February 11, 2007

• Teacher’s Leave Of Absence Shrouded Humorous

  Mr. Benson, in a file photo from the faculty section of last year’s Reflectionz yearbook. © Copyright 2007, Onion, Inc. All rights reserved. Teacher’s Leave Of Absence Shrouded In Legend February 9, 2007 | Issue 43•06 MOBILE, AL—Students at Adams Middle School have been feverishly speculating about the true circumstances surrounding seventh grade history teacher Mr. Benson’s unannounced second-semester leave of absence—now approaching one month—raising the mysterious disappearance well into the status of legend among the student body at large. “I heard he was a pot addict, and he went mental, and they took him away to a mental institution,” said Gregory Oswald, 13, a student of Benson’s, adding that he remembered noticing a growing impatience in Mr. Benson in the weeks before Christmas break. “Someone told me that the first night he was there, they shocked his brain. Now he can’t remember anything about the Civil War anymore.” Many in the semi-popular teacher’s fifth-period American history class say they remain suspicious of Principal Robert Standish’s relative silence on the matter, and were unsatisfied by Standish’s tersely worded public-address announcement explaining that Mr. Benson was out on “personal matters,” and would “return soon.” “Mr. Benson is dead,” said Joel Brown, 12. A number of other students, such as seventh-grader Julie Krivus, seemed certain that the “Get Well Soon” card that was passed around for their teacher on Monday was meant to cover up a horrific boating accident in which the 36-year-old had his face “burned all the way off.” “They had to take him to France to get a new face, but something went wrong and now he has to wear an iron mask,” Krivus said. “Or maybe Mr. Benson faked his death because he was in trouble with the mob, and then went on a spiritual quest to India,” she added. Other students’ theories as to Mr. Benson’s whereabouts include training for the 2008 Olympics in the 100-meter butterfly, robbing banks, fighting in and winning a Kumite death-match in Hong Kong, opening a restaurant in Texas, flying a hot-air balloon around the world to help poor people, searching for his real parents, having acid thrown on him by eighth-grade science teacher Roy DeWalt, being captured by the CIA as a terrorist operative, and working for the CIA to help catch terrorist operatives. “He had an affair with that [eighth-grade] slut Heather Winston, and the janitor caught him,” 13-year-old Lauren Eckhard said. “But then she got pregnant with his baby, and that’s why she had to move away last year.” One student, who asked not to be named, said that he recently listened in on a conversation through the teachers’ lounge door in which faculty members spoke specifically about Mr. Benson’s location. Though the student claimed specifics were difficult to make out, he heard nothing to dispel the theory that Mr. Benson was in fact a matador recovering from wounds he sustained in his last bullfight in Madrid. “Remember how he had that limp right before break?” the student said. Sixth-grader Vince Shelky, who was recently given a detention for attempting to break into Mr. Benson’s desk while the substitute teacher was at lunch, said he was sure there would be “tons of clues” regarding Mr. Benson’s disappearance in his extensive lesson plans and personal papers. “Why would the desk drawer be locked in the first place if there wasn’t something really important in there?” Shelky said. “But the point is, basically, he was living a double life. Teacher by day. Alien by night.” Despite the growing clamor and the widening scope of possible scenarios to explain Mr. Benson’s absence, not everyone is convinced that the teacher ever actually went missing to begin with. “I saw Mr. Benson coming out of McDonald’s yesterday,” said 12-year-old Harry Dale, whose testimony was dismissed by a number of students aware of his reputation as a burnout. “I didn’t recognize him at first—he was wearing a trench coat and a hat, but I could tell it was him. When I tried to get a closer look, he disappeared.” Curiosity was further piqued last Friday when Mr. Benson’s wife, Lisa, appeared at the school to pick up her husband’s mail, and told the receptionist that he would be returning within a week. “I wouldn’t listen to his wife,” Amanda Bell, 13, said. “She’s the one who poisoned him anyway.” © Copyright 2007, Onion, Inc. All rights reserved. The Onion is not intended for readers under 18 years of age.

   

  Happy Valentine’s Day

  For every weirdo and crackpot that might be lurking in some crevice there are thousands of people like ourselves who value the importance of communicating and supporting each other while recognizing that we are probably doomed to extinction or worse unless the inherrent isolation and alienation in our modern world is mitigated by the power of this technology to bind us together. Life is not easy, and the only thing that we can do to make some of the bad stuff better is to honestly love one another and help each other and if we all do that the whole load of human sufferring can only begin to lift and become lighter. We will bring ourselves back from this brink of extinction one person, one note, one act of kindness, one leap of faith, one trust, one sacrifice, one prayer, one sharing, one flower, one hug, ONE LOVE at a time Happy Valentines Day To One and All Thank You For All of The Love and Support, Michael

   

  Taking deep breath of freedom

  

  Timothy Atkins and cousin Pischon Jones leave L.A. County Jail on Friday. “It’s over. I made it,” Atkins said.

  (Luis Sinco / LAT)

  Feb 9, 2007

  
  http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-innocent10feb10,0,3314761.story?coll=la-home-local
  

  Taking deep breath of freedom

  After 20 years in prison for a killing that a key witness now says he didn’t commit, Timothy Atkins wants only some fresh air.

  By Ashraf Khalil
  Times Staff Writer
  
  February 10, 2007
  
  A lifelong heavy drug user, frequently homeless or in jail, Denise Powell was a hard person to track down.
  
  Researchers for the California Innocence Project spent months searching for Powell — who was only in intermittent contact with her own family. Their goal was to finally document on the record what Powell had been openly admitting for years: Her testimony implicating Timothy Atkins for murder was false.
  
  When researcher Wendy Koen finally found Powell in early 2005, in rehab after a recent arrest, she confessed without hesitation.
  
  “She was ready to talk. She’d been wanting to talk for years,” Koen said. “She said, ‘I was young and stupid. I didn’t know it would come to this. I lied.’ “
  
  Thus began the final step in Atkins’ 20-year campaign to prove his innocence. On Friday morning, Atkins, now 39, walked out of Los Angeles County Jail and into the arms of his family, free for the first time since his teens.
  
  “It’s over. I made it,” he said, as weeping, whooping relatives lined up to embrace him. “I don’t think the realization hit me until late last night.”
  
  In light of Powell’s recanted testimony, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Michael A. Tynan overturned Atkins’ conviction Thursday and ordered his immediate release. Tynan was the trial judge in 1987 when Atkins was convicted of second-degree murder and two counts of robbery and sentenced to 32 years in prison.
  
  In his ruling freeing Atkins, Tynan recalled that Powell’s testimony was “the key to the conviction in this case…. The state has no interest in upholding a conviction obtained by false testimony.”
  
  On Friday, Atkins still looked a little shellshocked as he was swarmed by dozens of ecstatic family members and the beaming legal team from the California Innocence Project, part of the California Western School of Law in San Diego.
  
  “This is the pinnacle of our existence,” said project director Justin Brooks. “This is the whole goal: freeing the innocent.”
  
  Back at his cousin Tanya Franklin’s house in South Los Angeles, Atkins dispensed hugs and fielded congratulatory phone calls. After decades of incarceration, he spent most of his time outside on the front lawn.
  
  Franklin asked, “You want to come inside?”
  
  “No,” he answered, “I want air.”
  
  Atkins’ conviction stemmed from a New Year’s Day 1985 carjacking attempt in which flower shop owner Vincente Gonzales was killed.
  
  Powell, an acquaintance of Atkins at the time, told police that Atkins and another man, Ricky Evans, had bragged about killing Gonzales. Both men were arrested. Evans was beaten to death in jail before the case could come to trial; Atkins was seriously injured in the same jailhouse fight.
  
  “I’m thinking about Ricky a lot today,” said Atkins, who has remained in contact with Evans’ mother.
  
  If Evans had lived, “He would have been exonerated as well,” Koen said. “It was the same evidence against him.”
  
  Police were unable to find Powell to testify at Atkins’ trial. Instead, her testimony at a preliminary hearing was read aloud in court.
  
  In his ruling releasing Atkins, Tynan wrote that Powell’s absence from the trial was crucial. If she had appeared, subject to cross-examination from the defense, “her demeanor and other indicia of truthfulness and veracity, or their absence, would have been observed by the jury,” Tynan wrote. “In all reasonable probability the result would have been more favorable” for Atkins.
  
  Other evidence, such as a vague description of the suspects from the victim’s widow, were deemed equally shaky in hindsight by Tynan.
  
  The judge also leveled pointed criticism at police for their “casual attitude toward maintaining contact with Powell.” The failure to find and produce her for the trial “appears to be an error of constitutional magnitude,” Tynan wrote.
  
  Despite losing half his life to the prison sentence, Atkins said he bore no ill will toward Powell or anyone else.
  
  “The past is the past,” he said. “If I see her, I’ll speak to her and if I can help her, I will.”
  
  Atkins and several family members expressed sympathy for Powell, who has a long history of drug addiction and legal problems and has said she was remorseful over her role in Atkins’ jailing.
  
  Powell told researchers she was pressured by police to name a suspect in Gonzales’ slaying.
  
  “They got her into the station and told her, ‘You’re not going to leave until you tell us something,’ ” said Brooks, who listened to a recording of Powell’s initial interrogation.
  
  “She had a whole lot of guilt over what she had done to Tim’s life,” said Koen, who videotaped Powell’s statement for the Innocence Project and tracked her down a second time to sign an official court declaration of her changed testimony. “The guilt has really destroyed her life in a lot of ways.”
  
  Atkins, who said he plans to work counseling at-risk youth, was remarkably philosophical Friday about his ordeal. He admits to a misspent youth before his arrest and views his incarceration as the only reason he’s going to live into his 40s.
  
  “I was a gang member. I was a thief and I had a drug habit,” he said. “The life that I was living before, I probably would have ended up dead.”
  
  The Los Angeles County district attorney has 60 days to refile charges against Atkins. But Brooks does not expect prosecutors to do so.
  
  “They have no case. They had no case 20 years ago,” he said.
  
  Brooks plans to file for state compensation, which offers $100 for each day in prison for those found to be wrongfully convicted. For Atkins, that could mean close to $800,000.
  
  There’s also the possibility of a civil suit against the police for wrongful imprisonment, “but that would be a tougher nut,” Brooks said.
  
  “First we’ll go for the compensation and get him some money to get on his feet.”
  
  For now, Atkins is celebrating, adjusting to life as a free man and enjoying some home cooking.
  
  “I’m whole now. I got my baby back,” said Atkins’ mother, Joyce Boney. “I’m going to the store. My boy wants to eat.”
  
  

  ---

  ashraf.khalil@latimes.com
  

   

  A Princeton Lab on ESP Plans to Close Its Doors

  

  Richard Perry/The New York Times

  Robert G. Jahn founded a Princeton laboratory that is closing after almost 30 years of disputed research on telekinesis and the ability of the mind to influence machines. Brenda Dunne is the laboratory’s manager.

  February 10, 2007

  A Princeton Lab on ESP Plans to Close Its Doors

  By BENEDICT CAREY

  PRINCETON, N.J., Feb. 6 — Over almost three decades, a small laboratory at Princeton University managed to embarrass university administrators, outrage Nobel laureates, entice the support of philanthropists and make headlines around the world with its efforts to prove that thoughts can alter the course of events.

  But at the end of the month, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory, or PEAR, will close, not because of controversy but because, its founder says, it is time.

  The laboratory has conducted studies on extrasensory perception and telekinesis from its cramped quarters in the basement of the university’s engineering building since 1979. Its equipment is aging, its finances dwindling.

  “For 28 years, we’ve done what we wanted to do, and there’s no reason to stay and generate more of the same data,” said the laboratory’s founder, Robert G. Jahn, 76, former dean of Princeton’s engineering school and an emeritus professor. “If people don’t believe us after all the results we’ve produced, then they never will.”

  Princeton made no official comment.

  The closing will end one of the strangest tales in modern science, or science fiction, depending on one’s point of view. The laboratory has long had a strained relationship with the university. Many scientists have been openly dismissive of it.

  “It’s been an embarrassment to science, and I think an embarrassment for Princeton,” said Robert L. Park, a University of Maryland physicist who is the author of “Voodoo Science: The Road From Foolishness to Fraud.” “Science has a substantial amount of credibility, but this is the kind of thing that squanders it.”

  PEAR has been an anomaly from the start, a ghost in the machine room of physical science that was never acknowledged as substantial and yet never entirely banished. Its longevity illustrates the strength and limitations of scientific peer review, the process by which researchers appraise one another’s work.

  “We know people have ideas beyond the mainstream,” said the sociologist Harriet Zuckerman, author of “Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States” and senior vice president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, “but if they want funds for research they have to go through peer review, and the system is going to be very skeptical of ideas that are inconsistent with what is already known.”

  Dr. Jahn, one of the world’s foremost experts on jet propulsion, defied the system. He relied not on university or government money but on private donations — more than $10 million over the years, he estimated. The first and most generous donor was his friend James S. McDonnell, a founder of the McDonnell Douglas Corporation.

  Those gifts paid for a small staff and a gallery of random-motion machines, including a pendulum with a lighted crystal at the end; a giant, wall-mounted pachinko-like machine with a cascade of bouncing balls; and a variety of electronic boxes with digital number displays.

  In one of PEAR’s standard experiments, the study participant would sit in front of an electronic box the size of a toaster oven, which flashed a random series of numbers just above and just below 100. Staff members instructed the person to simply “think high” or “think low” and watch the display. After thousands of repetitions — the equivalent of coin flips — the researchers looked for differences between the machine’s output and random chance.

  Analyzing data from such trials, the PEAR team concluded that people could alter the behavior of these machines very slightly, changing about 2 or 3 flips out of 10,000. If the human mind could alter the behavior of such a machine, Dr. Jahn argued, then thought could bring about changes in many other areas of life — helping to heal disease, for instance, in oneself and others.

  This kind of talk fascinated the public and attracted the curiosity of dozens of students, at Princeton and elsewhere. But it left most scientists cold. A physics Ph.D. and an electrical engineer joined Dr. Jahn’s project, but none of the university’s 700 or so professors did. Prominent research journals declined to accept papers from PEAR. One editor famously told Dr. Jahn that he would consider a paper “if you can telepathically communicate it to me.”

  Brenda Dunne, a developmental psychologist, has managed the laboratory since it opened and has been a co-author of many of its study papers. “We submitted our data for review to very good journals,” Ms. Dunne said, “but no one would review it. We have been very open with our data. But how do you get peer review when you don’t have peers?”

  Several expert panels examined PEAR’s methods over the years, looking for irregularities, but did not find sufficient reasons to interrupt the work. In the 1980s and 1990s, PEAR published more than 60 research reports, most appearing in the journal of the Society for Scientific Exploration, a group devoted to the study of topics outside the scientific mainstream. Dr. Jahn and Ms. Dunne are officers in the society.

  News of the Princeton group’s experiments spread quickly worldwide, among people interested in paranormal phenomena, including telekinesis and what people call extrasensory perception. Notable figures from Europe and Asia stopped by. . Keith Jarrett, the jazz pianist, paid a visit. For a time, the philanthropist Laurance Rockefeller visited regularly and donated money for research.

  And many people, in and out of science, joined what Ms. Dunne called the PEAR Tree, a kind of secret society of people interested in the paranormal, she said. Many PEAR Tree members who are science faculty members will not reveal themselves publicly, Ms. Dunne said.

  The culture of science, at its purest, is one of freedom in which any idea can be tested regardless of how far-fetched it might seem.

  “I don’t believe in anything Bob is doing, but I support his right to do it,” said Will Happer, a professor of physics at Princeton.

  Other top-flight scientists have taken chances. At the end of his career, Linus Pauling, the Nobel laureate, came to believe that vitamin C supplements could prevent and treat cancer, heart disease and other ailments. Dr. Pauling had some outside financing, too, and conducted research and had plenty of media coverage. But in the end he did not sway many of his colleagues, Dr. Zuckerman said.

  At the PEAR offices this week, the staff worked amid boxes, piles of paper and a roll of bubble wrap as big as an oil drum. The random-event machines are headed for storage.

  The study of telekinesis and related phenomena, Dr. Jahn said, will carry on.

  “It’s time for a new era,” he said, “for someone to figure out what the implications of our results are for human culture, for future study, and — if the findings are correct — what they say about our basic scientific attitude.”

  
  

  Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

   

  Inquiry on Intelligence Gaps

  

  Mian Khursheed/Reuters

  The Pentagon is critical of Douglas J. Feith’s analyses of Iraq.

  February 10, 2007

  Inquiry on Intelligence Gaps May Reach to White House

  By DAVID S. CLOUD

  WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 — The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Friday that he would ask current and former White House aides to testify about a report by the Pentagon’s inspector general that criticizes the Pentagon for compiling “alternative intelligence” that made the case for invading Iraq.

  The chairman, Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, said that among those called to testify could be Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, and I. Lewis Libby, a former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney. Both received a briefing from the defense secretary’s policy office in 2002 on possible links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein‘s government.

  In its report on Thursday, the acting inspector general, Thomas F. Gimble, found that the work done by the Pentagon team, which was assembled by Douglas J. Feith, a former under secretary of defense for policy, was “not fully supported by the available intelligence.”

  It was not clear whether Mr. Hadley and Mr. Libby would testify. The White House normally resists having top aides testify before Congress.

  The Senate Intelligence Committee may also seek to question the men. Tara Andringa, a spokeswoman for Mr. Levin, said Mr. Levin planned to consult with Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia and chairman of that committee. Mr. Levin is on both committees.

  The inspector general’s report found that while the Feith team did not violate any laws or knowingly mislead Congress, it made dubious interpretations of intelligence reports and shared them with senior officials without making clear that its findings had already been discounted or discredited by the main intelligence agencies.

  “The actions, in our opinion, were inappropriate, given that all the products did not clearly show the variance with the consensus of the intel community, and in some cases were shown as intel products,” Mr. Gimble told the Armed Services Committee in a hearing on Friday.

  That set off a two-hour partisan clash. Democrats argued that the report showed intelligence had been manipulated to justify an invasion of Iraq, and Republicans insisted that Mr. Feith’s office did nothing wrong by reaching conclusions that differed from those of the main intelligence agencies and presenting them to higher-ups, who had asked for the re-examination in the first place.

  Senator Levin, who has long been a leading critic of Mr. Feith’s role, called the report “a devastating condemnation of inappropriate activities” by Mr. Feith. But Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, responded, “I don’t think in any way that his report can be interpreted as a devastating condemnation.”

  Mr. Gimble said formal intelligence findings did not corroborate some of the Pentagon’s assertions: that Mr. Hussein’s government and Al Qaeda had a “mature symbiotic relationship,” that it involved a “shared interest and pursuit of” unconventional weapons and that there were “some indications” of coordination between Iraq and Al Qaeda on the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

  The briefers from Mr. Feith’s office should have noted their departures from the formal consensus findings of intelligence agencies, Mr. Gimble said.

  Representative Ike Skelton, a Democrat from Missouri and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said Mr. Feith’s office exercised “extremely poor judgment for which our nation, and our service members in particular, are paying a terrible price.”

  Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, noted that Mr. Feith’s superiors at the Pentagon had asked him to re-examine intelligence on links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Therefore, Mr. Sessions said, there was no need for the briefers to point out that their conclusions differed from those of the C.I.A., because the briefing was intended as a “critique” of the agencies’ conclusions.

  A similar argument has been made in a formal rebuttal to the inspector general that was prepared by Mr. Feith’s successor at the Pentagon.

  
  

  Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

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