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.
Laura Talmus felt helpless when her then-11-year-old daughter Lili kept calling her from school in tears. After her daughter passed away from medical complications in her sleep at age 15 in 2009, Talmus put together a video celebrating her life. When she showed the video, Lili's classmates were shocked to realize how isolated Lili had felt. The next year, Talmus ... and her husband channeled their grief into forming Beyond Differences, a nonprofit that focuses on raising awareness about social isolation in youth and providing solutions. Talmus believes the social isolation her daughter experienced is affecting students all over the country and contributing to serious health issues, mental health problems, suicide and school violence. Beyond Differences ... has now grown to reach over one million students in all 50 states. On February 16, 2,500 schools [participated] in No One Eats Alone Day, a day of action ... that encourages fifth through eighth graders to mingle, make new friends and become more aware and proactive about social isolation, especially at lunch. "No One Eats Alone is completely rooted in the experience Lili had," Talmus explains. "For many children, the lunch break or recess are the worst parts, so we started with that." Beyond Differences sends backpacks or "Belonging Boxes" with a lesson plan, games, toys, art projects, stickers and conversation starters to participating educators, at no cost to the schools.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.
Our moms and dads used to tell us about their mile-long walk to school. But if we're talking about peda-powered travel to school, this man has set a new standard. Leaving his home in Conakry, Guinea, on a bike, Mamadou Safayou Barry traveled across the whole of West Africa and the Sahara Desert's road network–2,500 miles–and across 5 countries in the mere hopes he'd be accepted into an Egyptian university. Along the way, the husband and father of one crossed Benin, southern Mali, Togo, and Chad, as well as some of the most bandit-filled areas on Earth, including parts of Burkina Faso and Niger. He was detained without cause or charge on three separate occasions, twice in Burkina Faso and once in Togo. It was in Chad, nearly four months after he left home, that he caught an auspicious wind. A local journalist reported on his efforts which led to a local philanthropist getting the man a flight to Cairo. Once there, the prestigious Al-Azhar University offered him a full scholarship, first for Islamic studies, then for engineering. Will Smith heard about Barry's successful voyage, and gave a surprise congratulations to the man. He video-called the Guinean in Cairo to gift him a new bicycle and a laptop for his studies. "When I saw him, I was confused in my head, because I had seen that man before," Barry told the BBC from Cairo. "Then I remember–it's Will Smith! Wow ... I used to watch his films. I was sat on a chair in front of Will Smith!"
Note: Don't miss the deeply inspiring video of Mamadou Safayou Barry's interview with Will Smith about his fascinating journey across Africa. Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.
They say it takes a village to raise a child. Centered on that concept of communal flourishing, a dementia care village in England has incorporated a day nursery for small children–bringing together young and old for learning and sharing. Stimulation, learning, and fun–these are all activities that are known to delay the progression of dementia, and what better way to add these critical elements of life to a daily regimen than to let a flock of preschoolers do it? Belong is a nonprofit operator of senior homes, specializing in dementia care. This is the first to integrate children. The pioneering facility supports older people to live their lives independently, with access to several shops and services on site. The UK charity Ready Generations partnered with Belong to run the village's day nursery. Children feature in the daily life of residents and tenants, enjoying experiences together including shared mealtimes, stories, arts and crafts, and exercise. Centered around a vibrant hub of amenities, including a bistro, hair salon, and specialist exercise studio, the site is open to the public, creating a bustling environment with customers from the local community. Similar projects have been pioneered in America as well. The Intergenerational Learning Center at Mount St. Vincent nursing home in Seattle opened its doors to the oldest–and the youngest–in 2015. The 400 adults in that assisted-living center join the kids in daily activities from music and dancing to storytelling and just plain visiting.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.
An industrial estate in Yorkshire is an unlikely location for ... an artificial intelligence (AI) company used by the Government to monitor people's posts on social media. Logically has been paid more than Ł1.2 million of taxpayers' money to analyse what the Government terms "disinformation" – false information deliberately seeded online – and "misinformation", which is false information that has been spread inadvertently. It does this by "ingesting" material from more than hundreds of thousands of media sources and "all public posts on major social media platforms", using AI to identify those that are potentially problematic. It has a Ł1.2 million deal with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), as well as another worth up to Ł1.4 million with the Department of Health and Social Care to monitor threats to high-profile individuals within the vaccine service. It also has a "partnership" with Facebook, which appears to grant Logically's fact-checkers huge influence over the content other people see. A joint press release issued in July 2021 suggests that Facebook will limit the reach of certain posts if Logically says they are untrue. "When Logically rates a piece of content as false, Facebook will significantly reduce its distribution so that fewer people see it, apply a warning label to let people know that the content has been rated false, and notify people who try to share it," states the press release.
Note: Read more about how NewsGuard, a for-profit company, works closely with government agencies and major corporate advertisers to suppress dissenting views online. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and media manipulation from reliable sources.
Vaccines that protect against severe illness, death and lingering long Covid symptoms from a coronavirus infection were linked to small increases in neurological, blood, and heart-related conditions in the largest global vaccine safety study to date. The rare events – identified early in the pandemic – included a higher risk of heart-related inflammation from mRNA shots made by Pfizer Inc., BioNTech SE, and Moderna Inc., and an increased risk of a type of blood clot in the brain after immunization with viral-vector vaccines such as the one developed by the University of Oxford and made by AstraZeneca Plc. The viral-vector jabs were also tied to an increased risk of Guillain-Barre syndrome, a neurological disorder in which the immune system mistakenly attacks the peripheral nervous system. More than 13.5 billion doses of Covid vaccines have been administered globally over the past three years. Still, a small proportion of people immunized were injured by the shots, stoking debate about their benefits versus harms. The new research, by the Global Vaccine Data Network, was published in the journal Vaccine last week. Exercise intolerance, excessive fatigue, numbness and "brain fog" were among common symptoms identified in more than 240 adults experiencing chronic post-vaccination syndrome in a separate study conducted by the Yale School of Medicine. The cause of the syndrome isn't yet known, and it has no diagnostic tests or proven remedies.
Note: Vaccine adverse event numbers are made publically available, and currently show 2,579,111 COVID vaccine injury reports and 37,100 COVID Vaccine Reported Deaths (out of 47,290 Total Reported Deaths from all vaccines). Read our in-depth report about this concerning trend that is often discussed by mainstream media as a rare occurrence. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on COVID vaccines from reliable major media sources.
Plastic producers have known for more than 30 years that recycling is not an economically or technically feasible plastic waste management solution. That has not stopped them from promoting it, according to a new report. "The companies lied," said Richard Wiles, president of fossil-fuel accountability advocacy group the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), which published the report. "It's time to hold them accountable for the damage they've caused." Plastic, which is made from oil and gas, is notoriously difficult to recycle. Doing so requires meticulous sorting, since most of the thousands of chemically distinct varieties of plastic cannot be recycled together. That renders an already pricey process even more expensive. Another challenge: the material degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can generally only be reused once or twice. The industry has known for decades about these existential challenges, but obscured that information in its marketing campaigns. The report does not allege that the companies broke specific laws. But Alyssa Johl, report co-author and attorney, said she suspects they violated public-nuisance, racketeering and consumer-fraud protections. The industry's misconduct continues today. Over the past several years, industry lobbying groups have promoted so-called chemical recycling, which breaks plastic polymers down into tiny molecules. But the process creates pollution and is even more energy intensive than traditional plastic recycling.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption from reliable major media sources.
U.S. immigration authorities locked thousands of people in solitary confinement in 2023. A new report by Harvard University-affiliated researchers ... found the dangerous confinements have not only persisted over the past decade, but also increased in frequency and duration under the Biden administration. The adverse effects of solitary confinement – generally defined as isolation without meaningful human interaction for 22 hours a day or more – are well documented. One of ICE's directives acknowledges that isolating detainees – who aren't considered prisoners and aren't held for punitive reasons under federal law – is "a serious step that requires careful consideration of alternatives." And yet the new report found the agency recorded more than 14,000 solitary confinement cases from 2018 to 2023. Researchers said the number is likely an undercount due to ICE's poor recordkeeping. The average length of the recorded confinements was 27 days, researchers found, stretching well beyond the 15-day period that meets the threshold for "inhuman and degrading treatment" defined by the U.N. special rapporteur on torture. The data revealed dozens of examples of facilities holding people in solitary confinement for over a year. Researchers also gathered accounts of the grueling conditions inside isolation cells. Interviewees described cells that were freezing cold; constantly lit, causing sleep deprivation; or had toilets only guards could flush.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on prison system corruption from reliable major media sources.
When the U.S. Government entered into its Covid vaccine agreement with Pfizer, which was acting on behalf of the BioNTech/Pfizer partnership, in July 2020, the agreement encompassed a minimum of 100 million doses of a "vaccine to prevent COVID-19" and a payment of at least $1.95 billion. The Government declared that we were "at war" with a catastrophically dangerous virus. In keeping with the declaration of war, it was a military framework that was used for acquiring the aspirational products that became known as Covid mRNA vaccines. The Government side to the agreement with Pfizer was the Department of Defence (DoD), represented by a convoluted chain of parties, each operating as a subcontractor, or co-contractor, for the next. In fact, agencies governing civilian and public health, like the NIH, NIAID and HHS, do not have the authority to grant certain types of special acquisition contracts, which is why the Covid vaccine contracts had to be overseen by the Department of Defence. Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA) ... is a very special way to authorise a medical countermeasure in very specific types of emergencies. EUA was meant for dire situations of warfare or terrorism, not to protect the entire population from naturally occurring pathogens. For this reason, EUA products do not require the type of legal safety oversight that is applied in civilian contexts by the FDA.
Note: Read how the Department of Defense and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority allowed vaccine makers to bypass standard safety testing of their products. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on COVID vaccines from reliable major media sources.
At least 33 U.S. state prison systems and the majority of federal medium-, high- and maximum-security prisons have placed general population ("gen pop") adults under nondisciplinary lockdown at least once (but more often repeatedly or for a prolonged period) from 2016-2023. While most lockdowns are intermittent (lasting from a few days to several weeks), an increasing number of state and federal prisons keep prisoners locked down for most or even all of the year. In addition, many prisons make people suffer through constant lockdown "cycles," where prisoners get a very brief return to normal "gen pop" status before they are once again subject to several days or weeks of lockdown. Prisoners have no routines or any real rights whatsoever under lockdown. There is no guarantee of exercise, showers are irregular at best, and access to phone, email or visitation are nonexistent. Education, religious activities, rehabilitative programs, psychiatric intervention to crises, access to commissary ... are typically denied or are nearly impossible to get. Meetings with attorneys come to a halt or are hard to obtain. People under lockdown are often not even given basic hygiene materials such as soap or toothpaste. Modern prison lockdowns can ... be traced back to 2016, in a decidedly repressive, politicized reaction to nationwide prison strikes. Entire prisons were and are still punished for the relatively minor actions of a few, including ... something as simple as a shouting match.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on prison system corruption from reliable major media sources.
Look at the case of Lucas Bellamy. He had been arrested in Minnesota. Immediately before the arrest, he ate a bag of drugs in an effort to fool police into thinking that he didn't have any. But he immediately began feeling sick. Jail officers took him to a local hospital, where he was treated. The doctors there told the jailers to return him to the hospital if he became ill again. He began vomiting as soon as he got back to his cell. By evening he was refusing food and crawling around his cell as a guard and nurse stood and watched him. By noon the next day, he was dead on the floor. The case of Brandon Clay Dodson is even worse. Dodson was arrested on a burglary charge and was being held in the local jail in Clayton, Alabama. He told a guard that several other prisoners had been beating him, and he asked to be moved into segregated housing for his own protection. He later told the guards in solitary that he wasn't feeling well, but they ignored him. And a day after that, the 43-year-old was found dead in his bed. In a 104-page ruling, a federal judge in Louisiana ruled against the administrators of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, [highlighting] just a few of the untold number of medical horrors that prisoners suffer all the time there, including "a man denied medical attention four times during a stroke, leaving him blind and paralyzed; a man denied access to a specialist for four years while his throat cancer advanced; even a blind man denied a cane for 16 years."
Note: John Kiriakou is a former CIA counter-terrorism officer and former senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In 2015, investigations in Arizona, Florida, Maine, Minnesota, and New York uncovered escalating inmate deaths related to the use of for-profit medical services in prisons. A New York Times article about this was published but it quickly disappeared. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on prison system corruption from reliable major media sources.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ... said last month it was "not right" for the charity to take on such a big role in funding the World Health Organization (WHO). Over the years, the billionaire philanthropists have become the WHO's second biggest donor, making the health agency heavily dependent on their support to keep functioning. Global health experts say that while this money is welcome, it gives the Gates an outsized influence and underscores the chronic funding problem WHO faces even as it contends with more and more health crises. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation alone is responsible for over 88 per cent of the total amount donated by philanthropic foundations to the WHO. Other contributors include the Bloomberg Family Foundation (3.5 per cent), the Wellcome Trust (1.1 per cent) and the Rockefeller Foundation (0.8 per cent). In 2018-2019, the United States was the largest donor at $893 million, accounting for around 15 per cent of WHO's budget. The Gates Foundation came only second, with $531 million. Most of these voluntary contributions are "specified" - meaning they are tied to a specific programme or health campaign in a specific part of the world and are given a detailed time frame during which to be spent. Polio eradication, for instance, has long been WHO's best-funded program, mainly because much of the Gates Foundation's contributions have been directed to that cause.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on health from reliable major media sources.
When Covid-19 struck ... four organizations took on roles often played by governments – but without the accountability of governments. While nations were still debating the seriousness of the pandemic, the groups identified potential vaccine makers and targeted investments in the development of tests, treatments and shots. And they used their clout with the World Health Organization to help create an ambitious worldwide distribution plan. The largest and most powerful was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest philanthropies in the world. Then there was Gavi, the global vaccine organization that Gates helped to found to inoculate people in low-income nations, and the Wellcome Trust, a British research foundation with a multibillion dollar endowment that had worked with the Gates Foundation in previous years. Finally, there was the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI, the international vaccine research and development group that Gates and Wellcome both helped to create in 2017. The organizations spent at least $8.3 million lobbying the U.S. and E.U., according to an analysis of lobbying disclosures. Now, critics are raising significant questions about the equity and effectiveness of the group's response to the pandemic – and the serious limitations of outsourcing the pandemic response to unelected, privately-funded groups.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on COVID from reliable major media sources.
When Garner entered the gates at Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, Louisiana, he didn't know what to expect. The maximum security facility has been dubbed "America's Bloodiest Prison" and its brutal conditions have made headlines for decades. It wasn't until five years later that Garner would get his chance to show everyone he wasn't the hardened criminal they thought he was. When the prison warden, Burl Cain, decided to start the nation's first prison hospice program, Garner volunteered. In helping dying inmates, Garner believed he could claw back some meaning to the life he had nearly squandered. For the next 25 years, he cared for his fellow inmates, prisoners in need of help and compassion at the end of their lives. The Angola program started by Cain, with the help of Garner and others, has since become a model. Today at least 75 of the more than 1,200 state and federal penal institutions nationwide have implemented formal hospice programs. The volunteers [in Angola] were issued hospice T-shirts that allowed them free movement through the prison. The primary rule of the hospice program was that no one would die alone. When death was imminent, the hospice volunteers conducted a vigil round-the-clock. The program used medications ... for the palliative care of patients, though the inmate volunteers were not allowed to administer them. The hospice volunteers ... functioned as confidants, giving dying inmates a last chance to get something off their chest.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.
In March, astrophysicist Eric W. Davis, who spent years working as a consultant for the Pentagon UFO program and is now a defense contractor, gave a classified briefing to the Defense Department on what he called "off-world vehicles not made on this earth." In other words, spaceships. The bombshell quote came in the latest UFO report from the New York Times. In December 2017, the paper reported on the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a Pentagon effort to investigate UFOs, that was supposedly shuttered in 2012. That article, hailed as a "historical inflection point in our attitudes regarding UFOs," implied the same message that the most recent one does: Basically, "flying saucers are real." This week's Times report says that while the program to study mysterious aerial vehicles was renamed and moved to a different part of the Pentagon, the effort remains active. And Luis Elizondo, the ex-director of the predecessor program, told the Times that the new program is moving toward an era of "transparency." Elizondo, the Times reports, is "among a small group of former government officials and scientists with security clearances who, without presenting physical proof, say they are convinced that objects of undetermined origin have crashed on earth with materials retrieved for study." Davis, who once produced a report urging the federal government to research time travel through wormholes, said he has studied the materials. What he found led him to a stark conclusion: "We couldn't make it ourselves."
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on UFOs from reliable major media sources.
When it came to UFOs, there was a time when the US government's official line was that it didn't study them.
Luis Elizondo was instrumental in changing that.
In late 2017, he met with the freelance journalist Leslie Kean and revealed the existence of a $22 million (Ł16m) Pentagon programme investigating military reports of UFOs – a programme he had been in charge of since 2010. He had left the job the day before and decided to turn whistle-blower in the name of national security. As he put it in his resignation letter to secretary of defense Jim Mattis: "Bureaucratic challenges and inflexible mindsets continue to plague the department at all levels... The department must take serious the many accounts by the Navy and other services of unusual aerial systems interfering with military weapon platforms and displaying beyond next-generation capabilities... There remains a vital need to ascertain the capability and intent of these phenomena for the benefit of the armed forces and the nation."Kean joined forces with two other reporters, one from the New York Times, and on 16 December 2017 the story appeared on the paper's front page. It detailed the "Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program" set up in 2007 to investigate unidentified aerial phenomena or "UAP", the term that has replaced the now stigmatised "UFO".
Kean joined forces with two other reporters, one from the New York Times, and on 16 December 2017 the story appeared on the paper's front page. It detailed the "Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program" set up in 2007 to investigate unidentified aerial phenomena or "UAP", the term that has replaced the now stigmatised "UFO". Many UAPs, the Times reported, appeared impossible to explain, lacking any visible means of lift but able to travel at unfathomable speed. What's more, the story stated, Elizondo and his colleagues had "determined that the phenomena they had studied did not seem to originate from any country".
But the reader didn't have to take the Times' word for all this. There were videos. An ally of Elizondo's, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence Chris Mellon, had helped the reporters obtain footage shot from the cockpits of US Navy fighter jets. One of the videos corroborates arguably the most compelling UAP episode ever to come to light.
According to reports, it took place in November 2004, when pilots were flying training missions from the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier. While squadron leader commander David Fravor was in the air, he was asked to intercept a mysterious aircraft. Upon arrival at its coordinates, what he saw was extraordinary: a 40-foot object, resembling a huge white Tic Tac, that had no visible propulsion system, rotors, wings or exhaust plume. Yet Fravor says it was able to jam radar, react to his movements and run rings around his F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet – turning so sharply it was as if the UAP had no inertia – before flying away faster than anything he had ever seen. Simply put, it defied the known laws of physics. Not only were there multiple eyewitnesses – including another pilot who filmed the Tic Tac using his plane's targeting camera (this was the footage passed to the Times) – but the UAP was also detected by the radar of the nearby USS Princeton, an Aegis-class missile cruiser with state-of-the-art sensor systems.
Now, Elizondo's hopes for government action have started to be realised. On 27 April 2020, the US Department Of Defense confirmed the veracity of the Times' UAP videos and released them officially into the public domain. In a statement, the Pentagon said, "The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as â€unidentified'." In August that same year, the Pentagon announced a new UAP Task Force "to detect, analyse and catalogue UAPs that could potentially pose a threat to US national security". And in June 2021, the Office Of The Director Of National Intelligence released a report to congress about the government's work on the UAP issue. Of the 144 encounters studied, it stated, 143 could not be explained. It didn't blame extraterrestrials, but nor did it rule that explanation out.
One of the consequences of his efforts, he says, is a significant piece of legislation that is going through congress. The 2022 National Defense Authorization Act contains important developments for the study of UAPs. It requires that the secretary of defense sets up a permanent office to carry out the duties currently performed by the UAP Task Force but on a department-wide basis. This new office would have to submit an annual report to congressional committees on a range of its findings, including updates on efforts to track, understand, capture and exploit UAPs – as well as an assessment of health-related effects on those who encounter these strange flying objects. Elizondo calls it "historic". GQ spoke to Elizondo as he prepared to head to Washington, DC, to brief members of congress on how to work with foreign allies on the issue.
Elizondo: I have in my possession official US government documentation that describes the exact same vehicle that we now call the Tic Tac [seen by the Nimitz pilots in 2004] being described in the early 1950s and early 1960s and performing in ways that, frankly, can outperform anything we have in our inventory. For some country to have developed hypersonic technology, instantaneous acceleration and basically transmedial travel in the early 1950s is absolutely preposterous.
Elizondo: I've got to be careful, I can't speak too specifically, but one might imagine that you get a report from a pilot who says, "Lue, it's really weird. I was flying and I got close to this thing and I came back home and it was like I got a sunburn. I was red for four days." Well, that's a sign of radiation. That's not a sunburn; it's a radiation burn. Then [a pilot] might say, if [they] had got a little closer, "Lue, I'm at the hospital. I've got symptoms that are indicative of microwave damage, meaning internal injuries, and even in my brain there's some morphology there." And then you might get somebody who gets really close and says, "You know, Lue, it's really bizarre. It felt like I was there for only five minutes, but when I looked at my watch 30 minutes went by, but I only used five minutes' worth of fuel. How is that possible?" Well, there's a reason for that, we believe, and it probably has to do with warping of space time. And the closer you get to one of these vehicles, the more you may begin to experience space time relative to the vehicle and the environment.
Elizondo: The government has already admitted not only that they're real, but that they truly are unidentified objects and they're behaving in a very peculiar way. For example, you have an object that is at altitude, going at 120 knots against the wind, that is rotating at 90 degrees without losing altitude. Anybody who understands aerodynamics, when you're flying an aircraft and you turn 90 degrees you lose lift, unless you're in a hard bank. What makes those videos more compelling is not so much what you see, but what you don't see. It's the radar signatures, it's the call signs from pilot to pilot, and pilot to ship, saying, "Hey, we've got a bogey up here." And in one case you hear one of them say, "Look, we have a whole fleet of these things on the ASA [radar display]." Some of the pilots have come out and said there was actually a whole fleet of these things manoeuvring right off camera. The pilots are trained observers. They are trained to identify an aircraft silhouette at 20 miles away – an SU-22, a European Tornado, a Harrier or even an F-16 – and literally within a split moment's notice be able to identify friend or foe and shoot it down. What they're reporting doesn't fit any type of parameters of any type of conventional aircraft that we know of.
Elizondo: I have been told I have to be very careful how I answer this question. I am not allowed to expound upon anything I've already said. What I have said is that it is my opinion, my belief – a strong belief, hint, hint – that the US government is in possession of exotic material associated with UAPs. That is all I'm allowed to say.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on UFOs from reliable major media sources.
When you imagine a 3D-printed home, you probably picture a boxy concrete structure. As 3D printing's popularity has grown in the construction industry – thanks to its efficiency when it comes to time, energy and cost – carbon-intensive concrete has become the go-to building material. But a project in Maine has set its sights on something different: a neighborhood of 600-square-foot, 3D-printed, bio-based houses crafted from materials like wood fibers and bioresins. The aim: a complex of 100-percent recyclable buildings that will provide homes to those experiencing houselessness. In late 2022, an initiative between the University of Maine and local nonprofit Penquis unveiled its prototype – BioHome3D, the first 100-percent recyclable house. Now, the pioneering project is working toward completing its first livable housing complex. It will be fully bio-based, meaning all materials will be derived from living organisms such as plants and other renewable agricultural, marine and forestry materials. As the materials are all 100-percent recyclable, so become the buildings. The materials are also all renewable. And thanks to its natural composition, the home acts as a carbon sink, sequestering 46 tons of carbon dioxide per 600-square-foot unit. The materials for this project will mainly come from wood left over by local mills. "The wood fiber material that's used in the mix is essentially waste wood here in Maine," says Jason Bird, director of housing development for Penquis.
Note: Don't miss pictures of beautiful homes built by this process at the link above. Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.
The Enmyoin Temple in the Fukushima prefecture of Japan is now known colloquially by a different name, said its Chief Monk, Tomonori Izumi: "The Miracle Temple." On March 11 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was the site of one of the worst nuclear disasters ever after an earthquake and subsequent tsunami caused its electrical grid to fail. Miraculously, the temple was untouched. " The UFO's came after the explosion. There were so many of them. I was shocked," said the monk. "Radioactive energy was leaking everywhere. I believe the UFOs came to readjust the flood of radioactive energy in order to save us. That's my theory, anyway," said Izumi. UFO's have been documented repeatedly around places where humans have spawned nuclear activity. Andresen cited declassified U.S. government reports from agencies like the FBI and CIA about UFO sightings near nuclear sites, saying she had looked at 39 different accounts between the 1940s and 1990s. "It goes back to the 1930s when the science and research was being done to understand fission. But then it really heats up in the 1940s, in particular, right after the detonation of the two atomic bombs in Japan in 1945. Then ... you see one after another event occurring in proximity specifically to sites associated with nuclear weapons," said Andresen. "There was a lot of UFO activity reported [around Chernobyl] also. At the height of the fire in Chernobyl, the reading was 3000 milliroentgens, which is a unit of ionizing radiation. And right at the height of the fire, many people observed a UFO come, stayed for 3 minutes, shown a light right at Unit 4 and departed," she said. "They took another reading and it had apparently dropped to 800. That seems like a very conscious attempt to remediate the danger caused by the malfunction there."
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on UFOs from reliable major media sources.
The US military is in possession of a video of a UFO apparently disabling a nuclear warhead during a routine test, according to multiple former officials. They claim the video in question captured a saucer-shaped craft circling the unarmed, dummy warhead shortly after it detached from the Atlas missile booster, then shooting four beams of light at the warhead, disabling it. Retired US Air Force officers Lieutenant Bob Jacobs and Major Florenze Mansmann claim to have viewed the recording of the 1964 encounter before the tape went missing. The former officials were part of a team responsible for capturing video of missile test launches in California with telescopic photography and videography equipment. Two days later, after they screened the video, they claim that two plain-clothed CIA agents confiscated the footage and swore them to secrecy. The incredible account is part of a pattern that some UFO experts have identified, where UFOs seem to interfere with nuclear weapons. The craft inadvertently caught on film was domed and disc-shaped, according to Jacobs and Mansmann. It was a 'classic disc, the center seemed to be a raised bubble ... the entire lower saucer shape was glowing and seemed to be rotating slowly,' according to a letter Mansmann wrote about the incident in 1983. Radar data of the September 15, 1964 event apparently confirmed that an unidentified aerial object was observed near the dummy warhead during the missile test.
Note: Watch Lt. Bob Jacob's intriguing full testimony here, where he discusses how he was sworn to secrecy about what he saw for 18 years. An anonymous US Senate investigator allegedly confirmed that the existence of the footage was verified by Luis Elizondo, the former head of the Pentagon's advanced aerospace threat identification program (AATIP). For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on UFOs from reliable major media sources.
A US court this week banned three weedkillers widely used in American agriculture, finding that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) broke the law in allowing them to be on the market. The ruling is specific to three dicamba-based weedkillers manufactured by Bayer, BASF and Syngenta, which have been blamed for millions of acres of crop damage and harm to endangered species and natural areas across the midwest and south. Discovery documents turned up in the litigation showed the companies knew that their dicamba weedkillers would probably lead to off-target crop damage. This is the second time a federal court has banned these weedkillers since they were introduced for the 2017 growing season. In 2020, the ninth circuit court of appeals issued its own ban, but months later the Trump administration reapproved the weedkilling products. But a federal judge in Arizona ruled on Monday that the EPA made a crucial error in reapproving dicamba, finding the agency did not post it for public notice and comment as required by law. US district judge David Bury wrote ... that it was a "very serious" violation and that if EPA had done a full analysis, it probably would not have made the same decision. Bury wrote that the EPA did not allow many people who are deeply affected by the weedkiller – including specialty farmers, conservation groups and more – to comment. "The evidence has shown that dicamba cannot be used without causing massive and unprecedented harm to farms as well as endangering plants and pollinators," said George Kimbrell [with] the Center for Food Safety, which litigated the case.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on health and government corruption from reliable major media sources.
An artist in the south of France says he's planning to destroy up to $45 million worth of art, including pieces by Rembrandt, Picasso, and Andy Warhol, if WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange dies in prison. Andrei Molodkin [said] that he put a collection of masterpieces that had been donated to him into a 29-ton safe hooked up to two barrels – one containing an acid powder and the other containing an accelerator – which, when pumped into the safe, will create a reaction strong enough to destroy all its contents. The project is called "Dead Man's Switch," and it is backed by Assange's wife, Stella. Assange is currently in jail in the U.K. awaiting his final appeal over extradition to the United States to face charges under the Espionage Act, which will take place later this month. WikiLeaks published thousands of leaked documents relating to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Assange is alleged to have conspired to obtain and disclose U.S. national defense information. Molodkin says that the safe will be hooked up to a 24-hour timer which must be reset every day or else it will trigger the release of the two barrel's corrosive substances inside. He says, each day, the timer will only be reset when someone "close to Assange" confirms he is alive. Assange's wife, Stella, says the project asks the question of "which is the greater taboo: destroying art or destroying human life? If democracy wins, the art will be preserved - as will Julian's life."
Note: The US prosecution of Assange undermines press freedom. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and media manipulation from reliable sources.
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