The Opperman Report'

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3 Years in Pakistan: The Erik Aude Story
The true life story of Erik Aude, who was duped into drug smuggling and spent three years in a Pakistani prison.

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Each year, more Americans die of drug abuse than the total of those who perished during the Vietnam War. This is the amazing and inspirational true story of an addict named Andrew and how he was able to overcome his addiction even though the odds were stacked against him.

 Andrew grew up in an unimaginably abusive family. His life seemed normal on the outside, but the internal turmoil he was experiencing was a horrific ordeal. Andrew's life began in an upper-class town of Moorestown, New Jersey. His family had a million-dollar beach house, he attended college, and even had the rare opportunity of driving a Ferrari around South Florida. 

Behind what seemed like an idyllic life was a nightmare of abuse, mental illness, and torment that no child should ever face. This led Andrew to suffer from pain, anxiety, panic attacks, and depression. Searching for relief, he found solace in drugs and became quickly addicted to anything that would change the way he felt. His addiction to drugs took him to such extremes as working for the DEA while being high on drugs, multiple rehabs, jails, becoming homeless, and even to the point of being considered dead. 

When all hope was lost, people he considers "angels" entered his life. One person, in particular, refused to give up on him even when everyone told her this was the best option. Through her determination, he was able to find the strength to look inside and find the real reasons for his addiction. Once he understood these reasons, he was finally able to figure out how to stay clean and successfully turned his life around. 

This book is a wild ride that will amaze, bewilder, amuse, and inspire you. People have said it was one of the "most interesting books they have ever read," and, "I never wanted to put it down." This book will give hope to anyone who is suffering from addiction or knows someone who is facing the adversity of addiction. It will show them why they should never give up. It also shows us how working together, we can beat this opiate epidemic.

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The ‘cover-up’ of child sexual abuse by the Catholic Church has been occurring under the pontificate of six popes since 1922. For 1500 years, the Catholic Church accepted that clergy who sexually abused children deserved to be stripped of their status as priests and then imprisoned. A series of papal and Council decrees from the twelfth century required such priests to be dismissed from the priesthood, and then handed over to the civil authorities for further punishment.That all changed in 1922 when Pope Pius XI issued his decree Crimen Sollicitationis that created a de facto ‘privilege of clergy’ by imposing the ‘secret of the Holy Office’ on all information obtained through the Church’s canonical investigations. If the State did not know about these crimes, then there would be no State trials, and the matter could be treated as a purely canonical crime to be dealt with in secret in the Church courts. Pope Pius XII continued the decree. Pope John XXIII reissued it in 1962. Pope Paul VI in 1974 extended the reach of ‘pontifical secrecy’ to the allegation itself. Pope John Paul II confirmed the application of pontifical secrecy in 2001, and in 2010, Benedict XVI even extended it to allegations about priests sexually abusing intellectually disabled adults. In 2010, Pope Benedict gave a dispensation to pontifical secrecy to allow reporting to the police where the local civil law required it, that is, just enough to keep bishops out of jail. Most countries in the world do not have any such reporting laws for the vast majority of complaints about the sexual abuse of children. Pontifical secrecy, the cornerstone of the cover up continues. The effect on the lives of children by the imposition of the Church’s Top Secret classification on clergy sex abuse allegations may not have been so bad if canon law had a decent disciplinary system to dismiss these priests. The 1983 Code of Canon Law imposed a five year limitation period which virtually ensured there would be no canonical trials. It required bishops to try to reform these priests before putting them on trial. When they were on trial, the priest could plead the Vatican ‘Catch 22’ defence—he should not be dismissed because he couldn’t control himself. The Church claims that all of this has changed. Very little has changed. It has fiddled around the edges of pontifical secrecy and the disciplinary canons. The Church has been moonwalking.

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A Los Angeles hotel with a haunting history. A missing young woman. A disturbing video followed by a shocking discovery. A cold-case mystery that has become an internet phenomenon—and for one determined journalist, a life-changing quest toward uncomfortable truths.

Twenty-one-year-old Vancouver student Elisa Lam was last heard from on January 31, 2013, after she checked into downtown L.A.’s Cecil Hotel—a 600-room building with a nine-decade history of scandal and tragedy. The next day, Elisa vanished. A search of the hotel yielded nothing. More than a week later, complaints by guests of foul-smelling tap water led to a grim discovery: Elisa’s nude body floating in a rooftop water tank, in an area extremely difficult to access without setting off alarms. The only apparent clue was a disturbing surveillance video of Elisa, uploaded to YouTube in hopes of public assistance.
As the eerie elevator video went viral, so did the questions of its tens of millions of viewers. Was Elisa’s death caused by murder, suicide, or paranormal activity? Was it connected to the Cecil’s sinister reputation? And in that video, what accounted for Elisa’s strange behavior? With the help of web sleuths and investigators from around the world, journalist Jake Anderson set out to uncover the facts behind a death that had become a macabre internet meme, as well as a magnet for conspiracy theorists.

In poring through Elisa’s revealing online journals and social-media posts, Anderson realized he shared more in common with the young woman than he imagined. His search for justice and truth became a personal journey, a dangerous descent into one of America's quiet epidemics. Along the way, he exposed a botched investigation and previously unreported disclosures from inside sources who suggest there may have been a corporate conspiracy and a police cover-up. In Gone at Midnight, Anderson chronicles eye-opening discoveries about who Elisa Lam really was and what—or whom—she was running from, and presents shocking new evidence that may re-open one of the most chilling and obsessively followed true crime cases of the century.

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Tony Ortega : Church of Scientology
Tony Ortega is a journalist who was formerly the editor of The Village Voice. He's written about Scientology since 1995, and in May 2015 released a book about Scientology's harassment of Paulette Cooper titled 'The Unbreakable Miss Lovely.' He continues to monitor breaking developments in Scientology and other controversial subjects from an undisclosed location in an underground bunker he shares with four cats and one of them wrinkly Shar Pei dogs. Despite his super-secret security protections, you can still reach him pretty easily by sending him a message at tonyo94 AT gmail.com (Drop him a line if you'd like to get an e-mail whenever a new story is posted.)

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