News StoriesExcerpts of Key News Stories in Major Media
Note: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.
Shock and panic spread through the country clubs of Palm Beach and Long Island after Bernard L Madoff, a trading powerbroker for over four decades, allegedly confessed to a massive fraud that will cost his wealthy investors at least $50 billion, perhaps the largest swindle in Wall Street history. Mr Madoff, 70, a former Nasdaq stock chairman, was apparently turned in by his two sons and arrested on Thursday morning at his Manhattan apartment by the FBI. The FBI claims that three senior employees of Mr Madoff's investment firm - once a towering presence on Wall Street - turned up at his apartment on Wednesday to ask questions about the company's solvency. Two of them are believed to be his sons, Andrew and Mark, who have worked for their father for two decades. Mr Madoff told them that he was "finished", that he had "absolutely nothing", and that "it's all just one big lie". He said the investment arm of his firm was "basically a giant Ponzi scheme," and that it had been insolvent for years. A Ponzi scheme, named after the swindler Charles Ponzi, is a fraudulent investment operation that pays abnormally high returns to investors paid from money put into the scheme by subsequent investors, rather from real profits generated by share trading. The FBI complaint states that Mr Madoff told his sons he believed the losses from his scheme could exceed $50 billion. If that is the case, his fraud would be far greater than past Ponzi schemes and easily the greatest swindle perpetrated by one man.
Note: If a former Nasdaq chairman was committing this kind of blatant fraud while still the chairman of Nasdaq, what does it say about the level of corruption on Wall Street? For a treasure trove of reports from reliable sources exposing the realities of the Wall Street corruption, click here.
What are the pills in your medicine cabinet, and how do you know they're best for you? When drug companies seek approval to market new medicines, they must show the U.S. Food and Drug Administration the results of all the tests they've run on volunteer patients - at first on only a few, then on dozens, and finally on hundreds or sometimes thousands. After winning approval, the companies typically sponsor reports of those tests in medical journal publications, which many doctors often rely on to determine whether to prescribe new drugs for their patients. Now a skeptical team of medical investigators at UCSF has accused the major drug companies of bias by distorting the results of their trials in those publications, making it hard for doctors to judge for themselves the pros and cons of prescribing the new drugs. As a result, the researchers say, patients may sometimes be taking medicines they don't need - or with unwanted side effects - that their doctors have prescribed on the basis of inadequate information. The UCSF team, led by Lisa A. Bero of the medical center's Institute for Health Policy Studies, probed the details of 164 drug trials involving as many as 1,500 patients over a two-year period and then examined reports on those trials that were published in medical journals, as well as those that remained unpublished. "We found really important information from the official trial reports that were either not published at all or that stressed mostly the positive results of trials in the published versions," said Kristin Rising, a physician at the institute who did the major investigation.
Note: For lots more on corporate corruption from reliable sources, click here.
Jim Rogers, one of the world's most prominent international investors, ... called most of the largest U.S. banks "totally bankrupt," and said government efforts to fix the sector are wrongheaded. Co-founder with George Soros of the Quantum Fund, [Rogers] said the government's $700 billion rescue package for the sector doesn't address how banks manage their balance sheets, and instead rewards weaker lenders with new capital. "Without giving specific names, most of the significant American banks, the larger banks, are bankrupt, totally bankrupt," said Rogers. "What is outrageous economically and is outrageous morally is that normally in times like this, people who are competent and who saw it coming and who kept their powder dry go and take over the assets from the incompetent," he said. "What's happening this time is that the government is taking the assets from the competent people and giving them to the incompetent people and saying, now you can compete with the competent people. It is horrible economics." While not saying how long the U.S. economic recession will last, he said conditions could ultimately mirror those of Japan in the 1990s. "The way things are going, we're going to have a lost decade too, just like the 1970s," he said. "Governments are making mistakes," he said. "They're saying to all the banks, you don't have to tell us your situation. You can continue to use your balance sheet that is phony.... All these guys are bankrupt, they're still worrying about their bonuses, they're still trying to pay their dividends, and the whole system is weakened."
Note: For a treasure trove of reliable reports exposing the realities of the Wall Street bailout, click here.
With the help of CIA spotters, the Peruvian air force shot down 15 small civilian aircraft suspected of carrying drugs, in many cases without warning and within two to three minutes of being sighted, a U.S. lawmaker said Thursday. It was the first public disclosure of the number of planes shot down between 1995 and 2001 as part of the Airbridge Denial Program, a CIA counternarcotics effort that killed an innocent American missionary, Veronica Bowers, and her infant daughter in 2001. Michigan Rep. Pete Hoekstra, senior Republican on the Intelligence Committee of the House of Representatives, told The Associated Press most of the 15 planes shot down with the help of the CIA crashed in the jungle. The wreckage has not been or could not be examined to ascertain whether narcotics were aboard the aircraft. "The Bowers could have gone in the same category if they had crashed in the jungle," Hoekstra said, speaking of the missionary family from Hoekstra's state, Michigan. The Bowers' plane made an emergency river landing after it was hit. Excerpts from a CIA inspector general's report released in November raised questions about whether the missionaries' plane was the only craft mistakenly suspected of drug smuggling. The CIA report said that in most of the shootdowns, pilots fired on aircraft "without being properly identified, without being given the required warnings to land, and without being given time to respond to such warnings as were given to land."
Note: For many key reports from major media sources on government corruption, click here.
In a sweeping critique ... an expert panel of the National Research Council said the federal government was not doing enough to identify potential health and environmental risks from engineered nanomaterials. Nanomaterials are engineered on the scale of a billionth of a meter, perhaps 1/10,000 the width of a human hair. They are turning up in a range of items including consumer products like toothpaste and tennis rackets and industrial products like degreasers or adhesives. But some experts say they may pose health or environmental risks. For example, researchers in Scotland reported this year that carbon nanotubes may pose the same health risks as asbestos. “Industry wants to run with it,” said Andrew D. Maynard, chief science adviser to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson Institute, who was the chairman of the panel. But he added, “one of the big barriers at the moment is understanding how to use it safely.” The panel analyzed the risk research strategy of the National Nanotechnology Initiative, the program to coordinate federal efforts in nanotechnology research and development. Its report concluded that the initiative’s strategy “does not present a vision, contain a clear set of goals, have a plan of action for how the goals are to be achieved, or describe mechanisms to review and evaluate funded research and assess whether progress has been achieved.” An informal coalition of environmental and business organizations praised the report, saying that for three years they had been urging the federal government to do more to assess potential health and environmental effects of nanomaterials.
Note: For many important articles on health issues from reliable sources, click here.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Thursday that Canada's governor general has allowed him to suspend Parliament, postponing a no-confidence vote from his opponents that he was likely to lose. Harper called on his opponents to work with his government on measures to aid the nation's economy when Parliament returns on January 26. Had Governor General Michaelle Jean -- who represents Britain's Queen Elizabeth II as head of state -- denied Harper's request, Monday's vote would have likely brought down Harper's government, less than two months after his Conservative Party strengthened its minority position in federal elections. The Liberal Party and the leftist New Democratic Party announced plans earlier this week to form a governing coalition with the support of the Bloc Quebecois, which supports independence for French-speaking Quebec. "For the first time in the history of Canada, the prime minister of Canada is running away from the parliament of Canada," said [Liberal Party Leader Stephane] Dion, accusing the premier of placing "partisan politics ahead of the interest of all Canadians." New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton said Harper had used a "maneuver to escape accountability." "He refuses to face the people of Canada through their elected representatives," he said. "The prime minister is choosing to protect his own job rather than focusing on the jobs of Canadians who are being thrown out of work today."
Note: What gives Canada's governor general the right to suspend parliament? The governor general is the representative of the queen of England. Few know that the queen has this power over all commonwealth nations. Canada is not truly independent of England, nor are the other commonwealth nations, including Australia. For more intriguing information on this, click here.
A revolutionary device that can harness energy from slow-moving rivers and ocean currents could provide enough power for the entire world, scientists claim. The technology can generate electricity in water flowing at a rate of less than one knot - about one mile an hour - meaning it could operate on most waterways and sea beds around the globe. Existing technologies which use water power, relying on the action of waves, tides or faster currents created by dams, are far more limited in where they can be used, and also cause greater obstructions when they are built in rivers or the sea. Turbines and water mills need an average current of five or six knots to operate efficiently, while most of the earth's currents are slower than three knots. The new device, which has been inspired by the way fish swim, consists of a system of cylinders positioned [horizontally] to the water flow and attached to springs. As water flows past, the cylinder creates vortices, which push and pull the cylinder up and down. The mechanical energy in the vibrations is then converted into electricity. The scientists behind the technology, which has been developed in research funded by the US government, say ... the technology would require up to 50 times less ocean acreage than wave power generation. The system, conceived by scientists at the University of Michigan, is called Vivace, or "vortex-induced vibrations for aquatic clean energy".
Note: For lots more on new energy technology developments, click here.
Vitamin D-binding protein-derived macrophage activating factor (GcMAF) appears to be an effective immunotherapeutic agent in patients with metastatic breast cancer, according to US and Japanese researchers. "Serum vitamin D-binding protein -- known as Gc protein -- is the precursor of the principal macrophage activating factor," lead investigator Dr. Nobuto Yamamoto told Reuters Health. "Treatment of purified Gc protein with beta-galactosidase and sialidase generates GcMAF," he added, "the most potent macrophage activating factor ever discovered, which produces no side effect in humans." Dr. Yamamoto of the Socrates Institute for Therapeutic Immunology, Philadelphia and colleagues note that in vitro studies show that macrophages treated with GcMAF have a highly tumoricidal effect in mammary adenocarcinomas. To investigate whether the approach can be effective in humans, the researchers studied 16 non-anemic breast cancer patients who were given "a minute amount -- 100 nanograms per week -- of GcMAF," Dr. Yamamoto said. The researchers found that after 16 to 22 GcMAF doses, initially elevated nagalase levels, which reflect the tumor burden, fell to those found in healthy controls. Follow-up over 4 years showed that the level remained low and that there was no tumor recurrence, they report in the January 15th issue of The International Journal of Cancer. The findings, the team concludes, clearly demonstrate "the importance of focusing cancer immunotherapy on macrophage activation."
Note: Another article from the National Institutes of Health website covers an experiment with colorectal cancer patients using this amazing discovery. It states that "all colorectal cancer patients exhibited healthy control levels of the serum Nagalase activity, indicating eradication of metastatic tumor cells." Why isn't this getting more major press coverage?
A Dutchman who is able to withstand freezing temperatures that would kill most people will submerge himself in icy water for almost two hours in a world record bid. Wim Hof, known as "The Ice Man", has spent the last 20 years testing his talent in the most extreme conditions from scaling mountain tops wearing nothing but a pair of shorts to swimming under sheets of ice [at] the north pole. Now he is set to break his own world record by submerging himself in a Plexiglas container filled with ice at temperatures as low as -20 degrees for more than 1 hour 45 minutes. Mr Hof discovered his unusual talent over 20 years ago during a stroll in the park in his native Holland. "I was really attracted to it. I went in, got rid of my clothes. Thirty seconds I was in and a tremendous good feeling when I came out and since then, I repeated it every day." It was the moment that Mr Hof knew that his body was different somehow: he was able to withstand fatally freezing temperatures. Mr Hof began a lifelong quest to see just how far his abilities would take him. In 2000, dressed only in a swimsuit, he dove under the ice at the North Pole and earned a Guinness World Record for the longest amount of time swimming under the ice. Whilst many scientists around the world find Mr Hof's ability an anomaly, Mr Hof says it is merely a case of mind over matter. Practising an ancient Himalayan meditation called "Tummo," or Inner Fire, Mr Hof says he can generate his own heat. Mr Hof now travels the world teaching the technique through his record attempts, lectures and talks.
The male [sex] is in danger, with incalculable consequences for both humans and wildlife, startling scientific research from around the world reveals. The research ... shows that a host of common chemicals is feminising males of every class of vertebrate animals, from fish to mammals, including people. Backed by some of the world's leading scientists, who say that it "waves a red flag" for humanity and shows that evolution itself is being disrupted, the report comes out at a particularly sensitive time for ministers. It also follows hard on the heels of new American research which shows that baby boys born to women exposed to widespread chemicals in pregnancy are born with smaller penises and feminised genitals. "This research shows that the basic male tool kit is under threat," says Gwynne Lyons, a former government adviser on the health effects of chemicals, who wrote the report. Wildlife and people have been exposed to more than 100,000 new chemicals in recent years, and the European Commission has admitted that 99 per cent of them are not adequately regulated. There is not even proper safety information on 85 per cent of them. Many have been identified as "endocrine disrupters" – or gender-benders – because they interfere with hormones. These include phthalates, used in food wrapping, cosmetics and baby powders among other applications; flame retardants in furniture and electrical goods; PCBs, a now banned group of substances still widespread in food and the environment; and many pesticides.
Note: For many key reports on health issues from reliable sources, click here.
To friends in the protest movement, Lucy was an eager 20-something who attended their events and sent encouraging e-mails to support their causes. Only one thing seemed strange. "At one demonstration, I remember her showing up with a laptop computer and typing away," said Mike Stark, who helped lead the anti-death-penalty march in Baltimore that day. "We all thought that was odd." Not really. The woman was an undercover Maryland State Police trooper who between 2005 and 2007 infiltrated more than two dozen rallies and meetings of nonviolent groups. Maryland officials now concede that, based on information gathered by "Lucy" and others, state police wrongly listed at least 53 Americans as terrorists in a criminal intelligence database -- and shared some information about them with half a dozen state and federal agencies, including the National Security Agency. Among those labeled as terrorists: two Catholic nuns, a former Democratic congressional candidate, a lifelong pacifist and a registered lobbyist. One suspect's file warned that she was "involved in puppet making and allows anarchists to utilize her property for meetings." "There wasn't a scintilla of illegal activity" going on, said David Rocah, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a lawsuit and in July obtained the first surveillance files. State police have released other heavily redacted documents. Investigators, the files show, targeted groups that advocated against abortion, global warming, nuclear arms, military recruiting in high schools and biodefense research, among other issues.
Note: For lots more on increasing threats to civil liberties, click here.
Outraged and determined Chicago factory workers who were abruptly laid off this week have occupied their former workplace and say they won't leave until they get the severance and vacation pay they say they're owed. The employees say they received three days notice their plant was closing. In the second day of a sit-in on the factory floor Saturday, about 250 union workers occupied the building in shifts while union leaders outside criticized a Wall Street bailout they say is leaving laborers behind. Leah Fried, an organizer with the United Electrical Workers, said the Chicago-based vinyl window manufacturer failed to give its 300 employees the 60 days' notice required by law before shutting. She said the company can't pay employees because its creditor, Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America, won't let them. Bank of America received $25 billion from the government's financial bailout package. The company said in a statement to news outlets Saturday that it isn't responsible for Republic's financial obligations to its employees. "Across cultures, religions, union and nonunion, we all say this bailout was a shame," said Richard Berg, president of Teamsters Local 743. "If this bailout should go to anything, it should go to the workers of this country." Outside the plant, protesters wore stickers and carried signs that said, "You got bailed out, we got sold out."
Note: For many revealing reports on the Wall Street bailout from major media sources, click here.
I spent Sunday afternoon brooding over a [New York Times] front-page article, entitled ["Citigroup Saw No Red Flags Even as It Made Bolder Bets”]. In searing detail it exposed ... how some of our country’s best-paid bankers were overrated dopes who had no idea what they were selling, or greedy cynics who did know and turned a blind eye. But it wasn’t only the bankers. This financial meltdown involved a broad national breakdown in personal responsibility, government regulation and financial ethics. So many people were in on it: People who had no business buying a home, with nothing down and nothing to pay for two years; people who had no business pushing such mortgages, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business bundling those loans into securities and selling them to third parties, as if they were AAA bonds, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business rating those loans as AAA, but made fortunes doing so; and people who had no business buying those bonds and putting them on their balance sheets so they could earn a little better yield, but made fortunes doing so. Citigroup was involved in, and made money from, almost every link in that chain. And the bank’s executives, including ...the former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, were ... so ensnared by the cronyism between the bank’s risk managers and risk takers (and so bought off by their bonuses) that they had no interest in stopping it. These are the people whom taxpayers bailed out on Monday to the tune of what could be more than $300 billion.
Note: For many revealing reports on the Wall Street bailout from major media sources, click here.
The songs that whales and dolphins use to communicate, orient themselves and find mates are being drowned out by human-made noises in the world's oceans. That sound pollution -- everything from increasing commercial shipping and seismic surveys to a new generation of military sonar -- is not only confounding the mammals, it also is further threatening the survival of these endangered animals. Studies show that these cetaceans, which once communicated over thousands of miles to forage and mate, are losing touch with each other, ... experts said at a U.N. wildlife conference in Rome. "Call it a cocktail-party effect," said Mark Simmonds, director of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, a Britain-based NGO. "You have to speak louder and louder until no one can hear each other anymore." Environmental groups also are increasingly finding cases of beached whales and dolphins that can be linked to sound pollution, Simmonds said. Marine mammals are turning up on the world's beaches with tissue damage similar to that found in divers suffering from decompression sickness. Scientists say the use of military sonar or seismic testing may have scared the animals into diving and surfacing beyond their physical limits. Several species of cetaceans are already listed as endangered or critically endangered from other causes, including hunting, chemical pollution, collisions with boats and entanglements with fishing equipment. Though it is not yet known precisely how many animals are affected, sound pollution is increasingly being recognized as a serious factor, the experts said.
Note: For many reports on threats to marine mammals from reliable, verifiable sources, click here.
Neuroscientists have shown that they can [create] a “body swapping” illusion that could have a profound effect on a range of therapeutic techniques. At the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience last month, Swedish researchers presented evidence that the brain, when tricked by optical and sensory illusions, can quickly adopt any other human form, no matter how different, as its own. “You can see the possibilities, putting a male in a female body, young in old, white in black and vice versa,” said Dr. Henrik Ehrsson of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. The technique is simple. A subject stands or sits opposite the scientist, as if engaged in an interview. Both are wearing headsets, with special goggles, the scientist’s containing small film cameras. The goggles are rigged so the subject sees what the scientist sees: to the right and left are the scientist’s arms, and below is the scientist’s body. To add a physical element, the researchers have each person squeeze the other’s hand, as if in a handshake. Now the subject can see and “feel” the new body. In a matter of seconds, the illusion is complete. In a series of studies, using mannequins and stroking both bodies’ bellies simultaneously, the Karolinska researchers have found that men and women say they not only feel they have taken on the new body, but also unconsciously cringe when it is poked or threatened. In previous work, neuroscientists have induced various kinds of out-of-body experiences using similar techniques. The brain is so easily tricked, they say, precisely because it has spent a lifetime in its own body.
UFO enthusiasts are pressing Barack Obama to release classified documents about sightings of alien spacecraft, encouraged by support from within the President-Elect's own White House team. Desperate to see the US emulate the British Government and disclose reported "contact" with UFOs, the enthusiasts have written to Mr Obama to ask that his administration [come] clean about the contents of America's "X-Files". They believe they have good prospects of success after public statements of support from both John Podesta, who is running Mr Obama's White House transition team, and Bill Richardson, the Governor of New Mexico ... who is expected to secure a cabinet post. When he was the White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton, Mr Podesta led a project to declassify 800 million pages of intelligence documents. Gov Richardson, a former presidential candidate and fellow UFO aficionado, has written a forward to a book on the so-called Roswell Incident in New Mexico. He has called for full disclosure by the Pentagon of what really occurred. Only last week a US Air Force pilot, Milton Torres, whose testimony was released from the British archives, appeared on US television explaining how he was ordered to shoot down a large UFO over the UK in 1957 and then silenced by military officials, who told him never to speak of the incident.
Note: Podesta has also publicly called for a release of UFO records for years, alleging a cover-up. See the CNN article reporting this available here. For a concise summary of evidence on UFO sightings presented by highly-respected former military and government professionals, click here.
Stefan Lyon has many titles: Author, humanitarian, international philanthropist. And seventh-grader. Stefan has just finished his third book about his San Francisco adventures with his pet rats. As with his first two books, all proceeds go to build schools in Africa. "I want to help the less fortunate," said Stefan, 13, at a recent book signing at a law firm in a downtown high-rise. "There are a lot of AIDS orphans in Africa." For $5,000, he financed the conversion of an abandoned cowshed in Kakamega, Kenya, into a two-room school. He's now halfway through construction of an eight-room school for 100 children ... in the neighboring village of Bungoma. Stefan is on a book promotion tour for the holidays, hoping to raise the last $30,000 to finish the school. Stefan, who has his own nonprofit, the Stefan Lyon Foundation, knows that he's not a typical 13-year-old, but he also doesn't know what all the fuss is about. Stefan was always a compassionate child. "He'd sit with the kids who got bullied at school until they felt better," [his mother] said. By elementary school, Stefan passed out cookies and blankets to the homeless at the Civic Center from his red wagon. He'd insert notes in the cookie bags: "I'm thinking of you." "God loves you." In the third grade at St. Brendan School, he was inspired by his teacher, Renée McHugh, who gave a lesson on Africa and explained how little money was needed to build schools for orphans. He wanted to sell cookies from his wagon to finance an African school. A supermarket gave him free cookie dough, and he got to work.
Happiness is contagious. The more happy people you know, the more likely you are yourself to be happy. And getting connected to happy people improves a person's own happiness, [a research team] reported in the British Medical Journal. "What we are dealing with is an emotional stampede," Nicholas Christakis, a professor of medical sociology at Harvard Medical School in Boston, said. Christakis and James Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, have been using data from 4,700 children of volunteers in the Framingham Heart Study, a giant health study begun in Framingham, Massachusetts in 1948. They have been analyzing a trove of facts from tracking sheets dating back to 1971, following births, marriages, death, and divorces. Volunteers also listed contact information for their closest friends, co-workers, and neighbors. They assessed happiness using a simple, four-question test. "People are asked how often during the past week, one, I enjoyed life, two, I was happy, three, I felt hopeful about the future, and four, I felt that I was just as good as other people," Fowler said. The 60 percent of people who scored highly on all four questions were rated as happy, while the rest were designated unhappy. People with the most social connections -- friends, spouses, neighbors, relatives -- were also the happiest, the data showed. "Each additional happy person makes you happier," Christakis said. "It is not just happy people connecting with happy people, which they do. Above and beyond, there is this contagious process going on." And happiness is more contagious than unhappiness, they discovered.
There has never been a more important time to invest in green technologies, yet many of us believe these efforts are doomed to failure. What nonsense. Myth 1: solar power is too expensive to be of much use. In reality, today's bulky and expensive solar panels capture only 10% or so of the sun's energy, but rapid innovation in the US means that the next generation of panels will be much thinner, capture far more of the energy in the sun's light and cost a fraction of what they do today. Myth 2: wind power is too unreliable. Actually, during some periods earlier this year the wind provided almost 40% of Spanish power. Parts of northern Germany generate more electricity from wind than they actually need. Northern Scotland, blessed with some of the best wind speeds in Europe, could easily generate 10% or even 15% of the UK's electricity needs at a cost that would comfortably match today's fossil fuel prices. Myth 3: marine energy is a dead-end. This year we have seen the installation of the first tidal turbine to be successfully connected to the UK electricity grid in Strangford Lough, Northern Ireland, and the first group of large-scale wave power generators 5km off the coast of Portugal, constructed by a Scottish company.
Note: The remaining energy myths treated in this article are: Myth 4: nuclear power is cheaper than other low-carbon sources of electricity. Myth 5: electric cars are slow and ugly. Myth 6: biofuels are always destructive to the environment. Myth 7: climate change means we need more organic agriculture. Myth 8: zero carbon homes are the best way of dealing with greenhouse gas emissions from buildings. Myth 9: the most efficient power stations are big. Myth 10: all proposed solutions to climate change need to be hi-tech. For lots more on exciting new energy technology developments from reliable sources, click here.
As a plastic surgeon, [Geoff] Williams could live in a sprawling house, cruise in a snazzy sports car and wear custom-made shoes instead of the $5 pair he snagged at the thrift store a few years back. Instead he spends his money on hundreds of strangers, half a world away. Grown men with rope-like tumors engulfing their eyes, nose, lips. Teenage girls with heads cocked permanently to one side because of burn-tightened skin. But mostly children — with faces split up the middle like a half-open zipper. Williams invests in faces. As he worked and taught in wealthy hospitals, his mind was preoccupied with thoughts of the hundreds of desperate mothers in Vietnam who had swarmed him during a volunteer training trip, thrusting their deformed babies at him and begging for help. Only 20 babies were treated that trip; about 180 were sent away. "Leaving, looking down at those lights, I knew these mothers were going home with total disappointment," Williams recalls. "I remember making a promise to myself then, to those mothers: I may not be able to find you, but I'll find someone like you. I'll come back. I'll do more." Several months later, he took another volunteer trip, this time to India. "I thought I'd do it a couple of times and get it out of my system. After about a year, it just hit me — it would not be easy to stop doing it." He took a leave of absence from the University of Texas in 2003 to immerse himself in treating the forgotten patients in developing countries. He never went back.
Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.