Archive for November 2nd, 2008

I had the pleasure of meeting Gianna Jessen earlier this year at “Walk for Life San Francisco.” Gianna’s vibrant energetic personality is therapeutic. Engaging her in conversation is a sure cure for anyone struggling with personal demons of fear and insecurity! Gianna is a sure and certain candidate for receiving the ‘against all odds’ award.

Challenges are not new to Gianna. She was scheduled for a saline solution abortion while she was in her third trimester in her mother’s womb. After being burned alive for approximately 18 hours, she survived! Her mother gave her up for adoption and the saline solution caused her to develop cerebral palsy. Challenged by death, desertion, and disease, she prevailed and is one of the most sought after anointed gospel vocalists of our time.

Gianna survived, but if a certain Illinois Senator would have had his way, she would have never received medical attention after the botched abortion. Senator Barack Obama heard the story of babies like Gianna who were surviving abortions but were being left to die in dirty laundry closets at Christ Hospital in Chicago but did nothing on their behalf. As well, the profession which takes the Hippocratic Oath to preserve and save life, ignores struggling infants in desperate need of assistance. Naked, helpless, and in extreme pain, they receive no assistance, no doctor to aid, and no mother to care. Barack Obama, after hearing of these brutal, calloused acts of man’s inhumanity to man, voted to allow this heinous, barbaric behavior to continue. Barack Obama voted three times against protecting these born alive victims.

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Ministers have been forced to order an emergency shutdown of a key Government computer system to protect millions of people’s private details.

The action was taken after a memory stick was found in a pub car park containing confidential passcodes to the online Government Gateway system, which covers everything from tax returns to parking tickets.

An urgent investigation is now under way into how the stick, belonging to the company which runs the flagship system, came to be lost.

The Department for Work and Pensions insisted that the system’s security has not been breached, but a computer expert told The Mail on Sunday that in the wrong hands the data on the memory stick could enable hackers to access personal details of the 12million people who have registered on the system, including their passwords.

Users trying to log on to the site yesterday were met by the message: ‘The Government Gateway is temporarily offline. We apologise for any inconvenience. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.’

The Government also closed down access to self-assessment tax applications via the Revenue and Customs website.

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A newly disclosed Downing Street memo has revealed how Tony Blair helped Rupert Murdoch overcome an official investigation which was jeopardising one of his big investments. It shows that Blair, while prime minister, immediately ordered his top officials to help the tycoon who was frustrated that a potentially lucrative scheme was being blocked by a long-running European commission investigation.

Blair told the media magnate that “he was instinctively sympathetic to what Murdoch was aiming to achieve”. The tycoon eventually won approval for the plan. BSkyB had teamed up with other big companies to develop an interactive scheme in which people could shop and manage their finances through their televisions.

The memo is the first to be disclosed under freedom of information legislation documenting the contents of meetings between Murdoch and Blair. Blair has been accused of granting political favours to Murdoch in return for support from his newspapers; Lance Price, a former Downing Street spin doctor, said Murdoch seemed to be one of the four most influential people in the administration.

The memo reveals an episode in 1998 - a year after the Sun’s conversion to Labour - in which Murdoch appears to call in one of those favours. Murdoch had privately approached Blair when he feared that the European commission investigation was hindering his business opportunities.

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During the time it takes you to read this article, something will happen high overhead that until recently many scientists didn’t believe in. A magnetic portal will open, linking Earth to the sun 93 million miles away. Tons of high-energy particles may flow through the opening before it closes again, around the time you reach the end of the page.

“It’s called a flux transfer event or ‘FTE,’” says space physicist David Sibeck of the Goddard Space Flight Center. “Ten years ago I was pretty sure they didn’t exist, but now the evidence is incontrovertible.”

Indeed, today Sibeck is telling an international assembly of space physicists at the 2008 Plasma Workshop in Huntsville, Alabama, that FTEs are not just common, but possibly twice as common as anyone had ever imagined.

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In a recent interview, Assistant Chief James Schwartz of the Arlington County Fire Department (ACFD) revealed an intriguing detail relating to the 9/11 Pentagon attack. Just before the Pentagon was hit, ACFD responded to alarms going off at the USA Today building, located a few miles from there. Yet it is unclear whether there was actually any fire. Other evidence indicates that, as a result of this alarm, when the Pentagon was hit a significant number of fire and medical units were already on the road nearby and available to quickly respond to the attack. Curiously, the two buildings of the USA Today complex were known as the “Twin Towers.”

In his interview, Assistant Chief Schwartz told McClatchy Washington Bureau that, after the two towers of the World Trade Center had been hit on September 11, the Emergency Communications Center (ECC), which is the focal point of all police and fire 911 calls for Arlington County, started receiving phone calls from buildings along the Potomac River and along the flight path for Washington’s Reagan National Airport. These were made by people concerned about what they should do. Among the callers were the building managers at the USA Today towers, who were afraid their complex might be a terrorist target and wanted to know if they should evacuate it

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THE prime minister’s high-profile plan to introduce a “bill of rights and responsibilities” is in disarray following a cabinet revolt.

Ministers have warned Gor-don Brown that his proposed charter laying out the rights and duties of citizens is unworkable and could pave the way for a deluge of court cases.

Earlier this year Brown hailed the proposed bill as “of fundamental importance to our liberties and to our constitutional settlement” and said it “opens a new chapter in the British story of liberty”.

However, the plan, unveiled to the cabinet last week by the prime minister and Jack Straw, the justice secretary, has been labelled “pointless” and “provocative” by ministers, who fear they will be given a hostile reception by a public weary of the “human rights culture”.

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Peter Hitchens lasted seconds, and they say it isn’t torture.

Until recently, “waterboarding” was something that Americans did to other Americans. It was inflicted, and endured, by those members of the special forces who underwent the advanced form of training known as Sere (survival, evasion, resistance, escape). In these harsh exercises, brave men and women were introduced to the sorts of barbarism that they might expect to meet at the hands of a lawless foe who disregarded the Geneva conventions. It was something that Americans were being trained to resist, not to inflict.

Exploring this narrow but deep distinction on a gorgeous day, I found myself deep in the hill country of western North Carolina, preparing to be surprised by a team of extremely hardened veterans who had confronted their country’s enemies in arduous terrain all over the world. They were going to show me as nearly as possible what real waterboarding might be like.

It goes without saying that I knew I could stop the process at any time, and that when it was all over I would be released into happy daylight rather than returned to a darkened cell. But it’s been well said that cowards die many times before their deaths, and it was difficult for me to forget the clause in the contract of indemnification that I had signed.

This document stated revealingly: “ ‘Waterboarding’ is a potentially dangerous activity in which the participant can receive serious and permanent (physical, emotional and psychological) injuries and even death, including injuries and death due to the respiratory and neurological systems of the body.”

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