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Below
are one-paragraph excerpts of important news articles you may have missed.
These news articles include revealing information on new car fuels, health
scandals Iraq War censorship, and more. Each excerpt is taken verbatim
from the major media website listed at the link provided. If any link
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here. Key sentences are highlighted for those with limited
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Fred Burks and Tod
Fletcher for PEERS and the WantToKnow.info Team




Not to See the Fallen Is No
Favor

May 28, 2007, New York
Times


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/28/business/media/28carr.html

While
troop numbers are surging, the media that cover them are leaking away,
worn out by the danger and expense of covering a war that refuses to end.
Many of the journalists who are in Iraq have been backed into fortified
corners, rarely venturing out to see what soldiers confront. And the
remaining journalists who are embedded with the troops in Iraq — the
number dropped to 92 in May from 126 in April — are risking more and more
for less and less. Since last year, the military’s embedding rules require
that journalists obtain a signed consent from a wounded soldier before the
image can be published. Images that put a face on the dead, that make them
identifiable, are simply prohibited. Ashley Gilbertson, a veteran
freelance photographer who has been to Iraq seven times ... said the
policy, as enforced, is coercive and unworkable. “They are not
letting us cover the reality of war,” he added. “I think
this has got little to do with the families or the soldiers and everything
to do with politics.” Until last year, no permission was required
to publish photographs of the wounded, but families had to be notified of
the soldier’s injury first. Now, not only is permission required, but any
image of casualties that shows a recognizable name or unit is off-limits.
And memorials for the fallen in Iraq can no longer be shown, even when the
unit in question invites coverage. James Glanz, a Baghdad correspondent ...
for The New York Times ... said that “This tiny remaining corps of
reporters becomes a greater and greater problem for the military brass
because we are the only people preventing them from telling the story the
way they want it told.”


Inside Medicine: Some 'diseases' invented for
profit

May 26, 2007, Sacramento Bee
(Sacramento's leading newspaper)


http://www.sacbee.com/107/story/193101.html

By
Dr. Michael Wilkes. When is a disease really a disease? Young doctors
in training work hard, and so do lots of other people. When people work 24
hours in a row ... the body feels tired. Is this fatigue an abnormal
physiologic state requiring medication and treatment, or is it a normal
part of belonging to the human race? If abnormal, then doctors and
pharmaceutical companies argue that the fatigue requires treatment. If it
is normal -- despite a movement to label it as an illness -- then
post-work fatigue belongs to the growing phenomenon of disease-mongering.
"Disease-mongering" ... is the process of trying to convince healthy
people that they are sick, or people with minor problems that they have
extremely worrisome symptoms. This is all in an attempt to sell
treatments. Countless examples of disease-mongering are driven by the
pharmaceutical industry's drive to sell drugs. Conditions such as female
sexual dysfunction syndrome, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, toenail
fungus, baldness and social anxiety disorder (a.k.a. shyness) are a few
places where the medical community has stepped in, thereby turning normal
or mild conditions into diseases for which medication is the treatment.
Most pharmaceutical companies devote huge amounts of money to prevent,
control and cure diseases. When their profits don't match corporate
expectations, they invent "new" diseases to be cured by existing drugs.
What happens to real diseases when [the media] are filled with information
promoting disease mongering? Government funding for public health
campaigns pales by comparison with the billions spent by pharmaceutical
companies on disease mongering intended to increase the markets for their
products.

Note:
For more reliable information about major corruption in the pharmaceutical
industry, click
here.


Clean energy claim: Aluminum in your car
tank

March 23, 2007, MSNBC


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18700750

A
Purdue University engineer and National Medal of Technology winner says
he's ready and able to start a revolution in clean energy.
Professor Jerry Woodall and students have invented a way to use an
aluminum alloy to extract hydrogen from water — a process that he thinks
could replace gasoline as well as its pollutants and emissions tied to
global warming. But Woodall says there's one big hitch: "Egos" at the U.S.
Department of Energy, a key funding source for energy research,
"are holding up the revolution. The hydrogen is generated on demand, so
you only produce as much as you need when you need it," he said in a
statement released by Purdue this week. So instead of having to fill up at
a station, hydrogen would be made inside vehicles in tanks about the same
size as today's gasoline tanks. An internal reaction in those tanks would
create hydrogen from water and 350 pounds worth of special pellets. The
hydrogen would then power an internal combustion engine or a fuel cell
stack. "It's a simple matter to convert ordinary internal combustion
engines to run on hydrogen," Woodall said. "All you have to do is replace
the gasoline fuel injector with a hydrogen injector." "The egos of program
managers at DOE are holding up the revolution," he told MSNBC.com.
"Remember that Einstein was a patent examiner and had no funding for his
1905 miracle year," Woodall added. "He did it on his own time. If he had
been a professor at a university in the U.S. today and put in a proposal
to develop the theory of special relativity it would have been summarily
rejected."

Note: For a treasure trove of reliable information
on clean, new energy sources, click here.



Doctors, Legislators Resist Drugmakers' Prying
Eyes

May 22, 2007, Washington
Post


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/21/AR2007052101701.html

Pediatrician
Rupin Thakkar's first inkling that the pharmaceutical industry was peering
over his shoulder ... came in a letter from a drug representative about
the generic drops Thakkar prescribes to treat infectious pinkeye. In the
letter, the salesperson wrote that Thakkar was causing his patients to
miss more days of school than they would if he put them on Vigamox, a more
expensive brand-name medicine made by Alcon Laboratories. "My initial
thought was 'How does she know what I'm prescribing?' " Thakkar said. "It
feels intrusive ... I just feel strongly that medical encounters need to
be private." He is not alone. Many doctors object to drugmakers' common
practice of contracting with data-mining companies to track exactly which
medicines physicians prescribe and in what quantities -- information
marketers and salespeople use to fine-tune their efforts. The concerns are
not merely about privacy. Proponents say using such detailed data
for drug marketing serves mainly to influence physicians to prescribe more
expensive medicines, not necessarily to provide the best
treatment. "We don't like the practice, and we want it to stop," said Jean
Silver-Isenstadt, executive director of the National Physicians Alliance.
(Thakkar is on the group's board of directors.) "We think it's a
contaminant to the doctor-patient relationship, and it's driving up
costs." The American Medical Association makes millions of dollars
each year by helping data-mining companies link prescribing data to
individual physicians. It does so by licensing access to the AMA
Physician Masterfile, a database containing names, birth dates,
educational background, specialties and addresses for more than 800,000
doctors.

Note:
For more reliable, verifiable information about major corruption in the
drug industry, click
here.


Water into fuel?

March 22, 2007, WKYC (NBC affiliate in
Cleveland, Ohio)


http://www.wkyc.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=68227

Retired
TV station owner and broadcast engineer, John Kanzius, wasn't looking for
an answer to the energy crisis.
He was looking for a cure for cancer. Four years ago, inspiration struck
in the middle of the night. Kanzius decided to try using radio waves to
kill the cancer cells. His wife Marianne heard the noise and found her
husband inventing a radio frequency generator with her pie pans. "I got up
immediately, and thought he had lost it." Here are the basics of John's
idea: Radio-waves will heat certain metals. Tiny bits of certain metal are
injected into a cancer patient. Those nano-particals are attracted to the
abnormalities of the cancer cells and ignore the healthy cells. The
patient is then exposed to radio waves and only the bad cells heat up and
die. But John also came across yet another extrordinary breakthrough. His
machine could actually make saltwater burn. John Kanzius
discovered that his radio frequency generator could release the oxygen and
hydrogen from saltwater and create an incredibly intense flame. "If that
was in a car cylinder you could see the amount of fire that would be in
the cylinder." The APV Company Laboratory in Akron has checked
out John's ... invention. They were amazed. "That could be a steam engine,
a steam turbine. That could be a car engine if you wanted it to be."
Imagine the possibilities. Saltwater as the ultimate clean fuel. A happy
byproduct of one man searching for the cure for cancer.

Note: Though this exciting breakthrough was
reported in dozens of local media, not one major news outlet found it
worthy of mention. To verify this yourself, click
here.


I Lost My Son to a War I Oppose. We Were Both
Doing Our Duty.

May 27, 2007, Washington
Post


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/25/AR2007052502032.html

When my
son was killed in Iraq earlier this month at age 27, I found myself
pondering my responsibility for his death. Among the hundreds of messages
that my wife and I have received, two bore directly on this question. Both
held me personally culpable, insisting that my public opposition to the war
had provided aid and comfort to the enemy. Each said that my son's death
came as a direct result of my antiwar writings. This may seem a vile
accusation to lay against a grieving father. But in fact, it has become a
staple of American political discourse, repeated endlessly by those keen
to allow President Bush a free hand in waging his war. What exactly is a
father's duty when his son is sent into harm's way? Among the many ways to
answer that question, mine was this one: As my son was doing his utmost to
be a good soldier, I strove to be a good citizen. As a citizen, I have
tried since Sept. 11, 2001, to promote a critical understanding of U.S.
foreign policy. I genuinely believed that if the people spoke, our
leaders in Washington would listen and respond. This, I can now see, was an
illusion. The people have spoken, and nothing of substance has
changed. The November 2006 midterm elections signified an
unambiguous repudiation of the policies that landed us in our present
predicament. But half a year later, the war continues, with no end in
sight. Indeed, by sending more troops to Iraq (and by extending the tours
of those, like my son, who were already there), Bush has signaled his
complete disregard for what was once quaintly referred to as "the will of
the people." To be fair, responsibility for the war's continuation now
rests no less with the Democrats who control Congress than with the
president and his party.

Note:
The author, Andrew
Bacevich, is a conservative professor on international relations at
Boston University. The title of his highly praised 2006 book, The
New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War,
establishes the case for an American empire which is not benign. For more
on the war machine, click
here.