Ft. Benning, GA - Sitting in a Georgia motel Saturday night, Kathy Kelly talked through a bad phone connection and a worse head cold to recount the previous day's activities where she and 13 others were arrested at an airstrip outside Raleigh, North Carolina.

The tiny Johnson County Airport is home to Aero Contractors Corp., a firm described by the New York Times as a major domestic hub of the Central Intelligence Agency's secret air service, that shuttles prisoners abroad for interrogation and suspected torture. The Times reports Aero was founded in 1979 by the chief pilot for Air America, a CIA front in Vietnam.

In addition to Kelly, those arrested Friday included residents of a Raleigh Catholic Worker house and members of Stop Torture Now, a project of the Center for Theology and Social Analysis in St. Louis, Missouri. Protesters walked onto company property and lowered the flags to half-mast before being arrested.

Gold closed at 486.40 dollars an ounce on Friday, up 3.5% from $470.00 for the week. The dollar closed at 0.8495 euros Friday, down 0.4% from 0.8531 the previous Friday. The euro, then, closed at 1.1772 dollars, up from $1.1722 the week before. Gold in euros, then, would be 413.18 euros an ounce, up 3.0% from 400.96 at the previous Friday's close. Oil closed at $57.21 a barrel, down 0.6% from $57.53 the week before. Oil in euros would be 48.60 euros a barrel, down 1.0% from 49.08 the week before. The gold/oil ratio closed at 8.50, up 4.0% from 8.17 at the previous Friday's close. In the U.S. stock market, the Dow closed at 10,766.33 on Friday, up 0.8% from 10,686.04 for the week. The NASDAQ closed at 2,227.07 up 1.1% from 2,202.47 the Friday before. The yield on the ten-year U.S. Treasury note was 4.50% down seven basis points from 4.57 at the previous week's close.

Washington - DuPont Co. hid studies showing the risks of a Teflon-related chemical used to line candy wrappers, pizza boxes, microwave popcorn bags and hundreds of other food containers, according to internal company documents and a former employee.

The chemical Zonyl can rub off the liner and get into food. Once in a person's body, it can break down into perfluorooctanoic acid and its salts, known as PFOA, a related chemical used in the making of Teflon-coated cookware.

Discussion on the use of physics in support of New Age concepts with Dr. Arkadiusz Jadczyk, author of eighty scientific papers and three books in the field of quantum theory, and winner of multiple awards for scientific achievements and excellence in teaching. For many years now, ideas from quantum physics have been picked up and used to support many ideas in the New Age movement. Is it really possible to create our own reality? Can we bring "love and light" by simply ignoring the darkness? Most importantly, does quantum physics really support any of these ideas? These are just some of the very questions we ask Dr. Jadczyk in our latest podcast.

Running Time: 01:10:21

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Olean -- Last week's column warned of imminent federal legislation that would toss powerful pharmaceutical companies billions of dollars and complete protection from liability suits in case untested and experimental bird flu vaccines damage American recipients. It drew heavy response.

The bill (S. 1873) -- a big congressional wet kiss to the drug industry -- is dressed up in a noble-sounding title: "Biodefense and Pandemic Vaccine and Drug Development Act."In essence, however, it would force Americans to receive inoculations against a disease that has yet to kill one of them, while removing their constitutional right to seek redress in our courts in case of injury or death from the shots because of company negligence. The proposal, now moving its way through the Senate, would also ban citizens from using the Freedom of Information Act and other popular informational laws to discover whether the new vaccine (when it is finally produced) was effective and safe, and even whether anyone had suffered adverse reactions to it.

Some of the e-mails and letters were laudatory, but sadly and predictably, many readers missed the point.

One wrote that I could only have reached my conclusions if I started from the position that the pharmaceutical companies were "evil" and that the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, and "practically every virologist and epidemiologist in the world is part of a conspiracy." Or was I saying that I have "some sort of privileged information that H5N1 influenza will never mutate and begin to infect humans and even if it does, it won't reach the USA?"

He ended by quoting some venerable Chinese philosopher's advice to "plan for what is difficult while it is easy, do what is great while it is small."

Well, yes, point taken on the aphorism -- but that's exactly the philosophical tack I'm following here: identifying a cancerous piece of federal business and dissecting it while it is still an undivided cell. If this bill -- which is absolutely laden with hidden agendas -- metastasizes into actual law, Senate 1873 could further ruin an already devastated national health care system.

Sure, the bird influenza that has killed 62 Asians may mutate into easily contractible flu for humans. I acknowledge that. It may soon reach the United States. I acknowledge that. But my beef is the thematic hidden agenda in this dangerous Senate bill that is designed to protect wealthy corporate contributors from any consequences of money-motivated, irresponsible scientific research and development. The legal precedent would be ruinous and take decades to set right.

One thing the bill-backer friends of Big Pharma are trying to slip through with this legislation is a market exclusivity provision that would extend patents on hugely profitable drugs that are about to evolve into the category of cheaper generic medicines.

Further, it would prohibit federal drug buyers from contracting with generic medicine makers to save taxpayers billions of dollars -- a current admirable practice.

Further, it would allow federal health officials to purchase medicines, vaccines and other palliatives by simple fiat without taking bids.

Further, and most onerously, the bill would vastly broaden the definition of products eligible to be characterized as "countermeasures" to terrorism -- in other words, potentially classifying commonly purchased substances like ibuprofen and aspirin as terrorist-fighting devices.

I'm not the only one who's noticed the exclusivity aspect of this legislative turkey.

The Coalition for a Competitive Pharmaceutical Market (CCPM) is an unusually broad-based national coalition of organizations powerful on Capitol Hill in representing employers, health insurers, chain drugstores, generic drug makers and pharmacy benefit managers.

Last week, this huge group urged the Senate to revise the "biodefense" bill to remove the broadened definition of terrorism "countermeasures" because the proposal allows it to be done "in a way that could grant existing everyday medicines -- rather than novel products related to (defense) against bioterrorism -- multiple years of additional market exclusivity."

This, contends CCPM chairman Annette Guarisco, "would unnecessarily drive up prescription drug costs for private and public payers without advancing our nation's bioterrorism preparedness."

Even the big health insurance companies and pharmaceutical management lobbyists were startled by the brazen provisions at the expense of common citizens Senate 1873 portends.

Mark J. Rubino, chief pharmacy officer for Aetna Inc., states, "For private and public purchasers seeking to provide consumers with therapeutically equivalent, but more cost-efficient generic drugs, the market exclusivity provision included in the Biodefense bill takes us in exactly the wrong direction."

Mark Merritt, president of the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, said, "This drug monopoly extension proposal is a sweeping and unprecedented measure that would rewrite drug-patenting and force working families, the disabled, and seniors to pay more for their prescription drugs. Perhaps most troubling of all, this measure has moved forward without any regard to the cost (effects) it would have on on Medicare, Medicaid, and private payers. America's working families, seniors, and small businesses deserve better."Some who read the column accused me of overstating the liability protections for Big Pharma contained in the bill. Surely, they wrote, I was guilty of hyperbole or making things up. Surely, federal legislators wouldn't remove the cherished American right to redress wrongs or seek compensation for uninvited injury.

Oh, yeah? The language seems pretty clear to me. It provides incredibly broad and iron-clad protection from any American seeking legal remedy from Big Pharma and just about everyone else involved in protecting against bird flu. Look up the draft bill's Section 319F-3 (a) if you don't believe me.

The international forecaster editor Bob Chapman writes: We reported on the large contingent of Israelis and Mossad personnel in Colombia a couple of months ago ... they are there in the thousands.

It's amazing the way the corporate media simply passes along unsubstantiated claims and outright Bushcon propaganda as fact - for instance, over at the Chicago Tribune, it is said an "al-Qaida offshoot" is "spearheading the anti-U.S. insurgency in Iraq," in other words, according to Joel Greenberg of the Tribune, the al-Zarqawi black op designed to discredit Iraqis who are attempting to end the illegal occupation of their country are terrorists who blow up hotels in neighboring countries. No doubt Greenberg is paid well to make up such fairy tales - or rather pass along the lies and distortions contrived by his editors and the Bushcons.

"After first claiming responsibility for the Wednesday attacks on three hotels popular with Israelis and Westerners, al-Qaida in Iraq later issued a second Internet statement that appeared to acknowledge that its tactics may have backfired and undermined any support the group enjoyed among the Jordanian population," writes Greenberg. In other words, the intelligence ops who issue these "internet statements" for the dead al-Zarqawi's P2OG false flag terrorist group decided their initial story didn't hold water, so they are sending out a clarification via one of their secured servers.

"The group said the attacks were launched only after its leaders became 'confident that (the hotels) are centers for launching war on Islam and support the crusaders' presence in Iraq and the Arab peninsula and the presence of the Jews on the land of Palestine,'" Greenberg continues. "They also were, the group asserted, 'a secure place for the filthy Israeli and Western tourists to spread corruption and adultery at the expense and suffering of the Muslims.'" No mention here of the now scrubbed fact the "filthy Israelis" were tipped off and evacuated the hotel before the black op unit attacked. Moreover, as usual, the blasts killed not only innocent Arabs, but in this instance also "the commander of the Palestinian Special Forces, Bashir Nafeh, Jihad Fatouh, the commercial attaché at the Palestinian Embassy in Cairo, and Mosab Khorma, deputy Chairman of Cairo-Amman Bank in the Palestinian territories and Col. Abed Allun, another high-ranking Preventive Security forces official, were also killed in the three nearly simultaneous suicide bombings on American-owned hotels," according to Rumor Mill News. It sure is odd how al-Zarqawi kills important Palestinians for the Likudites.

Jon, I know you're not dumb, and I'd like to think you're not hypocritical, so maybe you just really have missed the boat on this one. Therefore, in thanks for all the great laughs you've given us, I'd like to help you out a bit and invite you to join us on our next trip to the West Bank and Gaza. That way you can learn about things. The trip's on us, and the humus is great.

Interview with Laura Knight-Jadczyk about her new book 911: The Ultimate Truth, a look at the deep story of the events that have so marked the last four years. Conventional explanations set 911 in the context of the so-called "Clash of Civilisations" (if you agree with the official conspiracy theory that it was carried out by 19 Arabs guided by a madman holed up in an Afghani cave) or as part of a "New Pearl Harbor" to destabilise the Middle East and to ensure US control of world oil resources (if you disagree with the official story and think it was an inside job). While control of resources and reshaping the political map in the interests of a small group played a part on one level, 911 represents the opening of the End Game in a plan that stretches back thousands of years, a game in which we are all pawns. Laura delves into 911: The Ultimate Truth.

Running Time: 00:44:45

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We all have those images engraved in our memories: the aircraft approaches the skycraper and explodes sending out a fireball against the blue sky; the dust and smoke begins to arise as the towers tremble, collapsing in a vertical free fall, leaving only the ghost of the central core before it, too, evaporates into dust. Over and over again we have watched these clips, on that day and on many days since.