Luke_Wilbur

Apparently the US is giving Israel a window of a week to inflict maximum damage on Hizbullah before weighing in behind international calls for a ceasefire in Lebanon, according to British, European and Israeli sources. http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1823817,00.html

Have you experienced the energetic form of God?

I think families of soldiers and all government workers should not have to pay a death tax if the person lost their life in the line of duty. I also agree that families of victims of any declared catastrophe should not have to pay a death tax. But, I do think that our leaders deserve a pay status according to the value of leading our country.

Let's hope it does not come to that. Hezbollah or Hizbollah/Hizbullah or Hezb'Allah (Arabic: حزب الله‎, meaning Party of God) is a governmental and military Lebanese Shia Islamic group, with a military arm and a civilian arm, founded in 1982 to fight the Israeli Defense Forces who occupied southern Lebanon until the year 2000. Its leader is Hassan Nasrallah. Hezbollah is considered a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States the United Kingdom and Canada. Hezbollah was "inspired by the success of the Iranian Revolution" and was formed primarily to combat Israel following the 1982 Lebanon War. The United States and Israel say that Hezbollah has received financial and political assistance, as well as weapons and training, from Iran and Syria. The 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict is a series of ongoing military actions and clashes in northern Israel and Lebanon involving Hezbollah's armed wing and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). On 12 July 2006 Hezbollah initiated Operation Truthful Promise,named for a "promise" by its leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah to capture Israeli soldiers and swap them for the remaining three Lebanese prisoners held by Israel. The early morning raid into Israeli territory resulted in eight Israeli soldiers killed and two captured. Israel then responded with Operation Just Reward, later renamed Operation Change of Direction. This retaliatory strike has thus far encompassed a barrage of rockets fired into Lebanon and bombing raids by the Israeli Air Force (IAF), an Air and Naval blockade as well as some small raids into southern Lebanon by IDF ground troops.

Joe, Your dad is old. You have to be the man now and take care of him.

That is quite scary.

Here the list released by the Defense Department in May http://www.defenselink.mil/news/May2006/d20060515%20List.pdf

I asked Carolyn Steptoe what what separates her from the other candidates? What will be her major focus to improve Ward 5? Here is Carolyn Steptoe's response:

Angelo, According to the police and witnesses, there has been a raid on a large fuel storage tank at a power station. Moreover, the impact of at least seven missiles was heard in the attack on south Beirut in the hours before dawn on Friday. Anti-aircraft fire from the ground echoed in other suburbs of Beirut as the planes roared over the Lebanese capital. In retaliation, Hezbollah has also hit Israeli towns with rocket attacks and Israeli sources said the group had fired on the northern port city of Haifa. The fighting continues as Israel launches a fresh wave of attacks on Lebanese targets Friday, striking Beirut's International airport, the road from Lebanon to Damascus and a power plant. Since Wednesday, Hezbollah have fired over 300 rockets into towns in northern Israel according to Israeli website YnetNews. The Israeli attacks focused on the southern suburb of Beirut where Israel says Hezbollah has a stronghold. Most roads and bridges leading to the southern suburb of Beirut have been shelled isolating the suburb from the rest of the country. The bombing came after Israeli planes dropped leaflets, on the evening of July 13, warning residents in the mainly Shiite south suburb of impending attacks to Hezbollah property. "The targets chosen are connected either directly or indirectly with terrorism," Israeli Air Force General Ido Nehushtan, said. Israel says Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, is also a target. "Nasrallah has issued his own sentence." said Ronnie Bar-On, the Israeli interior minister. The Israeli military later said that the rockets fired into Haifa on Thursday by Hezbollah were manufactured in Iran. The Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora said that it was puzzling for Hezbollah to perform the attacks unsupported. States worldwide have called for the release of the prisoners and for Israel to exercise restraint, while Lebanon has urged the UN Security Council, which is having a emergency meeting on Friday, to pass a ceasefire resolution. The tarmac on Beirut International Airport was patched up after being hit several times by the Israeli airforce on Thursday. Four or five airplanes belonging to Middle East Airlines then took off from the airport. However, the runways were hit again on Friday some time after the airplanes had taken off. A parking lot near the terminal building was also hit. Other targets hit in Lebanon was a fuel tank at the power plant in Jiyyeh. Power shortages have been reported. The Hezbollah radio station al-Nour was targeted by an Israeli strike, but continued broadcasting. Also, a road between Haboush and Iqlion el Tufah was hit. A total of 18 targets claimed by Israel to be Hezbollah sites has been hit by air and sea launched missiles. Five civilians were killed and at least 50 have been wounded in Lebanon on Friday after Israeli attacks which were part of the Israeli mission called "Operation Just Reward". According to Lebanon, 73 people have been killed and 167 wounded in the country since the raids commenced on Wednesday. In related news, Hezbollah fired several rockets in five separate attacks into northern Israel, Friday. Packs of Katyusha rockets hit Nahariya, Safed, Hatzor, Pqui'in and Kiryat Shmona and Yesod Hamaalah. There were reports of casualties. Israel claimed it had hit the Hezbollah security headquarters in Jerusalem, but eyewitnesses said the airstrike had missed and hit a nearby appartment building instead. This was the second day of violence after July 11 when Hezbollah attacked Israeli army patrols and captured two Israeli soldiers in a mission Hezbollah called "Truthful Promise". Israel said the soldiers were kidnapped. On July 12 Israel set up a blockade of Lebanon and attacked Beirut International Airport and other areas in Lebanon, while Hezbollah fired rockets at towns in northern Israel. Israel is continuing its offensive in the Gaza strip against Hamas after a soldier named Gilad Shalit was kidnapped in a raid, June 2006. http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/275...8C31FD616C1.htm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5179862.stm http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/07...east/index.html http://www.voanews.com/english/2006-07-14-voa6.cfm http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3275609,00.html

Eight soldiers were killed and two kidnapped, following an attack of the Hizbullah terror organization on the border with Lebanon. The kidnapped soldiers are: Ehud Goldwasser, 31, of Nahariya, and Eldad Regev, 26, of Kiryat Motzkin. Summary of Events July 12: Hizbullah terrorists infiltrated into Israeli territory and attacked two IDF armored jeeps patrolling the border with Lebanon, killing three soldiers and kidnapping two. Ground forces entered Lebanon in the area of the attack. A large explosive device was detonated underneath an Israeli tank, killing all four of the tank crew. An eighth soldier was killed when IDF troops entered Lebanon to try to retrieve the bodies of the tank crew. Throughout the day, Hizbullah terror organization fired Katyusha rockets and mortar shells at Israel's northern borders' communities and IDF posts. July 13: Monica Seidman (Lehrer), 40, of Nahariya was killed in her home by a Katyusha rocket Thursday morning. In the evening, Nitzan Roseban, 33, was killed in Safed by a direct rocket hit. Hizbullah continued to fire at towns and cities in northern Israel throughout the day, wounding more than 100. On Thursday evening Katyushas landed in Haifa.

Do you think Carolyn Graham has what it takes to fix our schools?

Congressman Moran will hold roving town hall meetings on Monday, July 17th to discuss pertinent issues, including the Medicare Part D Prescription Drug Program, which affect senior citizens in Northern Virginia. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- When and Where: 10:00AM-11:00AM: Pimmit Hills Senior Center 7510 Lisle Avenue Falls Church, VA 22043 11:15AM-12:15PM: The Washington House 5100 Fillmore Ave, Alexandria, 22311 12:30PM-1:15PM: Groveton Senior Center 8350 Richmond Highway, Suite 325 Alexandria, VA 22309 1:30PM-2:30PM: Hollin Hall Senior Center 1500 Shenandoah Road Alexandria, VA 22308

Here is another story from bernie... Yahoo! Introduced a new Web site that does not sell plane tickets or hotel rooms. Instead, the new site integrates pay-per-click ads that charge a fee to companies such as Orbitz when users leave Yahoo's travel pages. Yahoo has also arranged a sponsorship deal for Trip Planner with MasterCard. "Yahoo hopes to lure surfers to the site using Silicon Valley's favorite gambit of the moment -- user-generated content, this time in the form of user-generated travelogues and photos," wrote Forbes.com. Jasper Malcolmson, director of Yahoo! Travel, said: "I don't know about any premium brand being associated with a 100% user-generated content product. Advertisers tend to feel uncomfortable with user-generated content because it is unpredictable." He said he thought Trip Planner will help Yahoo! grow its traffic and revenues in the face of a maturing on-line market. http://travel.yahoo.com/trip

How does Professor Cheh plan to modernize and bring all of our school buildings up to code differ from the other candidates? Is it true that Professor Cheh plans to work as a law professor and be a city council member?

Honey, I do not mind you posting on our boards, but you will need to discuss health related topics here. Luke Wilbur

Bernie forwarded me this... If you think you're reading the news, be warned that this story -- and any other on the web -- will be barely read by anyone 36 hours after it was first posted. That's the message from a team of statistical physicists who have analysed how people access information online. Albert-László Barabási of the University of Notre Dame in the US and colleagues in Hungary have calculated that the number of people who read news stories on the web decays with time in a power law, and not exponentially as commonly thought. Most news becomes old hat within a day and a half of being posted -- a finding that could help website designers or people trying to understand how information gets transferred in biological cells and social networks (Phys. Rev. E 73 066132). The web portal Physicists like Barabási are interested in studying the World Wide Web because it is an example of a "complex network", with a topology that changes as new documents and links are continually added. His team pictures a typical news web site as a series of circular blobs, or "nodes", each of which corresponds to an individual news story, with a line joining each node if the two stories are connected by a hyperlink (see figure). The area of each blob is proportional to the logarithm of the number of visits to each document. Their model reveals that a typical news site has a relatively stable "skeleton" -- corresponding to the overall organization of the site -- along with nodes (that is, actual stories) that are only temporarily linked to the main structure before being deleted from the site or not linked any more. In this sense, the network resembles a biological cell's regulatory network, whose "wiring" can change rapidly during a cell cycle. It is also a bit like social networks: we each have a relatively stable core network of friends and acquaintances but the number of people we interact with can vary drastically from one day to the next. To get a fuller understanding of such networks, Barabási and colleagues decided to study the visiting patterns on a popular Hungarian news and entertainment portal (origo.hu). Thanks to automatically assigned "cookies", the scientists were able to reconstruct the browsing history of about 250,000 visitors to the site over the course of a month. The researchers found that the documents belonging to the skeleton of the website receive an approximately constant stream of visitors, which means that the cumulative number of visitors accessing these documents increases linearly in time. In contrast, the news documents receive the most hits directly after their release, and decrease with time. Thus, the cumulative numbers of visits here reach saturation after just a few days. Barabasi's team calculated the "half-life" of a news document, which corresponds to the period in which half of all visitors that eventually access it have visited. The researchers found that the overall half-life distribution follows a power law, which indicates that most news items have a very short lifetime, although a few continue to be accessed well beyond this period. The average half-life of a news item is just 36 hours, or one and a half days after it is released. While this is short, it is longer than predicted by simple exponential models, which assume that web page browsing is less random than it actually is. The short life of a news item -- combined with random visiting patterns of readers -- implies that people could miss a significant fraction of news by not visiting the portal when a new document is first displayed, which is why publishers like to provide e-mail news alerts. The results also show that people read a particular web page not just because it looks interesting but because it can be accessed easily. Although the average half-life varies for different types of sites, the decay laws identified are likely to be generic because they do not depend on content, but are manly determined by a user's visiting and browsing patterns. "Such quantitative approaches to online media not only offer a better understanding of information access, but could have important commercial applications as well – from better portal design to understanding information diffusion, flow, and marketing in the online world," say the researchers.

It looks like Robert is involved in Operation Mountain Thrust, now under way in southern Afghanistan. Afghan and coalition forces are putting pressure on insurgents in areas where they haven't previously operated, Rumsfeld said. The coalition forces conducted a raid on a known extremist compound July 10, killing more than 40 extremists. This could explain the surge in violence, because terrorists see the success of democracy in the country and can sense their demise, he said.

CHEHforWARD3!!!, What Does Professor Cheh promise to do for Ward3?

North Korea's test-firing of several missiles has sparked world outrage.

Where are you located? I really dig you music.

So what are you trying to sell?

How do big businesses get away with this? It is truly unbelievable.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice took a quick, four-hour trip yesterday to Afghanistan's capital, Kabul, to show her support for President Hamid Karzai and his government. Outside the "heavily guarded high walls and concrete barriers" that protected Rice on her visit, there is an increasingly dangerous and violent conflict raging, with resurgent Taliban fighters gaining a stronger foothold across the country. In Sept. 2004, President Bush proudly announced, "As a result of the United States military, [the] Taliban is no longer in existence." That claim was premature; the revived Taliban is waging a "full-blown insurgency," something that the White House now claims was "predictable." The former head of the Taliban government, Mullah Omar, remains free and purportedly released an audiotape claiming his fighters still controlled large parts of Afghanistan. "We are not going to tire, we are not going to leave," Rice said yesterday, vowing not to repeat the mistake the United States made in the late 1980s of ignoring Afghanistan and watching the state fall into the hands of the Taliban. But with U.S. military and financial resources overwhelmingly dedicated to the ongoing war in Iraq, Afghanistan -- the "launching pad" for the 9/11 attacks -- continues to receive insufficient resources and support. "I do not see a long-term comprehensive strategy from the administration" on Afghanistan, said Rep. Ike Skelton (D-MO). http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...6062800263.html http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/20...20040927-4.html http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-06...tan-cover_x.htm

I am thankful for learning about so many cultures travelling this big blue marble. I still remember Hampi during the Indian New Year celebration. It was quite a mystical experience. I read that Mircea Eliade studied under Surendranath Dasgupta. He later wrote The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. His premise was the existance of both sacred and profane space. Do you believe this? If so, how do you define your thoughts on this? He wrote of the commonality of all rituals. Do you believe that a place of worship is reflection of the cosmos? Do you believe that our spirits originate in chaos? I believe that we are not corrupting, but rather gaining knowledge on real truth. The internet is a wonderful place that allows us to share space together and dissolve real world barriers. But, there are still cultural differences that still seperate the meaning of our words. Our quest is to define what is universal community first. Until we do that, there will be bloodshed that affects everyone. The United States seperated its governance from one religion based partly on reasons that you state. The idea of a Republic has been around since Plato's time. It is realized today. Our government is based on the idea that we all have differences, so we need to vote on what is the greater good. Some votes are selfish, some votes selfless. The pendulum of people's trust changes when corruption gets out of hand. There has been 200 years of transfer of power with little blood shed. It really quite amazing. By God's grace we must be doing something right. In God I trust. America I Love

Catholics believe that Jesus rose from the dead with his corporal body and ascended to heaven. In additon, that we do not know the time or place of his return.