"Russ Baker" -Is the Saudi Royal Family Connected to 9/11 Hijackers?

WhoWhatWhy has found evidence linking the Saudi royal family to Saudis in South Florida who reportedly had direct contact with the 9/11 hijackers before fleeing the United States just prior to the attacks. Our report connects some of the dots first laid out by investigative author Anthony Summers and Florida-based journalist Dan Christensen in articles jointly published in the Miami Herald and on the nonprofit news site BrowardBulldog.org.

In early September of this year, Summers and Christensen reported that a secret FBI probe, never shared with Congressional investigators or the presidential 9/11 commission, had uncovered information indicating the possibility of support for the hijackers from previously unknown confederates in the United States during 2001.

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"JA Myerson"- Ron Paul, Rick Perry and Other Right Wingers Want to Turn Back the Clock to 1900 -- What Was Life Like Back Then?

Wednesday's 230-195 vote in the GOP-controlled house against Speaker John Boehner's special funding measure to keep the government running past September 30th showed how far the far-right of the already far-right Republican Party will push a principle. They refuse to pass the bill (containing much-needed disaster relief, which is meager enough that the Democrats largely declined to vote for the bill) without deeper budget cuts written in. Boehner will have to rewrite the thing either to placate recalcitrant Democrats, intent on helping the vulnerable, or recalcitrant Republicans, intent on depriving the government of the means to help the vulnerable. One wonders what the odds are regarding his decision

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"Robert Reich" - Will Wall Street Break with the GOP Over Government Spending to Fix the Economy?

 The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped another 3 percent yesterday as Wall Street metabolized the truth most Americans already know: We’re in a recession. The “double dip” has arrived.

Most Americans never really emerged from the Great Recession anyway. 

We can get out of this recession but not via the Fed’s “quantitative easing” alone. When consumers can’t spend and businesses won’t spend without additional consumers, government must be the spender of last resort.

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"Bill van Auken" - Obama at the United Nations -- The Arrogant Voice of Imperialism

President Obama delivered an empty and arrogant sermon to the United Nations Wednesday, laced with platitudes about “peace” that were designed to mask Washington’s predatory policies.

The American president received a tepid response from the assembled heads of state, foreign ministers and UN delegates. Not a single line in his speech evoked applause. The novelty of two years ago, when Obama made his first appearance before the body posing as the champion of multilateral-ism in contrast to Bush, has long since worn off. As the world quickly learned, changing the occupant of the White House did little to shift the direction of American foreign policy or curb the spread of American militarism.

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"Bernie Sanders" - Why Do Republicans Hate Social Security?

Republicans hate Social Security because it has been an extraordinary success and has done exactly what it was designed to do. It is the most successful government program in our nation's history and is enormously popular.

When Social Security was developed, 50 percent of seniors lived in poverty. Today, that number is 10 percent -- still too high, but a testament to the success of Social Security.

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McClatchy- Tribune News Service Faster than light? CERN findings bewilder scientists

LOS ANGELES — Albert Einstein had the idea. A century of observations have backed it up. It's one of the cornerstones of physics: Nothing travels faster than the speed of light.

But now a team of experimental physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, says that one exotic particle possibly can.

The scientists reached their conclusion after sending streams of tiny, subatomic particles called neutrinos hurtling from an accelerator at CERN outside Geneva to a detector at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, about 450 miles away.

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The World in Transformation

By Mitchell Rabin - On a horizontal level, there is a mounting volume of chaos occurring in virtually every country in the world. There is economic, social and political turmoil, which one feels, is swelling. History shows us that this kind of chaos-to-order occurs cyclically and it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. Having lived through several cycles already, and of course having missed the World War time periods, I may not be the most qualified to say, but I do sense that we are going through something right now that really is world- transforming nation-to-nation, culture-to-culture. The Arab Spring, the uprisings in England, France, Greece, Wisconsin, the growing economic disparities in the so-called 'richest' nation on the planet, the vast deterioration of ethics, it's awesome to contemplate what is happening in this world.

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"AFP" - Protests mark rising environment awareness in China

by Staff Writers
Haining, China (AFP) Sept 20, 2011

A major anti-pollution protest has forced the Chinese government to take swift action for the second time in as many months, spurred by a rising environment movement that is spreading online.

More than 500 residents living near a plant making solar panels protested for three days last week in the eastern city of Haining, forcing authorities to temporarily shut the factory, which belongs to the US-listed Jinko Solar.

The incident came just over a month after authorities in the northeastern city of Dalian agreed to relocate a chemical plant following similar protests, underscoring official concern over mounting public anger about pollution.

"Citizens, particularly a rising Chinese middle class, have become more aware about how deep the impact of environmental issues is to their health," said Phelim Kine, senior Asia researcher for New York-based Human Rights Watch.

"They are no longer willing to take it passively."

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"Terra Daily Staff" - Humanity falls deeper into ecological debt: study

by Staff Writers
Paris (AFP) Sept 20, 2011

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Humanity_falls_deeper_into_ecological_debt_study_999.html

Humankind will slip next week into ecological debt, having gobbled up in less then nine months more natural resources than the planet can replenish in a year, researchers said Tuesday.

The most dominant species in Earth's history, in other words, is living beyond the planet's threshold of sustainability, trashing the house it lives in.

At its current pace of consumption humankind will need, by 2030, a second globe to satisfy its voracious appetites and absorb all its waste, the report calculated.

Earth's seven billion denizens -- nine billion by mid-century -- are using more water, cutting down more forests and eating more fish than Nature can replace, it said.

At the same time, we are disgorging more CO2, pollutants and chemical fertilizers than the atmosphere, soil and oceans can soak up without severely disrupting the ecosystems that have made our planet such a comfortable place for homo sapiens to live.

Counting down from January 1, the date when human activity exceeds its budget -- dubbed "Earth Overshoot Day" -- had receded by about three days each year since 2001.

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"Robert Borosage" - The end of the middle class?

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-end-of-the-middle-clas-by-Robert-Borosage-110920-650.html

September 20, 2011

By Robert Borosage

Finally, Washington has turned its attention back to jobs.

With President Barack Obama's demand that Congress pass his American Jobs Act and his call on the super committee to push hard on 10-year deficit reduction, a battle has begun that won't be resolved until the 2012 election. If then.

But the haunting reality is that neither side of the debate comes close to addressing the scope of our nation's economic challenge. Washington is fighting over who has the better sand castle -- while ignoring the tidal wave that is coming our way.

The jobs we've been shedding by the millions are solid, middle-class positions -- the kind that could support a family and send children to college. The hard reality is that the relatively few jobs being created are service-related -- disproportionately low-wage and low-skill. The broad middle class -- the triumph and strength of America's democracy -- is sinking. Unless we change course dramatically, we will become even more a nation of haves and have-nots.

The current debate offers clear contrast. Right now, Obama wants to "jolt" a flagging economy, investing in teachers and infrastructure an

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