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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.

In the booming surveillance industry they spy on whom they wish, when they wish, protected by barriers of secrecy, fortified by billions of pounds worth of high, high technology. Duncan Campbell reports from the United States on the secret Anglo-American plan for a global electronic spy system for the 21st century capable of listening in to most of us most of the time.
American, British and Allied intelligence agencies are soon to embark on a massive, billion-dollar expansion of their global electronic surveillance system. According to information given recently in secret to the US Congress, the surveillance system will enable the agencies to monitor and analyse civilian communications into the 21st century. Identified for the moment as Project P415, the system will be run by the US National Security Agency (NSA). But the intelligence agencies of many other countries will be closely involved with the new network, including those from Britain, Australia, Germany and Japan--and, surprisingly, the People's Republic of China.

Next month the kids will be going back to school, and the 2005-2006 school year holds one HELL of a surprise for parents. This year, all parents will receive written notice of new policies from the public schools. Many schools will ask you to sign permission slips, allowing school counselors or "advocates" to have conversations with your children. You will be told how your local schools are now involved in vision and dental screenings, learning disabilities and speech impediment screenings, and other acts of kindness. But beware of the small print, which states that your children will also be evaluated for emotional wellness. Watch for wording like "happiness indicators" or "family participation."
Our President has mandated that every American child, age 3 through 18, is federally ordered to be evaluated for mental health issues and to receive "enforced" treatment. Welcome to President Bush's New Freedom Initiative and New Freedom Commission on Mental Health. Welcome to life-long profiling and drug addictions, New Freedom-style.

Following a published report that the Bush Administration is holding up a study that shows most Americans carry a toxic rocket fuel chemical in their bodies at levels close to federal safety limits, Environmental Working Group (EWG) is calling for the immediate release of the study so EPA and state agencies can take steps to protect the public.

Risk Policy Report, an independent newsletter, reported Feb. 28 that the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy is pressuring the Centers for Disease Control to delay the release of a study that tested for perchlorate in human blood samples from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). An EPA source told the newsletter that CDC has found levels of perchlorate that "leave no margin of safety" for the public, compared to EPA's current risk limit.

On February 24 and February 27, 2006, EWG purchased the following drinks at four major retail outlets in Washington, DC. They all contained ascorbic acid and either sodium benzoate or potassium benzoate—the ingredients that the FDA and the beverage industry have said can mix together to form benzene, a known human carcinogen. The actual levels of benzene formed in these products may be at trace levels and within legal limits for drinking water. EWG has no information indicating that benzene is actually present in any of these products at any level, however, we recommend that consumers avoid any amount of benzene in drinks intended for children (listed alphabetically):

(WASHINGTON, Feb 28) - Today the Environmental Working Group (EWG) sent a letter to the FDA requesting that the Agency notify the public about the presence of two ingredients in many popular children's drinks that can mix together to form the cancer-causing chemical benzene. The FDA last addressed this problem more than 15 years ago when it entered into a voluntary agreement with the beverage industry to reformulate its products to avoid the presence of this hazardous mixture. It appears, based on news reports and a sampling by EWG of popular children's drinks from retail outlets, that many manufacturers have not complied.

In 1990, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) learned that certain soft drinks marketed to children contain two ingredients that can mix in the soda to form the toxic carcinogen benzene. The Agency didn't tell the public, but instead merely asked companies to voluntarily change their formulas to eliminate the problem.

For decades, U.S. and foreign pesticide manufacturers have been feeding their products to rats, rabbits, mice, and guinea pigs in thousands
of controlled laboratory studies, all designed to satisfy government regulatory requirements for chemicals that kill weeds, insects, rodents and other pests.
Studies on lab animals are still routinely conducted for pesticides today. But in recent years, in a growing number of experiments that
are raising ethical, legal and scientific questions inside and outside government, the test animals are people.
And for reasons neither U.S. nor British environmental officials can explain, most of the recent human pesticide experiments are being performed in England and Scotland.

Scientists have been studying pollutants in air, water and on land for decades. Now they're studying pollution in people, and the findings are troubling. In 2003, we tested the blood and urine of nine volunteers for 211 possible contaminants — and discovered 167 pollutants, including an average of 56 carcinogens in each person.

With this study we set a benchmark for the exploding science on the human "bodyburden" — the pollution in people — that raises deep concerns about a system of public health protections that doesn't ask chemical companies to safety test their products before they are sold.

EWG recognizes the value of fluoride to dentistry, yet a substantial and growing body of peer-reviewed science strongly suggests that adding fluoride to tap water is not the safest way to achieve the dental health benefits of fluoridation. Over the past ten years a large body of peer-reviewed science has raised concerns that fluoride may present unreasonable health risks, particularly among children, at levels routinely added to tap water in American cities. This strong body of science has taken concerns about the health hazards of fluoride from the fringe to the mainstream of the scientific establishment. ewly obtained documents show that the chairman of the Department of Oral Health Policy and Epidemiology at Harvard told federal officials unequivocally that there was no relationship between fluoride and bone cancer, but a grant-funded publication he cites found exactly the opposite.

A report released by a House committee on Thursday describes how the Bush administration worked with the United States chemical industry to undermine a European plan that would require all manufacturers to test industrial chemicals for their effect on public health before they were sold in Europe.

The administration had said publicly that the proposal last year would threaten the $20 billion in chemicals that the United States exports to Europe each year because the cost of testing would be prohibitive. Five years in the making, the proposal, which was revised and is still under consideration, would shift the burden to prove the safety of chemicals onto manufacturers instead of governments.