The good news is that the latest polls confirm that roughly half of all Americans believe extraterrestrial life exists. The weird news is that a similar fraction think some of it is visiting Earth.
Several recent TV shows have soberly addressed the possibility that alien craft are violating our airspace, occasionally touching down long enough to allow their crews to conduct bizarre experiments on hapless citizens. While these shows tantalise viewers by suggesting that they are fin... (more)
Like tear stains on old love letters, reports from the Census Bureau often cause pangs of nostalgia and regret. The bureau's report released Tuesday, "Examining American Household Composition: 1990 and 2000," does that by pointing to the "growing complexity" of our living arrangements. In particular, it says that at the turn of the century the nuclear family setup of two parents and their children was no longer the most common living arrangement in the U.S. In its place at the No. 1 spot are so-... (more)
A father who accused a Mount Dora policeman last year of dumping out his infant daughter's cremated remains sued the city and the officer Monday.
Filed in Lake Circuit Court, the lawsuit accuses the city and Officer Brad Cline of illegally stopping and searching Jason Burnham, 34, as he was walking home after Hurricane Charley.
During the stop, Burnham's suit says, Cline emptied the ashes from a cross-shaped pendant worn by Burnham, suspecting it contained cocaine.<... (more)
A 16-year-old boy was shot outside a Northwest Side apartment complex Thursday morning.
Police said two men approached Marquest Balboa at the Woodland Ridge Apartments in the 7000 block of Wurzbach Road at 1 a.m. and asked him for directions.
Unable to help the men, Balboa walked away and was shot in the leg.
He was transported to a hospital, where he is listed in fair condition.
A team of researchers from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) has successfully demonstrated, for the first time, that it is possible to control the speed of light – both slowing it down and speeding it up – in an optical fiber, using off-the-shelf instrumentation in normal environmental conditions. Their results, to be published in the August 22 issue of Applied Physics Letters, could have implications that range from optical computing to the fiber-opti... (more)
\Summary: On MSNBC's Scarborough Country, right-wing activist David Horowitz claimed that "[t]here are 50,000 professors" who are "anti-American" and "identify with the terrorists." There are just over 400,000 tenured and tenure-track full-time university professors in the United States. If Horowitz's numbers are accurate, that means approximately one out of every eight tenured or tenure-track college and universi... (more)
A "staff memo" to the Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) new director recommends that politicians and others of Leviathan's acolytes be exempted from screening at airports. Meanwhile, UPI reports that we "ordinary passengers" will continue to be wanded, questioned, groped, ordered about and insulted.
Hard to believe, in a democracy as dedicated to fairness and equality as ours, that the TSA sees two classes of citizens out... (more)
Sarah Zapolsky's 1-year-old son had better get used to being looked at as a possible terrorist every time his family gets on a plane.
That's because experts and officials say there's no way the toddler's name will be taken off the federal no-fly list - even after he and another tot made headlines for being stopped as potential terror threats.
"His name is the same or similar to someone on the no-fly list," said Ann Davis, a spokeswoman for the Transportation Securit... (more)
A high-ranking military officer has come forward saying "a real danger exists" for a large-scale terrorist attack in the coming weeks, adding Vice President Dick Cheney spends his entire day consumed with issues of terrorism and U.S. nuclear retaliation in the Middle East if an attack on American soil occurs.
The retired officer, who remains anonymous, claims military factions are battling over how to address the terrorist threat, claiming the Iraq War, the threats being leveled ... (more)
A US army intelligence officer has claimed that two out of three cells involved in the September 11 attacks had been identified a year before the event.
Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, 42, of Able Danger, a secret data-analyzing operation of the US army said his unit had identified Mohammed Atta and three other suicide hijackers involved in the 9/11 in mid 2000. Shaffer claimed the army intelligence unit had tried to transmit this information to the FBI but the Pentagon lawyers cancele... (more)
Published on Friday, August 5, 2005 by the Baltimore Sun
A story that the U.S. government hoped would never see the light of day finally has been published, 60 years after it was spiked by military censors. The discovery of reporter George Weller's firsthand account of conditions in post-nuclear Nagasaki sheds light on one of the great journalistic betrayals of the last century: the cover-up of the effects of the atomic bombing on Japan.
The July 7 London bombers may have been homegrown, but investigators are now certain they had direct ties to al Qaeda.
Mohammed Siddique Khan, the 30-year-old suspected ringleader of the London bombings, had key connections that could have led to his earlier arrest, CBS News Correspondent Sheila MacVicar reports from London.
A source familiar with the investigation has told CBS News that an American al Qaeda operative, now in U.S. custody, told the FBI that he escor... (more)
A U.S. District Court judge in Salt Lake City, Utah, has ordered the Oklahoma City FBI office to turn over unredacted copies of all documents currently at issue in a Freedom of Information lawsuit involving additional evidence and the names of additional conspirators in the Oklahoma City bombing case.
According to the judge, the materials would be reviewed in his chambers and then returned to the FBI.
The order could also include evidence in the possession of the F... (more)
The families of 9/11 victims are outraged that military spies were blocked from sharing key intelligence they believe could have averted the terrorist attacks – and are calling for a new commission to investigate.
"I’m angry that my son's death could have been prevented," Diana Horning, whose son was killed at the World Trade Center, told the New York Post.
"It outrages me because it's taken four years to come out."
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned this week that China must make significant structural changes in its economic policies, lest it remain "a problem for the international economy."
In an interview on Wednesday, Ms. Rice also laid out the administration's concerns about China's military buildup, its human rights record and its restrictions on religious freedom. Her unusually sharp criticism was a clear indication of the administration's ambivalence and frustration with Chin... (more)
Donald Rumsfeld, the American defence secretary, accused Venezuela's radical president Hugo Chavez yesterday of "anti-social, destabilising behaviour" that threatened regional security.
Mr Rumsfeld said that the oil-rich Venezuelan strongman and his Cuban ally Fidel Castro, had interfered in the affairs of Bolivia, lending support to a presidential candidate who has fought US efforts to eradicate cocaine production.
Speaking in the Peruvian capital Lima at the end o... (more)
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs voiced a high degree of concern on Thursday over an ongoing China-Russia joint military exercise and urged China to withdraw its missiles aimed at Taiwan.
Peace and security in the Taiwan Strait is of extremely vital importance to the Asia-Pacific region and the rest of the world, and no country in the region is allowed to do anything that threatens regional peace and stability, foreign ministry spokesman Michel Lu told reporters.
A global race is under way to reach the next milestone in supercomputer performance, many times the speed of today's most powerful machines.
And beyond the customary rivalry in the field between the United States and Japan, there is a new entrant - China - eager to showcase its arrival as an economic powerhouse.
The new supercomputers will not be in use until the end of the decade at the earliest, but they are increasingly being viewed as crucial investments for pro... (more)
British scientists have created the world’s first nerve stem cells in Edinburgh, Scotland, in a development which has been met with mixed reactions.
Some have touted the announcement as a major breakthrough in the race to treat diseases such as Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s. The cells were developed at the Edinburgh University Institute for Stem Cell Research, led by Professor Austin Smith.
It is the first time ever that scientists have been ... (more)
A federal grand jury has indicted five more people in a scheme in which employees of the state Department of Motor Vehicles office in Oakland accepted bribes to provide licenses and identification cards to illegal immigrants, court records show.
The grand jury returned indictments against the Oakland residents Aug. 11, charging them with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and other crimes stemming from a scam in which DMV employees received as much as $4,500 for each document and iss... (more)
When he worked in the Reagan White House in 1983, John Roberts made the case for a national ID card, saying in a memo that it would help address the "real threat to our social fabric posed by uncontrolled immigration."
The personal views of Roberts, whom President Bush has nominated to the Supreme Court, continued to emerge Thursday as the National Archives released more than 38,000 pages from his work in the White House counsel's office from 1982 to 1986. Combined with another 13... (more)
