Our memories can be very selective, and it turns out, very creative.

"Memory is not like a tape recorder," says Jacquie Pickrell, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of Washington, who has come up with evidence that it may be possible for outsiders to "implant" memories of phony events in our brains. Her research suggests it doesn't take much, maybe just the right advertisement.

Official study finds that France's 35-hour week has boosted the economy and proved a hit with both employees and their bosses.

Faded black jeans hanging in front of an anarchist-red banner, the words "INDEPENDENCE," "FREEDOM," and "WE THE PEOPLE" scrawled across display windows in fake black spray paint.

Despite the fact that Gap makes their clothes in sweatshops, and have been subject to many demonstrations across the nation, they believe that the growing movement against corporate power is now large enough to begin marketing on. Now the protest itself can be essentially sold to consumers as an image.

However ridiculous this new marketing scheme seems at first, due to the tremendous power of corporate advertising over consumers, Gap just might pull it off, trivializing the movement against free trade, and selling jeans at the same time.

Prayer and meditation are, if you think about it, ancient technologies for apprehending and communicating with God. That a brain can be manipulated in a laboratory to create a religious experience doesn't surprise me; that these age-old methods of focusing the mind can, does. Whether that brain is experiencing God, or a heightened or highly unusual way of being human is a split hair.

To my mind, the value of these heightened experiences - and of the religious life itself, comprised of a multitude of actions and emotional responses - is intrinsic, and in no way predicated on the accuracy of the individual's underlying belief system. Any experience or way of life that confers wisdom, grace, compassion, or courage upon those whom it affects is a strengthening force, a force for good, helping them as it does to shape their humanness in a more Godly form.

Personal debt is at an all-time high, and the amount of income Americans are dedicating to making payments on it is at levels unseen in 15 years. Mortgage delinquencies and write-offs by credit card companies are rising, and personal bankruptcy filings could hit a record this year.

That translates to serious financial pain for families that are overextended at a time when unemployment is rising, experts say. It also means that just when the cooling U.S. economy needs spending by consumers to sustain growth, they're hard-pressed to do so.

"Consumer debt isn't a problem unless and until people lose their jobs, and that has started to happen," said David Orr, chief economist at the First Union Corp. in Charlotte, N.C. "It's not the cause of the economy's problems, but it can make the snowball roll downhill faster."

...to understand the current situation you have to understand Africa's long, sad history of abuse at the hands of western governments and corporations. In particular, the Industry Standard, like most mainstream news organizations, failed to fully examine the U.S. government's historical role in the de-stablization and exploitation of the Congo. (...)

In 1960, the Congo achieved independence after almost a century of brutal Belgian colonial rule. Soon after, Patrice Lumumba, a pan-africanist who favored returning his country’s natural resources to its people, was elected prime minister.

Barely a week after independence, the Congolese army revolted. A few days later, Moise Tshombe, leader of Confederation des Association du Katanga (CONAKAT), declared independence for the mineral-rich province in the south. Tshombe called on Belgium to “re-establish public order and security and contribute its technical, financial and military aid” - opening the door for the colonial power to return.

On January 17, 1961, Belgian soldiers, with the aid of the CIA, executed Lumumba and several of his ministers. New documents have revealed the order to kill came from Eisenhower himself.

Their Wave Rider technology is a series of lightweight concrete floats that would sit one to two miles off shore. The floats are connected to a hydraulic pump that extends nearly 60 feet down to the ocean floor. The up-and-down motion of the waves creates pressure that drives the hydraulic pump, which then drives turbines to generate electric power.

Everyday life, supersaturated with images and jingles, makes intellectual life look hopelessly sluggish, burdensome, difficult. In a video-game world, the play of intellect -- the search for validity, the willingness to entertain many hypotheses, the respect for difficulty, the resistance to hasty conclusions -- has the look of retardation.

"We have stopped reading, we have not the time. Our mind is solicited simultaneously from too many sides: it has to be spoken to quickly as it passes by. But there are things that cannot be said or understood in such haste, and these are the most important things for man. This accelerated movement, which makes coherent thought impossible, may alone be sufficient to weaken, and in the long run utterly to destroy, human reason."

-- Lamennais (1819)

The term medical marijuana took on dramatic new meaning in February, 2000 when researchers in Madrid announced they had destroyed incurable brain tumors in rats by injecting them with THC, the active ingredient in cannabis.

The Madrid study marks only the second time that THC has been administered to tumor-bearing animals; the first was a Virginia investigation 26 years ago. In both studies, the THC shrank or destroyed tumors in a majority of the test subjects.

...

News coverage of the Madrid discovery has been virtually nonexistent in this country. The news broke quietly on Feb. 29, 2000 with a story that ran once on the UPI wire about the Nature Medicine article. This writer stumbled on it through a link that appeared briefly on the Drudge Report web page. The New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times all ignored the story, even though its newsworthiness is indisputable: a benign substance occurring in nature destroys deadly brain tumors.

It is hoped that artists of various disciplines will find some value in this work and that there is something that will inspire them in the studio during the long hours of solitary working. And that, in reading the quotations from other artists, feel a sense of connectedness to the traditions and struggles of which we are an intrinsic part; "participating", as Charles Schnieder has said, "in a trans- temporal dialog with the artists who have preceded us."; carrying on, through our work, a conversation with the generations of artists past, present and future.

Thurman: How do you feel about the state of the world as we approach the 21st century?

Dalai Lama: I am basically optimistic. And I see four reasons for this optimism. First, at the beginning of this century, people never questioned the effectiveness of war, never thought there could be real peace. Now, people are tired of war and see it as ineffective in solving anything.

Second, not so long ago people believed in ideologies, systems, and institutions to save all societies. Today, they have given up such hopes and have returned to relying on the individual, on individual freedom, individual initiative, individual creativity.

Third, people once considered that religions were obsolete and that material science would solve all human problems. Now, they have become disillusioned with materialism and machinery and have realized that spiritual sciences are also indispensable for human welfare.

Finally, in the early part of this century people used up resources and dumped waste as if there were no end to anything, whereas today even the smallest children have genuine concern for the quality of the air and the water and the forests and animals.

In these four respects there is a new consciousness in the world, a new sensitivity to reality. Based on that, I am confident that the next century will be better than this one.

There are words, such as underpants and douchebag, that crack me up every time I hear them. I cannot control this, but then again I don’t really want to.

For an as yet vaguely-defined upcoming project, I’d like to get an idea which words make you laugh involuntarily, and so am soliciting contributions. You need not explain why, but explanations are most welcome.

Jensen: What would you say is the fundamental difference between the Western and indigenous ways of life?

Deloria: I think the primary difference is that Indians experience and relate to a living universe, whereas Western people - especially scientists - reduce all things, living or not, to objects. The implications of this are immense. If you see the world around you as a collection of objects for you to manipulate and exploit, you will inevitably destroy the world while attempting to control it. Not only that, but by perceiving the world as lifeless, you rob yourself of the richness, beauty, and wisdom to be found by participating in its larger design.

...

In this universe, all activities, events, and entities are related. Thus, it doesn't matter what kind of existence an entity enjoys; whether it is human or otter or rock or star, it participates in the ongoing creation of reality. To Indians, life is not a predatory jungle, "red in tooth and claw," as Western ideology likes to pretend, but a symphony of mutual respect in which each player has a specific part to play. We must be in our proper place and play our role at the proper moment. Because we humans arrived last in this world, we are the "younger brothers" of the other creatures and therefore have to learn everything from them. Our real interest shouldn't be to discover the abstract structure of physical reality, but rather to find the proper road down which to walk.

I would also say that another major difference between Western and indigenous religions is that aboriginal groups have never had any need for a messiah. In fact, there really is no place for one in their cosmos.

Jensen: Why is that?

Deloria: If the world is not "a vale of tears," then there's no need for salvation. Indians know nothing of a wholly different world - a heaven - compared to which this world has no value. Indian religion is instead concerned, as sociologist Robert Bellah has noted, with "the maintenance of personal, social, and cosmic harmony, and with attaining specific goods - rain, harvest, children, health - as men have always been." The North American Indians don't desire transcendence. They simply want to learn more about the reality that confronts them.

Why do Western people - and the Near Eastern peoples from whom their religions are derived - need a messiah? Why is their appraisal of the physical world a negative one? Why do their societies suffer such crises? Why do they insist on believing that ultimate reality is contained in another, unimaginable realm beyond the senses and the span of human life? I don't understand it. Religion, as I have experienced it, isn't the recitation of beliefs, but a way of helping us understand our lives. It must, I think, have an intimate connection with the world in which we live, and any religion that favors other places - heaven and the like - over the physical world is a delusion, a mere control device to manipulate us.

This is a book about freedom, and above all about the idea that there is often no greater obstacle to freedom than the assumption that it has already been attained. What prison, after all, could be more secure than that deemed to be 'the world', where boundaries of action and thought are assumed to define not the limits of the permissible, but the limits of the possible.

In research carried out in the United States, particle physicists have shown that light pulses can be accelerated to up to 300 times their normal velocity of 186,000 miles per second.

The implications, like the speed, are mind-boggling. On one interpretation it means that light will arrive at its destination almost before it has started its journey. In effect, it is leaping forward in time.

A public-health researcher at Rutgers University in New Jersey, Vega followed recent immigrants from Mexico as they tried to integrate into American society. When they first arrived, they were much better adjusted than the Americans they settled among (they had half the incidence of psychological dysfunction). But as they Americanized, they got sicker and sicker. After 13 years Stateside, their rates of depression, anxiety and drug problems had almost doubled (to 32 per cent from 18 per cent), to the point where they were now on par with the average American.

Advertisements for a string of recent movies from Columbia Pictures have included gushingly positive comments from a critic who does not exist, Newsweek magazine reported in its edition that goes on sale on Monday.

The fake critic, David Manning, was the creation of an employee in the studio's advertising department whose unfailingly upbeat quotes went unchallenged since last July and were included in ad copy for at least four films, the magazine reported.

The world apparently sounds very different to infants than it does to adults. Sometimes it's filled with a cacophony of sounds that makes it difficult for babies to distinguish a single sound from all the surrounding noise, says a University of Washington scientist. That's because babies are generalists and hear all frequencies simultaneously so they can respond to unexpected sounds, reports Lynne Werner, a UW professor of speech and hearing science, in the May edition of The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.