US Navy diver, submarine weapons technician, and espionage photographer for special operations, William Craig Reed earned commendations for secret missions during the Cold War. In the first half, he reported on one of the most terrifying submarine disasters in naval history, and how the Russians and Vladimir Putin buried the truth. He also shared updates about North Korea. The Russian sub Kursk sank in an accident in the Barents Sea around 20 years ago. Reed uncovered that it was a secret rocket torpedo that accidentally blew up the submarine, not the kerosene torpedo that the public was led to believe. The entire crew of the Kursk was killed, but 23 members who survived the initial explosion might have been saved, Reed said, if the accident hadn't been shrouded in secrecy (which ended up delaying a rescue effort).
Yet Putin, Russia's then newly elected president, used the Kursk incident to solidify his power and rebuild the military, Reed commented. Currently, Putin has managed to take strategic control of Arctic maritime routes through building military bases in the area. With the increase in polar melting, the shipping lanes have become a desirable option for many nations. Reed addressed North Korea blowing up the inter-Korean liaison office, one of the most serious provocations against South Korea in years. He suggested that the person behind the attack was actually Kim Jong Un's sister, Kim Yo Jong, and that the rumors that her brother, the North Korean leader is dead or incapacitated may be true.
---------------------
A graduate of UC Berkeley, parapsychology journalist, speaker, and blogger Craig Weiler began his spiritual path during the New Age movement, teaching and practicing psychic healing. In the latter half, he outlined how so-called guerrilla skeptics and organizations lobby mainstream media, universities, and scientific organizations, and use digital media such as Wikipedia to defend their point of view and discredit consciousness researchers. Back in 2013, Rupert Sheldrake gave a TEDx Talk called "The Science Delusion," referring to various types of dogmatic thinking in the science field, and because of the outcry of skeptics, the speech became banned. Graham Hancock also had a presentation removed by TEDx over complaints that it was "pseudoscience," Weiler added.
The editors of the Wikipedia website are heavily biased against the soundness of psychic abilities and parapsychology, he cited, and often seek to ban people who try to edit articles that put these kinds of phenomena in a positive light. Weiler was also critical of the Million Dollar Challenge set up to prove psychic ability by the James Randi Foundation. He commented that the bar of achievement was so high that it was next to impossible for a legitimate psychic ever to accomplish. Weiler described psychic healing experiments conducted by William Bengsten on lab rats with cancer where skeptics and non-believers were used as healers. They found around an 85% success rate, and the rats would actually move toward the healing hands, he reported.
News segment guests: Lauren Weinstein, Steve Kates