SAN FRANCISCO -- After years of wrangling over legal procedures, the lawyer for a defunct Islamic charity laid out his case Wednesday that former President George W. Bush's secret wiretapping program was illegal - an argument that an Obama administration attorney refused to discuss.

"May the president of the United States break the law in the name of national security? ... We're asking this court to say, 'no,' " Jon Eisenberg, lawyer for the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, told a federal judge in San Francisco.

Neither the president's constitutional powers as commander in chief nor Congress' authorization to use military force against terrorists after Sept. 11, 2001, entitled Bush to override a 1978 law requiring court approval for electronic surveillance of suspected terrorists, Eisenberg argued...

In 2001, high school history teacher Matt Rozell began an oral history project. He and his students interviewed family members in the small town of Hudson Falls, N.Y., to capture fading stories of World War II. The students ended up unearthing a forgotten chapter in history.

Near the very end of World War II, on April 13, 1945, the American 30th Infantry Division was pushing its way into central Germany. They found a train carrying nearly 2,500 emaciated Jewish prisoners -- many of whom were children. The prisoners were traveling from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to another camp – a place where certain death awaited.

"All these people, men women and children, jampacked in those box cars," said Carrol Walsh, a member of the 30th Infantry Division. "I couldn't believe my eyes. There they were."

Five new fossils from northeastern China were found which add weight to the idea that birds descended from dinosaurs. According to The Guardian, the fossils are older than previous discoveries, and date from 151 to 164 million years ago. The specimens all show feathers or feather-like structures, including one fossil that has four wings, lots of plumage, and feathered feet. The discoveries suggest that there may have been a four-wing transition stage between dinos and birds, and will shed light on the mechanics of flight in early birds. On Friday, Xu Xing, who worked on the discovery, will detail his findings at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontologists.

Gustavo Mestas walked 57 blocks a day to medical school because he didn't have the money for the bus. He still saved up enough money to buy his daughter a Barbie doll, however, to replace the roomful of dolls she'd left behind in Cuba.

Recounting the story in Georgetown, Del., his daughter, Ileana Smith, chokes up.

"I want you to know that you have had the greatest influence in my life of anyone, and I love you and I respect you and admire you," she tells him, the interview now part of Historias, a new initiative by the oral history project StoryCorps to record and preserve the life stories of Hispanics across the United States and Puerto Rico.

StoryCorps already has recorded 30,000 interviews since its start in 2003 and launched other initiatives, including one in 2007 to record the stories of African-Americans. David Isay, who started the national effort to get people talking - and listening - said the response from the Hispanic community had been unprecedented.

There's been a"sense of excitement and gratitude that Latino voices are going to be heard, respected and preserved," he said.

The 40-minute interviews will be conducted over the next year in cities that include Miami, San Diego; Chicago; Houston; Taos, N.M.; Yuma, Ariz.; and San Juan, Puerto Rico. Bilingual facilitators will collect the interviews, which resemble intimate conversations between family members or close friends. Some end in tears, others in laughter.

SHANGHAI -- Beijing is making sure it won't rain on its 60th anniversary parade, but it still won't let anyone come.

Chinese newspapers say even more effort is being made to prevent showers or fog from spoiling the big day on Oct. 1 than was expended to ensure sunshine for the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

The air force is sending up 18 aircraft to chemically "disappear" clouds over the capital and 48 "fog-dispersal vehicles" will be stationed around the city, primarily at the airports where the military fly-passes will originate, according to the official Global Times newspaper.

It means everyone in Beijing should be able to see -- and hear -- the aircraft roar overhead, but they'll have to watch the rest of the parade on television.

When asked if ordinary citizens could come and join in the celebration of the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, watch as the parade makes its way along Chang'an Ave. to Tiananmen Square, a spokesperson at the 60th anniversary press office said: "No."

The United States harbored serious concerns about the potential involvement of Colombian security forces in the February 2000 massacre at El Salado, an attack that occurred while the two countries were hammering out the final details of the massive military aid package known as Plan Colombia, according to declassified documents posted today on the National Security Archive Web site.

Orchestrated and carried out by paramilitaries from the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), an illegal paramilitary army, there have long been allegations that Colombian security forces, including those from the Colombian Navy's 1st Marine Infantry Brigade, facilitated the massacre by vacating the town before the carnage began and constructing roadblocks to delay the arrival of humanitarian aid. U.S. assistance under Plan Colombia required the Colombian military to demonstrate progress in breaking ties with paramilitary forces.

The documents described in the article below—and in Spanish on the Web site of Semana (Colombia's leading news magazine)—show that U.S. officials had significant doubts about the credibility of their Colombian military counterparts and were well aware, even before El Salado, of the propensity of the Colombian military to act in concert with illegal paramilitary forces, whether through omission or commission.

esearchers have discovered that many pyramids in Mexico were created by the ancient Mayans to create “raindrop” music to communicate with their rain god.

Take for example, Mexico’s El Castillo pyramid in Chichen Itza. As visitors climb the colossal staircase, their footsteps begin to sound like raindrops falling into a bucket of water as they near the top.

The discovery of the raindrop “music” in another pyramid suggests that at least some of Mexico’s pyramids were deliberately built for this purpose.

Some of the structures consist of a combination of steps and platforms, while others, like El Castillo, resemble the more even-stepped Egyptian pyramids.

Researchers were familiar with the raindrop sounds made by footsteps on El Castillo - a hollow pyramid on the Yucatan Peninsula.

Mao Xinyu, the 39-year-old sole grandson of the Great Helmsman, was promoted to the post in June, according to the Chongqing Evening News.

Before his elevation, the younger Mao was a colonel. He works as a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences, where he specialises in Mao Tse-tung Thought.

Although his promotion has not been widely publicised, Mao Xinyu was introduced at a recent function as a major-general, and is the youngest person to hold such a high rank in the 2.5-million-strong People's Liberation Army.

In a recent interview in the Chinese media, the younger Mao said he had now fulfilled a dream. "I never thought I would be able to enter the military, even less did I dream that I could reach the rank of major-general," he said.

Mao Xinyu has become increasingly prominent in the run-up to the 60th anniversary of Communist Party rule in China. Last year, he was appointed as a dean of a university department dedicated to his grandfather, and his blog on the People's Daily website was chosen as the "most attention-grabbing" blog of the year.

An archaeological site more than 3330 years old has been found in the Udaranchamadama area in Embilipitiya, Sri Lanka, by a group of local archaeologists.

According to a report in the Daily Mirror Online, the site had been discovered by Professor Raj Somadeva and his team while excavating an area belonging to the Sri Jayabodharama temple in Udaranchamadama.

The ruins of a cemetery had been found earlier in the Pahalaranchamadama school premises and this team believed that traces of the village that used the cemetery could be discovered from this excavation.

“The discovery of this site is a landmark in our history. This is the first time in Sri Lanka that we have found artefacts that are to more than 3330 years old,” said Professor Somadeva.

A new C-SPAN poll of awareness and knowledge of the U.S. Supreme Court shows that nearly nine in ten American voters (88 percent) say the Court has an impact on their everyday lives -- but only half (49 percent) of respondents could name a specific case heard by the Court. The survey of 801 voters conducted for C-SPAN on Sept. 17 by Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates, LLC, also indicates the public supports major changes to the Court, most notably revisiting the concept of constitutionally-guaranteed lifetime appointments. Nearly eight in ten respondents (79 percent) know there is no mandatory retirement age for Supreme Court justices; 56 percent of those surveyed said would prefer that justices do not receive lifetime appointments. ... Another major change to the Court favored by survey respondents is televised oral arguments; nearly two in three (65 percent) want cameras in the Supreme Court (tracking closely with a 61 percent finding in a July 2009 C-SPAN poll conducted directly before the Sotomayor hearings).

Valery Yarynich glances nervously over his shoulder. Clad in a brown leather jacket, the 72-year-old former Soviet colonel is hunkered in the back of the dimly lit Iron Gate restaurant in Washington, DC. It's March 2009—the Berlin Wall came down two decades ago—but the lean and fit Yarynich is as jumpy as an informant dodging the KGB. He begins to whisper, quietly but firmly.

"The Perimeter system is very, very nice," he says. "We remove unique responsibility from high politicians and the military." He looks around again.

Yarynich is talking about Russia's doomsday machine. That's right, an actual doomsday device—a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called "the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination." Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one.
Chart source: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Natural Resources Defense Council

The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn't matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched.

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P.D. Smith: The Dead Hand

As a candidate for president, Barack Obama decried the financial toll that the Iraq war was taking on the economy, but Obama’s proposed spending on welfare through 2010 will eclipse Bush’s war spending by more than $260 billion.

“Because of the Bush-McCain policies, our debt has ballooned,” then-Sen. Barack Obama told a Charleston, W.V., crowd in March 2008. “This is creating problems in our fragile economy. And that kind of debt also places an unfair burden on our children and grandchildren, who will have to repay it.”

During the entire administration of George W. Bush, the Iraq war cost a total of $622 billion, according to the Congressional Research Service.

President Obama’s welfare spending will reach $888 billion in a single fiscal year--2010--more than the Bush administration spent on war in Iraq from the first “shock and awe” attack in 2003 until Bush left office in January.

Obama’s spending proposals call for the largest increases in welfare benefits in U.S. history, according to a report by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. This will lead to a spending total of $10.3 trillion over the next decade on various welfare programs. These include cash payments, food, housing, Medicaid and various social services for low-income Americans and those at 200 percent of the poverty level, or $44,000 for a family of four. Among that total, $7.5 trillion will be federal money and $2.8 trillion will be federally mandated state expenditures.

In a chapter in his new book purporting to explain to"idiots" what"our Founding Fathers really intended," Glenn Beck praises an obsolete provision of the U.S. Constitution that prohibited Congress from outlawing the slave trade before 1808 and capped taxes on the slave trade at $10 per slave. In his explanation of the provision, Beck does not mention slavery, saying instead that the provision means that the Founders apparently"felt like there was a value to being able to live here" and lamenting:"Not anymore. These days we can't ask anything of immigrants -- including that they abide by our laws."

Beck claims to provide authoritative explanation of Constitution's meaning

Beck explains to"idiots" what"our Founding Fathers really intended" in the Constitution. In the introduction to a chapter titled,"The U.S. Constitution: Lost in Translation," Beck mocks"idiots" who don't share his interpretation of the Constitution:

How many times have you argued with your idiot friends about what's constitutional and what isn't? You may even show them the Constitution, but the disagreement continues. That made me think that maybe the problem is that the entire Constitution is written in English -- a language that is very difficult for the average idiot to comprehend. In addition, there are several words in the document longer than three letters, making it a tougher read than the"Dick and Jane" books they normally struggle through.

What follows is a translation (from English to Idiot) of several important parts of the U.S. Constitution, leaving no doubt as to what our Founding Fathers really intended. [Beck, et. al, Arguing With Idiots, Page 267]

Beck praises constitutional provision protecting slave trade

Beck praises"Migration or Importation" tax provision in taking cheap shot at"immigrants." In the chapter, Beck reprints and then praises Article I, Section 9, Clause 1 of the Constitution. Beck specifically highlights in yellow the phrase"ten dollars for each person":

Section 9. The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.

That's right, the Founders actually put a price tag on coming to this country: $10 per person. Apparently they felt like there was a value to being able to live here. Not anymore. These days we can't ask anything of immigrants -- including that they abide by our laws. [Arguing with Idiots, Page 278]

...

The Serbian war crimes court acquitted two former policemen of collaborating in the killing of three Albanian-American brothers in 1999. The officers were accused of torture while handing over the brothers — Illy, Mehmet and Agron Bytyqi — to a Serbian police unit that shot and killed them.

It’s not uncommon in Washington for a book or an article to become the must-read of the moment for every player in town. (You may recall Atul Gawande's New Yorker article last Spring looking at the health care system in McAllen, Texas that was required reading for everyone at the White House and up on Capitol Hill as the health care debate was kicking into high gear. )

With President Obama expressing skepticism about a further troop buildup in Afghanistan and his commander on the ground, Gen. McChrystal, advising that more troops are urgently needed to avoid "mission failure," the Afghanistan war is front and center.

And so Washington has a new must-read book.

My colleague Martha Raddatz and I have been told that many on the national security team at the White House are now reading "Lessons in Disaster" by Gordon Goldstein.

It’s a very powerful book focused on Vietnam-era national security adviser McGeorge Bundy.

From the Publishers Weekly blurb:

“As national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy was the prototypical best and brightest Vietnam War policymaker in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Bundy was, according to foreign policy scholar Goldstein, an out-and-out war hawk who again and again demonstrated a willingness, if not an eagerness, to deploy military means in Vietnam. Goldstein worked with Bundy in the year before his death, in 1996, on an uncompleted memoir and retrospective analysis of America's path to war. While drawing on that work in this warts-and-all examination of Bundy's advisory role, this book is something different, containing Goldstein's own conclusions. He painstakingly recounts his subject's role as national security adviser and ponders the complexities of the elusive inner Bundy: for example, the buoyant good humor in the 1960s that seemed unbowed by the weight of difficult strategic decisions. Among the surprising revelations: late in life Bundy came to regret his hawkish ways, although he maintained to the end that the presidents, not their advisers, were primarily responsible for the outcome of the war. Vietnam, he said, was overall, a war we should not have fought. “

One of the conclusions Goldstein says Bundy reached is that President Kennedy would have likely NOT escalated US involvement in Vietnam had he lived. He says that JFK emerged from Cuban Missile Crisis determined not to get rolled again by military.

The book was reviewed last November in the New York Times by Richard Holbrooke with comments relevant to the current situation in Afghanistan.

A survey published last week by the German magazine Stern revealed that one in seven Germans wanted the Berlin Wall back. Of the country’s 82 million inhabitants, 15% were in favour of the wall because they believed that they were better off during the 28 years that Germany was divided by the Berlin Wall.

The survey was carried out by the Forsa institute, two months ahead of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9th, 1989. Between September 9th and 10th, 1,002 Germans living in both former eastern and western Germany were questioned. 16% of those living in former West Germany, ‘Wessies’, wanted the wall back, against 11% of ‘Ossies’.

For the most part, those living in western Germany resented paying higher taxes to pay for the rebuilding of the formerly communist east. Over the past twenty years, approximately 1.2 trillion Euros worth of state funds have been transferred to eastern Germany.

Archaeologists in the ancient city of Troy in Turkey have found the remains of a man and a woman believed to have died in 1,200 B.C., the time of the legendary war chronicled by Homer, a leading German professor said on Tuesday.

Ernst Pernicka, a University of Tubingen professor of archaeometry who is leading excavations on the site in northwestern Turkey, said the bodies were found near a defense line within the city built in the late Bronze age.

The discovery could add to evidence that Troy's lower area was bigger in the late Bronze Age than previously thought, changing scholars' perceptions about the city of the "Iliad."

In an "unexpected" discovery, a rattle-wielding elite male has been found buried among powerful priestesses of the pre-Inca Moche society in Peru, archaeologists announced Monday.

Surrounded by early "smoke machines" as well as human and llama bones, the body was among several buried inside a unique double-chambered tomb that dates back to A.D. 850, said archaeologist Luis Jaime Castillo Butters, of the Catholic University of Peru in Lima.

The tomb contained a wooden coffin decorated with a copper lattice and a gilded mask, sitting on a raised platform. Inside the coffin "is where we find the main object of the burial, and that fellow is a male," Castillo said.

Three people suspected of stealing valuable artefacts dating as far back as the Sumerian period, were arrested near the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk on Saturday, the army said.

"A specialist army and intelligence unit arrested three people involved in the theft and trafficking of Iraqi antiquities" in the region of Abassi, west of Kirkuk, General Abdel Amir al-Zaidi told journalists.

He said eight pieces were recovered during the arrests, including the head of a Sumerian king. The Sumerian period dates from 4,000 BC to 2,000 BC.

Routine sidewalk replacement has led to the discovery of part of the foundation of Michigan State University’s historic first building, College Hall.

The Campus Archaeology Program on Sept. 17 unearthed the northeast corner of the building’s stone-and-mortar foundation just south of the site where Beaumont Tower now stands.

Built in 1856 as the nation’s first building for the study of scientific agriculture, College Hall was plagued by defective construction and torn down after two walls collapsed in 1918. Today, the building’s image is featured on MSU’s official seal.

The discovery came after MSU Landscape Services, a division of Physical Plant, contacted the Campus Archaeology Program about plans to replace the sidewalk near Beaumont Tower. Construction was put on hold for a few days while team members conducted an excavation – and ultimately discovered the intact foundation a few feet underground.