Osama Bin Laden Tape; Cell Phone Towers; Nazi Looted Art Decision; H.P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture
Osama Bin Laden Tape
Larry Mantle talks with Romesh Ratnesar, World Editor for Time Magazine about the resurfacing of Osama Bin Laden in an audio tape aired on Al Jazeera. He also speaks with Graham Allison, Dean of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, and James Phillips of the Heritage Foundation.
Cell Phone Towers
The Ninth U-S Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday that local regulators have no authority to prohibit cell phone network operators to erect telephone lines or antennas based on aesthetics. The San Francisco-based appellate court ruled in favor of Sprint P-C-S in its appeal of a permit denial by the city of La Canada Flintridge. The precedent-setting ruling could have broad effects for many California cities. Larry Mantle talks with La Canada Mayor Anthony Portantino and John Flynn, an attorney who represented Sprint P-C-S.
Nazi Looted Art Decision
Larry Mantle talks with Jonathan Petropoulos, the John V. Croul Professor of European History at Claremont McKenna College who was the expert witness in the case of Maria Altmann, whose family fled Austria in 1939 and left behind 5 multi-million dollar paintings by Gustave Klimt. These paintings were confiscated by the Nazis and an Austrian arbitration court has now ordered their return to the Altmann family.
H.P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture
In his new book The Cult of Alien Gods, author Jason Colavito reveals for the first time that the theory that aliens visited the Earth in the ancient past (and may even have genetically engineered humankind) began not as science fact but as science fiction in the work of master horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. His comprehensive survey of Lovecraft’s work examines the author’s influence on maverick historians, occultists, pop culture and modern UFO cults including those trying to clone human beings. Larry Mantle talks with Colavito about everything from flying saucers to lost civilizations and how Lovecraft created the first ancient-astronaut story, which threatened to permeate mainstream science.