My wife doesn't allow a television in our home, so when I'm traveling alone, as I often must, temptation sometimes overwhelms me and I find myself indiscriminately channel-surfing for hours, searching for what -- I don't know, perhaps a football game even in March or April, May, June, July, August.
It was on such a fruitless mission in April that I paused on the A&E channel long enough to hear that a documentary about cults was in the offing. If I watched the thing, I was promised... (more)
A previously localized trial of CCTV cameras that allow local government officials to monitor people in the streets and shout orders at anyone they deem to be acting in an anti-social manner is to be enforced nationwide across the UK. In a bizarre psychological move the cameras will speak in a child's voice.
In an incredibly Orwellian move, loudspeakers are to be fitted to surveillance cameras throughout major cities, allowing CCTV operators to bark comma... (more)
CCTV cameras will bark orders at people who misbehave in the streets of eight major British cities as part of a government scheme to cajole people into respecting authority.
Faceless bureaucrats will tell people off when they are being "anti-social" by dropping litter, behaving drunkenly, fighting, and, presumably, smashing up CCTV cameras and otherwise dismantling the apparatus of the nanny state.
But these bureaucrats will be voiceless too - C... (more)
BRUSSELS, April 3 (RIA Novosti) - The government of Belgium's French-speaking region of Wallonia, which has a population of about 4 million, has approved a tax on barbequing, local media reported.
Experts said that between 50 and 100 grams of CO2, a so-called greenhouse gas, is emitted during barbequing. Beginning June 2007, residents of Wallonia will have to pay 20 euros for a grilling session.
The local authorities plan to monitor compliance with the new tax leg... (more)
A Pakistani tribal militant group responsible for a series of deadly guerrilla raids inside Iran has been secretly encouraged and advised by American officials since 2005, U.S. and Pakistani intelligence sources tell ABC News.
The group, called Jundullah, is made up of members of the Baluchi tribe and operates out of the Baluchistan province in Pakistan, just across the border from Iran.
It has taken responsibility for the deaths and kidnappings of more than a doz... (more)
A suspended Toronto elementary school principal has pleaded guilty to throwing feces (excrement) on a child.
Maria Pantalone, 49, was charged with two counts of assault - one against that child and one against another – but only admitted to one of the charges today.
“I couldn’t take it any more,” she testified, in describing the provocative circumstances leading up to the incident last June 30.
You're in the thick of it, arguing any number of topics against a more knowledgable adversary. Against the ropes, bloodied and bullied, you look for a way out of the conversation – and find it in the comforting one-two punch of calling someone a fat witch or anti-American. Sure, you're no master orator or verbal pugilist, but who cares? The opponent is on the ground while you stand victorious over their reputation.
Drug makers are hell-bent on recovering the antidepressant customer base represented by women of childbearing years. With doctors now reluctant to prescribe the drugs to pregnant women, a new recruitment scheme has cropped up. Screening programs are being set up all over the country to screen every pregnant woman for mental disorders.
The name-brand selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor antidepressants, or SSRIs, with a stake in this controversy, include Paxil, by GlaxoSmithKline... (more)
TALLAHASSEE, Florida (CNN) -- Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani told CNN Wednesday he supports public funding for some abortions, a position he advocated as mayor... (more)
The suppression of truth has long been among the highest priorities for the upper echelons of power and authority. For a minority elite that clings to power by the manipulation of the masses using an omnipresent cocktail of lies, deception, mass-produced ignorance and ingrained propaganda, the destruction of truth is an essential method of control. It is a formula that has worked to unmitigated success for the e... (more)
Recent visitors of the DrudgeReport.com will have found huge headlines about the recent conflict between the Brits an Iranians over blowing the whole subject in order to provocateur a war. Just today the top of Drudge read in huge red letters "BLAIR: WE'VE 48 HOURS TO SAVE SAILORS" creating the impression something significant will happen after 48 hours and everyone needs to start panicking. In reality the article is a non-story in which Blair just says, "The next 48 hours will be fairly c... (more)
Seriously, the article has one source, and one source alone that says an Iranian nuke could be possible by 2009. And what does this one source base this completely unrealistic claim on? 1,000 new centrifuges Iran is installing at Natanz, which the ... (more)
He was the ultimate keeper of secrets, lurking in the shadows of American history. He toppled banana republics, planned the Bay of Pigs invasion and led the Watergate break-in. Now he would reveal what he'd always kept hidden: who killed JFK
Once, when the old spymaster thought he was dying, his eldest son came to visit him at his home in Miami. The scourges recently had been constant and terrible: lupus, pneumonia, cancers of the jaw and prostate, gangrene, the amputation ... (more)
The April 5 issue of Rolling Stone features the deathbed confession of CIA operative and key Bay of Pigs/Watergate/Nixon administration figure E. Howard Hunt, The Last Confession of E. Howard Hunt by Erik Hedegaard. This piece is significant not only for its exploration of Hunt, but for breakthrough information that appears to thoroughly corroborate the work of key John F. Kennedy assas... (more)
Genetically modified potatoes developed by Monsanto, the multinational biotech company, have been fed to sick patients in an experiment. Rats that ate similar potatoes in the research suffered reductions in the weight of their hearts and prostate glands.
Dr Michael Antoniou, reader in molecular genetics at Guy's, King's and St Thomas' School of Medicine, said use of humans was "irresponsible and totally unethical, especially when already ill subjects were enrolled. These people tr... (more)
A failed US attempt to abduct two senior Iranian security officers on an official visit to northern Iraq was the starting pistol for a crisis that ten weeks later led to Iranians seizing 15 British sailors and marines.
Early in the morning of 11 January helicopter-born US forces launched a surprise raid on a long-established Iranian liaison office in the city of Arbil in Iraqi Kurdistan. They captured five... (more)
A secret FBI intelligence unit helped detain a group of war protesters in a downtown Washington parking garage in April 2002 and interrogated some of them on videotape about their political and religious beliefs, newly uncovered documents and interviews show.
For years, law enforcement authorities suggested it never happened. The FBI and D.C. police said they had no records of such an incident. And police told a federal court that no FBI agents were present when officers arrested ... (more)
It was 3 a.m. in Italy on Jan. 29, 2003, when President Bush in Washington began reading his State of the Union address that included the now famous -- later retracted -- 16 words: "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Like most Europeans, Elisabetta Burba, an investigative reporter for the Italian newsweekly Panorama, waited until the next day to read the newspaper accounts of Bush's remarks. But wh... (more)
