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Blair Gadsby's hunger strike lasted for 17 days.

Senator John McCain was able to tough it out, and did not succumb to the urge to meet with a constituent.

Blair Gadsby, a religious history professor who has been involved in 9/11 truth for about a year, decided to do something about his frustrations in trying to approach U.S. Senator John McCain. McCain, the leading Republican presidential hopeful is also the author of the preface to the Popular Mechanics book "Debunking 9/11 Myths", which ignores most of the evidence for controlled demolition at the WTC.

One month after the attack on the World Trade Center, M.I.T. structural engineers offer their take on how and why the towers came down

There is presently an intense discussion if electromagnetic field (EMF) exposure has consequences for human health. This include exposure to structures and appliances that emit in the extremely low frequency (ELF) range of the electromagnetic spectrum, as well as emission coming from communication devices using the radiofrequency part of the spectrum.

William Bergman worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago from July 1990 until early 2004. He served as an economist for eight years, and then moved to a senior analyst position in a new department researching financial market and payment system risk policy issues. In late 2003, he was asked to consider an assignment in the money laundering area. Bergman accepted the assignment, underwent a background check, received credentials affording access to confidential banking information, and began working in the area. He was told that he was “part of the fight against terrorism” and that he “had been asking good questions.”

On New Year's Eve, the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq passed 3,000. By Tuesday, the death toll had reached 3,004 -- 31 more than died in the Sep. 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

But the number of injured has far outstripped the dead, with the Veterans Administration reporting that more than 150,000 veterans of the Iraq war are receiving disability benefits.

Advances in military technology are keeping the death rate much lower than during the Vietnam War and World War Two, Dr. Col. Vito Imbascini, an urologist and state surgeon with the California Army National Guard, told IPS, but soldiers who survive attacks are often severely disabled for life.

"If you lost an arm or a leg in Vietnam, you were also tremendously injured in your chest and abdomen, which were not protected by the armour plates back then," he said. "Now, your heart and chest and lungs and heart are protected by armour, leaving only your extremities exposed."

Dr. Imbascini just returned from a four-month deployment to Germany, where he treated the worst of the U.S. war wounded. He said that an extremely high number of wounded soldiers are coming home with their arms or legs amputated. Imbascini said he amputated the genitals of one or two men every day.

Fixing the issuing process of driver's licenses is a complex and difficult undertaking, but must be the top priority. In particular: bribery and physical security lapses are rampant in the DMVs; the basic documents used to make decisions about individuals applying for licenses and ID cards are rife with inconsistencies and fraud; the laws in each state are not harmonized, leading to weak states that have been targets of fraud; and many states lack adequate security to protect the machinery that issues cards and collects personal information. Work has begun in this area. The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators has several task groups to address various aspects of these concerns. However, Congress should study the policy implications of reforms in each area; act quickly based on the new information; and then, continue oversight to ensure that the enacted reforms are successful. Fraud and physical security need to be the top priority in driver's license security since it has posed the greatest threat and will continue to undermine all other security reforms at the DMV.

The following is a list of selected bribery and burglary cases at Motor Vehicle Offices since September 11, 2001.

AMERICA'S chief interest in going after Iraq's president, Saddam Hussein, is doubtless to save the world from his actual or potential weapons of mass destruction. Another large consideration, secondary as it may be, has attracted less attention than it should have: the effects that would follow from the opening up of the country's enormous reserves of oil.

Iraq's reserves are the second-biggest in the world, after Saudi Arabia's (see table). At present, thanks to UN sanctions and Mr Hussein's attempts to evade them, the country is producing a fraction of its potential. If it were to produce oil at a rate to match its reserves, say some geopolitical strategists, it could end Saudi Arabia's domination of world oil markets.

The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is an 11-member cartel set up in 1960. It wrought havoc in the 1970s and early 1980s by forcing up oil prices, causing high inflation and slow growth in rich countries. The cartel fell apart in the late 1980s, and the world enjoyed relatively low and stable oil prices for much of the following decade.

When there is a change of command—and not just in government—the new people often persuade themselves that the old people were much worse than anyone suspected. This feeling seems especially intense in the Bush Administration, perhaps because Bill Clinton has been bracketed by a father-son team. It's easy for people in the Administration to believe that, after an unfortunate eight-year interlude, the Bush family has resumed its governance—and about time, too.

The Bush Administration's sense that the Clinton years were a waste, or worse, is strongest in the realms of foreign policy and military affairs. Republicans tend to regard Democrats as untrustworthy in defense and foreign policy, anyway, in ways that coincide with what people think of as Clinton's weak points: an eagerness to please, a lack of discipline. Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national-security adviser, wrote an article in Foreign Affairs two years ago in which she contemptuously accused Clinton of "an extraordinary neglect of the fiduciary responsibilities of the commander in chief." Most of the top figures in foreign affairs in this Administration also served under the President's father. They took office last year, after what they regard as eight years of small-time flyswatting by Clinton, thinking that they were picking up where they'd left off.

Not long ago, I had lunch with—sorry!—a senior Administration foreign-policy official, at a restaurant in Washington called the Oval Room. Early in the lunch, he handed me a twenty-seven- page report, whose cover bore the seal of the Department of Defense, an outline map of the world, and these words:

Adolf Hitler clearly spelled out his plans to destroy the Jews and launch wars of conquest to secure German domination of world affairs in his 1925 book, long before he ever assumed power. Despite the zigzags of rhetoric he later employed, the various PR spins and temporary justifications offered for this or that particular policy, any attentive reader of his vile regurgitation could have divined his intentions as he drove his country -- and the world -- to murderous upheaval.

Similarly -- in method, if not entirely in substance -- the Bush Regime's foreign policy is also being carried out according to a strict blueprint written years ago, then renewed a few months before the Regime was installed in power by the judicial coup of December 2000.