“The Jersey Girls” support AE911Truth efforts!

www.ae911truth.org

We’re proud to have the endorsement of The Jersey Girls, who single handedly forced the Bush Administration to convene the 9/11 Commission after one year of inaction following the attacks of September 11

Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth is proud to be working for and on behalf of the 9/11 victims’ family members, in particular The Jersey Girls. We recommend “9/11 Press for Truth”, which is the story of the Jersey Girls and their struggle for the truth.

We are pleased that Patty and Lorie have signed our petition. We have also received signatures from Josef Princiotta, Manny Badillo, Bob McIlvaine, Ellen Mariani. Let us know if there are any of them we are not listing here!

We have taken a lot of criticism from so called debunkers & unconscious government officials that our work is “upsetting the family members”. Let it be clear that only the truth about the deaths of these innocent people will bring healing to their loved ones. AE911Truth has ever increasing support from them to reveal the truth to the American people.

February 25, 2010

We must applaud Mr. Richard Gage and his colleagues, Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, for their tenacity in seeking to answer lingering questions concerning the total destruction of the World Trade Center complex, in particular buildings 1, 2 and 7.

As with any scientific report, conclusions must be able to be replicated and verified by subsequent public peer reviews. Mr. Gage and his colleagues have attempted to do just that with NIST’s Final Report of the Collapse of the WTC. There seem to be discrepancies and omissions in NIST’s conclusions, which Mr. Gage and his colleagues have brought to light.

With their combined professional training and work experience, this group of professionals is uniquely qualified to address the myriad oddities resulting in the collapse of the WTC high-rise buildings – including WTC 7, which was not hit by an airplane. This chosen course of action by the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, has often come at a high cost to them personally and professionally making this endeavor all the more admirable.

As family members of 9/11 victims, we have been seeking truth and transparency since 200l. Almost nine years later, in spite of the NIST Investigation and the 9/11 Independent Commission, a vast majority of our questions remain unanswered.

It was always our hope that both of these government investigations would uncover the cause of the WTC destruction and any loopholes or lapses in security protocols that could be remedied to protect us in the future. In this case, it was of utmost importance to determine what actually caused the collapses to ensure the future safety of high-rise buildings. Since the government failed to do that, we applaud Mr. Richard Gage and the many other professionals who are spending their own time attempting to seek the truth.

Sincerely,

Patty Casazza
Lorie Van Auken
Mindy Kleinberg
Monica Gabrielle

Mayor Kiely Calls For ‘Selective Internment’ After Limerick City Gun Killing

www.limerickleader.ie
Published Date: 22 February 2010

AFTER another gun killing in Limerick this morning, the city’s mayor, Cllr Kevin Kiely, has called for “selective internment of known criminal gangs.

“It’s the only way out of it,” he said. “We have to solve this problem in Limerick and across the country.

“We have to have a situation where we have selective internment of known criminal gang members. It’s the only way out of it. It was done during the time of the troubles with the Republican parties and I think it should be re-introduced.

“The Guards know who these gang members are in Dublin and in Limerick but these new laws that Dermot Ahern brought in a few months ago after the Collins murder and the Shane Geoghegan murder in Limerick, not one person has been brought before the courts.

“I understand from the Guards they have to build up cases against these people before they can take them to court. I think what should happen is that we should introduce selective internment.”

Mayor Kiely was speaking on the Lunchtime with Eamonn Keane programme on Newstalk radio.

Source: www.limerickleader.ie/news/Mayor-Kiely-calls-for-39selective.6093714.jp

U.K. Bill Would ‘Outlaw Open Wi-Fi’

David Meyer, ZDNet UK
Published: 26 Feb 2010

The government will not exempt universities, libraries and small businesses providing open Wi-Fi services from its Digital Economy Bill copyright crackdown, according to official advice released earlier this week.

This would leave many organisations open to the same penalties for copyright infringement as individual subscribers, potentially including disconnection from the internet, leading legal experts to say it will become impossible for small businesses and the like to offer Wi-Fi access.

Lilian Edwards, professor of internet law at Sheffield University, told ZDNet UK on Thursday that the scenario described by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) in an explanatory document would effectively “outlaw open Wi-Fi for small businesses”, and would leave libraries and universities in an uncertain position.

“This is going to be a very unfortunate measure for small businesses, particularly in a recession, many of whom are using open free Wi-Fi very effectively as a way to get the punters in,” Edwards said.

“Even if they password protect, they then have two options — to pay someone like The Cloud to manage it for them, or take responsibility themselves for becoming an ISP effectively, and keep records for everyone they assign connections to, which is an impossible burden for a small café.”

In the explanatory document, Lord Young, a minister at BIS, described common classes of public Wi-Fi access, and explained that none of them could be protected. Libraries, he said, could not be exempted because “this would send entirely the wrong signal and could lead to ‘fake’ organisations being set up, claiming an exemption and becoming a hub for copyright infringement”.

Universities cannot be exempted, Young said, because some universities already have stringent anti-file-sharing rules for their networks, and “it does not seem sensible to force those universities who already have a system providing very effective action against copyright infringement to abandon it and replace it with an alternative”. Read more…

Father stopped from taking picture of his son, 4, on children’s train ride ‘in case he was a paedophile’

www.dailymail.co.uk
28th February 2010

A father was stopped from taking a photo of his son on a children’s train ride after an over-zealous security guard accused him of being a paedophile.

Kevin Geraghty-Shewan, 48, was approached by the guard after he took the picture of his four-year-old son Ben on the toy engine outside a shop.

He was then threatened with arrest after refusing to hand his mobile phone containing the picture after a row with a policeman.

Mr Geraghty-Shewan said: ‘Ben saw a children’s ride which had a train on it and wanted to have a go because he’s obsessed with trains.’

Moments later, he was apprehended by the security guard.

The father-of-one, who was in the North East visiting family, said: ‘He said “you can’t take pictures in here”. I asked why and he told me it was because for all he knew I could be a paedophile.

‘I told him Ben Was my son. But he said I couldn’t prove it.

‘I couldn’t believe it. I walked away and then I thought about making a complaint.’

A few minutes later a police officer arrived at the Bridges Shopping Centre in Sunderland and threatened to delete the photograph.

‘They said I matched the description of a man who had been taking pictures,’ Mr Geraghty-Shewan said.

‘They took my details and said they had the right to remove the picture from my phone.

‘I got annoyed and things got heated, then he threatened me with arrest for breach of the peace.

Read more…

Man jailed after flouting English smoking ban

www.rte.ie
Saturday, 27 February 2010

A pub landlord in England who failed to pay fines for deliberately flouting smoking ban laws was jailed yesterday.

He was described as ‘devastated’ by his wife today.

Nick Hogan, 43, from Chorley, Lancashire, was originally fined £3,000 and ordered to pay £7,136 in costs when he was found guilty of breaching the smoking ban.

The hearing, in January 2008, was told that on the day the ban came into force he organised a ‘mass light-up’ in his two pubs, The Swan and Barristers, both in Bolton, Greater Manchester.

His wife Denise, 53, also a publican, said that following the conviction he lost his job and was unable to keep up with the £125-a-week fine payments.

He was jailed for six months yesterday by magistrates in Bolton.

Mrs Hogan said today the sentence was unfair.

She said: ‘He’s not a smoking campaigner or anything like that.

‘He didn’t want to change the law, he just thought if people wanted to smoke it should be their choice.

‘When he lost his job the fine repayments were too much for him and he couldn’t pay it.

‘We never expected him to go to jail. He hasn’t harmed anybody and he isn’t a criminal. Read more…

Buck-Fevered US Soldiers Tragically Kill Iraqi Tribal Chief’s Son

www.dawn.com
Saturday, 27 Feb, 2010

AQUBA: US soldiers killed an Iraqi tribal chief’s son and wounded his wife in what the Americans on Saturday called a tragic accident, although local accounts of the incident differed.

US troops were travelling through the district of Kanaan, northeast of Baghdad, late on Thursday when Zhaheri tribe chief Thaher Zaihud al-Zhaheri’s son, Ahmed, walked outside the family’s front door and was shot dead, the tribal leader said.

Further gunfire wounded Zhaheri’s wife in the leg.

According to the US military, American soldiers were conducting a reconnaissance patrol ahead of a combined operation with Iraqi security forces when the “tragic accident” occurred.

“Villagers responded to what they thought were intruders and began firing in the darkness, which caused other residents to come out of their homes and also fire their rifles,” a statement said.

“Thinking they were under attack, the US soldiers returned fire to protect themselves. Regrettably, as a result of this gunfire exchange, a young man was killed and a woman was wounded.”

The statement said an investigation had been launched.

According to Zhaheri, however, there was no shooting prior to the family hearing a noise near their home and they thought there might be thieves in their village, Saisabanah.

“Ahmed went outside and when he opened the door and walked outside, the Americans shot and killed him,” he told AFP. Read more…

Trinitite – WHAT THE HECK IS THIS STUFF?

Michael Rivero
whatreallyhappened.com

The above image is a scan of a piece of Trinitite. This is desert sand that was underneath the explosion of the world’s first Atomic bomb in New Mexico as part of project TRINITY, hence the name Trinitite. The heat from that blast melted the sand into a green glass, not unlike the Fulgurites that result when lightning hits sandy soil.

Now, imagine an entire nation looking like the above sample, melted into green glass. Buried in the green glass are the charred remains of the people of that nation. It’s not an idle fantasy. The US spent $5 trillion dollars (back in the 1950s, when a trillion dollars was REALLY a lot of money!) building a nuclear deterrent capability that can actually do that; melt any nation and it’s people into a giant slab of green glass. The USSR knew it, the world knows it, Saddam knew it. The government of Iran knows it.

Even if Iraq had possessed weapons of mass destruction (which we now know they did not), and even if Iraq had the long range ICBMs to reach across the Atlantic with (which we know they did not), Iraq would still not have been a threat to the US because any attack with a weapon of mass destruction would be national suicide.

Those that insist that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were a threat that justified invasion are in essence claiming that the US Government took $5 trillion of your money (over $17,000 from each of you alive today) in a gigantic swindle, because the $5 trillion nuclear deterrent isn’t a deterrent after all, that it doesn’t work, that nobody is really afraid of it, because they all know it was just a hoax to soak the American taxpayer for another several thousand dollars. Was it all a hoax, Mr. Obama? Did the American people foot a $5 trillion bill in 1950s dollars for a deterrent system that isn’t really a deterrent?

Either the deterrent works or it does not. If it doesn’t, then the American taxpayers have been defrauded on a grand scale. But if the nuclear deterrent does work, then Iraq or Iran can have all the weapons of mass destruction they want, they just won’t dare use them. Maybe they can put them in a museum or something. But they won’t dare use them against the United States because they don’t want to end up like that piece of green glass at the top of this article. There is no need to invade over the issue of weapons of mass destruction. There never was.

Of course, the issue has shifted. The UN inspectors have found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction. They found some documents ABOUT weapons of mass destruction, but documents are not a weapon of mass destruction (with the sole exception of the 1040 form). The UN inspectors found a bunch of old empty artillery warheads from 1988, but empty warheads are not a weapon of mass destruction, and tests show that these empties were never weapons. Soil samples have tested negative for chemicals or radioactivity indicating weapons development. Iraq and Iran have allowed the inspectors to pretty much go everywhere they want without hindrance, even into Saddam’s home. Imagine the KGB demanding and getting permission to peek into every closet and drawer in the White House and you will get an idea of just how much Iraq and now Iran is cooperating. The CIA gave the UN inspectors a list of sites they were convinced had weapons of mass destruction. Nothing was found.

But Bush still got his invasion, and grabbed the oil wells.

Now the target has shifted to Iran. And once again, we are being warned that Iran, while it does not actually have nuclear weapons, might be close to building one, and this justifies another invasion. The theory is that if Iran has a nuclear power station, they will build bombs with it. Iran hasn’t planned to build bombs with it, and invites inspections (and now tourists) to prove that they are not making bombs, but the theory is that Iran will make bombs with their reactor and fool the inspectors, because, well, to be blunt about it, that’s what Israel did at Dimona while they clandestinely built the world’s 6th largest nuclear arsenal.

Iran says they don’t want a bomb. Personally, after Iraq proved to the world what the US does to oil-rich nations that do not have weapons of mass destruction I would rethink that position. But if Iran builds a bomb, so what? Maybe they can put it in a museum, or march it down the streets of Tehran in a parade like the Soviets used to do. But they won’t use it against the United States. They won’t dare.

Even if Iran has a weapon of mass destruction (which we know they do not), and even if Iran has long range ICBMs to reach across the Atlantic with (which we know they do not), Iran would still not be a threat to the US because any attack with a weapon of mass destruction would be national suicide.

You see, leaders of nations have huge egos. They are driven by that dream that future generations will admire their faces on statues and stamps and money. and that doesn’t happen if you let your nation get destroyed.

Simply having a nuclear weapon does not mean the nation that owns it will use it. Many nations possess nuclear weapons. And contrary to all the dire warnings the historical truth is that one and only one country has actually used nuclear weapons against the citizens of another nation and that country is the United States of America. For all the talk about the threat from Iraq and now the threat from Iran, it is the USA which remains the only country to have actually used a nuclear weapon.

If Iran were to have a weapon of mass destruction and use it against the US, the US could just stand back and turn the entire nation into green glass just like that at the top of this article. That’s what we all paid that $5 trillion for. And unless the US Government wants to admit that $5 trillion nuclear deterrent is a hoax, then we should use it as it was intended to be used, to deter an attack without having to invade a foreign attacker.

Why Iran’s nuclear weapons don’t matter (even if they did exist).

The [Ohio class] submarine has the capacity for 24 Trident missile tubes in two rows of 12. The dimensions of the Trident II missile are length 1,360cm x diameter 210cm and the weight is 59,000kg. The three-stage solid fuel rocket motor is built by ATK (Alliant Techsystems) Thiokol Propulsion. The US Navy gives the range as “greater than 7,360km” but this could be up to 12,000km depending on the payload mix. Missile guidance is provided by an inertial navigation system, supported by stellar navigation. Trident II is capable of carrying up to twelve MIRVs (multiple independent re-entry vehicles), each with a yield of 100 kilotons, although the SALT treaty limits this number to eight per missile. The circle of equal probability (the radius of the circle within which half the strikes will impact) is less than 150m. The Sperry Univac Mark 98 missile control system controls the 24 missiles.

The 14 Trident II SSBNs carry together around 50 percent of total U.S. strategic warheads. (The exact number varies in an unpredictable and highly classified manner below a maximum set by various strategic arms limitation treaties.) Although the missiles have no pre-set targets when the submarine goes on patrol, the SSBNs are capable of rapidly targeting their missiles should the need arise, using secure and constant at-sea communications links. The Ohio class are the largest submarines ever built for the U.S. Navy, and are second only to the Russian Typhoon class in mass and size. A single submarine carries the destructive power more than nine times greater than all Allied ordnance dropped in WWII.

Only the whales and dolphins know where these submarines are when they are out on patrol. Not even the president knows their exact location.

When the Soviet Union achieved nuclear parity with the United States, the Cold War had entered a new phase. The cold war became a conflict more dangerous and unmanageable than anything Americans had faced before. In the old cold war Americans had enjoyed superior nuclear force, an unchallenged economy, strong alliances, and a trusted Imperial President to direct his incredible power against the Soviets. In the new cold war, however, Russian forces achieved nuclear equality. Each side could destroy the other many times. This fact was officially accepted in a military doctrine known as Mutual Assured Destruction, a.k.a. MAD. Mutual Assured Destruction began to emerge at the end of the Kennedy administration. MAD reflects the idea that one’s population could best be protected by leaving it vulnerable so long as the other side faced comparable vulnerabilities. In short: Whoever shoots first, dies second.

If Iran needs to be invaded, and occupied, to prevent them from ever developing and possibly using a nuclear weapon against the mainland United States, then our parents and grandparents wasted untold trillions in producing nuclear weapons and submarines to defend against just such a threat.

And we want our money back.

DNA’s Dirty Little Secret

A forensic tool renowned for exonerating the innocent may actually be putting them in prison.

By Michael Bobelian
Washington Monthly, March/April 2010

Three days before Christmas 1972, a twenty-two-year-old nurse named Diana Sylvester wrapped up her night shift at the University of San Francisco Medical Center and made her way to her apartment, halfway between the hospital and Golden Gate Park. She arrived around 8:00 a.m. and set her newspaper and purse on the kitchen table. A few minutes later, Sylvester’s landlord, Helen Nigidoff, heard loud thuds and screams emanating from Sylvester’s unit upstairs. With her apron still on, Nigidoff rang the doorbell before opening a door leading up to Sylvester’s apartment, where she came face-to-face with a stranger. “Go away,” he growled angrily. “We’re making love.” As Nigidoff raced downstairs to call the police, the man ran out of the building holding a denim jacket over his face.

When the officers arrived a half hour later, they found a gruesome scene. Sylvester lay motionless next to the Christmas tree on her living-room floor, her mouth unnaturally agape, blood oozing from her chest like molten lava. An autopsy revealed that Sylvester’s attacker had forced her to perform oral sex and then strangled her, before plunging a knife into her chest two times. One stab pierced her heart. The other tore through her left lung, drowning her in her own blood.

Police immediately scoured Sylvester’s apartment and questioned the landlady, who offered a description of the assailant: white, medium height, and heavy-set, with curly brown hair and a beard. But neither these details nor the bits and pieces of evidence they collected in the months-long investigation that followed were enough to pinpoint the culprit. The few leads investigators turned up fizzled, and the case went cold.

Then in early 2003 the San Francisco Police Department, which had received a grant to use DNA technology to crack unsolved crimes, dug Sylvester’s case file out of storage and discovered a slide with sperm that had been swabbed from Sylvester’s mouth after her death. The sample was badly deteriorated and contained less than half the DNA markers that are normally used to link a suspect to a crime. But investigators ran the profile through California’s DNA database and turned up a match: an ailing seventy-year-old man named John Puckett, who had a history of sexual violence. There was no other physical evidence linking him to the crime. But Puckett was arrested, tried, and eventually convicted based mostly on the DNA match, which was portrayed as proof positive of his guilt—the jury was told that the chance that a random person’s DNA would match that found at the crime scene was one in 1.1 million.

If Puckett’s were an ordinary criminal case, this figure might have been accurate. Indeed, when police use fresh DNA material to link a crime directly to a suspect identified through eyewitness accounts or other evidence, the chances of accidentally hitting on an innocent person are extraordinarily slim. But when suspects are found by combing through large databases, the odds are exponentially higher. In Puckett’s case the actual chance of a false match is a staggering one in three, according to the formula endorsed by the FBI’s DNA advisory board and the National Research Council, a body created by Congress to advise the government and the public on scientific issues. But the jury that decided Puckett’s fate never heard that figure. In fact, his lawyers were explicitly barred from bringing it up.

Over the past quarter century, DNA evidence has transformed criminal justice, freeing hundreds of innocent people and helping unravel countless crimes that might otherwise have gone unsolved. It has also captivated the public imagination: the plots of popular TV crime shows often hinge on the power of DNA to crack impossible cases, which has helped to give this forensic tool an air of infallibility—a phenomenon known in criminal justice circles as “the CSI effect.” This failsafe image is not entirely unfounded, especially when it comes to traditional applications of DNA evidence. But increasingly DNA is being used for a new purpose: to target the culprits in cold cases, where other investigative options have been exhausted. All told, U.S. law enforcement agencies have conducted more than 100,000 so-called cold-hit investigations using the federal DNA database and its state-level counterparts, which hold upward of 7.6 million offender profiles. In these instances, where the DNA is often incomplete or degraded and there are few other clues to go on, the reliability of DNA evidence plummets—a fact that jurors weighing such cases are almost never told. As a result, DNA, a tool renowned for exonerating the innocent, may actually be putting a growing number of them behind bars. Read more…

The Bloom Box: The Holy Grail of Energy?

bedlamreview.wordpress.com
27 February 2010

K.R. Sridhar is a NASA scientist who was working on a project to terraform Mars. He invented a machine that would produce oxygen in the Martian atmosphere and make the Red Planet habitable for humans.

But the budget got cut. The program got cancelled. So K.R. Sridhar took the invention and reversed it to suck in oxygen. He created an entirely new kind of fuel cell, which is far more compact and more efficient than anything now producing electricity. It is designed to replace the grid. And it is coming.

A single block the size of a brick can power a European home. Two small blocks about the size of bricks can power the average American home. Or four Asian homes. Or six Indian homes. Power lines – gone. Electrical stations – gone. Combustion and emissions – gone. Oxygen + fuel combine upon a ceramic tile painted with chemical inks. A chemical reaction produces an electrical charge. A small substation can power an office block – and then some.

It is being funded to the tune of $100 million by the same venture capitalist who helped found Netscape, Amazon and Google. The project, under development for 10 years, has been extremely secretive precisely because any leak would threaten the untold riches and public good that will come from it. The aim is not to undermine energy companies and public utilities but to allow them to buy these fuel cells and replace the grid.

He has customers for the invention. Twenty companies in California are quietly testing the device. Walmart is on board. FedEx powers their Oakland, CA hub on the Bloom Box. They’re the company whose slogan is “If it absolutely, positively has to be there on time.” Each unit costs $700-$800,000. One reason Californian companies have have signed on to the idea is that the State of California subsidizes the purchase by 20% and the Federal government provides a 30% tax break for energy efficiency. Ebay runs their campus on this stuff and says, averaged out over the week, it provides five times as much energy as they use, and saved $100,000 in energy costs over the first nine months. (Bank of America and Coca-Cola are also using the system, according to MSNBC.com.)

However Colin Powell has seen it and says it works. This does not exactly constitute a confident endorsement, considering Iraq and all that. Although if Powell surely does not want to be seen negatively in the light of history, he probably is trying very hard to back a winner in order to re-establish his integrity and his legacy. So he is on of the Board of Directors.

It should be noted that the financial backer of the Bloom Box, Netscape, Amazon and Google also backed the Segway. It should also be noted that the Bloom Box is made by a NASA scientist. NASA scientists are regularly required to build impossible things that work. Both FedEx and Ebay depend upon dependable energy or else their businesses fail.

In five to ten years, it should be available for every home at $3,000 apiece. That seems like a slight fudge to me. Most likely they are trying to terrify the energy and utility companies to purchase Bloom Boxes now and continue to supply the energy needs of the country or, in 5-10 years, face the threat that they will be wiped out as cleanly as the mainstream media by the rapid advances in digital technology. If I were them, I would take that threat very seriously. Read more…

A million books to be stored underground

Deborah Linton
www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk
January 29, 2010

ONE million books from Manchester’s Central Library – including valuable volumes dating back to the 15th century – are to be put into temporarily storage with many going deep underground in the Cheshire salt mines.

Works from the city’s reference library will be stored in the mines, hundreds of feet below ground, for the next three years while the landmark city centre site undergoes a massive refurbishment to save it from ruin.

Experts say the mine’s caverns – the size of 700 football pitches – provide the perfect environment for preserving the manuscripts, which include the works of eminent academics.

A phased shut down of the St Peter’s Square library will begin next month, with the site closing its doors in June. The Library Theatre, which will most likely relocate to the historic Theatre Royal, will close the following month with a celebratory show entitled Last Night at the Library.

A temporary city library will open in Elliot House, on Deansgate, where staff will also be able to arrange access to some rare reference works that are not available elsewhere in the country. All others will be stored in the salt mines from where they will be digitally catalogued but inaccessible for the duration of the refurbishment.

More than 22 miles of shelving and one million books – including more than 30 works dating back to the 15th century and 44,000 published before 1850 – will be relocated to the mines, Elliot House and other temporary locations including the Royal Northern College of Music. The project is part of multi-million pound plans to transform and modernise St Peter’s Square and the Town Hall Complex, bringing services and facilities up to date and carrying out vital restoration works to the listed buildings. Read more…

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