News ArticlesExcerpts of Key News Articles in Major Media
Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on dozens of engaging topics. And read excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.
Catching his breath at a fitness club, Matt McHugh took a gulp of water from his trusty Nalgene plastic bottle and pondered the idea of switching to an alternative made of glass, stainless steel or another kind of plastic. Worries about a hormone-mimicking chemical used in the bottles' construction led a major Canadian retailer to remove polycarbonate containers made by Nalgene and other manufacturers from store shelves in early December. Vancouver-based Mountain Equipment Co-op is waiting for Canadian health regulators to finish a preliminary review in May before it reconsiders restocking its 11 stores with the reusable, transparent bottles made with bisphenol A, or BPA. There is little dispute that the chemical can disrupt the hormonal system, but scientists differ markedly on whether very low doses found in food and beverage containers can be harmful. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration sides with the plastics industry that BPA-based products do not pose a health risk. But an expert panel of researchers reported at a U.S. government conference that the potential for BPA to affect human health is a concern and that more research is needed. The panel cited evidence that Americans have levels of BPA higher than those found to cause harm in lab animals. Patagonia, an outdoor-gear retailer based in Ventura, Calif., pulled polycarbonate water bottles from its 40 stores worldwide in December 2005 and, a month later, the Whole Foods Markets chain stopped selling polycarbonate baby bottles and children's drinking cups. "Given there are comparably priced, greener alternatives, I'm quite convinced that within a couple of years, we're going to see the end of this chemical in consumer products," said Rick Smith, executive director of Toronto-based Environmental Defense Canada.
Note: For many revealing major-media reports on health issues, click here.
Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, a physics professor, has long had a cult following at M.I.T. And he has now emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to the global classroom the institute created to spread knowledge through cyberspace. Professor Lewin’s videotaped physics lectures, free online on the OpenCourseWare of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have won him devotees across the country and beyond who stuff his e-mail in-box with praise. “Through your inspiring video lectures i have managed to see just how BEAUTIFUL Physics is, both astounding and simple,” a 17-year-old from India e-mailed recently. Professor Lewin delivers his lectures with the panache of Julia Child bringing French cooking to amateurs and the zany theatricality of YouTube’s greatest hits. He is part of a new generation of academic stars who hold forth in cyberspace on their college Web sites and even, without charge, on iTunes U, which went up in May on Apple’s iTunes Store. In his lectures at ocw.mit.edu, Professor Lewin beats a student with cat fur to demonstrate electrostatics. Wearing shorts, sandals with socks and a pith helmet — nerd safari garb — he fires a cannon loaded with a golf ball at a stuffed monkey wearing a bulletproof vest to demonstrate the trajectories of objects in free fall. He rides a fire-extinguisher-propelled tricycle across his classroom to show how a rocket lifts off. “We have here the mother of all pendulums!” he declares, hoisting [himself] on a 30-pound steel ball attached to a [rope] hanging from the ceiling. He swings across the stage, holding himself nearly horizontal as his hair blows in the breeze he created. The point: that [the] period of a pendulum is independent of the mass — the steel ball, plus one professor — hanging from it.
In the [U.S.] Army's vision, the war of the future is increasingly combat by mouse clicks. It's as networked as the Internet, as mobile as a cellphone, as intuitive as a video game. The Army has a name for this vision: Future Combat Systems, or FCS. The project involves creating a family of 14 weapons, drones, robots, sensors and hybrid-electric combat vehicles connected by a wireless network. It has turned into the most ambitious modernization of the Army since World War II and the most expensive Army weapons program ever, military officials say. It's also one of the most controversial. Even as some early versions of these weapons make their way onto the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, members of Congress, government investigators and military observers question whether the Defense Department has set the stage for one of its biggest and costliest failures. At risk, they say, are billions of taxpayer dollars spent on exotic technology that may never come to fruition. Future Combat Systems "has some serious problems," said Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), chairman of the House air and land forces subcommittee. "Since its inception, costs have gone up dramatically while promised capability has steadily diminished." Today, the Army program involves more than 550 contractors and subcontractors in 41 states and 220 congressional districts. "When a program gets to a certain size, in the billions, it employs so many people in so many districts you can't kill it. It's kind of like the Titanic. How do you move it five degrees?" said a congressional staffer and former Army officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the ongoing review of the program. The GAO said the cost has increased 79 percent, to $163.7 billion, from $91.4 billion, its original estimate in 2003.
Note: For highly revealing reports from major media sources on corruption in government contracting, click here.
Travel company operator Hal Taussig buys his clothes from thrift shops, resoles his shoes and reads magazines for free at the public library. The 83-year-old founder of Untours also gives away all of his company's profits to help the poor — more than $5 million since 1999. He is content to live on Social Security. Taussig takes a salary of $6,000 a year from his firm, but doesn't keep it. It goes to a foundation that channels his company's profits to worthy causes in the form of low-interest loans. (About seven years ago, the IRS forced him to take a paycheck, he said, because they thought he was trying to avoid paying taxes by working for free.) If he has money left at the end of the month in his personal bank account, he donates it. At a time of the year when many people are asked to give to the poor, Taussig provides a model for year-round giving. "I could live a very rich life on very little money. My life is richer than most rich people's lives," Taussig said. "I can really do something for humanity." His decision to give away his wealth stems from a moment of clarity and freedom he felt when he wrote a $20,000 check — all of his money back in the 1980s — to a former landlord to buy the house they were renting. It didn't work out, but the exhilaration of not being encumbered by money stuck with him. "It was kind of an epiphany," he said. "This is where my destiny is. This is what I was meant to be." Taussig has his bike for transportation, which he faithfully rides to and from work every day, three miles round trip. He calls consumerism a "social evil" and "corrupting to our humanity" because of what he said is the false notion that having more things leads to a richer life. "Quality of life is not the same as standard of living," he said. "I couldn't afford (to buy) a car but I learned it's more fun and better for your health to ride a bike. I felt I was raising my quality of life while lowering my standard of living."
Americans are expected to spend nearly half a trillion dollars this holiday season ... splurging on presents for loved ones and themselves. But as some shoppers drive themselves into debt, maxing out their credit cards and wiping out already slim savings, one man says it's time to stop. Actor and activist Bill Talen, also known as Reverend Billy, heads the self-styled Church of Stop Shopping, which replaces more traditional beliefs with the gospel that consumerism is destroying the American spirit. "I think, in the United States, we are addicted to shopping. Every Christmas ... we're supposed to save the economy by shopping ourselves to death," said Talen, whose persona as Revered Billy is part performance act, part serious protest. "No. There are other ways. There is another way." As Reverend Billy, Talen spends his days preaching on the street or protesting outside large chain stores, like [Macys,] Wal-Mart and Starbucks. Members of the church's "Stop Shopping Choir" and the "Not Buying It Band," dressed in colorful robes and clapping, often accompany his teachings with energetic, anti-consumerist chants. Talen is also the subject of a new documentary, "What Would Jesus Buy?" which tracks the efforts of the church as it tries to prevent what Talen and his followers call "shopocalypse." "We have to slow down our consumption, now," Talen said, gesturing at the hordes of shoppers trampling down Manhattan's 6th Avenue to take advantage of this year's sales. "The real cost is not always the sticker price," he continued. "We have to stop. The Earth is telling us, we're telling each other, we have to stop." Until his message catches on nationwide, Reverend Billy seems content saving one American soul at a time. "We can ask the god that is not a product, the god that is not a multinational corporation ... to come into these wonderful citizens. And give them the power to be careful, conscious shoppers this year. Amen. Hallelujah. Praise be."
Note: To watch the short clip of this fascinating piece, click here.
They were smart, scrappy brothers who rose from modest circumstances in Baltimore to become lacrosse stars at Princeton, succeed in business and land big government jobs. Now the Krongard brothers — who have carried childhood nicknames, Buzzy and Cookie, through long careers — are tied up in the tangled story of Blackwater, the security contractor accused in the deaths of at least 17 Iraqis while guarding a State Department convoy in Baghdad. The shorthand version boils their involvement down to that Washington catchall conflict of interest. The full story appears more complicated. Alvin [Buzzy] Krongard, 71, ... left a $4 million-a-year job in investment banking to serve in top posts at the Central Intelligence Agency from 1998 to 2004. Buzzy Krongard spoke [to the New York Times] in his 15,000-square-foot Georgian mansion, Torch Hill, north of Baltimore. After rising to the helm of Alex. Brown & Sons, the venerable Baltimore investment banking firm, Buzzy Krongard oversaw its acquisition by Bankers Trust in 1997 and left the next year for the C.I.A., as a counselor to George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence. He became executive director, the No. 3 post, in 2001 and helped design the agency’s secret detention program after the Sept. 11 attacks. Buzzy Krongard vigorously defends Blackwater’s record in Iraq. “It’s very easy to second-guess them when you’re sitting back in an air-conditioned office,” he said.
Note: Buzzy Krongard took quite a cut in pay to move from Bankers Trust to the comparatively modest salary of even a high-ranking CIA position. Bankers Trust was purchased by the same company that placed the highly unusual and suspicious "put options" on United Airlines stock just days before 9/11. For a powerful summary of similarly strange, unexplained facts related to 9/11, click here.
In a major legal action alleging misdeeds in the mortgage business, New York's attorney general [Andrew Cuomo] has accused appraisers of helping fuel the nation's foreclosure crisis by pumping up home values at the behest of lenders and other real estate professionals. The lawsuit said that First American eAppraiseIT, a subsidiary of Fortune 500 company First American Corp., caved in to pressure from Washington Mutual to rely on "proven appraisers" who were willing to inflate home prices. Washington Mutual profited from the artificially high appraisals because they allowed the company to close more home loans at greater values, the lawsuit said. First American, a provider of business information, title insurance and related services, wanted to win more business from Washington Mutual, the suit said. The lawsuit comes in the midst of the nation's subprime lending crisis, which industry experts say could cause up to 2 million homes to be lost to foreclosure over the next couple of years. Most subprime foreclosures are caused by a confluence of two factors: mortgage payments that rise when adjustable loans reset, and home prices that are lower than the amount owed on the mortgage. A moribund real estate market has caused prices to flatten or fall. But if home prices were artificially high to begin with - which would be the case if appraisers inflated values, as the lawsuit alleged - the likelihood increases of homeowners owing more on the mortgage than their properties are worth. Cuomo said fraudulent appraisal practices were pervasive in the industry. At a news conference announcing the lawsuit, he said lenders, mortgage brokers, real estate agents and others frequently pressured appraisers to "come in with the right number, the number that justifies the transaction" so that everyone in the chain would receive commissions.
Victor Viggiani has one of the toughest jobs in the universe. The retired elementary school principal spends his time lobbying reporters to blow a massive government cover-up wide open and reveal that extra-terrestrials have been visiting our planet for years. "I have no intention of convincing anybody of anything," said Viggiani, 59, director of media relations for Exopolitics Toronto, a non-profit educational group pushing for full disclosure of the truth about off-world beings. "What I do is point them to the evidence." Exopolitics is a field of study that has moved far beyond the question of whether we are alone in the universe. Its supporters believe there is enough evidence out there that they can state as fact that a) intelligent, sentient, ethical extra-terrestrials exist; b) they have made contact; and c) they probably have [many] lessons to teach us about sustainable energy sources and countless other matters of global importance. Viggiani [has] found [a] champion in Paul Hellyer, who was federal defence minister in Lester B. Pearson's cabinet. "I think the significance – and they are probably exaggerating it – but the significance is that I'm the first person of cabinet rank in the G8 to have come out openly and unequivocally and said the extra-terrestrial presence is real," said Hellyer. Stephen Bassett, executive director of the Paradigm Research Group in Washington, D.C., said the dearth of serious coverage has [him] suspecting whether publishers and national security forces are working together to keep things quiet. "The failure of the major media in the United States to cover the ET issue is one of the great failures of all journalism," he said.
Note: For powerful accounts of UFO sightings reported now and again by reliable sources, click here.
NASA has agreed to search its archives once again for documents on a 1965 UFO incident in Pennsylvania, a step the space agency fought in federal court. The government has refused to open its files about what ... moved across the sky and crashed in the woods near Kecksburg, Pa., 40 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Traffic was tied up in the area as curiosity seekers drove to the area, only to be kept away from the crash site by soldiers. The Air Force's explanation for the unidentified flying object: A meteor or meteors. "They could not find anything," one Air Force memo stated after a late-night search on Dec. 9, 1965. Several NASA employees also were reported to have been at the scene. Eyewitnesses said a flatbed truck drove away a large object shaped like an acorn and about the size of a Volkswagen bus. A mock-up based on the descriptions of local residents sits behind the Kecksburg Volunteer Fire Department. UFO enthusiasts refused to let the matter die and journalist Leslie Kean of New York City sued NASA four years ago for information. The agency has turned over several stacks of documents which Kean says are not responsive to the request, an argument that U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan agreed with. In March, Sullivan rejected NASA's request to throw the case out of court, resulting in negotiations that led to the agency promising last week that it will conduct a more comprehensive search. Kean said Friday that she sued NASA rather than the Army because the space agency a decade ago released some relevant documents on the case.
Note: To read a revealing summary of UFO evidence presented by highly credible military and government officials, click here.
An unprecedented national survey of pilots by [NASA] has found that safety problems like near collisions and runway interference occur far more frequently than previously recognized. But the government is withholding the information, fearful it would upset air travelers and hurt airline profits. NASA gathered the information ... through telephone interviews with roughly 24,000 commercial and general aviation pilots over nearly four years. Since shutting down the project more than one year ago, the space agency has refused to divulge its survey data publicly. Last week, NASA ordered the contractor that conducted the survey to purge all related data from its computers. Congress on Monday announced a formal investigation of the pilot survey and instructed NASA to halt any destruction of records. A senior NASA official, associate administrator Thomas S. Luedtke, said earlier that revealing the findings could damage the public's confidence in airlines and affect airline profits. Luedtke acknowledged that the survey results "present a comprehensive picture of certain aspects of the U.S. commercial aviation industry. Release of the requested data, which are sensitive and safety-related, could materially affect the public confidence in, and the commercial welfare of, the air carriers and general aviation companies whose pilots participated in the survey," Luedtke wrote. NASA also cited pilot confidentiality as a reason, although no airlines were identified in the survey, nor were the identities of pilots, all of whom were promised anonymity. Among other results, the pilots reported at least twice as many bird strikes, near mid-air collisions and runway incursions as other government monitoring systems show. The survey also revealed higher-than-expected numbers of pilots who experienced "in-close approach changes" -- potentially dangerous, last-minute instructions to alter landing plans.
[Las Vegas], famous for being America's playground, has also become its security lab. Like nowhere else in the United States, Las Vegas has embraced the twin trends of data mining and high-tech surveillance, with arguably more cameras per square foot than any airport or sports arena in the country. Even the city's cabs and monorail have cameras. Some privacy advocates view the city as a harbinger of things to come. In secret rooms in casinos across Las Vegas, surveillance specialists are busy analyzing information about players and employees. Relying on thousands of cameras in nearly every cranny of the casinos, they evaluate ... behavior. They ping names against databases that share information with other casinos, sometimes using facial-recognition software to validate a match. And in the marketing suites, casino staffers track players' every wager, every win or loss, the better to target high-rollers for special treatment and low- and middle-rollers for promotions. "You could almost look at Vegas as the incubator of a whole host of surveillance technologies," said James X. Dempsey, policy director for the Center for Democracy and Technology. Those technologies, he said, have spread to other commercial venues: malls, stadiums, amusement parks. After Sept. 11, 2001, several airports tested facial-recognition software, with little success. But the government is continuing to invest in biometric technologies. "We often hear of the surveillance technology du jour, but what we're seeing now in America is a collection of surveillance technologies that work together," said Barry Steinhardt, the American Civil Liberties Union's technology and liberty project director. "It isn't just video surveillance or face recognition or license plate readers or RFID chips. It's that all these technologies are converging to create a surveillance society."
Note: For revealing major media reports of privacy risks and invasions, click here.
Despite the protests of more than 50 scientists, including five Nobel laureates in chemistry, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Friday approved use of a new, highly toxic fumigant, mainly for strawberry fields. The new pesticide, methyl iodide, is designed for growers, mainly in California and Florida, who need to replace methyl bromide, which has been banned under an international treaty because it damages the Earth's ozone layer. In a letter sent last month to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson, 54 scientists, mostly chemists, warned that "pregnant women and the fetus, children, the elderly, farmworkers and other people living near application sites would be at serious risk." Methyl iodide is a neurotoxin and carcinogen that has caused thyroid tumors, neurological damage and miscarriages in lab animals. But EPA officials said Friday that they carefully evaluated the risks and decided to approve its use for one year, imposing restrictions such as buffer zones to protect farmworkers and neighbors. Growers, particularly those who grow strawberries and tomatoes, have been searching for 15 years for a new soil fumigant to replace methyl bromide. Fumigants are valuable to growers because they can be injected into the soil before planting to sterilize the field and kill a broad spectrum of insects and diseases without leaving residue on crops. But fumigants are among the most potentially dangerous pesticides in use today because the toxic gas can evaporate from the soil, exposing farmworkers and drifting into neighborhoods. Methyl iodide ... will be allowed on fields growing strawberries, tomatoes, peppers, ornamentals, turf, trees and vines.
Since Robert Goddard launched a 10-foot rocket from a New England farm more than 80 years ago, the basic principles of space travel haven't changed much. Still required: a violent combustion of fuel and oxygen to propel the vehicle. Unless, maybe, you have a laser and a couple of mirrors. Young K. Bae, a maverick one-man rocket research institution in Tustin, believes he has hit on a propulsion technology that could revolutionize space travel, finally overcoming the limits of chemical rockets, which are slow and dangerous and need vast amounts of fuel. The 51-year-old physicist calls it the photonic laser thruster. "This overcomes the physical barriers of current rocket technology," he says, pointing to a tiny laser encased in glass. Hurling ships into space with light beams has been the stuff of science fiction novels for decades, but Bae says he has proved that it really is just science. He says a laser beam bouncing off two mirrors facing each other was able to exert force on one of the mirrors, albeit ever so slight. The discovery came in December, but Bae waited months to reveal the experiment to verify that the measuring devices were accurate and that the results could be repeated. Franklin B. Mead, a rocket propulsion expert at the Air Force Research Laboratory, calls it "pretty incredible." The photonic laser thruster can in theory be made much more powerful -- strong enough to propel a spacecraft to near light speed. "If it proves out it would be revolutionary," says Carl Ehrlich, a retired aerospace engineer who has worked on the space shuttle and other rocket programs. Within a year or two, [Bae] will attempt to have the laser device lift an object the size and weight of a compact disc. Ehrlich will be watching. "We're still using the same technology developed by Goddard. We need a breakthrough," he says.
On July 9, 1947, the Roswell Daily Record, a newspaper, printed a story with the alarming headline: "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region." There appear to be few things people agree on regarding what has become known as "the Roswell incident." Six decades later, competing UFO enthusiasts promote their own theories, skeptics dismiss the spaceship claims as outrageous, and the military, which originally claimed all the fuss was over a weather balloon, now sticks to its story that it was an experimental spy craft. Escondido resident Milton Sprouse, 85, said he knows what happened in Roswell ---- not because he favors one theory over another, but because he was there. As for the outrageous stories of mysterious metal, alien corpses and a military coverup? It's all true, he said. "I was there the day they announced a UFO had crashed," he said. "The next day, it was published in the Roswell Daily Record, and that night, all the generals said the story was untrue." Sprouse said all copies of the Roswell newspaper were collected by officers. Sprouse ... said he recalls people speaking about "alien bodies" immediately after the debris discovery. "They took the bodies to a hangar, and there were two guards at each door with machine guns," he said. Sprouse said one witness, a barracksmate, was an emergency-room medic who reported seeing what he called "humanoid" bodies in the hospital. "They went to the ER room and two doctors and two nurses were called in, and they dissected two of those humanoid bodies. Then the doctors and nurses were transferred. My friend said he saw the bodies, and I believed him," Sprouse said. "He said, 'We don't think the humanoid ate food.' I don't know why he said that. The digestive system wasn't designed for food or something."
Note: For more revealing information on UFOs from major media sources, click here.
Frustrated by press leaks about its most sensitive electronic surveillance work, the secretive National Security Agency convened an unprecedented series of off-the-record "seminars" in recent years to teach reporters about the damage caused by such leaks and to discourage reporting that could interfere with the agency's mission to spy on America's enemies. The half-day classes featured high-ranking NSA officials highlighting objectionable passages in published stories and offering "an innocuous rewrite" that officials said maintained the "overall thrust" of the articles but omitted details that could disclose the agency's techniques, according to course outlines obtained by The New York Sun. Dubbed "SIGINT 101," using the NSA's shorthand for signals intelligence, the seminar was presented "a handful of times" between approximately 2002 and 2004. The syllabi make clear that the sessions, which took place at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., were conceived of ... as part of a campaign to limit the damage caused by leaks of sensitive intelligence. During one sensitive discussion, journalists were to be told they could not take any notes. The exact substitutions of language that the NSA proposed were deleted from the syllabi released to the Sun under the Freedom of Information Act. In 2005, following the publication of a New York Times story on a secret program for warrantless wiretapping ... Director of Central Intelligence Porter Goss crusaded against leaks at the CIA and later told a Senate committee that he hoped reporters would be called before grand juries to identify their sources. Attorney General Gonzales also discussed the "possibility" of prosecuting journalists who wrote stories based on leaked intelligence. The syllabi, which are marked as drafts, list presenters including the director of the NSA at the time, General Michael Hayden, [now director of the CIA].
[Madeline] Nelson, 51, once earned a six-figure income as director of communications at Barnes and Noble. Tired of representing a multimillion dollar company, she quit in 2005 and became a "freegan" -- the word combining "vegan" and "free" -- a growing subculture of people who have reduced their spending habits and live off consumer waste. Though many of its pioneers are vegans, people who neither eat nor use any animal-based products, the concept has caught on with Nelson and other meat-eaters who do not want to depend on businesses that they believe waste resources, harm the environment or allow unfair labor practices. "We're doing something that is really socially unacceptable," Nelson said. "Not everyone is going to do it, but we hope it leads people to push their own limits and quit spending." Nelson used to spend more than $100,000 a year for her food, clothes, books, transportation and a mortgage on a two-bedroom co-op in Greenwich Village. Now, she lives off savings, volunteers instead of works, and forages for groceries. Her annual expenditures now total about $25,000. Freeganism was born out of environmental justice and anti-globalization movements dating to the 1980s. The concept was inspired in part by groups like Food Not Bombs, an international organization that feeds the homeless with surplus food. Last year, Nelson asked her family if she could make Thanksgiving dinner out of foraged food. They ... agreed, and ended up enjoying an elaborate feast. She has never been happier.
The Bush administration's chief intelligence official said yesterday that President Bush authorized a series of secret surveillance activities under a single executive order in late 2001. The disclosure makes clear that a controversial National Security Agency program was part of a much broader operation than the president previously described. The disclosure by Mike McConnell [is] the first time that the administration has publicly acknowledged that Bush's order included undisclosed activities beyond the warrantless surveillance of e-mails and phone calls that Bush confirmed in December 2005. McConnell [disclosed] that the executive order following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks included "a number of . . . intelligence activities" and that a name routinely used by the administration -- the Terrorist Surveillance Program -- applied only to "one particular aspect of these activities, and nothing more. This is the only aspect of the NSA activities that can be discussed publicly, because it is the only aspect of those various activities whose existence has been officially acknowledged." News reports ... have detailed a range of activities linked to the program, including the use of data mining to identify surveillance targets and the participation of telecommunication companies in turning over millions of phone records. Kate Martin ... of the Center for National Security Studies, said the new disclosures show that ... administration officials have "repeatedly misled the Congress and the American public" about the extent of NSA surveillance efforts. "They have repeatedly tried to give the false impression that the surveillance was narrow and justified," Martin said. "Why did it take accusations of perjury before the DNI disclosed that there is indeed other, presumably broader and more questionable, surveillance?"
Highly sensitive information about the religious beliefs, political opinions and even the sex life of Britons travelling to the United States is to be made available to US authorities when the European Commission agrees to a new system of checking passengers. The EC is in the final stages of agreeing a new Passenger Name Record system with the US which will allow American officials to access detailed biographical information about passengers entering international airports. Civil liberty groups warn it will have serious consequences for European passengers. In a strongly worded document drawn up in response to the plan that will affect the 4 million-plus Britons who travel to the US every year, the EU parliament said it 'notes with concern that sensitive data (ie personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, and data concerning the health or sex life of individuals) will be made available to the DHS.' The US will be able to hold the records of European passengers for 15 years compared with the current three year limit. The EU parliament said it was concerned the data would lead to 'a significant risk of massive profiling and data mining, which is incompatible with basic European principles and is a practice still under discussion in the US congress.' Peter Hustinx, the European Data Protection Supervisor, has written to the EC expressing his 'grave concern' at the plan, which he describes as 'without legal precedent' and one that puts 'European data protection rights at risk'. Hustinx warns: 'Data on EU citizens will be readily accessible to a broad range of US agencies and there is no limitation to what US authorities are allowed to do with the data.'
J. Bond Johnson is one of this newspaper's most famous photographers. He has been portrayed in Hollywood films and documentaries and discussed at length in magazine articles. His photos have been a prominent exhibit for almost two decades in a museum that draws 150,000 visitors a year. And they are "the most frequently requested images from our Fort Worth Star-Telegram collection -- really from all of our photo collections," said Brenda McClurkin of the University of Texas at Arlington Library of Special Collections. That's because on a warm afternoon in July 1947, Johnson, at the age of 21, took the only known photographs of the supposed remains of the UFO crash near Roswell, N.M.. What looked like beams of balsa wood and sheets of tinfoil were laid out on the carpet in the office of the airfield commander, Maj. Gen. Roger M. Ramey. Boxes around the office were thought to hold more wreckage that had not been examined. Ramey and Maj. Jesse A. Marcel, who brought the debris from Roswell, posed for pictures holding the material. After filling both sides of three glass-plate negatives ... Johnson, on deadline, rushed back to the paper, printed his photos, handed them -- still wet -- to his editors and went home. By sunrise the next morning, his photos of the shiny material adorned newspapers around the world, accompanied by a story that the Army had explained the wreckage as a fallen weather balloon. "I asked him one time if he believed the artifacts were from alien beings," said his daughter, Janith Johnson. "Having the conservative and religious background that he did, he said, 'I don't know, but it was like nothing I have ever seen on this earth.'"
“But my secret is hidden within me, my name no one shall know.” Those are the words, roughly translated, from the famous Puccini aria “Nessun Dorma.” You’ve probably heard Luciano Pavarotti sing it once or twice, and the song has made its way into many films. But it has never had so much meaning as it did on a stage in Great Britain, being sung by a mobile phone salesman named Paul Potts. Potts is an average-looking bloke whose teeth aren’t straight, and he admits to having battled self-confidence issues his whole life. Still, he decided to audition for a television show called “Britain’s Got Talent.” Beat box artists, break dancers and jugglers combined with a few people trying to be pop stars. On his first night, Potts took to the stage and sang that famous aria from “Turandot,” after telling judge Simon Cowell that he felt he needed to pursue his first love, opera. You could hear the snickers from the crowd, see Simon’s telltale eye roll, and practically feel the ... sweat rolling down Potts’ brow. But then he sang. From the first note floating from his snaggle-toothed beak, it was clear there was no competition for him in that room. The crowd gave him a standing ovation in what is now one of the Internet’s most popular viral videos. It has been viewed on YouTube alone more than 2.4 million times. What’s the reason for this Pottsmania? It’s something my high school English teacher called “the triumph of the human spirit.” Watch the video, seriously.
Note: To watch the incredibly moving four-minute video of Paul's audition, click here.
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