Free Republic

CHICAGO - Two Chicago-area cousins were arrested Wednesday on federal charges out of Cleveland accusing them of conspiring to wage holy war against Americans overseas, including U.S. military forces in Iraq. Zubair A. Ahmed, 27, of suburban North Chicago, and Khaleel Ahmed, 26, of Chicago, were accused along with three other men from the Toledo, Ohio, area who already had been under indictment on charges of plotting acts of terrorism against Americans overseas. The fresh indictment returned by a grand jury in Cleveland added the two Chicago-area men to the roster of defendants and brought additional charges against the three...

Here are further excerpts from F. A. Hayek’s incredible little book, The Road to Serfdom . Quotes from Chapters I & II can be viewed here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1775089/posts Chapter III: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1778528/posts The Road to Serfdom (Ch IV) The “Inevitability” of Planning We were the first to assert that the more complicated the forms assumed by civilization, the more restricted the freedom of the individual must become. Benito Mussolini Most (planners) affirm that we can no longer choose but are compelled by circumstances beyond our control to substitute planning for competition. The myth is deliberately cultivated that we are embarking on the...

There are a number of smart, talented and acclaimed planners and architects who spend virtually all day every day thinking about a better future for New Orleans. Spend a week in the life of one, the prince of 'new urbanism,' Andres Duany. To hear some people talk, you'd think architect and urban planner Andrés Duany is the devil. They'd have us resist with religious zeal his designs for a newer, better post-Katrina New Orleans. Given a chance, Duany would damn the Crescent City to a future of cleanliness, orderliness and artificiality. He would do to us what he did to...

SAN DIEGO ---- Regional planners are polling San Diego County residents to see if they would support a special "quality of life" tax to fund beach-sand replenishment, open-space purchases, habitat restoration and water-quality programs, an agency official said Thursday. The funding source could come in the form of a sales, property, hotel or rental-car tax, and could appear on the county ballot in 2008, said Rob Rundle, principal planner for the San Diego Association of Governments, the county's regional planning agency. Rundle said results of the telephone poll of 2,000 county registered voters will be reported to the association board...

Currently, the majority of San Diego's affordable housing options have been limited to rental units, leaving little available for middle and lower-income households wishing to buy. To help alleviate this problem, Centre City Development Corp. (CCDC) is now offering an attractive incentive to builders to bring more affordable homes to the city and one of the largest new developments in the area is the first to sign on. According to Robb Walker, vice president of KMA Architecture & Engineering, by law developers have the option to pay in-lieu fees as an alternative to actually incorporating affordable units within new projects....

NOTE: If you have security concerns,please respond with private message. Hijacking 4 airliners on 9/11 required a helluva lot of planning - especially as to "flight plans". It might have been "relatively simple" to hijack the planes ,and, since some of the hijackers had taken lessons,they could operate aircraft controls to some degree ; but how about the navigation? Think about it for a minute.You take over an aircraft,but cannot reliably predict how long the takeover efforts will require,and what your location will be when this occurs. You now have to change course and altitude precisely so you hit your...

Bishop Howard J. Hubbard of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany hopes involving members of the diocese -- from its top clerical leaders to its average parishioners -- will stifle apprehension as the Catholic church begins a two-year pastoral planning process that will reshape the diocese and close some churches. "I believe we have before us ... an opportunity to dream a new church into being; an opportunity to evangelize and re-evangelize," Hubbard said Monday in a prepared speech to diocese leaders in Albany. The meeting was closed to the public, but copies of his speech were provided to the...

US 'planning to keep 50,000 troops in Iraq for many years' By Francis Harris in Washington (Filed: 12/06/2006) America plans to retain a garrison of 50,000 troops, one tenth of its entire army, in Iraq for years to come, according to US media reports. The revelation came as George W Bush summoned his top political, military and intelligence aides to a summit on Iraq's future today at the presidential retreat at Camp David. America has indicated that it may raise troop levels in Iraq in the short-term Tomorrow the Americans will talk by video link to Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq's prime...

WASHINGTON, May 24, 2006 – With hurricane season nearing, the Defense Department has tremendous assets to offer a civilian-led response to a major disaster, a top DoD official involved in the process told reporters here yesterday. "Those assets are ready for deployment, and ... we are better prepared than at any point in our nation's history to move that assistance as rapidly as is humanly possible," Paul McHale, assistant defense secretary for homeland defense, said. DoD defense coordinating officers will be assigned full-time to each of the 10 Federal Emergency Management Agency's regional offices to ensure coordinated planning and operational...

Recent water shortages in Rockland County, N.Y., reveal an increasing mismatch between water demand and supply following rapid growth in the Northeast during period of abnormally high precipitation. With the summer approaching, new research has shown that recent water emergencies in the Northeast have resulted from more than just dry weather. Instead, researchers from The Earth Institute at Columbia University found droughts had more direct, human causes. The result is a condition known as demand-driven drought that may catch more water managers and residents off-guard in coming years. The study, which appeared in a recent issue of Journal of the...

... In Barbour's state, New Urbanists dominated a weeklong charrette held in October at the Isle of Capri casino in Biloxi. Led by Miami architect and CNU mainstay Andrés Duany, the so-called Mississippi Renewal Forum architects and planners from around the country who are loyal to the group's cause. Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco has also begun relying on New Urbanists for rebuilding advice. This week the newly formed Louisiana Recovery Authority tapped Duany to lead a statewide charrette and chose Berkeley-based architect and planner Peter Calthorpe, a CNU founder, to develop a long-term regional plan for areas devastated by...

“Sustainable Development” is the current buzz term that represents the efforts to eliminate private property in America... Sustainable Development is a synonym for “shortage ecology”. The philosophy behind the creation of shortage ecology underlies the Endangered Species Act.The ESA is the foundation of the land-use element of SD. The ESA is based on international treaties and is rooted in the Precautionary Principle, which abandons the legal standard that presumes innocence. Since the ESA puts the government in control of [the environment], the ideals of private property are destroyed...This idea can be illustrated using the so-called “fish-land” ordinance that has been...

The Mississippi Governor's Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding, and Renewal aims for no less than an "economic renaissance for coastal Mississippi," said its chairman Jim Barksdale, a former president and CEO of Netscape. To help create a physical plan, state officials invited New Urbanist Andres Duany, FAIA, to lead a charrette last month in Biloxi, one of Hurricane Rita's hard-hit targets. Joining him were 100 members of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), including transportation planners, environmentalists, code writers, sociologists, and representatives of such large AE firms as SOM, HOK, HDR, and UDA. General teams will deal with regional issues,...

GULFPORT, Miss. - (KRT) - The challenge of rebuilding Mississippi's Gulf Coast is attracting some of the nation's leading professionals in architectural planning, engineering and management, who have offered to help at reduced or no cost, state officials say. "These folks are offering their services anywhere from totally free to partially free," said Leland Speed, executive director of the Mississippi Development Authority. "We also have offers from third parties that are interested in funding planning activities." Among those whose name has surfaced: Andres Duany, the Miami-based planning guru best known for designing the traditional town of Seaside in the Florida...

In the first line of his book, Planning for Freedom, Ludwig Von Mises, the famed Austrian economist, observed "Planning is socialism." I will admit that my first acquaintance with government planners was a planning class in my Master’s program, where I was given the party line about how important it was to plan for growth. I read dozens of books, by some very brilliant writers, bemoaning the fact that our society doesn’t plan growth, and I was treated to descriptions of the planning utopia that would exist if we just "planned" our growth. I then sat on a City Planning...

I thought we might need to start finding all of the disaster readiness plans for each state. I found this for TN.

McCain, Clinton planning Alaska visit Associated Press Published August 3 2005 Senator Hillary Clinton (L) arrives for the world premier of Miramax Film's 'The Great Raid' with Senator John McCain at the Uptown Theatre in Washington, D.C. July 28, 2005. REUTERS/Jeffrey Snyder ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- A group of U.S. Senators are planning a trip to Alaska in two weeks to view melting permafrost, retreating glaciers and other consequences of global climate change in cold latitudes. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who co-authored a bill to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, and Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., are scheduled...

Bush faulted on postwar planning REUTERS WASHINGTON - An independent assessment of the tumult in Iraq led by two top former presidential advisers found that the Bush administration was unprepared for postwar Iraq and underestimated the number of troops needed in a miscalculation that helped fuel the insurgency. The report by a Council on Foreign Relations task force, released Wednesday, concluded that the failure to prepare properly for the period after the war had given "early impetus for the insurgency" now gripping the country. The task force was headed by two former national security advisers, Democrat Samuel "Sandy" Berger and...

Maryland is the "global hotspot for biotechnology," the state's secretary of business and economic development told a group visiting from India last month. "I made it up this morning," Aris Melissaratos acknowledged, shortly after the meeting in Montgomery County.

Stephen Hayes, whose book The Connection detailed the links that are said not to have taken place between Saddam and al Qaeda, returns to the fray. Marvelling at the bare-faced lies of CNN which has been stating that there were no links -- and that the 9/11 Commission said so, when it said explicitly that there were -- he adds a few more examples of the contacts: 'In 1992 the Iraqi Intelligence services compiled a list of its assets. On page 14 of the document, marked "Top Secret" and dated March 28, 1992, is the name of Osama bin Laden,...