Dr. Gio Gori, former deputy director of the US National Cancer Institute's Division of Cancer Cause and Prevention and chairman of the Tobacco Working Group, explains why the alleged dangers of Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS) are entirely fictional.

Talk recorded at the international conference "Thinking is forbidden", held in Brussels 27/28 January 2009 (originally: "Smoking Bans and Lies", organized by The International Coalition against Prohibition).

Part 1

Forces International are glad to re-introduce to our readers the multimedia version of the most concise and scientifically accurate documentary on the international fraud on passive smoking. In only thirteen minutes you can learn how to educate others, while gaining for yourself a full perspective on the depth of this fraud - and of the corruption of the institutions that promote it.

A few years ago a group of researchers in Scotland studying learning in apes did some experiments (involving opening boxes to get a piece of candy inside) that showed that chimpanzees learn in a variety of "flexibly adaptive" ways, and that 3 year old children being presented with a similar task most often did it in ways that appear to be less intelligent than the apes. They "suggest that the difference in performance of chimpanzees and children may be due to a greater susceptibility of children to cultural conventions." (Horner and Whiten, 2005; Whiten, et al., 2004).

In my newsletter on puberty, I described some of the effects of foods and hormones on intelligence. Here, I want to consider the effects of culture on the way people learn and think. Culture, it seems, starts to make us stupid long before the metabolic problems appear.

For many years I described culture as the perceived limits of possibility, but people usually prefer to think of it as the learned rules of conduct in a society. In the late 1950s I was talking with a psychologist about the nature of "mental maps," and I said that I found my way around campus by reference to mental pictures of the locations of things, and he said that his method was to follow a series of rules, "go out the front door and turn left, turn left at the first corner, walk three blocks and turn right, ....up the stairs, turn right, fourth office on the left." He had been studying mental processes for about 40 years, so his claim made an impression on me.

I'm sitting on a white plastic chair in what seems like total darkness. Strapped to my chest and shoulders is an array of electronic gear--microphones, a video camera, a box that detects magnetic changes and a Geiger counter. Somewhere in the mix is a flashlight, the only device whose function I understand, and thus, the only device I cannot find.

In front of me, I can almost make out the sinister shapes of some truly spooky trees. Malevolent bugs are buzzing in and out of my eyes and ears, and it occurs to me that there must be a tavern open somewhere nearby, even in this remote corner of Utah. One hundred or more yards away, beyond a barbed-wire fence and a little creek, are my fellow paranormal rangers, equipped with their own video cameras, night-vision glasses and assorted scientific gear. They are supposed to be watching me to see if anything happens.

On this night, I am the bait. Bait for what, I wonder? The unspoken hope is my own inherent weirdness quotient might give me some sort of connection to the undeniably odd energy, or entity, that seems to have concentrated itself on this remote rural community, and, in particular, on this small ranch where I now sit, waiting for something to announce its presence.

Some very strange things have happened at the precise spot where I'm sitting. It is here that a visitor was accosted by a roaring but nearly invisible creature, something akin to the Predator of movie fame. It is here that a Ph.D. physicist reported that his mind was invaded, literally taken over, by some sort of hostile intelligence that warned him that he was not welcome. It is here that an entire team of researchers watched in awe as a bright door or portal opened up in the darkness and a large humanoid creature crawled out before quickly vanishing. And it is here that several animals--cattle and dogs--were mutilated, obliterated or simply disappeared.

People have got shorter and our brains have shrunk - and scientists believe farming could be to blame.

Modern humans are about 10 percent smaller and shorter than our hunter-gatherer ancestors, scientists have found, and our brains have fallen in size by the same proportion.

Most of that decline in physical size has occurred since the advent of farming about 10,000 years ago.

The findings run contrary to the popular notion that humans are growing progressively larger and taller.

Research shows that declines in height occurred in 19 of 21 societies that switched from hunter-gathering to farming - perhaps the greatest change in lifestyle in human history.

The findings pose a puzzle since societies that switch to farming usually experience a population boom as food becomes more plentiful.

Several writers have noted the odd fact that the Libyan rebels took time out from their rebellion in March to create their own central bank - this before they even had a government. Robert Wenzel wrote in the Economic Policy Journal:

I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising. This suggests we have a bit more than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty sophisticated influences.

Alex Newman wrote in the New American:

In a statement released last week, the rebels reported on the results of a meeting held on March 19. Among other things, the supposed rag-tag revolutionaries announced the "[d]esignation of the Central Bank of Benghazi as a monetary authority competent in monetary policies in Libya and appointment of a Governor to the Central Bank of Libya, with a temporary headquarters in Benghazi."

Newman quoted CNBC senior editor John Carney, who asked, "Is this the first time a revolutionary group has created a central bank while it is still in the midst of fighting the entrenched political power? It certainly seems to indicate how extraordinarily powerful central bankers have become in our era."

It's official: The housing crisis that began in 2006 and has recently entered a double dip is now worse than the Great Depression.

Prices have fallen some 33 percent since the market began its collapse, greater than the 31 percent fall that began in the late 1920s and culminated in the early 1930s, according to Case-Shiller data.

The news comes as the Federal Reserve considers whether the economy has regained enough strength to stand on its own and as unemployment remains at a still-elevated 9.1 percent, throwing into question whether the recovery is real.

"The sharp fall in house prices in the first quarter provided further confirmation that this housing crash has been larger and faster than the one during the Great Depression," Paul Dales, senior economist at Capital Economics in Toronto, wrote in research for clients.

The true identity of internationally renowned blogger 'A Gay Girl in Damascus' has been revealed as a 40-year-old American man.

Tom MacMaster, a student at the University of Edinburgh, wrote an apology on the blog today, confessing that the entire thing was a hoax.

His admission came after days of questioning and pressure by suspicious readers who did not buy the story that 'blogger' Amina Arraf, a lesbian Syrian-American living in Damascus, had been arrested.

In his post today MacMaster, writing from Istanbul in Turkey where he is on holiday with his wife Britta Froelicher, admitted his narrative was fictional.

But he insisted the blog, popular with thousands around the world, 'created an important voice for issues I feel strongly about'.

He claimed he had never expected so much attention.

The writer formerly employed by Nature, Rex Dalton, recently implied in a Miller-McCune blog that Allen West is a criminal charlatan. That is untrue. I have spoke over the last month to Allen, as well as a number of his collaborators, and determined the true story to the satisfaction of the Tusk. I have also assembled and shared a number of primary documents linked below, not identified or referenced by Dalton, et. al.

The true story is consistent with my experience that Allen West is an honest-to-goodness, if imperfectly credentialed, key contributor to the hypothesis and the papers.

I am very biased in this matter. For instance, Allen is my most frequent (if only) house guest. My wife Pam and I have allowed Allen to stay with our young family on several occasions. The little guy has been a close friend for over five years. I know Allen West as well as anyone on the Younger Dryas team or its collaborators.

I suppose Allen West could appear to readers of Dalton's article to be a liar salting his samples at his own expense to get on TV. But I have reason to believe this is untrue.

For one, I have spoken regularly over the last decade with the laboratory techs, supervising scientists and co-authors dealing with the hundreds of samples from dozens of locations around the world and it would simply be impossible for Allen to direct from his "laboratory" in Arizona a fraud of this complexity, scale and nature.

Should you keep paying your mortgage on a home that's dwindling in value?

No way, say an increasing number of underwater homeowners who are voluntarily choosing to "walk away" from their home loans, a practice known as "strategic default."

Jon Maddux, CEO of YouWalkAway.com, reports 10% more clients this year to his company, which advises people how best to handle the walk away process.

Charles Gallagher, a real estate attorney in St. Petersburg, Fla., has also seen an uptick.