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A U.S.-led research team may have finally located the lost city of Atlantis, the legendary metropolis believed swamped by a tsunami thousands of years ago in mud flats in southern Spain.

“This is the power of tsunamis,” head researcher Richard Freund told Reuters.

“It is just so hard to understand that it can wipe out 60 miles inland, and that’s pretty much what we’re talking about,” said Freund, a University of Hartford, Connecticut, professor who lead an international team searching for the true site of Atlantis.

To solve the age-old mystery, the team used a satellite photo of a suspected submerged city to find the site just north of Cadiz, Spain. There, buried in the vast marshlands of the Dona Ana Park, they believe that they pinpointed the ancient, multi-ringed dominion known as Atlantis.

The team of archeologists and geologists in 2009 and 2010 used a combination of deep-ground radar, digital mapping, and underwater technology to survey the site.

Freund’s discovery in central Spain of a strange series of “memorial cities,” built in Atlantis’ image by its refugees after the city’s likely destruction by a tsunami, gave researchers added proof and confidence, he said.

Atlantis residents who did not perish in the tsunami fled inland and built new cities there, he added.

The team’s findings will be unveiled on Sunday in “Finding Atlantis,” a new National Geographic Channel special.

While it is hard to know with certainty that the site in Spain in Atlantis, Freund said the “twist” of finding the memorial cities makes him confident Atlantis was buried in the mud flats on Spain’s southern coast.

“We found something that no one else has ever seen before, which gives it a layer of credibility, especially for archeology, that makes a lot more sense,” Freund said.

Greek philosopher Plato wrote about Atlantis some 2,600 years ago, describing it as “an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Hercules,” as the Straits of Gibraltar were known in antiquity. Using Plato’s detailed account of Atlantis as a map, searches have focused on the Mediterranean and Atlantic as the best possible sites for the city.

Tsunamis in the region have been documented for centuries, Freund says. One of the largest was a reported 10-story tidal wave that slammed Lisbon in November, 1755.

Debate about whether Atlantis truly existed has lasted for thousands of years. Plato’s “dialogues” from around 360 B.C. are the only known historical sources of information about the iconic city. Plato said the island he called Atlantis “in a single day and night… disappeared into the depths of the sea.”

Experts plan further excavations are planned at the site where they believe Atlantis is located and at the mysterious “cities” in central Spain 150 miles away to more closely study geological formations and to date artifacts.

Source: Reuters

Egyptian activists have been circulating a kind of primer to Friday’s planned protest. We were sent the plan by two separate sources and have decided to publish excerpts here, with translations into English. Over Twitter, we connected with a translator, who translated the document with exceptional speed.

What follows are side-by-side translations of nine pages from the 26-page pamphlet. They were translated over the last hour and pasted up in Photoshop to give you an idea of what’s in the protest plan. While the plan itself contains specifics about what protesters might do, these excerpts show how one might equip oneself for clashes with riot police.

Source: The Atlantic

That photo of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. riding one of the first desegregated buses in Montgomery, Ala.? He took it. The well-known image of black sanitation workers carrying “I Am A Man” signs in Memphis? His. He was the only photojournalist to document the entire trial in the murder of Emmett Till, and he was there in Room 306 of the Lorraine Hotel, King’s room, on the night he was assassinated.

But now an unsettling asterisk must be added to the legacy of Ernest C. Withers, one of the most celebrated photographers of the civil-rights era: He was a paid FBI informant.

On Sunday, The Commercial Appeal newspaper in Memphis published the results of a two-year investigation that showed Withers, who died in 2007 at age 85, had collaborated closely with two FBI agents in the 1960s to keep tabs on the civil-rights movement. It was an astonishing revelation about a former police officer nicknamed the “Original Civil Rights Photographer,” famous in part for the trust he had engendered among high-ranking civil-rights leaders, including King.

“It is an amazing betrayal,” said Athan Theoharis, a historian at Marquette University who has written books about the FBI. “It really speaks to the degree that the FBI was able to engage individuals within the civil-rights movement. This man was so well trusted.”

From at least 1968 to 1970, Withers, who was black, provided photographs, biographical information and scheduling details to Howell Lowe and William H. Lawrence, two FBI agents in the bureau’s Memphis domestic surveillance program, according to numerous reports summarizing their meetings. The reports were obtained by the newspaper under the Freedom of Information Act and posted on its website.

A clerical error appears to have allowed for Withers’ identity to be divulged: In most cases in the reports, references to Withers and his informant number, ME 338-R, have been blacked out. But in several locations, the FBI appears to have forgotten to hide them. The FBI said Monday that it was not clear what had caused the lapse in privacy and was looking into the incident.

Civil-rights leaders have responded to the revelation with a mixture of dismay, sadness and disbelief. “If this is true, then Ernie abused our friendship,” said the Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., a retired minister who organized civil-rights rallies throughout the South in the 1960s.

Others were more forgiving. “It’s not surprising,” said Andrew Young, a civil-rights organizer who later became mayor of Atlanta. “We knew that everything we did was bugged, although we didn’t suspect Withers individually.”

Many details of Withers’ relationship with the FBI remain unknown. The bureau keeps files on all informants but has declined repeated requests to release Withers’, which would presumably explain how much he was paid by the FBI, how he was recruited and how long he served as an informant.

At the time of his death, Withers had the largest catalog of any individual photographer covering the civil-rights movement in the South, said Tony Decaneas, the owner of the Panopticon Gallery in Boston, the exclusive agent for Withers. His photographs have been collected in four books, and his family was planning to open a museum and name it after him.

His work shows remarkable intimacy with and access to top civil-rights leaders. Friends used to say he had a knack for being in the right place at the right time. But while he was growing close to top civil-rights leaders, Withers was also meeting regularly with the FBI agents, disclosing details about plans for marches and political beliefs of the leaders, even personal information like the leaders’ car-tag numbers.

David J. Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who has written biographies of King, said many civil-rights workers gave confidential interviews to the FBI and CIA, and were automatically classified as “informants.” The difference, Garrow said, is the evidence that Withers was being paid.

Although Withers’ motivation is not known, Garrow said informants were rarely motivated by the financial compensation, which “wasn’t enough money to live on.” But Marc Perrusquia, who wrote the article for The Commercial Appeal, noted that Withers had eight children and might have struggled to support them.

One daughter of Withers, Rosalind Withers, told local news organizations that she did not find the report conclusive.

“This is the first time I’ve heard of this in my life,” Withers told The Commercial Appeal. “My father’s not here to defend himself. That is a very, very strong, strong accusation.”

Other children of Withers did not respond to requests for comment.

Source: Seattle Times

The son of President Ronald Reagan suggests in an as-yet-unpublished book that his father was exhibiting the tell-tale signs of Alzheimer’s disease while still serving as President of the United States.

Alzheimer’s disease is a brain condition that interferes with memory and behavior, which usually starts small and develops into a debilitating form of dementia.

Ron Reagan’s book, titled “My Father at 100,” was to mark what would have been President Reagan’s 100th birthday on Feb. 6, 2011. President Reagan died in June 2004.

But his son, who’s identified himself as a liberal and an atheist, wrote that in 1984, as his father went on to become the oldest president ever reelected at age 74, the younger Reagan began to “experience the nausea of a bad dream coming true” with regards to his father’s mental condition.

He’d already suspected “something beyond mellowing” had begun to affect President Reagan and characterized his debate performance against Democratic nominee Walter Mondale as “fumbling,” “lost,” “tired and bewildered.”

The younger Reagan added that as early as 1986, his father had become alarmed at his growing lack of certain memories. “[He] had been alarmed to discover, while flying over the familiar canyons north of Los Angeles, that he could no longer summon their names,” Reagan wrote.

He specified that had his father been told then that he was developing Alzheimer’s, he probably would have resigned.

The younger Reagan also mentions an incident that went completely unreported in the media and remains unsupported in publicly available history to-date: that when his father was bucked off a horse while visiting Mexico in 1989, doctors actually had to remove part of the president’s skull to relieve swelling on his brain.

That’s when they first noticed physical signs of decay, he explained.

The incident was reported at the time as a minor injury, with Reagan ostensibly being treated for bruises and scrapes.

“There were no reports of Reagan with a shaved head or skull stitches later that month when he served as a guest TV announcer at the July 11 baseball All-Star Game in Anaheim, Calif., or when he was inducted into the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City on July 21,” Paul Bedard wrote for the Washington Whispers blog at US News and World Reports.

Many of Reagan’s liberal critics suggested then and still maintain today that he was essentially a corporate spokesman for the finance industries, serving as a frontman for a full-bore assault on labor unions and the further dismantling of US infrastructure and safety net programs.

President Reagan was said to have not experienced the “tell-tale” signs of Alzheimer’s until 1993, before his official diagnosis in late 1994. But if his son is correct, the history of a president lionized by virtually all of today’s Republicans could come to be seen under a very different light.

Read the excerpts in full, below, courtesy of US News and World Reports. Reagan’s book is due out in the coming months from The Viking Press.

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Three years into his first term as president, though, I was feeling the first shivers of concern that something beyond mellowing was affecting my father. We had always argued over this issue or that, rarely with anything approaching belligerence, but vigorously all the same. He generally had the advantage of practiced talking points backed up by staff research, but I was an unabashed, occasionally effective advocate for my own positions. ‘He told me you make him feel stupid,’ my mother once shared, to my alarm. I didn’t want my father to feel stupid. If he was going to shoulder massive responsibility, I wanted him to feel on top of his game. If he was going to fulfill his duties as president, he would have to be.” Pages 204-205

“Watching the first of his two debates with 1984 Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale, I began to experience the nausea of a bad dream coming true. At 73, Ronald Reagan would be the oldest president ever reelected. Some voters were beginning to imagine grandpa—who can never find his reading glasses—in charge of a bristling nuclear arsenal, and it was making them nervous. Worse, my father now seemed to be giving them legitimate reason for concern. My heart sank as he floundered his way through his responses, fumbling with his notes, uncharacteristically lost for words. He looked tired and bewildered.” Page 205.

“My father might himself have suspected that all was not as it should be. As far back as August 1986 he had been alarmed to discover, while flying over the familiar canyons north of Los Angeles, that he could no longer summon their names.” Page 218.

“In July 1989, barely six months out of office, my father visited friends in Mexico. While out riding he was thrown when his horse shied at something in the trailside scrub. That my father, even at age 78, would be bucked off his mount was, in itself, an ominous sign. It’s a wonder he didn’t break any bones, but he did hit his head hard enough to cause a sizable contusion. After initially refusing medical attention, he ultimately relented and was transported to a hospital in San Diego. Surgeons opening his skull to relieve pressure on the brain emerged from the operating room with the news that they had detected what they took to be probable signs of Alzheimer’s disease. No formal diagnosis was given, as far as I know. I have since learned from a doctor who happened to be interning at the hospital when my father was brought in that surgeons involved in his care, in what my informant characterized as ‘shameful’ behavior, violated my father’s right to medical privacy by subsequently gossiping about his condition.” Page 217.

“Doctors recommended to my mother that further tests of cognition be conducted the following year to measure any decline. Those tests, at the Mayo Clinic, confirmed the initial suspicion of Alzheimer’s.” Page 217.

“I’ve seen no evidence that my father (or anyone else) was aware of his medical condition while he was in office. Had the diagnosis been made in, say 1987, would he have stepped down? I believe he would have. Far less was known about the disease then, of course, than is known now. Today we are aware that the physiological and neurological changes associated with Alzheimer’s can be in evidence years, even decades, before identifiable symptoms arise. The question, then, of whether my father suffered from the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s while in office more or less answers itself.” Pages 217-218.

Source: Raw Story

CBS almost reported Reagan was mentally unfit in 1986

The Radium Girls were a group of female factory workers who contracted radiation poisoning from painting watch dials with glow-in-the-dark paint at the United States Radium factory in Orange, New Jersey around 1917.  The women, who had been told the paint was harmless, ingested deadly amounts of radium by licking their paintbrushes to sharpen them; some also painted their fingernails with the glowing substance.

Five of the women challenged their employer in a court case that established the right of individual workers who contract occupational diseases to sue their employers.

The Radium Girls saga holds an important place in the history of both the field of health physics and the labour rights movement. The right of individual workers to sue for damages from corporations due to labor abuse was established as a result of the Radium Girls case. In the wake of the case, industrial safety standards were demonstrably enhanced for many decades. Nonetheless, management and the US Government were again guilty of lax standards in the handling of asbestos during WWII ship building.

The case was settled in the fall of 1928, before the trial was deliberated by the jury, and the settlement for each of the Radium Girls was $10,000 ($127,589.47 in 2010 US dollars) and Read more »

Scott Noble has made a revelatory and important documentary, available free to the public, called “Human Resources: Social Engineering in the 20th Century.”

“Esentially,” says Scott, “this film is about the rise of mechanistic philosophy and the exploitation of human beings under modern hierarchical systems.” The film includes original interviews with: “Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Rebecca Lemov (“World as Laboratory”), Christopher Simpson (“The Science of Coercion”), George Ritzer (“The McDonaldization of Society”), Morris Berman (“The Reenchantment of the World”), John Taylor Gatto (“Dumbing us Down”), Alfie Kohn (“What does it mean to be well educated?”) and others.”

Read David Ker Thomson’s review of the film. He writes: “It answers the significant events of the last century the way a glass answers the implicit questions of a man who peers into its reflective surface–point for point. It corresponds, in short, to reality.”

A new analysis of a 40-year-old audio recording reveals that someone ordered National Guard troops to prepare to fire on students during a deadly Vietnam War protest at Kent State University in 1970, two forensics experts said.

The recording was enhanced and evaluated by New Jersey-based audio experts Stuart Allen and Tom Owen at the request of The Plain Dealer newspaper. Both concluded that they hear someone shout, “Guard!” Seconds later, a voice yells, “All right, prepare to fire!”

“Get down!” someone shouts, presumably in the crowd. A voice then says, “Guard!…” followed two seconds later by a booming volley of gunshots.

Four Kent State students were killed and nine were wounded.

“I think this is a major development,” said Alan Canfora, who was shot and wounded in the right wrist during the protest on May 4, 1970. Canfora, who has long believed that the troops were ordered to fire, located a copy of the tape in a library archive in 2007 and has urged that it be professionally reviewed.

The original reel-to-reel audio recording was made by Terry Strubbe, a student who placed a microphone in a window sill of his dormitory that overlooked the anti-war rally.

Allen, president and chief engineer of the Legal Services Group in Plainfield, N.J., removed extraneous noises — wind blowing across the microphone, for example — that obscured voices on the recording.

Without a voice sample for comparison, the new analysis can’t determine who might have issued such a command or why.

Most of the senior Ohio National Guard officers directly in charge of the troops have died.

Ronald Snyder, a former Guard captain who led a unit that was at the Kent State protest but was not involved in the shootings, said the prepare-to-fire phrasing does not seem consistent with how military orders are given.

The FBI investigated whether an order had been given to fire and said it could only speculate. One theory was that a guardsman panicked or fired intentionally at a student and others fired when they heard the shot.

In 1974, eight guardsmen tried on federal civil rights charges were acquitted by a U.S. judge. The surviving victims and families of the dead settled a civil lawsuit for $675,000 in 1979, agreeing to drop all future claims against the Guardsmen.

The significance of the new audio analysis may be more historical than legal, said Sanford Rosen, one of plaintiffs’ attorneys in the civil lawsuit.

Source: boston.com

LONDON (AFP) – Scouting founder Lord Robert Baden-Powell was invited to meet Adolf Hitler after friendly talks with the Hitler Youth about forming closer ties, secret British files released Monday showed.

Britain’s Baden-Powell, who started the Scouts in 1907, held talks with German ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop and Hitler Youth chief of staff Hartmann Lauterbacher on November 19, 1937.

Lauterbacher, then 28, was in Britain to foster closer relations with the Boy Scout movement and Ribbentrop invited Baden-Powell to tea with the Hitler Youth leader, newly declassified MI5 Security Service files revealed.

A letter from Baden-Powell to Ribbentrop the day after the meeting showed how he felt about the talks.

“I am grateful for the kind conversation you accorded me which opened my eyes to the feeling of your country towards Britain, which I may say reciprocates exactly the feeling which I have for Germany,” Baden-Powell wrote.

“I sincerely hope that we shall be able, in the near future, to give expression to it through the youth on both sides, and I will at once consult my headquarters officers and see what suggestions they can put forward.”

In a report on the meeting, Baden-Powell described Ribbentrop as “earnest” and “charming”.

He wrote: “I had a long talk with the ambassador, who was very insistent that the true peace between the two nations will depend on the youth being brought up on friendly terms together in forgetfulness of past differences.

“He sees in the Scout movement a very powerful agency for helping to bring this about if we can get into closer touch with the Jugend (Youth) movement in Germany.

“To help this he suggested that if possible we should send one or two men to meet their leaders in Germany and talk matters over and, especially, he would like me to go and see Hitler after I am back from Africa.”

He went on: “I told him that I was fully in favour of anything that would bring about a better understanding between our nations, and hoped to have further talks with him when I return from Africa.”

There is no evidence that Baden-Powell ever met Hitler.

Once the war had been under way for several years, the security services had no doubt about the nature of the Nazi youth wing.

An October 1944 intelligence assessment warned that the organisation should not be taken lightly and could not be compared to the Scouts.

It said: “It is a compulsory Nazi formation, which has consciously sought to breed hate, treachery and cruelty into the mind and soul of every German child.

“It is, in the true sense of the word, ‘education for death’.”

It was the period in the history of the United States known as Prohibition, from 1920-1933. During this time, the manufacture, sale and transportation of alcohol for consumption was banned throughout the US as mandated in the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Noble Experiment was a colossal failure.  As public use of alcohol was illegal, all drink was driven underground.  Syndicated crime sky rocketed, as the need to provide illegal liquor increased.

Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

Although mostly forgotten today, the “chemist’s war of Prohibition” remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was “our national experiment in extermination.”

Read the rest of the story at: The Chemist’s War (Slate)

Watch Prohibition – The Last War on Drugs

The worlds first real introduction to the atom was the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. What we witnessed was the raw destructive force of splitting the atom. In order to win us over to the peacetime uses of this technology the public needed to be educated.

A Is for Atom is a 14-minute animated propaganda film created by Sutherland Productions and paid for by General Electric.  The short explains what an atom is, how nuclear energy is released from certain kinds of atoms, the peacetime uses of nuclear power, and the by-products of nuclear fission.

Watch A Is for Atom