News ArticlesExcerpts of Key News Articles in Major Media
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ES&S, Diebold, and Sequoia are the companies primarily involved in implementing the new, often faulty, technology at voting stations throughout the country. All three have strong ties to the Bush Administration along with major defense contractors in the United States. Some of the most generous contributors to Republican campaigns are also some of the largest investors in ES&S, Sequoia, and Diebold. Most notable of these are government defense contractors Northrup-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin, Electronic Data Systems.
The Bush administration periodically put the USA on high alert for terrorist attacks even though then-Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge argued there was only flimsy evidence to justify raising the threat level, Ridge now says. Ridge, who resigned Feb. 1, said Tuesday that he often disagreed with administration officials who wanted to elevate the threat level to orange, or "high" risk of terrorist attack, but was overruled. Ridge said he wanted to "debunk the myth" that his agency was responsible for repeatedly raising the alert under a color-coded system he unveiled in 2002.
ULM, Germany -- Khaled el-Masri says his strange and violent trip into the void began with a bus ride on New Year's Eve 2003. When he returned to this city five months later, his friends didn't believe the odyssey he recounted. Masri said he was kidnapped in Macedonia, beaten by masked men, blindfolded, injected with drugs and flown to Afghanistan, where he was imprisoned and interrogated by U.S. intelligence agents. He said he was finally dumped in the mountains of Albania. A Munich prosecutor has launched an investigation and is intent on questioning U.S. officials about the unemployed car salesman's claim that he was wrongly targeted as an Islamic militant. Masri's story, if true, would offer a rare firsthand look at one man's disappearance into a hidden dimension of the Bush administration's war on terrorism. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. authorities have used overseas detention centers and jails to hold or interrogate suspected terrorists, such as at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Many of the estimated 9,000 prisoners in U.S. military custody were captured in Iraq, but others, like Masri, were allegedly picked up in another country and delivered to U.S. authorities in Afghanistan or elsewhere for months of confinement.
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Anheuser-Busch Cos., the nation’s No. 1 buyer of rice as well as its largest brewer, says it won’t buy rice from Missouri if genetically modified, drug-making crops are allowed to be grown in the state. Last month, Arkansas-based Riceland Foods Inc., the world’s largest rice miller and marketer, asked federal regulators to deny a permit for Ventria’s project, saying its customers don’t want to risk buying genetically modified rice. Anheuser-Busch is believed to be the first major company to threaten a boycott over the issue, according to comments filed last month with the Agriculture Department.
United Kingdom Chief of Defense (1971 - 73), Admiral Lord Peter Hill-Norton: "I have frequently been asked why a person of my background—a former Chief of the Defense Staff, a former Chairman of the NATO Military Committee—why I think there is a cover-up of the facts about UFOs. Governments fear that if they did disclose those facts, people would panic. I don’t believe that at all. I've said so in print. There is a serious possibility that we are being visited—and have been visited for many years—by people from outer space, from other civilizations. It behooves us to find out who they are, where they come from, and what they want. This should be the subject of rigorous scientific investigation, and not the subject of rubbishing by tabloid newspapers." Apollo 14 Astronaut, Edgar Mitchell, Ph.D. (Sixth Man to Walk on Moon): "Yes, there have been ET visitations. There have been crashed craft. There have been material and bodies recovered. People in high-level government have very little, if any, valid information about this. Most have no more knowledge than the man in the street."
Aviation obsessives with cameras and Internet connections have become a threat to cover stories established by the CIA to mask its undercover operations and personnel overseas. U.S. intel sources complain that "plane spotters" -- hobbyists who photograph airplanes landing or departing local airports and post the pix on the Internet -- made it possible for CIA critics recently to assemble details of a clandestine transport system the agency set up to secretly move cargo and people -- including terrorist suspects -- around the world.
In one of the most controversial scientific projects ever conceived, a group of university researchers in California's Silicon Valley is preparing to create a mouse whose brain will be composed entirely of human cells. Researchers at Stanford University have already succeeded in breeding mice with brains that are one per cent human cells. In the next stage they plan to use stem cells from aborted foetuses to create an animal whose brain cells are 100 per cent human.
Global warming is approaching the point of no return, after which widespread drought, crop failure and rising sea levels will be irreversible, an international climate change task force warned Monday. It called on the Group of 8 leading industrial nations to cut carbon emissions, double their research spending on technology and work with India and China to build on the Kyoto Protocol for cuttings emissions of carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” blamed for global warming. “An ecological time bomb is ticking away,” said Stephen Byers, who was co-chairman of the task force with U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine. “World leaders need to recognize that climate change is the single most important long-term issue that the planet faces.” According to the report, urgent action is needed to stop the global average temperature rising by 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the level of the year 1750 — the approximate start of the Industrial Revolution, when mankind first started significantly adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. No accurate temperature readings were available for 1750, the report said, but since 1860 the global average temperature has risen by 0.8 percent to 15 degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit).
A review of election results in 10 counties nationwide by the Scripps Howard News Service found more than 12,000 ballots that weren't counted in the presidential race, almost one in every 10 ballots cast in those counties. When the mistakes were pointed out to local officials, some were chagrined; others said they didn't want to be bothered correcting mistakes.
Sarpy County election officials are trying to figure out how they ended up with more votes than voters in the general election. Sarpy County borrowed the election equipment from Omaha-based Election Systems & Software. Its employees operated the machines that are now double-checking the ballots. No one is sure exactly what went wrong.
Note: What the article fails to mention is that with no paper trail, there is not way to know what happened. How is it possible we let our elections use machines that could not be audited or verified?
As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however—the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States. When did this calamity happen? It hasn't—yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. "It's not if it will happen," says University of New Orleans geologist Shea Penland. "It's when."
Emergency planners believe that it is a foregone conclusion that the Big Easy someday will be hit by a scouring storm surge. This watery "big one" will produce a staggering amount of damage. Yet, this doesn't necessarily mean that there will be a massive loss of lives. The key is a new emergency warning system developed by...Louisiana State University. Within 30 minutes to an hour after raw data is collected from monitoring stations in the Gulf, an assessment of storm-surge damage would be available to emergency planners. Disaster relief agencies then would be able to mobilize resources.
They knew which factories to burn, which bridges to blow up, which cargo ships could be sunk in good conscience. They had pothole counts for roads used for invasion and head counts for city blocks marked for incineration. They weren't just secret agents. They were secret insurance agents. These undercover underwriters gave their World War II spymasters access to a global industry that both bankrolled and, ultimately, helped bring down Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. Newly declassified U.S. intelligence files tell the remarkable story of the ultra-secret Insurance Intelligence Unit, a component of the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA, and its elite counterintelligence branch X-2. Though rarely numbering more than a half dozen agents, the unit gathered intelligence on the enemy's insurance industry, Nazi insurance titans and suspected collaborators in the insurance business. But, more significantly, the unit mined standard insurance records for blueprints of bomb plants, timetables of tide changes and thousands of other details about targets, from a brewery in Bangkok to a candy company in Bergedorf. "They used insurance information as a weapon of war," said Greg Bradsher, a historian and National Archives expert on the declassified records. That insurance information was critical to Allied strategists, who were seeking to cripple the enemy's industrial base and batter morale by burning cities.
The experiment looks like some ingenious test of mental telepathy. Seated inside a small isolation booth with wires trailing from the helmet on her head, the subject seems deep in concentration. She does not speak or move. Suddenly, a little white dot hovering in the center of the screen comes to life. It sweeps to the top of the screen, then it reverses itself and comes back down. After a pause, it veers to the right, stops, moves to the left, momentarily speeds up and finally halts — almost as if it were under the control of some external intelligence. In fact, it is. The unusual experiment, conducted at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, Calif., is a graphic display of one of the newest and most dazzling breakthroughs in cybernetics. It shows that a computer can, in a very real sense, read human minds. Although the dot's gyrations were directed by a computer, the machine was only carrying out the orders of the test subject. She, in turn, did nothing more than think about what the dot's movements should be. Brainchild of S.R.I. Researcher Lawrence Pinneo, a ... neurophysiologist and electronics engineer, the computer mind-reading technique is far more than a laboratory stunt. The key to his scheme: the electroencephalograph, a device used by medical researchers to pick up electrical currents from various parts of the brain. If he could learn to identify brain waves generated by specific thoughts or commands ... he might be able to teach the same skill to a computer. Pinneo does not worry that mind-reading computers might be abused by Big Brotherly governments or overly zealous police trying to ferret out the innermost thoughts of citizens.
Note: This research conducted in 1974 shows that the capability for computers to respond to human thought was developed decades ago. The subject was classified top secret and continued to be developed secretly by the military and government, but kept well-hidden from public view. For more on this important topic, click here.
At a congressional hearing, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said the Environmental Protection Agency had designated as confidential the details of about 140 Superfund sites where toxic exposure remained uncontrolled. The secret data included information about how much money and time it would take to clean up the dangerous sites, including one site where the EPA predicted it would take 26 years to close off access to toxics. "This isn't a question of left or right," Boxer said, waving a document marked "Privileged" by EPA officials to prevent its release to the public. "This is a question of right and wrong." The Superfund program was created almost three decades ago in response to environmental disasters such as Love Canal, a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, N.Y., where chemical contamination forced the removal of 800 families and led to $200 million in remediation costs. Those sites are areas where the public still faces some possible exposure to toxic substances -- such as a building near buried radioactive waste that was not surrounded by a fence. A skateboard park built over the site, however, was protected by a layer of dirt. One Republican-sponsored bill moving through Congress would limit data available on toxic substances released into communities, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has blocked information on flooding dangers in Florida.
Note: Major toxic hazards would seem to be a direct threat to the security of those living around the hazards, yet the EPA is keeping these records secret. If you read the entire article, you will see how the LA Times is framing this as a Democrat vs. Republican issue, when it is in fact about public health and safety.
The main limitation of solar power right now is cost, because the crystalline silicon used to make most solar photovoltaic (PV) cells is very expensive. One approach to overcoming this cost factor is to concentrate light from the sun using mirrors or lenses. But traditional light concentrators are bulky and unattractive. Now Prism Solar Technologies...has developed a proof-of-concept solar module that uses holograms to concentrate light, possibly cutting the cost of solar modules by as much as 75 percent, making them competitive with electricity generated from fossil fuels. The panels, says Rick Lewandowski, the company's president and CEO, are a "more elegant solution" to traditional concentrators, and can be installed on rooftops -- or even incorporated into windows and glass doors. A layer of holograms...directs light into a layer of glass where it continues to reflect off the inside surface of the glass until it finds its way to one of the strips of PV silicon. Reducing the PV material needed could bring down costs from about $4 per watt to $1.50 for crystalline silicon panels. The company is expecting to...start manufacturing its first-generation modules by the end of the year, selling them at about $2.40 per watt. CEO Lewandowski says the holographic modules will cost about $1.50 per watt in a few years, using their second-generation technology. At that price, they'll start to compete with fossil fuel-generated electricity, which now costs almost three times less than conventional solar electricity.
A society of experts and scholars has now joined with Judicial Watch in calling for release of videos that are being held by the Department of Defense, which are essential to understanding events at the Pentagon that transpired on September 11, 2001. Scholars for 9/11 Truth, which is dedicated to exposing falsehoods and establishing truths about the events of 9/11, has gone beyond Judicial Watch by calling for the release of other films and evidence that, its officers maintain, are essential to understanding 9/11. "It is outrageous that the government is withholding this vital information", said James H. Fetzer, founder and co-chair of the society. They are calling for immediate release of the full Pentagon surveillance tape as well as video tapes seized by FBI agents minutes after the Pentagon hit; a complete inventory of the plane wreckage and debris from Flights 11, 77, 93, 175 or any other aircraft that crashed or was destroyed on September 11, 2001.
Note: Though Yahoo! News picked up this important article, no major media found it newsworthy until many months later.
Officials in Franklin County — which includes state capital Columbus — acknowledged that they may have improperly counted votes for Bush because of a touch-screen voting system malfunction. A precinct in the county reported that a 4,000-vote margin won by Bush appeared to exceed the number of registered voters.”
Note: How many cases like this go unnoticed? How can we trust our elections to unreliable machines?
In Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking - the results seem to contain substantial anomalies. In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry. In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush. The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used.
A high-ranking military analyst has accused the Federal Government of systematically putting foreign policy objectives ahead of intelligence, seriously undermining the work of its own spies. A saga that has wracked the military for six years has culminated in General Peter Cosgrove's senior intelligence analyst during the East Timor conflict, Lieutenant-Colonel Lance Collins, writing to the Prime Minster demanding a Royal Commission into the spy services. The letter says there has been a litany of intelligence failures. "I strongly urge you, Prime Minister, to appoint an impartial and wide-ranging Royal Commission into intelligence," the letter says. "To do otherwise would merely cultivate an artificial scab over the putrefaction beneath". A navy lawyer, Captain Martin Toohey, conducted a review of Colonel Collins's grievances and found his intelligence on Timor was blocked at high levels in the DIO. Captain Toohey said the DIO reported what "the government wants to hear" on East Timor. He found it vindictively and unfairly placed Colonel Collins's name on an Australian Federal Police search warrant looking for leaked intelligence documents, effectively ending his career as an intelligence officer. The Herald can reveal the DIO shut down an intelligence-sharing network at the height of the East Timor operation and ordered, in early 2000, that no more intelligence be gathered from West Timor, where atrocities against East Timorese refugees occurred.
Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key 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.