From: Peace & Freedom Are Achieved Through Understanding
Date: Jan 25, 2009 12:04 AM



























































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Riddles in Stone - Secret Architecture of Washington D.C.




http://video. google. com/videoplay?docid=-5839084912030464561&hl=en

Wednesday, 14 January 2009 3:37:01 PM
By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS

President-elect Barack Obama called disclosures about Treasury choice Timothy Geithner's tax problems an embarrassment Wednesday but said Geithner's "innocent mistake" shouldn't keep him from confirmation as the new administration's top official in urgent efforts to revive the economy.

The revelations that Geithner had failed to pay $34,000 in taxes several years ago derailed Senate Democrats' plans to speed him to confirmation by Inauguration Day, but senators in both parties said the information was unlikely to torpedo his chances in the end.

Obama had hoped for approval by Tuesday, but senators now have scheduled Geithner's
confirmation hearing for next Wednesday, with Senate debate and a vote sometime after that.

Two Republicans objected to scheduling a confirmation hearing this Friday at the Senate Finance Committee after the panel disclosed Geithner had failed to pay taxes he owed for several years. Democrats were working to clear away the obstacles, holding out hope that he could still be confirmed the day Obama is sworn in.

The president-elect, asked about the situation on Wednesday, said, "Look is this an embarrassment for him? Yes. He said so himself. But it was an innocent mistake. It is a mistake that is commonly made for people who are working internationally or for international institutions. It has been corrected. He paid the penalties."

"My expectation is that Tim Geithner will be confirmed," Obama said.

He spoke at his transition office after a meeting with Vice President-elect Joe Biden and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., about their recent trip to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Kuwait.

Democrats and Republicans on the Finance Committee voiced strong support for Geithner, who was phoning senators individually in an effort to persuade them his tax problems were the result of innocent errors, not deliberate attempts to avoid paying the Internal Revenue Service.

Senators' comments suggested that Geithner's tax troubles are being viewed on Capitol Hill more as embarrassing mistakes than as disqualifying misdeeds. That's despite the fact that tax problems have sunk other government nominees, including Zoe Baird, Bill Clinton's choice for attorney general, who stepped aside when word leaked that she had hired illegal immigrants as household workers and failed to pay their Social Security taxes.

"It's an honest mistake," said Sen. Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat who chairs the committee, adding that Geithner's confirmation was "a given."

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Strip Maul

Israel gets their bombing in before the January 20th hope and change deadline.

By SETH BORENSTEIN

Take that, Andromeda! For decades, astronomers thought when it came to the major galaxies in Earth's cosmic neighborhood, our Milky Way was a weak sister to the larger Andromeda. Not anymore. The Milky Way is considerably larger, bulkier and spinning faster than astronomers once thought, Andromeda's equal.

Scientists mapped the Milky Way in a more detailed, three-dimensional way and found that it's 15 percent larger in breadth. More important, it's denser, with 50 percent more mass, which is like weight. The new findings were presented Monday at the American Astronomical Society's convention in Long Beach, Calif.

That difference means a lot, said study author Mark Reid of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. The slight 5-foot-5, 140-pound astrophysicist said it's the cosmic equivalent of him suddenly bulking up to the size of a 6-foot-3, 210-pound NFL linebacker.

"Previously we thought Andromeda was dominant, and that we were the little sister of Andromeda," Reid said. "But now it's more like we're fraternal twins."

That's not necessarily good news. A bigger Milky Way means that it could be crashing violently into the neighboring Andromeda galaxy sooner than predicted -- though still billions of years from now.

Reid and his colleagues used a large system of 10 radio telescope antennas to measure the brightest newborn stars in the galaxy at different times in Earth's orbit around the sun. They made a map of those stars, not just in the locations where they were first seen, but in the third dimension of time -- something Reid said hasn't been done before.

With that, Reid was able to determine the speed at which the spiral-shaped Milky Way is spinning around its center. That speed -- about 568,000 miles per hour -- is faster than the 492,000 mph that scientists had been using for decades. That's about a 15 percent jump in spiral speed. The old number was based on less accurate measurements and this is based on actual observations, Reid said.

Once the speed of the galaxy's spin was determined, complex formulas that end up cubing the speed determined the mass of all the dark matter in the Milky Way. And the dark matter -- the stuff we can't see -- is by far the heaviest stuff in the universe. So that means the Milky Way is about one-and-a-half times the mass had astronomers previously calculated.

The paper makes sense, but isn't the final word on the size of the Milky Way, said Mark Morris, an astrophysicist at the University of California Los Angeles, who wasn't part of the study.

Being bigger means the gravity between the Milky Way and Andromeda is stronger.

So the long-forecast collision between the neighboring galaxies is likely to happen sooner and less likely to be a glancing blow, Reid said.

But don't worry. That's at least 2 to 3 billion years away, he said.

UN General Assembly chief Miguel d'Escoto has criticized the Security Council for its inability to curb Israel's "monstrosity" in Gaza.

D'escoto criticized the UN Security Council for not showing enough tenacity in ending Gazans suffering in the wake of the weeklong Israeli offensive in the coastal strip.

"I think it's a monstrosity; there's no other way to name it," D'escoto said Saturday when asked about the Israeli incursion on Gaza.

The UN Security Council again failed to call for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip due to US intervention. The statement would have called on Israel to end its ground incursion into the region.

"Once again, the world is watching in dismay the dysfunctionality of the Security Council," D'escoto argued.

The two previous UN draft resolutions seeking an end to the violence in the region have been blocked by Washington. The United States has so far vetoed over 40 anti-Israel resolutions at the UN.

Tel Aviv has so far snubbed international calls for a cease-fire and began what it claims to be the "long-lasting" ground invasion of Gaza on Saturday night.

In a weekly radio address on Saturday, US President George W. Bush supported the Israeli decision to reject a forty-eight-hour ceasefire to allow humanitarian aid to enter the besieged strip.

"Another one-way cease-fire that leads to rocket attacks on Israel is not acceptable. And promises from Hamas will not suffice," said the outgoing US president.

Tel Aviv launched Operation Cast Lead on Saturday allegedly to stop rocket attacks on Israeli communities. So far Israeli forces have killed 497 Gazans and wounded 2790 others in the assault, a large number of whom are civilians.

UN officials and aid workers have warned that the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip is spiraling into a critical state of emergency.

"How can one carry out proper relief work in these conditions of violence? The people of Gaza have already suffered the most stringent economic sanctions. … [A]s things stand now, we have only a few days supply left," said the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.

By Hedieh Ghavidel


Ironically, Israel has become the Fourth Reich, dealing with basic human rights and dignity in a brutal and arrogant manner, much as their unexpected mentors taught.

The Nazis would be proud and yet horrified that the evil torch of their methods is being carried onward by some of the very people they sought to repress.

What happened to the Jewish people was unarguably hideous and despicable, but not less than what they are perpetrating upon the long-suffering Palestinians.

For many, the word 'Palestinian' has come to be equated with 'terrorist'. What the world forgets is that for decades after the creation of Israel, the Palestinians patiently and non-violently awaited the world to recognize them in the same manner.

A people who have virtually claimed World War II as theirs have conveniently forgotten that other countless millions died in that inhumane conflict that ultimately aimed to conquer and subjugate the entire world, to eliminate free-thinking and the right of dissent, and to slaughter like animals any individual not meeting Aryan ideals.

Many cultural atrocities and massacres have happened throughout history, and are indeed happening at this moment, but none have been given a title or have been used as a breast-beating excuse to commit the very same crimes against decency.

Excluding Israel's few but powerful allies, many countries in the world view Zionists as bullies, murderers and land-thieves.

The title of 'settlers' given to Israeli land-thieves is a very appropriate one. It is the same designation given to those in America in the 1800s who progressively murdered their way across stolen native land while claiming a manifest destiny from God in doing so.

The German philosopher Hegel once said that history teaches that history teaches us nothing. While the Berlin wall has come down, Israel puts one up, and the hypocritical governments who purport to be democracies and to advocate human rights make mild and symbolic protests while allowing crimes against humanity to continue.

When some Israeli students of conscience were conducting a protest at the illegally fenced-off road in a show of support for Palestinian rights, fully-armed Israeli soldiers stood ready at the other side of the fence with their weapons trained on protestors.

Some student hotheads, not content with a peaceful demonstration, shook the fence and threw some rocks. The soldiers responded by opening fire on them. Despite being reported and televised, this incident has somehow disappeared from the media.

When a government is willing to have its own children shot for daring to question its illegal acts, it is no longer a mystery why this government would not give a second thought to cutting off Gaza from the rest of the world, why it has no qualms about starving its inhabitants and depriving them of the basic necessities of life, why it does not flinch at massacring thousands of Palestinian innocents.

It is the cause of wonder how a tiny strip of land considered holy by many faiths can become the site of such unholiness.

Polls show that the Israeli public demands harsher military measures against Gaza and there is increased support for political parties determined to level the coastal sliver and wipe out any traces of life there.

When even the many Jewish voices raised in protest against this crime are drowned out by the roar of the less compassionate and more powerful, one cannot expect to ever see compassion from the Fourth Reich for the plight of the Palestinian nation.