Researchers map how schizophrenia engulfs teen brains: “Scientists at UCLA and the National Institute of Mental Health employed magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology to

scan a group of teenagers repeatedly as they developed schizophrenia. Using a new image analysis method that detects

very fine changes in the brain, the scientists detected gray matter loss of more than 10 percent first in the parietal, or outer,

regions of the brain; this loss spread to engulf the rest of the brain over five years.” EurekAlert

Now, Doctors Must Identify the Dead Among the Trade Center Rubble, “… gearing up for the largest

effort in the annals of forensic

medicine…” New York Times [login:”fmhreader”; password: “fmhreader”]

How big a war? More on the Wolfowitz/Powell schism. I thought Powell’s restraint in not wanting to march on Baghdad during Desert Storm was a soldier’s conceit about getting done just the job he was sent to do. According to this essay, however, he was more the diplomat even then, concerned for the fragility of the alliance the U.S. had forged.

During the Gulf War, then-President Bush sided with Powell, rejecting calls from Gen.

Norman Schwarzkopf and others to continue on to Baghdad. Bush’s background as a

legislator and, like Powell, a diplomat made him sensitive to Powell’s concerns about

undermining the tenuous coalition that was assembled during the Gulf War.

But the current President Bush does not have the foreign policy experience of his father, and

so the question of who has his ear on key foreign policy decisions has been the topic of

much speculation. During the presidential campaign, Bush tried to temper concerns about his

lack of foreign policy experience and knowledge by pointing to the seasoned foreign policy

hands surrounding him. But those advisors have real ideological divides over a number of

issues, and so far Bush has not sided clearly with one side or the other. Salon

The terrorist attacks: news frames and filters Susan D. Moeller’s 1999 book Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine,

War and Death describes a typology of media coverage of assassinations and terrorist events that anticipates what we’ve seen in the last two weeks.

…there is rarely even any cognizance that the media’s rendition is itself

“framed.” Only if multiple similar events are compared is it made evident

that conscious choices guided the media’s coverage. Many news

frames appear to be natural, unforced, perhaps even self-evident ways

of reporting a story.

— Susan D. Moeller

disinformation