Ex-Rep. Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa., pens an op-ed in the New York Times today about the proper political response to this weekend's tragedy. I wholeheartedly support the former Congressman (Kanjorski lost his seat in November) when he argues that, following this weekend's shooting, Congressmen need to remain open and accessible to the public. However, Kanjorski is rather hypocritical when he climbs up on his soapbox:

We all lose an element of freedom when security considerations distance public officials from the people. Therefore, it is incumbent on all Americans to create an atmosphere of civility and respect in which political discourse can flow freely, without fear of violent confrontation.

Their stories are a staple of conspiracy culture: broken men, suffering hallucinations and near-total amnesia, who say they are victims of secret government mind-control experiments. Think Liev Schreiber in The Manchurian Candidate or Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory. Journalists are a favorite target for the paranoid delusions of this population. So is Gordon Erspamer - and the San Francisco lawyer's latest case isn't helping him to fend off the tinfoil-hat crowd. He has filed suit against the CIA and the US Army on behalf of the Vietnam Veterans of America and six former American soldiers who claim they are the real thing: survivors of classified government tests conducted at the Army's Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland between 1950 and 1975. "I get a lot of calls," he says. "There are a lot of crazy people out there who think that somebody from Mars is controlling their behavior via radio waves." But when it comes to Edgewood, "I'm finding that more and more of those stories are true!"

That government scientists conducted human experiments at Edgewood is not in question. "The program involved testing of nerve agents, nerve agent antidotes, psychochemicals, and irritants," according to a 1994 General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) report (pdf). At least 7,800 US servicemen served "as laboratory rats or guinea pigs" at Edgewood, alleges Erspamer's complaint, filed in January in a federal district court in California. The Department of Veterans Affairs has reported that military scientists tested hundreds of chemical and biological substances on them, including VX, tabun, soman, sarin, cyanide, LSD, PCP, and World War I-era blister agents like phosgene and mustard. The full scope of the tests, however, may never be known. As a CIA official explained to the GAO, referring to the agency's infamous MKULTRA mind-control experiments, "The names of those involved in the tests are not available because names were not recorded or the records were subsequently destroyed." Besides, said the official, some of the tests involving LSD and other psychochemical drugs "were administered to an undetermined number of people without their knowledge."

Erspamer's plaintiffs claim that, although they volunteered for the Edgewood program, they were never adequately informed of the potential risks and continue to suffer debilitating health effects as a result of the experiments. They hope to force the CIA and the Army to admit wrongdoing, inform them of the specific substances they were exposed to, and provide access to subsidized health care to treat their Edgewood-related ailments. Despite what they describe as decades of suffering resulting from their Edgewood experiences, the former soldiers are not seeking monetary damages; a 1950 Supreme Court decision, the Feres case, precludes military personnel from suing the federal government for personal injuries sustained in the line of duty. The CIA's decision to use military personnel as test subjects followed the court's decision and is an issue Erspamer plans to raise at trial. "Suddenly, they stopped using civilian subjects and said, 'Oh, we can get these military guys for free,'" he says. "The government could do whatever it wanted to them without liability. We want to bring that to the attention of the public, because I don't think most people understand that." (Asked about Erspamer's suit, CIA spokeswoman Marie Harf would say only that the agency's human testing program has "been thoroughly investigated, and the CIA fully cooperated with each of the investigations.")

It seems that being the lender of last resort in a financial crisis has its benefits. The US Federal Reserve recorded $80.9bn (£52bn) profit last year thanks to the interest payments on the vast amount of US government and private debt it now owns.

More than $75bn of the total, which it hands over to the Treasury, came from income generated by its holdings of Treasury bonds, mortgage-backed securities and debt issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The 65pc jump in profits compared with 2009 comes as the Fed's quantitative easing (QE) programme has pushed the size of its balance sheet to almost $2.5 trillion. After the first round of QE in March of last year, the Fed embarked on controversial second round in November designed to boost the US economy's stuttering recovery. Critics say QE is the wrong policy to try to cut unemployment with, and it risks sparking inflation as more money chases investments.

Iran's intelligence chief said Tuesday that more than 10 people arrested in connection with last year's killing of a nuclear physicist were linked to the Mossad and he warned that Israel's spy agency was out to roll back scientific progress in Muslim nations.

Heidar Moslehi revealed few new details to bolster the claim a day earlier that Iran's probe into the killing had led its agents to infiltrate the Mossad. He did not say exactly how many people were arrested but accused "more than 10" of them of belonging to networks linked to the Israeli agency. Officials also displayed for reporters several handguns - one fitted with a silencer - that they said were seized from the suspects.

Tehran University physics professor Masoud Ali Mohammadi was killed by a bomb-rigged motorcycle that exploded outside his house as he was leaving for work in January 2010. Possible explanations for why he was targeted have never been clear, particularly as he had no known link to Iran's nuclear program.

In November, a pair of mysterious bomb attacks in Tehran killed one nuclear scientist and wounded another - both of whom appeared deeply involved in the country's atomic work.

Speaking to reporters, Moslehi said Israel was out to stop nations in the region from making scientific advancements.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton compared the man who shot Gabrielle Giffords to Islamist terrorists and the 9/11 attackers and said the incident showed America and the Arab world faced similar problems.

In a television broadcast filmed before students in Abu Dhabi, Mrs Clinton was asked why the 9/11 terror attacks, the work of a handful of men, had been allowed to colour American views of a whole people.

She replied that America was "proud" of its many Muslim citizens and public servants, and said that the media exaggerated the voices of those who presented hostile views of the Muslim and Arab worlds.

She then raised the shooting at the weekend of the Arizona Democratic congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords.

"We have extremists in our country," she said. "A wonderful and incredibly brave young woman congress member was just shot by extremists in our country.

"We have the same kinds of problems, so rather than standing off of each other we should work to try and prevent the extremists wherever they are from being able to commit violence."

Ascribing the Arizona shootings to political extremism rather than the work of a mentally deranged loner has already proved controversial, and President Barack Obama avoided doing so directly in his address to the American people afterwards.

Mrs Clinton may be taking an even bigger risk in comparing the attack, even obliquely, to al-Qaeda's war on America.

Google mogul Larry Page has joined the billionaire boat owner club by splashing out $45m on his own super yacht - but unlike many moguls, he bought his yacht used.

Page, 37, picked up the 193-ft boat 'Senses' which comes with a helipad, gym, multi-level sun decks, ten luxurious suites, a crew of 14 and interior design by famed French designer Philippe Starck.

As the new year dawns, and we look at the state of our world and its human population, we find little cause for hope for the future. Wars, rumors of wars and suffering on an ever increasing scale seem to be the order of the day. The blame, of course, lies squarely with ourselves, the civilian population, not so much for anything we are doing but rather for what we, collectively, are not doing. Our political leaders are, naturally enough, very happy with this state of affairs, having invested long years and much effort in placating and anesthetizing the 'little people' via toxic propaganda and toxic food. But have they, the supposed creme de la creme of human society, been a little too successful?

If their main reason for getting up and going to 'work' in the morning (or early afternoon) was to wage silent political (and often military) wars to safeguard their own ascendancy against the threat of an irate multitude of awakened plebs, what will they do now that that threat has been neutralized? Where will all that self-righteous, narcissistic rage go? If we look to the animal kingdom (which is a rather good place to look for an analogy in this case) we find that in similar situations, predatory animals tend to turn on each other.

Hope springs eternal, as they say, but perhaps not in the way we expect.

Who knows more about health - the mainstream media or those that believe in "conspiracy theories"? Well, the truth is that time after time after time those in the "alternative media" and those who believe in "conspiracy theories" have been proven to be far ahead of those in the mainstream media when it comes to matters of health. Sadly, the mainstream media receives so much funding and so many advertising dollars from the pharmaceutical industry, the medical industry, the big chemical companies and the health insurance industry that they are extremely cautious to report any information that would be harmful to any of them. So for years, the mainstream media generally refused to talk about the dangers posed by things such as fluoride, aspartame, prescription drugs, genetically modified crops and cell phones. But now the alternative media has been making so much noise about many of these health issues for so long that the mainstream media has been forced to acknowledge that some of these "conspiracy theories" about health are actually true.

Not that the mainstream media is all of a sudden turning their backs on the financial giants that are pumping billions of dollars into them. But the truth is that we are starting to see just a little bit more honest reporting about health issues from the mainstream media these days.

The following are 8 conspiracy theories about health that the mainstream media has been forced to admit are actually true....

The Video Discusses legislation the govenment intends to be able to use in case of an outbreak of Swine Flu in the State of Massachusetts and how the state will give itself the powers to force anyone, unwilling to take the vaccine, to have it administered anyway. The bill also protects health care workers from liability in case something went wrong with the voluntary or forced vaccine(s).

What you need to know about Swine Flu and other vaccines.