The Eastern Coast of the United States has once again experienced repeated sightings of streaking lights across the nighttime sky followed by a sonic boom. Early reports again speculate that meteors are the cause for the alarming number of responses from concerned or flat out frightened citizens.
The frequency which these events seem to be happening appears to have increased as widespread accounts of similar events were reported in New Jersey, New York, Georgia and North Carolina earlier this month.
NEW YORK (Reuters) – The name "Freedom Tower" has been dropped for the skyscraper under construction in New York to replace the World Trade Center towers destroyed in the September 11 attacks, but some locals are not happy about it.
Designed amid much fanfare to symbolize the city's revival after the attacks in 2001, the tower, which will be New York's tallest building, has been beset by delays and its developer has struggled to attract tenants, due partly to fears it could be targeted for another attack.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is building the 1,776-foot (541-meter) skyscraper, has admitted even its own workers do not want to return to the site where nearly 3,000 people were killed.
On Thursday, it announced it planned to refer to the building by its address -- One World Trade Center -- because that was easiest for people to identify with.
"As we market the building, we will ensure that the building is presented in the best possible way," Port Authority Chairman Anthony Coscia told reporters on Thursday.
The plan was savaged by local tabloids. "Free Dumb Tower," was the New York Post's reaction, while the Daily News' front-page headline was: "No More Freedom."
Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on Friday he was disappointed.
"I would like to see it stay the Freedom Tower but it's their building and they don't need me dumping on them," Bloomberg said on his radio show.
"If they could rent the whole thing by changing the name, then they should do that," Bloomberg said, adding the most important part of the rebuilding was a planned memorial.
"We're not going to forget what happened down there and in the end the real thing that will tell the story and memorialize and hopefully give us a lesson that this should never happen again is the World Trade Center Memorial," Bloomberg said.
George Pataki, who was New York's governor at the time of the attacks, told the Daily News the name Freedom Tower was "symbolic of our commitment to rise above the attacks of September 11." He added the addresses 1 and 2 World Trade Center should never be used again since they were the names of the twin towers.
The Port Authority announced on Thursday that after on-again off-gain talks, it signed its first commercial tenant, Vantone Industrial Co Ltd, which rented several floors for a new China Center.
Swiss watchmaker Borgeaud has now teamed up with Indian fortune tellers, have created a watch that is claimed to be able to predict the future.
The Borgeaud watch automatically displays a daily 90-minute period called the Rahu Kaal, which is believed to be the worst time to make important decisions or start new projects. The watch face has a bedpan-shaped section, which will turn brown when the worst time is about to strike and turn back to its normal color when the Rahu Kaal is over and “dark astral forces” have left the area.
The watch maker claims this watch is useful to warn anyone when misfortune is about to strike. The company will be producing only limited number of these fortune telling watches - there will be 500 for women and 150 for men and each will cost £1,500 or USD $2,000 each. The company seems to be hinting women will have higher chance to get bad days to strike.
By Jeremy Gaunt, European Investment Correspondent
LUXEMBOURG (Reuters) - A U.N. panel will next week recommend that the world ditch the dollar as its reserve currency in favor of a shared basket of currencies, a member of the panel said on Wednesday, adding to pressure on the dollar.
Currency specialist Avinash Persaud, a member of the panel of experts, told a Reuters Funds Summit in Luxembourg that the proposal was to create something like the old Ecu, or European currency unit, that was a hard-traded, weighted basket.
Persaud, chairman of consultants Intelligence Capital and a former currency chief at JPMorgan, said the recommendation would be one of a number delivered to the United Nations on March 25 by the U.N. Commission of Experts on International Financial Reform.
"It is a good moment to move to a shared reserve currency," he said.
Central banks hold their reserves in a variety of currencies and gold, but the dollar has dominated as the most convincing store of value -- though its rate has wavered in recent years as the United States ran up huge twin budget and external deficits.
Some analysts said news of the U.N. panel's recommendation extended dollar losses because it fed into concerns about the future of the greenback as the main global reserve currency, raising the chances of central bank sales of dollar holdings.
"Speculation that major central banks would begin rebalancing their FX reserves has risen since the intensification of the dollar's slide between 2002 and mid-2008," CMC Markets said in a note.
Russia is also planning to propose the creation of a new reserve currency, to be issued by international financial institutions, at the April G20 meeting, according to the text of its proposals published on Monday.
It has significantly reduced the dollar's share in its own reserves in recent years.
GOOD TIME
Persaud said that the United States was concerned that holding the reserve currency made it impossible to run policy, while the rest of world was also unhappy with the generally declining dollar.
"There is a moment that can be grasped for change," he said.
"Today the Americans complain that when the world wants to save, it means a deficit. A shared (reserve) would reduce the possibility of global imbalances."
Persaud said the panel had been looking at using something like an expanded Special Drawing Right, originally created by the International Monetary Fund in 1969 but now used mainly as an accounting unit within similar organizations.
The SDR and the old Ecu are essentially combinations of currencies, weighted to a constituent's economic clout, which can be valued against other currencies and indeed against those inside the basket. Persaud said there were two main reasons why policymakers might consider such a move, one being the current desire for a change from the dollar.
The other reason, he said, was the success of the euro, which incorporated a number of currencies but roughly speaking held on to the stability of the old German deutschemark compared with, say, the Greek drachma.
Persaud has long argued that the dollar would give way to the Chinese yuan as a global reserve currency within decades.
A shared reserve currency might negate this move, he said, but he believed that China would still like to take on the role.
Posse Comitatus Act tossed out the window in Alabama...is your town next?
In a follow-up to my Moon Over Alabama post, it would seem that the U.S. Military has nothing better to do these days than protect us from ourselves. Any NWO doubters out there should wake up...How many supposed laws do these people have to break, how much or your precious FREEDOM and Templar Notes do they have to steal from you before you realize WE are expendable...slaves in a system that was never meant for us to prosper in.
CNSNews.com) - The U.S. Army has launched an inquiry into how and why active duty troops from Fort Rucker, Ala., came to be placed on the streets of Samson, Ala., during last week's murder spree in that tiny South Alabama community. The use of the troops was a possible violation of federal law.
“On March 10, after a report of an apparent mass murder in Samson, Ala., 22 military police soldiers from Fort Rucker, Ala., along with the provost marshal, were sent to the city of Samson,” Harvey Perritt, spokesman for the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) at Fort Monroe, Va., told CNSNews.com on Monday.
“The purpose for sending the military police, the authority for doing so, and what duties they performed is the subject of an ongoing commander’s inquiry--directed by the commanding general of U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, Gen. Martin Dempsey.”
TRADOC is the headquarters command for Ft. Rucker.
“In addition to determining the facts, this inquiry will also determine whether law, regulation and policy were followed,” Perritt added. “Until those facts are determined, it would be inappropriate to speculate or comment further.”
Jim Stromenger, a dispatcher at the Samson Police Department, confirmed the MP’s presence in the town, telling CNSNews.com that the troops “came in to help with traffic control and to secure the crime scene”--and the department was glad for the help.
“We’ve been getting a lot of calls,” Stromenger said. “They weren’t here to police, let me make that clear. They were here to help with traffic and to control the crime scene--so people wouldn’t trample all over (it).”
Stromenger said the town needed help--calls had gone out to all police departments in the area.
“We only have a five-man police department,” he told CNSNews.com. “We had officers from all surrounding areas helping out. There were a lot of streets to be blocked off and there had to be someone physically there to block them off. That’s what these MPs were doing. I don’t think they were even armed. The troops helped keep nosy people away.”
But Stromenger said it wasn’t the Samson Police Department that called for the troops.
“I don’t know who called Fort Rucker. But someone did. They wouldn’t have been able to come if someone hadn’t,” he added.
Under Whose Authority?
The troops were apparently not deployed by the request of Alabama Gov. Bob Riley -- or by the request of President Obama, as required by law.
When contacted by CNSNews.com, the governor’s office could not confirm that the governor had requested help from the Army, and Gov. Riley's spokesman, Todd Stacy, expressed surprise when he was told that troops had been sent to the town.
No request from President Obama, meanwhile, was issued by the White House--or the Defense Department.
Wrongful use of federal troops inside U.S. borders is a violation of several federal laws, including one known as the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, Title 18, Section 1385 of the U.S. Code.
“Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both,” the law states.
David Rittgers, legal policy analyst at the Cato Institute, said there are other laws barring use of federal troops outside of federal property, as well.
“Title 18, Section 375 of the U.S. Code is a direct restriction on military personnel, and it basically precludes any member of the army in participating in a ‘search, seizure, arrest or other similar activity, unless participation is otherwise authorized by law,’ “ Rittgers told CNSNews.com.
“The security of a crime scene is something I think that would roll up in the category of a ‘search, seizure or other activity,’” Rittgers added.
In addition, there is the Insurrection Act of 1808, as amended in 2007, (Title 10, Section 331 of the U.S. Code) under which the president can authorize troops “to restore order and enforce the laws of the United States” in an insurrection.
“Whenever there is an insurrection in any State against its government, the President may, upon the request of its legislature or of its governor if the legislature cannot be convened, call into federal service such of the militia of the other States, in the number requested by that State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to suppress the insurrection,” the law states.
In 2007, Congress expanded the list to include “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition” as situations for which the president can authorize troops, provided that “domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the state or possession are incapable of maintaining public order.”
Congress has been clear that the use of U.S. troops for civilian police purposes is forbidden.
“One of the statutes explicitly says that military brigs can’t even be used to detain domestic criminals,” Rittgers said. “It really is supposed to be a black and white line.”
The U.S. Department of Justice, meanwhile, would have prosecuting authority, if any violation is deemed to have occurred. The Justice Department did not comment for this story.
Ft. Rucker, located in Southern Alabama, is the home of Army Aviation.
While much of the Southern and Eastern United States entered the month of March with a massive snow storm…the Mirroring or Doubling Effect oft cited here was once again at work. In Michigan, Sarah Reinfelder, a woman with TWO wombs overcame all odds by giving birth to TWIN Girls; one from each of her TWO uteri (or a Mullerian abnormality).
My recent coverage of TWINS [here], and the darkly Cronenbergian nature of this story launches us directly towards the March 10th DOUBLE Killing sprees in Alabama and Germany…one day prior to Space Shuttle Discovery’s STS-119 (911=TWIN Towers or Emergency) departure. This mission will mark BELLWOOD, Ill. Astronaut and Shuttle Captain Lee Joseph Archambault’s SECOND time in space. He was also aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis' TWO-week mission in 2007. This Discovery mission will essentially DOUBLE the power of the Space Station, making room for TWO new science facilities. It is also interesting to note that the last man to have walked on the Moon was also from BELLWOOD, Ill. His name, Eugene Cernan...the two mens' backgrounds practically mirror one another.
In his excitement, Archambault commented: "We’re going to go back to the moon. We’re going to use what we learn when we go back to the moon, and how to live on the moon for an extended period of time, and we’re going to go to Mars and we’re going to live on Mars, and then that’ll set the stage for who knows going even beyond Mars"
I would also remind readers the deep connections I have made in past articles between THE QUESTION aka RORSCHACH as CERES' Avenger, and the possible triggering effect embedded in director Zach Snyder's work which could have set off the first Virginia Tech event in 2007. Copycat expert Loren Coleman is also cautioning about the April 20, Ceres period today at his site [here]. More on The Watchmen 3/6/9 soon...
SAMSON, ALABAMA(CNN) -- An Alabama man went on a shooting rampage Tuesday, killing 10 people -- family members and apparent strangers -- before turning the gun on himself, officials said.
By the time Michael McLendon ended his rampage, he had fatally shot his mother and set fire to her house, killed his grandparents, his aunt and uncle, the wife and child of a sheriff's deputy, and three other people, according to the coroners of the two counties where the shootings occurred.
"He was shooting at just ordinary people going about their business," said Alabama state Sen. Harri Anne Smith.
Smith represents Geneva County, where all but one of the victims were killed. Smith said she had been briefed about the incident by state and local law enforcement.
By early Wednesday, authorities were still trying to piece together the chronology of events and the motive for McLendon's actions.
Though they have identified all the victims, they withheld releasing their names until they could notify family members.
The shooting started about 4 p.m. at a house that McLendon shared with his mother, Lisa, in the town of Kinston, near the Florida border in Coffee County.
A passerby found the house on fire and alerted authorities. Inside, firefighters found the bodies of Lisa McLendon and four dogs, said county Coroner Robert Preachers.
The mother had been shot, he said.
The gunman then went east into Geneva County. There, he shot his grandfather, grandmother, uncle and aunt as they sat on a porch in the nearby town of Samson, said Geneva Coroner Max Motley.
The wife of a sheriff's deputy who lived in a house across the street was also killed, along with her toddler, Motley said. Both were shot.
A second child was airlifted to a hospital in Florida in critical condition, authorities said.
"I can't describe what happened, why it happened," Geneva County Sheriff Greg Ward told CNN affiliate WTVY. "It's just a sad day for Geneva County."
McLendon, armed with a semiautomatic weapon, allegedly also fatally shot a man who lived in a mobile home in his family members' yard, Motley said.
At some point, the gunman headed down state Highway 52, firing at least seven bullets into a state trooper's car. The trooper suffered minor injuries from shattered glass.
The final two victims were a woman killed at a Big-Little Store service station off the highway and a man outside the Samson Pipe and Supply store. Both victims were apparently shot at random, authorities said.
The gunman ended up at the Reliable Metal Products plant in Geneva, where police rammed his vehicle, forcing him to get out. He fired a 30-round burst with what appeared to be an M16 rifle, grazing Police Chief Frankie Lindsey with a bullet.
"Then the subject entered the business. Within minutes, shots were heard. ... Law enforcement officers found him dead," state police Cpl. Steve Jarrett said.
The manufacturing plant is 12 miles from his mother's house.
Sheriff's officials say the gunman was a former employee of Reliable Metal, CNN affiliate WEAR-TV reported.
Col. Christopher Murphy, head of the Alabama Department of Public Safety, called the southern Alabama rampage "the worst that DPS has a memory of."
Another mass killing occurred in southern Alabama in 2002, when Westley Devon Harris gunned down six members of his 16-year-old girlfriend's family at their farm in Luverne. Harris was convicted and sentenced to death in 2005.
BERLIN, Germany (CNN) -- Fifteen people died Wednesday in the shooting spree in the German town of Winnenden, about 20 kilometers (12 miles) northeast of Stuttgart, police spokeswoman Renate Roesch told CNN.
At least five people were injured. The gunman is dead, she said.
The shooting, which lasted about two minutes, happened at the Albertville-Realschule Winnenden school, a junior high school, about 9:30 a.m. About 1,000 students attend the school.
Police said the gunman was a 17-year-old former student dressed in military gear.
Authorities had sealed the town off and launched an intense manhunt for the man they described as 1.80m (5'11") and heavily armed.
"It is a small town, an idyllic town," said Frank Nipkau, the editor in chief of local Winnenden Zeitung newspaper. "The town people are devastated and they can't understand why this is happening in this town."
"Police are coming through the whole time. They're obviously looking all over town for him," said Roberto Seifert, who works at a company next to the school. "We've never had anything like this," he told Reuters.com by phone. Video CNN's Charles Hodson looks at Twitter reports »
Security at German schools has been an issue in the past. In November 2006, an 18-year-old former student strapped explosives to his body and went on a rampage at a middle school in western Germany, shooting and wounding six people -- most of them students -- before killing himself. Do you think the gun control issue is taken seriously enough? [QUESTION embedded by CNN]
In July 2003, a 16-year-old student shot a teacher before taking his own life at a school in the southern German town of Coburg.
A year earlier, 18 people were killed when an expelled student went on a shooting spree at his school in eastern Germany.
Another European country, Finland, is planning to toughen firearms laws after two school shootings there left 20 people dead. Those incidents occurred in November 2007 and September 2008.
Finnish news reports on Wednesday said an Interior Ministry working group has issued a proposal calling for age 20 as the minimum age for handgun ownership and 18 as the minimum for rifles. The proposal will be circulated among legislators. advertisement
"Under the proposal, a firearm license applicant would be required to provide a certificate from a shooting club instructor to certify that the applicant has practiced shooting at a gun club for two years prior to applying for a permit.
"The ministry also wants applicants' health and behavior to come under closer scrutiny and has suggested adopting aptitude tests used by the Defense Forces," according to yla.fi.
“He who does not carry demonic seeds within him will never give birth to a new world.” - Adolph Hitler
PROVIDENCE The vault at the John Hay Library at Brown University is not exactly Hitler’s bunker, but it is below ground and could endure a bomb blast. It’s big. It’s locked. And inside, one finds something fascinating.
No, the Führer’s not in there, but his books are — lots of them. They’ve been there for 30 years. And inside one of them, a book on the occult, is a passage marked for special attention in Hitler’s own hand that is chilling even today.
But few know of this trove, much less look at it.
“We treat this collection the way we do every other collection,” says Samuel Streit, the library’s director of special collections. “We’ve never hidden it. They’re in our online catalog. We don’t have flashing lights saying, ‘Hitler’s library.’ But they’re there like anything else.”
Included in the collection is a book by Friederich Nietzsche, the German philosopher whose writings, some say, provided a basis for Hitler’s fervent nationalism and belief in Aryan supremacy. What you don’t find in Brown’s Hitler collection, Streit says, are fresh insights into his mind or character.
“There is nothing in anything that we have here that would contradict what is generally known about Hitler. He doesn’t say anything about, ‘Jews are good people.’ There is no refutation for anything he stood for.”
But there is unsettling substantiation. One notable subject represented in Brown’s Hitler library is the occult. And the most requested book in the collection is Magic: History, Theory and Practice (1923) by Ernst Schertel. This book, as with some others, Hitler had marked.
“Like footprints in the sand,” Ryback writes of those notes in the margin, “they do not necessarily reveal the purpose of the journey, but they do allow us to see where his attention caught and lingered, where it rushed ahead, where a question was raised or an impression formed. In these books one finds Hitler’s pencil repeatedly drawn to passages related to the connection between the scientific and the spiritual, between the material and the immaterial.”
Hitler marked the margins of his books with vertical lines beside paragraphs or sentences he thought important. And one marked sentence in Magic is quite chilling, given Hitler’s history:
“He who does not carry demonic seeds within him will never give birth to a new world.”
MOSCOW — If you're inclined to believe Igor Panarin, and the Kremlin wouldn't mind if you did, then President Barack Obama will order martial law this year, the U.S. will split into six rump-states before 2011, and Russia and China will become the backbones of a new world order.
Panarin might be easy to ignore but for the fact that he is a dean at the Foreign Ministry's school for future diplomats and a regular on Russia's state-guided TV channels. And his predictions fit into the anti-American story line of the Kremlin leadership.
"There is a high probability that the collapse of the United States will occur by 2010," Panarin told dozens of students, professors and diplomats Tuesday at the Diplomatic Academy — a lecture the ministry pointedly invited The Associated Press and other foreign media to attend.
The prediction from Panarin, a former spokesman for Russia's Federal Space Agency and reportedly an ex-KGB analyst, meshes with the negative view of the U.S. that has been flowing from the Kremlin in recent years, in particular from Vladimir Putin.
Putin, the former president who is now prime minister, has likened the United States to Nazi Germany's Third Reich and blames Washington for the global financial crisis that has pounded the Russian economy.
Panarin didn't give many specifics on what underlies his analysis, mostly citing newspapers, magazines and other open sources.
He also noted he had been predicting the demise of the world's wealthiest country for more than a decade now.
But he said the recent economic turmoil in the U.S. and other "social and cultural phenomena" led him to nail down a specific timeframe for "The End" — when the United States will break up into six autonomous regions and Alaska will revert to Russian control.
Panarin argued that Americans are in moral decline, saying their great psychological stress is evident from school shootings, the size of the prison population and the number of gay men.
Turning to economic woes, he cited the slide in major stock indexes, the decline in U.S. gross domestic product and Washington's bailout of banking giant Citigroup as evidence that American dominance of global markets has collapsed.
"I was there recently and things are far from good," he said. "What's happened is the collapse of the American dream."
Panarin insisted he didn't wish for a U.S. collapse, but he predicted Russia and China would emerge from the economic turmoil stronger and said the two nations should work together, even to create a new currency to replace the U.S. dollar.
Asked for comment on how the Foreign Ministry views Panarin's theories, a spokesman said all questions had to be submitted in writing and no answers were likely before Wednesday.
It wasn't clear how persuasive the 20-minute lecture was. One instructor asked Panarin whether his predictions more accurately describe Russia, which is undergoing its worst economic crisis in a decade as well as a demographic collapse that has led some scholars to predict the country's demise.
Panarin dismissed that idea: "The collapse of Russia will not occur."
But Alexei Malashenko, a scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center who did not attend the lecture, sided with the skeptical instructor, saying Russia is the country that is on the verge of disintegration.
"I can't imagine at all how the United States could ever fall apart," Malashenko told the AP.
Posts
