America's oldest religious icon revealed Gourd fragments unearthed in Peru have pushed back clear evidence of religion in the Americas by a thousand years, to 2250 BC. The two key pieces are incised with an image of the fanged "staff god", a major deity in later Andean cultures. They were discovered at a burial site in the Patavilca River valley and dated using carbon isotopes.

Fearing FEMA Most Americans know FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as the helping hand that shows up after major natural disasters or large-scale terrorist attacks like 9/11, handing out blankets and dolling out loans like a friendly neighbor with a taxpayer-fattened bank account. But beginning in the early 90's, a small contingent of "conspiracy theorists" began to claim there was something much more sinister to the agency. They see FEMA as the nothing less than the stormtroopers of a New World Order, a dark force for oppression that hides behind its benevolent public image waiting to round up patriotic Americans who dare question the creation of a United Nations-controlled One World Government. Frequently, Jews are implicated as part of the scheme, as are assorted Rockefellers and Rothschilds.

What Patriot II Proposes To Do The Bush Administration's draft Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 would radically expand law enforcement and intelligence gathering authorities, reduce or eliminate judicial oversight over surveillance, authorize secret arrests, create a DNA database based on unchecked executive "suspicion," create new death penalties, and even seek to take American citizenship away from persons who belong to or support disfavored political groups. Here are a few highlights.

Exclusive: Saddam key in early CIA plot U.S. forces in Baghdad might now be searching high and low for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, but in the past Saddam was seen by U.S. intelligence services as a bulwark of anti-communism and they used him as their instrument for more than 40 years, according to former U.S. intelligence diplomats and intelligence officials.

Nutra-Sweet The Aspartam Pentagon Biological Warfare Weapon Food additives seldom cause brain lesions, headaches, mood alterations, skin polyps, blindness, brain tumors, insomnia and depression, or erode intelligence and short-term memory. Aspartame, according to some of the most capable scientists in the country, does. In 1991 the National Institutes of Health, a branch of the Department of Health and Human Services, published a bibliography, *Adverse Effects of Aspartame*, listing not less than 167 reasons to avoid it.