the economy and technology for good.
The largest investigation of UFOs in the history of the world ... was launched by the former USSR in the late 1970s. Back in September, Congress heard testimony about once-classified files from the Russian UFO programs, files that fell into the hands ... journalist George Knapp in the 1990s, who brought those files out of Russia and is now making them public, starting with two of the most important documents. Could UFOs ignite an apocalyptic World War? It almost happened in October 1982 at a Russian nuclear missile base in what is now Ukraine. One document contains some of the eyewitness statements collected by a secret Ministry of Defense program. The witnesses were stationed at a missile base near the hamlet of Usovo. They watched in awe as multiple unknown objects flooded the skies, changed shapes and colors, appeared and then disappeared, traveled at high speeds, and stopped mid-air. A few officers made drawings of the different UFO formations seen over a wide area around and over the base. The most dramatic statement was from a senior communications officer who watched in horror as the launch control system for the missiles suddenly lit up and someone, somehow, entered the proper codes that would unleash hell. Nuclear missiles that could reach and obliterate New York City in a mere 25 minutes were ready to launch. And the Russians were powerless to stop it. As soon as the unknown objects over the base vanished, the launch sequence ended.
Note: Our 26-minute video UFO Disclosure: Breakthrough Technology and Awakening Human Consciousness features interviews with leading experts along with well-sourced, verifiable information to help you make sense of this fascinating issue and its immense potential to transform our world. For more, explore the comprehensive resources provided in our UFO Information Center.
What if a ticket to the opera could also be a prescription against loneliness? In Hamburg, the nonprofit KulturistenHochZwei – a play on the words culture (kultur) and tourists (touristen) – is turning concert and museum visits into powerful social medicine. Founded in 2015 by Christine Worch ... the initiative pairs teenagers with older adults to attend cultural events – everything from symphony performances to plays and art exhibitions. For the seniors, many of whom live on limited incomes and might otherwise stay home alone, these shared outings are a way back into public life. "With the young people, I feel young again," one 85-year-old from Bramfeld in the northeastern part of the city said after a concert at Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie. "They're so kind and respectful. Everyone talks badly about youth these days, but these students are wonderful. We even exchanged phone numbers. I hope we can go again soon." The idea is as elegant as it is effective. Seniors who fall below the income threshold – â‚Ź1,350 ($1,575) per month for individuals or â‚Ź1,750 ($2,040) for couples – receive free tickets to cultural events. But instead of attending alone, they're matched with a "culture buddy" aged 16 or older, recruited through partnerships with local schools. For the young volunteers, the outings are a crash course in empathy and human connection. The teenagers commit to at least three cultural outings per school year and receive a certificate for their volunteer service.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this on healing social division and amazing seniors.
Chatbots and AI-generated search summaries – which are rapidly transforming the way people get their information – both use Wikipedia as a key source. Now, we can reveal Wikipedia has been subject to shady, paid-for edits ordered by partners at an elite London PR firm with links to Downing Street. And the clients who benefitted from this "wikilaundering" are some of the world's richest and most powerful people. The firm in question is Portland Communications. And it has been busted once already for this practice. After the firm was exposed, former employees told us, it simply started hiring middlemen instead. As one of them put it: "No one said, â€We should stop doing this.' The question was how we could keep doing it without getting caught." Portland's subcontractors have ... obscured mentions of a major terrorist-financing case involving Qatari businessmen; scrubbed evidence that a billion-dollar Gates-funded project failed in its mission; and promoted one side of Libya's post-Gaddafi government over the other. Often, however, their changes were more subtle: burying bad press under descriptions of a client's philanthropic work or swapping out critical news references with something more positive. "Small Wikipedia edits punch above their weight," explained Alberto Fittarelli ... at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab. "Small, incremental changes are likely to stick for longer. These kinds of edits make narratives seem credible precisely because they are hardly noticeable. Once that enters the information stream, it becomes really hard to claw it back."
Note: Read how Wikipedia is systematically manipulated by the military-intelligence complex. The CIA, FBI, and the Pentagon has secretly edited entries in Wikipedia, including removing references to CIA illegal rendition and torture, downplaying US involvement in Iraqi civilian deaths, and rewriting the definition of "terrorism" to expand its political use. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on media manipulation.
For the past decade, every year, Parisians like [Anne-ValĂ©rie] Desprez have been able to see their proposals come to life on the streets of the French capital. Under the city's Participatory Budget, any resident above the age of seven, regardless of their nationality, can propose a project to be paid for by municipal funds. The model, increasingly popular across the globe, is helping authorities spend resources efficiently and boost democratic participation. In Paris, more than 21,000 ideas have been submitted by citizens since the scheme launched in 2014, resulting in 1,345 funded projects and an expenditure of â‚Ź768 million (almost $900 million), including â‚Ź263 million set aside for low-income districts. Each proposal must pass a feasibility study by city hall before being voted on by residents. "It is a very good device and it's important," says Yves Sintomer, a French researcher and co-author of the book Participatory Budgeting in Europe. It's led to the creation of rooftop farms, children's play areas, community art murals, shade structures and baggage storage for the homeless, as well as a number of projects at the [Cherry Sociocultural Center], which was founded in 1999. In 2017, following the center's first successful budget proposal, benches were installed in the street out front, providing a place for people to congregate for free. Further funding from the participatory budget enabled the center to buy a cargo bike – shared with other local businesses – for short-distance deliveries in 2019.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this on healing social division and reimagining the economy.
The relatively small Somali community in the U.S., estimated at 260,000, has lately been receiving national attention thanks to a massive fraud scandal in Minnesota. A central theme of Trump's anti-Somali rancor is that they come from a war-torn country without an effective centralized state, which in Trump's reasoning speaks to their quality as a people, and therefore, their ability to contribute to American society. It is worth reminding ourselves, however, that Somalia's state collapse and political instability is as much a result of imperial interventions, including from the U.S., as anything else. Cold War geopolitical machinations partly created the contextual background to the 1977-78 Somalia-Ethiopia war. Somalia's defeat in this war set the stage for the disintegration of the state in 1991. This threw the country into a prolonged state of conflict, resulting in mass displacement and migration. U.S. drone strikes in Somalia have continued over the past two decades with varying degrees of intensity at different times. Since Trump returned to office, his administration has dramatically increased the drone campaign, while the transparency of the decision-making process and consequences of these strikes have become more opaque. Recent scholarship has noted the link between U.S. militarism in Somalia and the policing and surveillance of Somali immigrants in the U.S. Trump's xenophobic rhetoric ... conveniently omits the U.S role in fomenting instability.
Note: Read about the terrible consequences of US policy in Somalia. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption.
"We had no way to compete with their technology, with their weapons. I swear, I've never seen anything like it," a Venezuelan security guard says in a video widely shared on social media and promoted by the White House. His account tells how U.S. special forces in Venezuela captured then-President Maduro using new technology which incapacitated the entire protective team and allowed two dozen U.S. troops to easily defeat hundreds of defenders. Guard: "At one point, they launched something–I don't know how to describe it... it was like a very intense sound wave. Suddenly I felt like my head was exploding from the inside. We all started bleeding from the nose. Some were vomiting blood. We fell to the ground, unable to move." In the 90's and early 2000s, the Pentagon poured resources into the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate, now rebranded the Joint Intermedia Force Capabilities Office. Their task was to develop non-lethal, or less-lethal weapons which ... would disable or incapacitate people. The Pentagon worked on a wide variety of concepts, including strobe dazzlers, malodorants and electroshock projectiles. One of the biggest was the millimeter-wave Active Denial System or â€pain beam' which could inflict severe pain and drive back rioters from several hundred meters away. A patented device known as Electromagnetic Personnel Interdiction Control (EPIC) ... uses radio waves "to excite and interrupt the normal process of human hearing and equilibrium."
Note: Acoustic or sonic weapons can vibrate the insides of humans to stun them, nauseate them, or even "liquefy their bowels and reduce them to quivering diarrheic messes," according to a Pentagon briefing. These devices can also cause excruciating pain, with some able to heat up skin from a distance and others that can beam sound into the skull of a human. Learn more about non-lethal weapons in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center.
The Defense Department has spent more than a year testing a device purchased in an undercover operation that some investigators think could be the cause of a series of mysterious ailments impacting US spies, diplomats and troops that are colloquially known as Havana Syndrome. A division of the Department of Homeland Security, Homeland Security Investigations, purchased the device for millions of dollars in the waning days of the Biden administration, using funding provided by the Defense Department, according to two ... sources. Officials paid "eight figures" for the device, these people said, declining to offer a more specific number. The device is still being studied and there is ongoing debate ... over its link to the roughly dozens of anomalous health incidents that remain officially unexplained. The device acquired by HSI produces pulsed radio waves, one of the sources said, which some officials and academics have speculated for years could be the cause of the incidents. Although the device is not entirely Russian in origin, it contains Russian components. The device could fit in a backpack. Havana Syndrome, known officially as "anomalous health episodes" ... first emerged in late 2016, when a cluster of US diplomats stationed in the Cuban capital of Havana began reporting symptoms consistent with head trauma, including vertigo and extreme headaches. In subsequent years, there have been cases reported around the world.
Note: Read more about Havana Syndrome. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption.
More than a decade ago, I walked into the Challenger Memorial Youth Center in Los Angeles County to gather data for a lawsuit related to their "failure to provide an adequate education to detained youth." What our team found was much more horrifying: masses of teachers not showing up or late to work, leaving youth in their cells; children in solitary confinement for weeks; sexual assault by probation officers and detention staff; teacher-run fight clubs during class; and more. These abuses continue even today, as exposed earlier this year by sex tapes recorded in a juvenile detention facility in Seattle and videos of gladiator fights between teens in custody in Los Angeles County. The juvenile justice system was originally designed to be supportive and child-centered, but it became increasingly punitive and harsh through the War on Drugs in the 1980s, which resulted in exponentially higher rates of arrests and imprisonment. As a result, children with externalizing symptoms of trauma – abuse, neglect, domestic violence – have been incarcerated without treatment for their behavioral and mental health symptoms. Youth incarceration is extremely harmful to communities, causing worse adult health and functional limits. If we want a healthy society, we need to address trauma through treatment, not incarceration. Punishment provides immediate, visible results, while empowering youth requires patience, understanding and time.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption and sexual abuse scandals.
CIA and DEA ... drug operations were intimately tied to the Latin American anticommunist brigades funded by Western capital throughout the Cold War, and the brutal liquidation of the Left these narco-terrorists often carried out. Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro is being held in a Brooklyn jail charged with smuggling cocaine into the United States. But even the Drug Enforcement Agency estimates that less than 10 percent of cocaine shipments to the U.S come through Venezuela. The vast majority of cocaine shipments originate in Colombia and move through the Pacific route and Mexico. There are no shortages of Latin American leaders and military chiefs who are heavily involved in drug trafficking but who are considered close allies of the United States. One of them, former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, was pardoned by Donald Trump last month, after he was sentenced to 45 years in prison for conspiring to distribute over 400 tons of cocaine in the U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also Trump's national security advisor, comes out of the rightwing Cuban exile community in Miami, one that has for decades engaged in drug trafficking and a dirty war against those it condemns, like Maduro, of being communists. These anti-communist Cubans, including Rubio's inner circle, have [close ties] with the drug trade and [support] Ecuadorean President Daniel Noboa, whose family fruit business is accused of trafficking 700 kilos of cocaine. Rubio hailed Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa, who leads a country whose homicide rate has risen eightfold since 2016, as an â€incredibly willing partner' who â€has done more just in the last couple years to take the fight to these narco-terrorists and these threats to the security and stability of Ecuador than any previous administration.' Just five months earlier, a damning investigation revealed that Noboa's family fruit business had trafficked 700 kilos of cocaine to Europe in banana crates between 2020 and 2022.
Note: Read our in-depth Substack, "How The Deep State Won the War on Drugs: A Complete Timeline," which reveals undeniable evidence that drug trafficking is an essential tool used by the US government and authoritarian regimes around the world to maintain power. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on the war on drugs.
In Montana, a focus on restorative justice is reducing juvenile recidivism through a nonprofit program that engages them, rather than punishes them. The nonprofit believes that it's actually far more challenging for juvenile offenders to look their victims in the eye and explain why they behaved antisocially than it is to simply serve a suspension from school, where they're distanced from friends and mentors, and often fall behind in their education. The Center for Restorative Youth Justice (CRYJ), is not a new organization, but their influence in Montana is growing. CRYJ receives referrals from Youth Court probation officers, school administrators, or school resource officers made on behalf of a juvenile offender who's broken the law. CRYJ then has a conference with the youth and their parent or guardian, and creates a tailormade program of restorative justice. This can involve peer group discussion, victim-offender meetings, and other situations where the youth is given the forum to reestablish a relationship with the community, rather than something like a school suspension. CRYJ believes that by limiting the overuse of exclusionary discipline and emphasizing a community-driven approach, it can help at-risk youth avoid falling behind in school. We spend a lot of time separating people after there's been harm, but often the deepest healing and learning and moving forward can happen ... when we can actually come together and talk about what happened and how to make things right.
Note: Read more about the powerful work of restorative justice. Explore more positive stories like this on repairing criminal justice.
Popular dietary narratives that romanticize meat heavy or so-called ancestral diets collapse when confronted with the realities of modern food production. What may have made sense in ecological contexts defined by pasture, seasonality, and low chemical inputs no longer maps onto an industrial system dependent on genetically engineered feed, pervasive herbicide use, and routine pharmaceutical intervention. The newly released Dietary Guidelines for Americans double down on that disconnect. Rather than grappling with how food is actually produced in the United States today, they reinforce dietary advice that assumes a food system that no longer exists. The guidelines promote increased consumption of meat and dairy while remaining almost entirely silent on how those foods are produced, what they contain, and whether our land, water, animals, and bodies can bear the cost. In the United States today, the overwhelming majority of meat, eggs, and dairy come from highly intensive industrial systems. These systems rely on confinement, routine drug use, chemically saturated feed, and enormous waste burdens. Animals are routinely administered antibiotics, hormones, beta agonists, coccidiostats, and other pharmaceutical agents, many of which accumulate in animal tissues and enter the human food supply. Health policy that ignores these realities is not reform. It is avoidance.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on health and factory farming.
In 1993, 60 Minutes aired a report detailing how the CIA recruited Venezuelan military officer Gen. RamĂłn GuillĂ©n Dávila, enabling the shipment of roughly 22 tons of cocaine into U.S. cities under the guise of an intelligence operation. Once the so-called "Cartel of the Suns" outlived its usefulness to U.S. intelligence, it quietly vanished–only to be revived years later by the U.S. government as a political weapon in its campaign against Venezuela. The Trump administration has accused Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro of leading the long-defunct "Cartel of the Suns." But as journalist Diego Sequera explains, the cartel's origins trace back to the early 1990s, when the CIA allegedly directed one of its top Venezuelan military assets to facilitate the shipment of tons of cocaine into U.S. cities. The "Cartel of the Suns" functions less as a criminal organization than as a political fiction–one born from a U.S. intelligence operation, buried when it became inconvenient, and resurrected decades later to justify coercive measures against a government Washington seeks to remove. What remains consistent is not the evidence, but the utility of the accusation. And in the end, the "Cartel of the Suns" tells us far less about Venezuela than it does about U.S. power: how an intelligence-linked drug operation can be erased from history when it implicates Washington, then revived as propaganda when regime change again becomes the goal. The cartel never needed to exist–only the narrative did.
Note: Read our in-depth Substack investigation and timeline exploring how the deep state won the war on drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on the war on drugs.
Thousands of surveillance reports compiled by undercover police officers who spied on political campaigners were routinely passed to MI5, documents obtained by the spycops inquiry have revealed. Police sent undercover officers on long-term deployments to infiltrate mainly leftwing protest groups and gather enormous quantities of information about their political and personal activities. It can now be revealed that most of those clandestine reports were sent to MI5, helping the Security Service to build up large files on peaceful protesters who were engaged in democratic protests for an array of causes. MI5 still retains these surveillance reports in its files today. Officers have been criticised for spying on thousands of political organisations such as campaigns against racism and nuclear weapons, the Socialist Workers party, justice campaigns and trade unions. Their reports logged personal information about protesters, including their marriages, sexuality, holiday plans and bank accounts, as well as their plans for political action such as demonstrations. Stamped on the surveillance reports are a tell-tale sign – Box 500, a nickname for MI5 ... which confirms that they were sent to the Security Service by the police spies. Working in tandem, senior police officers running the undercover spies and MI5 met regularly to discuss the political groups they wanted to infiltrate. On several occasions, MI5 warned that particular police spies were in danger of being rumbled by activists.
Note: Read more about the spycops scandal and the dozens of activists tricked into having romantic relationships with undercover police. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on police corruption.
A military contractor with a lineage going back to the notorious mercenary firm Blackwater will help U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement track down a list of 1.5 million targeted immigrants across the country. ICE inked a deal with Constellis Holdings to provide "skip tracing" services, tasking the company with hunting immigrants down and relaying their locations to ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations wing for apprehension. Contractors will receive monetary bounties in exchange for turning over the whereabouts of specified immigrants as quickly as possible, using whatever physical and digital surveillance tools they see fit. Constellis was formed in 2014 through the merger of Academi, previously known as Blackwater, and Triple Canopy, a rival mercenary contractor. The combined companies and their subsidiaries have reaped billions from contracts for guarding foreign military installations, embassies, and domestic properties, along with work for the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. spy agencies. In 2007, Blackwater mercenaries massacred 14 civilians in Baghdad; several of its contractors serving prison sentences for the killings were pardoned by President Donald Trump in 2020. The government has so far paid Constellis $1.5 million, with the potential for the total to grow to more than $113 million by the contract's end in 2027. Constellis ... secured a $250 million construction contract at the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, earlier this year.
Note: Erik Prince's Blackwater got caught systematically defrauding the government. Then Blackwater changed its name to Academi and made over $300 million off the Afghan drug trade. More recently, Prince was recruiting ex spies to infiltrate progressive activist groups. Furthermore, the bounty-based approach mirrors a core tactic of the War on Terror, when US forces offered cash rewards for tips that fueled mass detentions in Afghanistan and beyond. This swept up thousands of people who posed no threat and had no ties to terrorism.
John Seigel-Boettner ... has been coordinating the local chapter of Cycling Without Age (CWA) since 2019. Effortlessly charming and still ferociously fit at 70-years-old, he gives rides at least twice a week. Though the people who ride upfront don't pedal, he doesn't call them "passengers" but "riding partners" to emphasize the program's spirit of companionship. "Cycling Without Age is about connection," Seigel-Boettner says. "It's about the conversations between pilot and partner, and the connection with everyone we meet along the way." While anybody can ride for free, CWA prioritizes riders with limited mobility. Seigel-Boettner's youngest rider was a five-year-old boy on a feeding tube who wanted to ride to school with his friends. "We provided that," he says, "and it made him very happy." Sometimes, his riders have lost their ability to speak at all. When Seigel-Boettner rides with someone experiencing memory loss, the words might fade away, but not the emotional resonance. The vibrations, the breeze, watching the passing world together become their shared language. "They see a flower, or the ocean, or a bird, and suddenly a memory surfaces," Seigel-Boettner says. CWA is much more than a lovely idea. A 2020 study found that participants experienced measurable improvements in mood and well-being after rides. The trishaw excursion is a chance to be seen again, not as a diagnosis but a person, not a burden but a being alive in the world.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this on amazing seniors and inspiring disabled persons.
The police department in Heber City, Utah, was forced to explain why a police report software declared that an officer had somehow shapeshifted into a frog. As Salt Lake City-based Fox 13 reports, the flawed tool seems to have picked up on some unrelated background chatter to devise its fantastical fairy tale ending. "The body cam software and the AI report writing software picked up on the movie that was playing in the background, which happened to be â€The Princess and the Frog,'" police sergeant Rick Keel told the broadcaster, referring to Disney's 2009 musical comedy. "That's when we learned the importance of correcting these AI-generated reports." The department had begun testing an AI-powered software called Draft One to automatically generate police reports from body camera footage. The goal was to reduce the amount of paperwork – but considering that immense mistakes are falling through the cracks, results clearly vary. Draft One was first announced by police tech company Axon – the same firm behind the Taser, a popular electroshock weapon – last year. The software makes use of OpenAI's GPT large language models to generate entire police reports from body camera audio. Experts quickly warned that hallucinations could fall through the cracks in these important documents. Critics also argue that the tool could be used to introduce deniability and make officers less accountable in case mistakes were to fall through the cracks.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and police corruption.
Important Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.