Did "19 men with box-cutters" destroy so many lives in the world's only super-power?
Just 19 men with rudimentary tools?
No Weapons of Mass Destruction, no armies, no air force?
Just 19 guys with box-cutters?
AND THE THIRD ANGEL FOLLOWED THEM, SAYING WITH A LOUD VOICE, IF ANY MAN WORSHIP THE BEAST AND HIS IMAGE, AND RECEIVE HIS MARK IN HIS FOREHEAD, OR IN HIS HAND. *** REVELATION 14:9
How the Illuminati is Destroying America!
by Texe Marrs
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/texemarrshowilluminatidestroysamerica25nov07.shtml
Posted Nov. 25, 2007http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/False%20Religions/Illuminati/how_the_illuminati_is_destroying.htm
1. Immigration lawlessness and rising crime wave by illegal aliens.
2. Government bankruptcy and indebtedness at an all-time high.
3. Social Security swindle—Social Security Fund battered as Feds blow money on worthless spending scams.
4. Veteran mistreatment and genocide. Most V. A. hospitals are deathtraps; Vets receive inferior medical care. Millions of Vets are dying from Agent Orange (Vietnam), Persian Gulf War sickness, and other service-related illnesses.
5. Outsourcing of American jobs—to foreigners in Pakistan, India, Red China, Mexico, Indonesia, etc. America’s manufacturing base declining rapidly and being shifted overseas.
6. Foreign student takeover of America’s colleges, universities, and public schools.
7. Corporate globalism—Greedy U.S. corporations, as globalist entities, are unpatriotic and hostile to American interests.
8. Harnessing of U.S. Military for global mercenary duties. Americans forced to pay for and fight Israel’s wars and die for causes unrelated to U.S. defense.
9. Hate Crime laws—state, federal, and U.N.—forbid free speech, prohibit criticism of Israel and prevent the Christian gospel being preached.
10. Sexual barbarism and dehumanization accomplished by vulgar, crude, sexually explicit, physically degrading movies, television, cartoons, books, video games, advertising and other media.
11. Private property regularly seized and its uses restricted to promote the Communist agenda of environmentalist and globalist organizations.
12. Unfair and unlawful tax system used to rob producers and transform U.S. citizens into federalized serfs and wards of the state.
13. Manipulation of water supplies and contrived water shortages used to drive up water prices and control the citizenry.
14. White race discriminated against and American culture savaged by promotion of "cultural diversity."
15. Two meaningless political parties whose real agenda are identical, and corrupt, rigged elections which frustrate the will of the people.
16. Satanization of society through occult influences and symbols which permeate media, music, entertainment, and sports.
17. Free Press replaced by propaganda ministries and elitist media accomplices who work nonstop to psychologically hypnotize, mesmerize, and control the minds of the population.
18. "War on Terror" used as pretext to create an American police state and remove the peoples’ constitutional rights.
19. Death culture promoted. Conditioning of minds. Desensitizing of the masses to the mass genocide to come, with abortion, euthanasia, necrophilia, cannibalism, group death, and cruelty.
20. Gulag concentration camps prepared for resisters and dissidents.
21. Religious debasement. False religions promoted and encouraged. Traditional Christianity portrayed as anti-Semitic, bigoted and politically incorrect.
Source: http://educate-yourself.org/cn/texemarrshowilluminatidestroysamerica25nov07.shtml
Tue Sep 9, 2008 5:19pm EDT
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. House of Representatives Republican leaders on Tuesday called on New York Democrat Charles Rangel to step down as chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee pending a House investigation of possible ethical breaches.
In a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Republican leaders questioned Rangel's ability to lead the committee after his lawyer revealed last week that he failed to report $100,000 of income from a villa he owns in the Dominican Republic.
Rangel, who has represented New York City's Harlem district for 38 years, plans to hold a news conference on Wednesday to discuss the tax filing error and to answer the Republican letter, an aide said.
Last week his attorney, Lanny Davis, told reporters that Rangel plans to file an amendment to his previous tax returns and likely has no federal tax liability on the investment.
"Given Chairman Rangel's continuing ethical lapses, he cannot effectively carry out his duties as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee," said the letter signed by House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio and other Republican leaders.
The letter also took a broad swipe at the Democratic-led Congress, accusing its leaders of failing to advance legislation to encourage more domestic oil production.
Pelosi spokesman Nadeam Elshami accused Republicans of playing politics and trying to divert public attention from financing scandals that have hurt the Republican party.
"The American people would be better served if Republicans would stop playing politics and allow the bipartisan Ethics Committee to do its job," he said in a statement.
Rangel's finances have been under scrutiny since July, when the New York Times reported that the lawmaker lived in multiple reduced-rent apartments provided under a plan to preserve affordable housing in New York City.
Rangel defended his right to maintain those below-market rentals, but agreed to give up one office that he used for campaign activities.
Rangel has asked for a congressional ethics inquiry on that matter and was considering requesting a similar review of his Dominican property, Davis told reporters last week.
(Reporting by Donna Smith, editing by Vicki Allen)
Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSN0932536420080909?sp=true
September 05, 2008
So Who is Sarah Palin?
Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has been chosen by Senator John McCain as his vice-presidential running mate. Palin carries very strong credentials for fighting corruption and cleaning up government, defense of gun ownership and she is pro-life and pro-family. She is a mother of five. Her eldest son volunteered for the military on September 11 last year and will be deployed to Iraq on September 11 of this year. Her most recent child was born four months before she was picked for the VP job by the Republican nominee. Palin is the second woman to run on the presidential ticket after Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 who ran with Walter Mondale.
Palin’s background includes a strong love of sports, runner up to the Miss Alaska beauty queen and several elected posts in local government before running for governor of Alaska. Forty-four year old Palin is the first woman and was the youngest person to hold the office of governor (at 42 years of age). She has been governor since 2006.
Evangelicals are ecstatic over McCain’s pick. Conservative Catholics are supportive, but not as emotional and are more muted and philosophical about it. Palin’s last child was known to have Down syndrome early in her pregnancy. Birthing the child puts personal sacrifice behind her convictions and greatly enhances her credibility among pro-life voters. Sarah Palin was born and baptized a Roman Catholic but her parents left the church. She was re-baptized in a Pentecostal church but is now a non-denominational Evangelical Christian. Palin has strong moral convictions particularly on social issues. Non-denominational churches tend to be quite ecumenical, only emphasizing those things on which most Christians can agree. Often they center on social issues. With her religious background, she should not have much resistance to the influence and political power of Rome in the halls of power in the United States.
It is important to understand that it is the Catholic Church that now often shapes at least some aspects of U.S. presidential politics, especially as it relates to abortion, traditional marriage, and other moral issues that Rome champions. The evangelicals have the political savvy to take those doctrines into the political arena. The issue of abortion is clearly front and center of the 2008 presidential election campaign. Roman Catholic voters (particularly conservatives) are viewed by many as able to determine an election. They largely vote on the basis of issues and have frequently influenced election outcomes at various levels of government. The record of George W. Bush in assisting the Roman Catholic Church to increase its power and influence in the U.S. reveals how important the Roman Catholic vote has become.
Now that John McCain has visited the Basilica of the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico, the most important Catholic icon in the Americas, and received the papal blessing while there (see: John McCain Visits the Virgin of Guadalupe), it is apparent that he sees the importance of the Roman Catholic voice in politics. He has also indicated that he would appoint Roman Catholics to his key advisory panels (see: John McCain Courts the Catholic Vote). Even Senator Obama has chosen a Roman Catholic running mate in Joe Biden at least in part to garner support from Roman Catholics for the democratic ticket. One reason McCain picked Palin was because she would appeal to conservative religious voters because of her strong moral stands. Palin will certainly strengthen the support of the Roman Catholic Church for the republican ticket.
Here is what is being said about Sarah Palin by some of the leaders in Christian circles.
“’I am now more confident about a John McCain presidency than I am about a George Bush presidency,’ said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. ‘The campaign has courted conservatives aggressively, and it has turned around remarkably in just the last few weeks.’”
“For skeptical Christian conservatives, Mr. Perkins said, the selection of Ms. Palin was evidence that when it came to the Supreme Court, Mr. McCain would deliver on the principles he laid out at Saddleback Church.”
“Colin Hanna, a prominent conservative organizer in Pennsylvania and Ohio said, ‘The candidate and his brain trust have evidently concluded what we have always held as a given: that he cannot succeed without the enthusiastic support of the conservative base.’”
“Dr. [James] Dobson said the Palin selection had persuaded him to endorse Mr. McCain. Dr. Dobson said in a statement that the nomination ‘gives us confidence he will keep his pledges to voters regarding the kinds of justices he would nominate to the Supreme Court.’”
“In Minneapolis, ‘it was as if the whole Republican convention had started drinking Red Bull,’ said Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, who added that when the McCain campaign had sought his input weeks before he had suggested picking Ms. Palin.
John Allen, a Roman Catholic pundit said: “Palin’s nomination, therefore, does not simply mark a breakthrough for women, or for western states. She also puts a face on the fastest-growing and most dynamic segment of global Christianity these days – even if it’s proving difficult for journalists and political handicappers to get their minds around.”
One Catholic blogger wrote: “Actually the Dems and their women are ready to make hay about everything they can think of [concerning Palin], but with every issue they open a mirror reflecting back to themselves.”
Another blogger wrote: “McCain’s values and priorities overall are much more in line with the Catholic worldview, and it is vitally important to educate Catholics about this in key battleground states (Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, etc).”
It was widely speculated that McCain wanted to pick off Hilary Clinton’s supporters that don’t like Obama. If elected, Palin would be the first female vice president of the United States.
As Hurricane Gustov bore down on the Gulf coast, presidential candidate John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate, turning the election “upside down” and changing the direction of the race. Palin is something of a hurricane to the political establishment. Watch out. When it comes to religious principles, she has them, and her convictions run deep. She may well be the most conservative person to ever be on a presidential ticket. That makes conservatives happy, but perhaps Sabbath keepers should be wary, not because they don’t agree with her moral principles (most of them probably do), but precisely because they are so very strong. When Sunday laws begin to be agitated, what would Sarah Palin do to defend religious liberty? Or would she advocate and even assist in the movement to enforce Sunday observance?
Sources:
Source: http://www.ktfministry.org/news/290/palin-chosen-as-vice-presidential-running-mate
WASHINGTON -- Dead or alive.
President Bush said he didn't care how terrorism architect Osama bin Laden was brought to justice.
"We'll smoke him out of his cave and we'll get him eventually," Bush said confidently.
That was back in 2001 when the U.S. reeled in shock and horror after 19 men hijacked four airliners and turned them into guided missiles. The jets slammed into New York's World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside, killing nearly 3,000 people in the deadliest attack in history on U.S. soil.
It was the beginning of a new era of anxiety and vulnerability for the country after only a few years of post-Cold War comfort. Americans suddenly woke up to the chilling threat of terrorism -- not in the Middle East or somewhere else around the world, but here, at home.
It was a turning point, too, for Bush, an inexperienced, little-traveled president who had shown marginal interest in world affairs.
Before Sept. 11, Bush was best known for winning his office in a controversial Supreme Court decision and then cajoling Congress into passing one of the largest tax cuts in history and enacting a major education bill.
After Sept. 11, Bush declared himself a wartime president. He denounced "evildoers" and launched a global war on terrorism. He rallied the nation and the world; his approval ratings soared into the stratosphere.
Now, on the seventh anniversary of Sept. 11, Bush winds down his presidency with those attacks and the aftermath standing as the defining events of his time in office.
"You have to view this as the seminal event of his presidency," said Norman Ornstein, a political analyst at the American Enterprise Institute. "It transformed him, it focused him and gave a sense of purpose to his presidency that really had not existed before."
Suddenly, Ornstein said, Bush's mission was clear: "Fight a war against terror and win it."
The president laid the groundwork for two wars in close succession, in Afghanistan and then Iraq. Today, he still is carrying the burden of those wars, still not won, and a tarnished U.S. image around the globe. Critics blame him for allowing people to be tortured, for domestic spying and for abuses of executive power.
Bush sent U.S. troops into Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001, to strike al-Qaida training camps and remove the Taliban rulers who harbored bin Laden. The Taliban fell quickly. Bin Laden slipped away.
Many key lieutenants, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, were captured. Others were killed.
On March 19, 2003, with solid support from Congress, Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein. The decision was justified largely on grounds -- later proved false -- that Saddam was building weapons of mass destruction that, Bush said, "could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."
Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney repeatedly sought to link Saddam to the Sept. 11 attacks. But the independent Sept. 11 commission concluded there was no such relationship. Bush eventually stopped making that connection, but still cast Saddam as a terrorist threat.
In an Oval Office speech on the fifth anniversary of the attacks, Bush said, "I am often asked why we are in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks. After 9/11, Saddam's regime posed a risk that the world could not afford to take."
The war at first was popular, when it looked like a relatively easy victory. Bush made protecting the U.S. the central theme of his re-election campaign and staged the 2004 Republican convention in New York, a reminder of the attacks.
On the seventh anniversary this year, Bush will mark the day simply by going to the Pentagon for the unveiling of a Sept. 11 memorial.
History will judge his presidency on the war in Iraq, which Bush decreed the central front in the war against Islamic extremists. It has lasted longer than the Civil War, World War I and World War II. It has claimed the lives of more than 4,100 Americans and cost about $653 billion.
Many people already have come to a decision.
A Gallup Poll in March found that 54 percent of Americans believe Iraq will be remembered as a failure and that 59 percent think it was a mistake to send U.S. troops there in the first place.
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama calls the war "one of the biggest foreign policy disasters in our history" and says "al-Qaida's leadership is stronger than ever because we took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan" to invade Iraq.
Republican John McCain is emphasizing the same national security theme in his campaign that the Bush White House won with four years ago. McCain also distances himself from Bush, saying the incumbent mishandled the war until he adopted the combat troop increase strategy last year that has led to a sharp reduction in the violence.
As security in Iraq has grown in the past year, however, it has deteriorated in Afghanistan. Bush says Afghanistan is a central front, too. More than 500 U.S. troops have died there or in neighboring Pakistan and Uzbekistan since 2001, and the Taliban is regrouping. More American troops died in Afghanistan in July than in Iraq, for the first time since the Iraq war started.
Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush's vow to get bin Laden remains unfulfilled. From time to time, bin Laden taunts Bush with Internet insults and threats taped in his hide-out, presumed somewhere in the lawless border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Bush says he does not think much about bin Laden, that his influence has been diminished.
Still, U.S. intelligence officials worry al-Qaida is establishing cells in other countries and training for attacks in Afghanistan, the Middle East, Africa and the United States.
"Al-Qaida remains the pre-eminent threat against the United States," Mike McConnell, the national intelligence director, told Congress this year. FBI Director Robert Mueller said al-Qaida continues to present a "critical threat to the homeland" and warned that "homegrown terrorists" inspired by al-Qaida's propaganda on the Internet posed a threat as well.
So far, the United States has not suffered another terrorist attack, though some allies have. Bush says the U.S. and its allies have thwarted some major plots.
"I vowed that day that I would not rest, so long as I was the president, in protecting the people," Bush remarked after a briefing in 2006 at the U.S. Central Command, the military command that oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. "So a lot of my decision-making is based upon the attack."
Each workday at 8 a.m., McConnell and an intelligence briefer sit down with Bush in the Oval Office to update him on threat assessments, turmoil and problems around the globe.
As the wars have gone better and worse, so has the look of Bush's legacy.
"The Bush presidency has been more of a roller coaster presidency than anything I've seen in my lifetime," said Lee Edwards, a historian of the American conservative movement at the Heritage Foundation. "No one has soared higher or dipped lower than George W. Bush."
Today, his approval ratings are low. But Lee said that just as history changed its initially dim view of Harry Truman's decision to send U.S. forces to Korea, it will conclude over time that Bush made the right move in Iraq.
Ornstein says the jury is still out. "We don't know what history is going to say about this until it shakes down in a number of years."
Bush said he worries Americans will lose patience with the fight against terrorism, lulled into a false feeling of safety. But he says he does not worry about his legacy.
"Oh, I don't know," Bush told an interviewer recently. "I'll be dead when they finally figure it out."
(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
Source: http://www1.whdh.com/news/articles/national/BO87392/
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- A group of ministers filed a complaint Monday with the Internal Revenue Service to stop a conservative organization from encouraging pastors to endorse or oppose political candidates.
The group of 55 religious leaders from Ohio, Indiana, Iowa and other states said the actions by the Alliance Defense Fund jeopardize the constitutional separation of church and state.
"The rightful place of religious leaders and communities of faith in American life is not in electoral politics," said the Rev. Eric Williams, a minister with the liberal United Church of Christ.
The Phoenix-based conservative group has enlisted ministers around the country to invite investigations by the IRS by giving political sermons Sept. 28, a day the group has dubbed "Pulpit Freedom Sunday." The alliance says it will represent any churches targeted by the IRS in lawsuits against the government.
"Pastors have a right to speak about biblical truths from the pulpit without any fear of punishment," said Erik Stanley, senior legal counsel for the alliance. "They shouldn't be intimidated into giving up those constitutional rights."
The defense fund says it's looking for a lawsuit to challenge a 1954 IRS restriction that led to the prohibition against pastors endorsing candidates at the risk of losing their churches' tax exempt status.
A message seeking comment left Monday at the IRS was not immediately returned.
The nonprofit alliance has about 40 staff attorneys and about 1,200 volunteer lawyers around the country who handle the group's lawsuits pro bono.
The group has filed lawsuits challenging California's gay marriage law, in defense of an Illinois student's right to wear a T-shirt with an anti-gay message, and in defense of allowing a judge to hang a portrait of Jesus in a Louisiana courthouse.
Three former IRS officials, including Mortimer Caplin, the agency's commissioner under President Kennedy, also asked the IRS on Monday to investigate the Alliance Defense Fund's initiative.
Marcus Owens, a former director of the IRS exempt organizations division, questioned the ethics of lawyers encouraging ministers to break the law.
"It is the role of attorneys to assist their clients in understanding the law," Owens said. "It is not at all clear, under any set of ethical rules applicable to members of the bar, that one can actively aid, assist and encourage a violation of the law."
According to defense fund's promotional materials about its initiative, "Each pastor will prepare the sermon with the legal assistance of the ADF to ensure maximum effectiveness in challenging the IRS."
Stanley said that information is being misinterpreted.
"What we're doing here is working within the framework of American law that allows for these types of civil rights challenges, and allows an individual who believes their constitutional rights are violated to have their day in court," he said.
Many of the ministers signing the complaint against the ADF are members of the liberal United Church of Christ.
The IRS investigated the denomination earlier this year over allegations it violated IRS rules when it hosted Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama at its convention in Hartford, Conn., in 2007. The tax agency ultimately found no violations had occurred.
(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
Source: http://www1.whdh.com/news/articles/national/BO87473/
By CHRISTOPHER SHERMAN – 43 minutes ago
McALLEN, Texas (AP) — With Hurricane Ike steaming into the Gulf of Mexico, Texas emergency officials Tuesday stood ready to order 1 million people evacuated from the impoverished Rio Grande Valley and tried to convince tens of thousands of illegal immigrants that they have less to fear from the Border Patrol than from the storm.
Emergency planning officials were meeting all day to decide if and when to announce a mandatory evacuation for coastal counties close to the Mexican border.
With forecasts showing Ike blowing ashore this weekend, authorities lined up nearly 1,000 buses in case they are needed to move out the many poor and elderly people who have no cars.
Federal authorities gave assurances they would not check people's immigration status at evacuation loading zones or inland checkpoints. But residents were skeptical, and there were worries that many illegal immigrants would refuse to board buses and go to shelters for fear of getting arrested and deported.
"People are nervous," said the Rev. Michael Seifert, a Roman Catholic priest and immigrant advocate. "The message that was given to me was that it's going to be a real problem."
One reason for the skepticism: Back in May, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the Border Patrol would do nothing to impede an evacuation in the event of a hurricane. But when Hurricane Dolly struck the Rio Grande Valley in late July, no mandatory evacuation was ordered, and as a result the Border Patrol kept its checkpoints open. Agents soon caught a van load of illegal immigrants.
It would be the first mandatory large-scale evacuation in South Texas history. State and county officials let people decide for themselves whether to leave a hurricane area until just before Hurricane Rita struck the Gulf Coast in 2005. Now county officials can order people out of harm's way.
Hidalgo County Judge J.D. Salinas said if an evacuation is ordered this time, county officials will visit immigrant neighborhoods and forcefully urge people to clear out.
After Hurricanes Katrina and Gustav, "there were a lot of immigrants who said, `I'm not going to go,'" said Salinas, the county's top elected official. "It's going to be hard."
In Washington, Rear Adm. W. Craig Vanderwagen, assistant U.S. health secretary for preparedness and response, told reporters: "In storm events, if people are trapped it doesn't particularly matter to those of us in the humanitarian assistance world which side of that border they come from. We will do what we need to do to evacuate the people who need to be evacuated."
At 5 p.m. EDT, Ike was about 90 miles southwest of Havana, Cuba, moving northwest at 10 mph with sustained winds near 75 mph. It was expected to cross the Gulf of Mexico, strengthening to a Category 3 with winds of up to 130 mph.
Forecasters said that it could hit on Saturday morning just about anywhere along the Texas coast, with the most likely spot close to the Corpus Christi area.
Areas from Matagorda Bay to Corpus Christi and south to Brownsville — about 250 miles of coastline — were told to prepare for possible mandatory evacuation.
On Tuesday, Ike roared across Cuba, ravaging homes, killing at least four people and forcing 1.2 million to evacuate.
The Rio Grande Valley is still soggy from Dolly, which flooded the region, damaging hundreds of homes but killing no one. Many homes still have blue tarps on their roofs.
The Rio Grande Valley's residents are among those least equipped to handle hurricane flooding. It is one of the poorest parts of the country, with one-third of all families living below the poverty line, compared with 10 percent nationally.
Colonias, or ramshackle communities often lacking sewer systems and paved streets, dot the Valley. Even an ordinary rainstorm can fill yards with disease-ridden sewage from flooded septic tanks. Many of the poor lack health insurance.
Mexican officials said more than a dozen dams in the northern state of Chihuahua were at capacity or spilling over, heightening fears of flooding on the American side of the border.
Gov. Rick Perry declared 88 coastal counties disaster areas Monday to start the flow of state aid, and began preparing for an evacuation, lining up "buses rather than body bags."
The Dallas-Fort Worth area sheltered about 3,000 Hurricane Gustav evacuees last week and is prepared for up to about 20,000 people this time, said Steve Griggs, a county official. The downtown convention center would again serve as the main shelter.
Associated Press writers Eileen Sullivan in Washington, April Castro in Austin, Texas, and Jeff Carlton in Dallas contributed to this report.
Source: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5j6UrKz5o7SLKv74ElY7REhtekB5AD933FKR01
Moscow - Russia said Monday it would send warships and planes to participate in joint exercises with Venezuela in the Caribbean this year, a move that could exacerbate an already tense security balance with the United States.
Russian Foreign Ministry official Andrei Nesterenko said the nuclear-powered cruiser Peter the Great, one of the world's largest warships, and a unit of long-range anti-submarine aircraft would enter Venezuelan waters 'before the end of the year.'
The Russian statement came after Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced the planned arrival of Russian ships on national television Sunday, saying they would dock in the South American country by late November.
Chavez, who has spearheaded an alliance of non-aligned states against the United States, has sought closer ties with Russia, including by making several large weapons purchases in recent years.
Nesterenko told journalists the exercises were 'not connected to the present crisis in the Caucasus,' over which Moscow and Washington have traded accusations.
He said the joint exercise would not be directed against a third country.
'The decision to conduct Russian-Venezuelan naval exercises was adopted at the meeting between the presidents in July this year,' navy spokesman Igor Dygalo said.
While the deployment appeared to have been agreed earlier, the heightened tension between the ex-Cold War foes cast Russia's announcement as a tit-for-tat response to the presence of US warships in the Black Sea to deliver aid to Georgia.
In Washington, the Bush administration and Pentagon did not appear overly concerned.
'We conduct exercises around the world all the time with other countries, other nations, other naval forces,' a Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said if the plans were true, it meant that Russia had 'found a few ships that can make it that far.'
'Look, I'm sure we'll be watching if such exercise take place,' he told reporters.
It will be the first time Russia has held manoeuvres in waters patrolled by the US Navy since the end of the Soviet Union in December 1991.
McCormack dismissed the suggestion that Russia would be intruding on the US sphere of geographical influence.
'I'm not aware of any legal violations,' he said.
Premier Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials charge Washington with encouraging Georgia's military actions, and said US aid shipments were an excuse for an arms build-up in the region.
Russia maintains a military presence just inside the former Soviet state of Georgia's Black Sea port of Poti, where the USS Mount Whitney warship docked last week.
Sep 5, 2008, 11:46 GMT
Santiago de Compostela, Spain - The Catholic Church on Friday criticized Spain's Socialist government for its plans to liberalize the country's abortion law.
Cardinal William Joseph Levada, who serves as prefect of the Vatican's Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, said the government's announcement 'saddened' him.
'It is a sign that the vision of created life, the precious dignity of every person that begins with conception, is not the basis of such a project,' said the Vatican official, who was attending a theology meeting in the northern Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela.
The conservative daily El Mundo accused Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's government of becoming 'radicalized' in an attempt to divert Spaniards' attention from the deepening economic crisis.
Equality Minister Bibiana Aido announced Thursday that the government was appointing a commission of experts to propose a new abortion law for 2009.
Spain's current, 1985 law theoretically allows abortion only in exceptional cases such as rape or malformation of the foetus.
In practice, however, some 100,000 abortions are performed annually on grounds of danger to the mother's psychological health.
The contents of the new law were not yet known, but it was expected to lift the requirement that women had to justify their abortions.
Abortion came under debate last and this year after police raided clinics suspected of performing illegal terminations on Spanish and foreign women in advanced states of pregnancy.
Abortion clinics then complained of harassment by authorities, and suffered minor attacks from pro-life activists. Police were also criticized for questioning women who had ended their pregnancies.
© By David Kowalski
Looking out of the windows of our homes we respond indifferently to the presence of dirt on the ground. Should that dirt makes its way into our homes, however, our feelings change and we proceed to sweep it out because it does not belong there. In John 2:14-16 [1] , after passing passively through the streets of Jerusalem, Jesus’ passivity gave way to angry expression as he proceeded to sweep clean the house of God. John says in verse 15 that when Jesus saw the money changers “He made a scourge of cords, and drove them all out of the temple.” It seems that while God opposes all error and sin, he is especially passionate about expressing this opposition when error and sin come into his house and when his children are affected. In Galatians 5:12 Paul models the heart and actions of a servant of God responding to an internal corruption of the church as he says “I wish that those who are troubling you would even mutilate themselves.” The intensity of his response is dictated by his zeal for God and his love of the Church. Servants of God feel the inappropriateness of God’s house being defiled. God’s shepherds feel responsible for guarding the flock. This divinely inspired, holy passion compels an appropriate response when God’s house is trashed and his people are deceived.
Unfortunately, many evangelical shepherds, who have passed from a prophetic to a professional model of ministry too readily welcome wolves into God’s flock if those wolves are decked out in the latest, trendiest garb. The cutting-edge heresy that is being welcomed by many Evangelicals today is known as the Emerging Church movement. While many participants in this movement undoubtedly know and love Christ, and while many of their criticisms of evangelical tendencies are well founded, their concessions to relativism inevitably lead them downward to serious doctrinal and moral deviations that they bring into the household of God.
The Emerging Church movement consists of a diverse group of people who identify with Christianity, but who feel that reaching the postmodern world requires us to radically reshape the church’s beliefs and practices to conform to postmodernism. Postmodernism is a term that has been dissected and broken down into various schemes of subcategories and there is not absolute unanimity among postmodern thinkers. Nevertheless, there are certain defining characteristics of this phenomenon that grew in the late twentieth century out of some elements that always existed in modernism. [2] Grenz and Franke summarize postmodernism as “…the rejection of certain central features of the modern project, such as its quest for certain, objective, and universal knowledge, along with its dualism and its assumption of the goodness of knowledge. It is this critical agenda, rather than any proposed constructive paradigm to replace the modern vision that unites postmodern thinkers.” [3]
Postmodernism rejects the basic premises of modern epistemology. [4] In modernist thought perception corresponds to truth and language refers to an independent referent. [5] Douglas Groothuis describes the correspondence theory of truth as the assumption that “A belief or statement is true only if it matches with, reflects, or corresponds to the reality to which it refers. For a statement to be true it must be factual. Facts determine the truth or falsity of a belief or statement.” [6] For Groothuis, this theory harmonizes with the presuppositions he finds clearly implied and presupposed in Scripture: “The Bible does not relate a technical view of truth, but it does implicitly and consistently advance the correspondence view in both testaments.” [7]
The referential theory of language is the view that language refers to something objectively real in the mind of the one who communicates. Communication is not seen as ambiguous verbalizations that can have various private meanings for each hearer independent of the author or speaker’s original intent. Just as Groothuis finds the correspondence theory of truth presupposed in the Bible, Justin Taylor finds the referential theory of language similarly presumed in Scripture:
Nothing could be clearer from the New Testament, it seems to me, than the idea that God has given us universally true doctrinal revelation that can be understood, shared, defended and contextualized. ‘The faith’ has been once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3). We are to guard the ‘good deposit’ entrusted to us (1 Tim. 6:20; 2 Tim. 1:14), instructing in ‘sound doctrine’ and rebuking contrary doctrine (Titus 1:9; 2:1). False doctrine is associated with conceit and ignorance (1 Tim 6:3-4), and we are commanded not to be tossed to and fro by its winds (Eph. 4:14). [8]
Postmodern rejection of these two principles causes them to “deconstruct” the language of texts (including Scripture), redefining the words and reinterpreting the texts to mean whatever they feel as they have an encounter with the text’s language.
Although many aspects of modernism cannot blend with Christian faith, the correspondence theory of truth and referential theory of language harmonize with the presuppositions of Scripture. God intended real, objective meaning in the Bible. Scripture has no real value to us beyond subjective moments of “inspiration” if we do not believe its narratives and propositions connect with reality or that each author’s original intent is the ground and goal of our interpretation. Contemporary, biblical scholars who adopt these elements of “modern” epistemology, embracing the correspondence and referential theories and incorporating them into their hermeneutics, are not thereby embracing a wholesale adherence to all of the beliefs of secular modernism. Although Emerging Church leaders accuse Evangelicals of being culture-bound to modernism, Evangelicalism has in many ways been a countercultural movement rejecting, for example, modernism’s strict empiricism that disallows miracles or revelation. Only classic, theological liberals have accommodated modernism in all of its views.
Postmodern epistemology has serious practical consequences as it leaves no foundation for objective beliefs – a position called “postfoundationalism.” In spite of the ingenious efforts of skilled, postfoundationalist theologians to construct a theology that “has universal implications,” all postfoundational thought eventually succumbs to some form of skepticism or relativism. Thus, within postmodern thought no truth or morality can be “normative.” That is, no person or “scripture” can authoritatively tell postmoderns what is true or right for them. “Truth” and “morals” are found in the context of a specific community and they vary from one community to another.[9]
Thus, while generic “spirituality” is more acceptable to postmoderns than it has been to moderns (partly because the absolutist claims of science are losing ground everywhere but college science departments) any exclusive claim to revelation-based truth or morals is now thought to be arrogant and philosophically untenable. Postmoderns believe espousal of absolutes is an illegitimate attempt to manipulate others and exercise power over them. No one who embraces this epistemology has any room for others’ proclamation of an ahistorical, [10] objective, universally authoritative meaning of a scriptural text.
It is not an oversimplification to say that postmodernism is hostile to the objective and exclusive claims of biblical Christianity. While Christians must be sensitive to the culture they find themselves in, and while we must contextualize our methods to reach those in that culture, we must never alter the Gospel itself to fit the prevalent worldview of any given culture. [11] Postmodernized Christianity is a seriously compromised “Christianity.”
I contend that the Emerging Church movement is guilty of this kind of compromise through embracing postmodern epistemology and accepting this epistemology’s practical implications. Emergents’ efforts to accommodate postmodernism by shaping theology to suit culture (as opposed to merely adapting methods to reach culture) have been every bit as disastrous as liberal scholars’ accommodation to modernism. This accommodation follows the removal of a theological foundation (an objective basis for faith) with the rejection of “bounded-set” theology (borders for orthodoxy). With no foundation or boundaries it becomes practically impossible to say what is or is not Christian truth or conduct as there are no objective definitions or limits to faith or practice. Culturally arbitrary opinions are all that remain. Any belief or standard may then be questioned or changed. In a postmodernized faith all beliefs are valid to those who hold them. Brian McLaren, for example, says
I don’t believe making disciples must equal making adherents to the Christian religion. It may be advisable in many (not all!) circumstances to help people become followers of Jesus and remain within their Buddhist, Hindu or Jewish contexts … rather than resolving the paradox via pronouncements on the eternal destiny of people more convinced by or loyal to other religions than ours, we simply move on … To help Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, and everyone else experience life to the full in the way of Jesus (while learning it better myself), I would gladly become one of them whoever they are, to whatever degree I can, to embrace them, to join them, to enter into their world without judgment but with saving love as mine has been entered by the Lord. [12]
Any thoughtful consideration of the removal of the foundation and the boundaries for Christian faith must conclude that this postmodernization is fatal to biblical faith, stripping the term “faith” of any real meaning and opening the door to substantial change in fundamental beliefs. These changes can be found most prominently in the soteriology and eschatology of emergents. After they have undergone emergent accommodation to postmodernism, doctrines such as atonement and judgment no longer resemble the biblical teachings Evangelicals believe are non-negotiable. The collection of quotations from emergents found later in this article should give the reader an idea of the extent to which heresies have been entertained in the movement.
The effect of the emergent movement’s presence in the body of Christ is equivalent to both an autoimmune disease (such as multiple sclerosis, in which the body attacks itself with harmful consequences) and an immunocompromising disease (such as AIDS, in which the body lowers its defenses to external pathogens). The Emerging Church movement acts like an autoimmune disease, stripping Christian terminology of its biblical meanings, and it acts like an immunocompromising disease, disarming the body’s defenses against foreign invasion. The result is that this movement represents a deadly influence within the Church which requires a decisive response from those who recognize it as such.
While many participants in this movement such as Dan Kimball acknowledge that the terms “emergent” and “emerging” are essentially synonymous in popular understanding, and while many scholars such as D. A. Carson use them interchangeably, some participants in the movement see a distinction in meaning between the two. Mark Driscoll and many of the churches listed on the Acts 29 Network website (http://www.acts29network.org/index.html) consider themselves “emerging” but not “emergent” because they associate “emergent” with the more liberal and antinomian positions of Brian McLaren and Emergentvillage. This more conservative minority may be characterized by some but not all of the criticisms offered in this article. An even smaller minority of “emerging” bloggers consider the “emergent stream” too conservative and structured. [This paragraph was edited on Aug. 8, 2006]
Source: http://www.apologeticsindex.org/290-emerging-church
Just as there is diversity in postmodernism at large there is diversity in the Emerging Church movement and there are many things within it that are in themselves good. To isolate the essence of emergent we will disregard the diverse elements they do not necessarily hold in common with each other. Emergents differ on many peripheral theological and practical issues. Thus, these issues do not help define the movement in spite of their being a real part of the movement. We will also disregard those elements emergents do hold in common with Evangelicals outside of the movement. Emergents share many things with non-emergents such as a belief in contextualization, caring for the needy, friendship evangelism, and fellowship. Consequently, these commendable elements are not part of the distinctive essence of emergent regardless of the legitimate place they have in the movement. This leaves us with the distinctive teachings and goals elaborated below.
If we think of this distinctive essence of emergent as a lake, we can observe that some people, such as Brian McLaren, are swimming in its deepest spot, while others, such as Scott McKnight, are wading in the lake at a shallower depth. Still others (perhaps John Ortberg and Rick Warren fit this description), seem to enjoy boating on the lake and occasionally drinking its water, enjoying friendship with the movement while maintaining a distinctly Evangelical identity.
DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) here in the USA is still playing God with the weather, modifying weather for warfare, and God only knows what else. The Department of Defense (DoD) knows how to modify the weather. They plan to use this in warfare, “to enhance friendly force capabilities and degrade those of the adversary.”
I heard the military had the capability to modify the weather for weather warfare, and was experimenting here in the U.S.A. I was told they were causing hurricanes, drought, earthquakes, floods, forest fires, lightning, tsunamis and other things like experimenting with mind control. I refused to believe it. How foolish I was. I soon stumbled upon the information on an Air Force website.
HAARP (High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program) is the American military’s plan to manipulate the world’s ionosphere, and can create earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, jam all global communications, disrupt weather systems, interfere with migration patterns, disrupt human mental processes, negatively affect your health and disrupt the upper atmosphere.
In the video Dr. Nick Begich discusses HAARP. HAARP technology is the ultimate radio frequency microwave weapons system disguised as a research instrument. Publicity gives the impression that HAARP is an academic project with the goal of changing the ionosphere to improve communications for our own good. I can see how it could be used in much more sinister ways, and according to U.S. military documents — HAARP aims to “exploit the ionosphere for Department of Defense purposes”.
The Air Force site I found the paper on moved or deleted it, but you can check out the unclassified Air Force Weather Modification For Warfare paper called Weather As A Force Multiplier: Owning The Weather 2025 on the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) website.
Here is a short excerpt of what Philip Hoag who published a book on the subjects of weather modification and tesla-scalar electromagnetic weapons, had to say about it. “The threats of weather warfare, totalitarian government and famine dovetail together. As we saw in the famine which the Soviets artificially created in the Ukraine prior to World War II, famine is an effective means of subjugating a people. By controlling food, you can control people. Weather modification can affect food production and eventually the available supply. Starving resisters out is much more effective than having to track them down and shoot it out with them.
If you have not surrendered your weapons, you don’t get a food ration coupon. Long-term food storage, well hidden, is the only insulation against famine and totalitarian oppression.” Read more of Weather Modification by Philip L. Hoag
In the US, the technology is being perfected under the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) as part of “Star Wars,” otherwise known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). There is scientific evidence proving that HAARP is fully operational and has the ability to potentially trigger floods, droughts, hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes. Now you might say the military gave up Star Wars, but read on to see the truth.
World-renowned scientist and nun Dr. Rosalie Bertell confirms that “US military scientists are working on weather systems as a potential weapon.” As The Times of London reported on November 23, 2000, “The methods include the enhancing of storms and the diverting of vapor rivers in the Earth’s atmosphere to produce targeted droughts or floods.” You can read some of Dr. Rosalie Bertell’s work HERE
Bertell depicts HAARP as “a gigantic heater that can cause major disruption in the ionosphere, creating not just holes, but long incisions in the protective layer that keeps deadly radiation from bombarding the planet.”
In The Military’s Pandora’s Box, Dr. Nick Begich, a scientist actively involved in the campaign against HAARP, describes it as “a super-powerful radio wave beaming technology that lifts areas of the ionosphere (upper layer of the atmosphere) by focusing a beam and heating those areas. Electromagnetic waves then bounce back onto earth and penetrate everything - living and dead.”
If you like live webcams then you will love this: The HAARP Cam
The official HAARP site:
This site has photographs of the high frequency antenna array at the HAARP Ionospheric Research Observatory in Gakona, Alaska. The photos are taken with an automated camera located in the temporary operation center trailer at the HAARP facility HERE
The US Air Force claims:
“The potential applications of artificial electromagnetic fields are wide-ranging and can be used in many military or quasi-military situations… Some of these potential uses include dealing with terrorist groups, crowd control, controlling breaches of security at military installations, and antipersonnel techniques in tactical warfare. In all of these cases the EM (electromagnetic) systems would be used to produce mild to severe physiological disruption or perceptual distortion or disorientation. In addition, the ability of individuals to function could be degraded to such a point that they would be combat-ineffective. Another advantage of electromagnetic systems is that they can provide coverage over large areas with a single system. They are silent, and countermeasures to them may be difficult to develop… One last area where electromagnetic radiation may prove of some value is in enhancing abilities of individuals for anomalous phenomena.”
Do these comments point to uses already somewhat developed? The author of the government report refers to an earlier Air Force document about the uses of radio-frequency radiation in combat situations. (Here, Begich and Manning note that HAARP is the most versatile and the largest radio-frequency radiation transmitter in the world.)
The United States congressional record deals with the use of HAARP for penetrating the Earth with signals bounced off the ionosphere. These signals are used to look inside the planet to a depth of many kilometers in order to locate underground munitions, minerals and tunnels. Way back in 1996, the US Senate set aside US $15 million to develop this ability: Earth-penetrating tomography, with millions and millions more set aside every year since then.
The problem with earth-penetrating tomography is that the frequency needed for Earth-penetrating radiations is within the frequency range most cited for disruption of human mental functions. It also has profound effects on migration patterns of fish and wild animals which rely on an undisturbed energy field to find their routes.
As if electromagnetic pulses in the sky and mental disruption were not enough, Bernard J. Eastlund (patent holder and developer of some of the HAARP technology, bragged that the super-powerful ionospheric heater could control weather. Begich and Manning brought to light government documents indicating that the military has weather-control technology. When HAARP is eventually built to its full power level, it could create weather effects over entire hemispheres. If one government experiments with the world’s weather patterns, what is done in one place will impact everyone else on the planet. Angels Don’t Play This HAARP explains a principle behind some of Nikola Tesla’s inventions-resonance-which affects planetary systems.
Bernard J. Eastlund’s US Patent #4,686,605, “Method and Apparatus for Altering a Region in the Earth’s Atmosphere, Ionosphere and/or Magnetosphere”, was sealed for a year under a government secrecy order.
The military’s goal is full scale global dominance by the year 2025. And one of those stated goals is owning the weather: “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning The Weather In 2025.”
Part of what HAARP is doing now is what was first sketched out by President Ronald Reagan in 1983 as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), quickly dubbed “Star Wars”. The military said they gave up Star Wars. They convinced congress that it was never fully developed or deployed. What a joke, because in January of 2007 the Czechoslovakian government gave the go-ahead for a US ’son of star wars’ base.
See “No Star Wars in Europe”. And then watch this video “David against Goliath” of Czech citizens protesting the plan in Wenceslas Square in Prague, Czechoslovakia last year for more background on the issue.
And just last Wednesday April 16, 2008 the Czech Humanist Movement, a group of Czechoslovakian peace activists, posted an international petition against the possible stationing of a US radar base in their homeland. The petition is called No Star Wars. The movement plans to launch a billboard campaign promoting the petition in the Czech Republic later this week. The statement accompanying the petition says that “The implementation of this project is… generating a new arms race and is the first step towards the militarization and control of space.”
The US government must clearly understand that it is not carrying out a dialogue with the Czech people, but with a minority that does not represent the will of the majority of Czech citizens. Americans must clearly understand that the American government’s policies are generating a widespread feeling of “anti-Americanism”.
Join these modern-day Czech dissidents in protesting one of the latest of the Bush Administration’s imperial schemes (conspiracy, propaganda) by clicking here adding your name to the petition and by helping spread the word. With your help, the organizer’s goal of securing 500,000 signatures is well within reach.
And don’t even think that it is just the American government involved in these creepy research projects. The British Royal Air Force (RAF) and Western scientists engaged in Operation Cumulus in 1952, which, according to an August 2001 BBC broadcast, was a rainmaking project that led to 35 flood-related deaths in Devon, it was an artificially created man made disaster, instead of a natural disaster. Declassified documents show that in 1953 the British military and their allies experimented with increasing rain and snow by artificial means in hopes of “bogging down enemy movement.” Perhaps more shocking, the documents showed that they contemplated the possibility of “exploding an atomic weapon in a seeded storm system or cloud.” This would produce a far wider area of radioactive contamination than a normal atomic explosion. Read all about the British weather modification experiment and the deaths it caused at the British Broadcast Corp (BBC) News Site. Click HERE to visit the BBC and read more about the Britain’s experiments with weather modification.
Source: http://www.staticbrain.com/archive/haarp-weather-modification-for-weather-warfare/

You'll get Osama Bin Laden.....What a winning ticket!
Joe Biden | |||||||||
The Anagram Candidates 2008.
Arsenio. |
"[N]ationalisation . . . would bring the whole of Fannie’s and Freddie’s debt onto the federal government’s balance sheet. In terms of book-keeping this would almost double the public debt." ... It sounds pretty grim, but let’s think about that. Would the end of the current financial system really be so bad? The international financial system is now controlled by a network of private central banks that print national currencies and trade them with sovereign governments for government bonds (or debt). The bonds then become the basis for creating many times their value in loans by commercial banks. At a 10% reserve requirement, banks are allowed to fan $1 worth of reserves into $10 in loans, effectively delivering the power to create money into private hands. The price exacted by this private money-creating machine is compound interest perpetually drawn off the top, in a Ponzi scheme that has now reached its mathematical limits. The chief role of Fannie and Freddie has been to keep the Ponzi scheme alive by adding “liquidity” to markets, something they do by buying mortgages and bundling them together as securities that are then sold to investors. Old loans are moved off the banks’ books, making room for new loans, further expanding the money supply and driving up home prices. As economist Michael Hudson noted in Counterpunch in July: “Altruistic political talk aside, the reason why the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sectors have lobbied so hard for Fannie and Freddie is that their financial function has been to make housing increasingly unaffordable. They have inflated asset prices with credit that has indebted homeowners to a degree unprecedented in history. This is why the real estate bubble has burst, after all. Yet Congress now acts as if the only way to resolve the debt problem is to create yet more debt, to inflate real estate prices all the more by arranging yet more credit to bid up the prices that homebuyers must pay. “. . . The economy has reached its debt limit and is entering its insolvency phase. We are not in a cycle but the end of an era. The old world of debt pyramiding to a fraudulent degree cannot be restored . . . . The class war is back in business, with a vengeance. Instead of it being the familiar old class war between industrial employers and their work force, this one reverts to the old pre-industrial class war of creditors versus debtors. Its guiding principle is ‘Big Fish Eat Little Fish,’ mainly by the debt dynamic that crowds out the promised economy of free choice. “. . . No economy in history ever has been able to pay off its debts. That is the essence of the ‘magic of compound interest.’ Debts grow inexorably, making creditors rich but impoverishing the economy in the process, thereby destroying its ability to pay. Recognizing this financial dynamic most societies have chosen the logical response. From Sumer in the third millennium BC and Babylonia in the second millennium through Greece and Rome in the first millennium BC, and then from feudal Europe to the Inter-Ally war debts and reparations tangle that wrecked international finance after World War I, the response has been to bring debts back within the ability to pay. “This can be done only by wiping out debts that cannot be paid. The alternative is debt peonage. Throughout most of history, countries have found again and again that bankruptcy – wiping out the debts – is the way to free economies. The idea is to free them from a situation where the economic surplus is diverted away from new tangible investment to pay bankers. The classical idea of free markets is to avoid privatizing monopolies, such as the unique privilege of commercial bankers to create bank-credit and charge interest on it.” ... Once bankrupt businesses have been restored to solvency, the usual practice is to return them to private hands; but a better plan for Fannie and Freddie might be to simply keep them as public institutions. In the August 8 London Tribune, British MP Michael Meacher proposed this alternative for Northern Rock, a major British bank that was recently nationalized after becoming insolvent. He wrote: “[W]hen the banks have failed the public interest so badly and still even now continue to pursue so single-mindedly their commitment to privatise their gains whilst socialising their losses, would not a publicly owned bank be the most effective way of changing the current corrosive financial culture of short-termism, lower investment, house price inflation, and insider enrichment at the expense of systemic fragility for everyone else? Perhaps we should not return Northern Rock to the private sector after all.” Perhaps we should not return Fannie and Freddie either. (09/06/08) |
| Tropical Storm Hannah Drenches New York City |
| www.chinaview.cn |
NEW YORK, Sept. 6 (Xinhua) -- Tropical storm Hanna drenched New York City on Saturday, but no serious damages have been officially reported as the center of the storm approached. The storm flooded highways and delayed flights for hours in the city. Rain fell heavily at times, and the National Weather Service predicted that the fast-moving storm would dump rain up to four inches (0.1 meter) before midnight and buffet the area with winds of up to 50 miles (80.47 km) per hour. The effects were expected to be stronger on Long Island, where emergency shelters were opened and parks were closed, the Associated Press (AP) reported. Stretches of several highways north of the city were closed because of flooding, Westchester County police were quoted as saying. In the city, a tree toppled onto the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn, injuring no one but briefly closing the highway, according to city police. New York City emergency management commissioner Joseph F. Bruno was quoted as saying that park employees were ready to clear any fallen trees or limbs. The Red Cross reportedly opened two shelters on Long Island and said it had 1,500 volunteers ready to assist. |