The U.S. government's debt rating could be heading for the "fiscal cliff" along with the federal budget.

Moody's Investors Service said Tuesday it would likely cut its "Aaa" rating on U.S. government debt, probably by one notch, if budget negotiations fail.

If Congress does not reach a budget deal, more than $600 billion in spending cuts and tax increases will automatically kick in starting Jan. 1, a scenario that's been dubbed the "fiscal cliff," because it is likely to send the economy back into recession and drive up unemployment.

A year ago, Moody's cut its outlook on U.S. debt to "negative," which acts as a warning that it might downgrade the rating, after partisan wrangling over raising the U.S. debt limit led the nation to the brink of default.

How do you know the people who told the official story of the 9/11 attack were lying?

Because their lips were moving.

ALL the misinformation that became the 9/11 official story wad laid down by the US news media within minutes after the attack.

Morgan O. Reynolds was a professor emeritus at Texas A&M University and former director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis headquartered in Dallas, TX.

He served as chief economist for the United States Department of Labor during 2001 - 2002, George W. Bush's first term. In 2005, he gained public attention as the first prominent government official to publicly claim that 9/11 was an inside job, and is a member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth.

Glad to see these kinds of people speaking out!

Doha, Qatar - Islamic militant leader Osama bin Laden, the man the United States considers the prime suspect in last week's terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, denied any role Sunday in the actions believed to have killed thousands.

In a statement issued to the Arabic satellite channel Al Jazeera, based in Qatar, bin Laden said, "The U.S. government has consistently blamed me for being behind every occasion its enemies attack it.

"I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks, which seems to have been planned by people for personal reasons," bin Laden's statement said.

"I have been living in the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan and following its leaders' rules. The current leader does not allow me to exercise such operations," bin Laden said.

The evidence is in, the analyses have been made, and conclusions have been drawn by scientists, engineers and other experts: the so-called terror attacks of September 11, 2001 were faked. There is, moreover, independent evidence from multiple and credible sources that Al Qaeda is the creation of western intelligence agencies.

If you have any questions concerning these assertions, visit http://www.physics911.net

The Scientific Panel Investigating Nine-Eleven has formed around this website. The Panel consists of over thirty experts in the fields of science, engineering, architecture, intelligence, the military, medicine, Islamic studies and other disciplines. The members are willing to stand up and be counted, even the ones with the highest public profiles. You will find them listed on this page: http://physics911.net/spine.htm

Of course, the Physics 911 website is hardly alone in cyberspace. There are now literally hundreds of skeptical websites on the internet (with only a handful of dissenting sites defending the official story). There are other working groups with websites, as well, not to mention thousands of people doing their own inquiries into 911, and millions of people skeptical of the official story (including 48% of New Yorkers, according to a Zogby poll taken in 2005).

Nothing Bush has ever said about 911 is true --nor is there a shred, a scintilla of verifiable evidence in support of it. Bush put forward a crazy conspiracy theory about a world wide conspiracy of radical Arabs and incompetent pilots. Not a word of it can be believed! Three indisputable, verifiable facts utterly disprove everything said by Bush and apologists about 911.

Bush kicked up a lot of dust and hoped to hide out in the smokescreen. It hasn't worked. Three irrefutable facts lay waste to the official lies.

©Joe Tabacca / New York Times

911 Commissioner Bob Kerrey admits 911 was a conspiracy 30 years in the making

I have known Nick Bryant since 1995. He was new to New York from Minnesota then, and looking to make a jump from science reporting in technical journals to writing for a mass audience. I noticed that he was persistent and ethically motivated and I thought, "He might be a good reporter." We got to be friends, and had many long discussions about the nature of evil, which was his preferred subject matter as he tried to make a move into general circulation magazines. When he wasn't chasing doctors at AIDS conferences, he was chasing outlaw bikers and Satanists.

On one such foray in 2002, he stumbled on a scandal that I had never heard of. The scandal centered around the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union, which was created to serve a poor black neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska. During the 70s and 80s, its manager, a man named Larry King (not the talk show host), ran the Franklin as a Ponzi scheme and looted over $40 million, which he spent on an opulent lifestyle and Republican fundraising. King sang the National Anthem at the Republican convention in 1984 and served on several committees of the National Black Republican Council. He had a townhouse in Washington, DC, where he threw parties with many prominent guests. In August 1988, he threw a $100,000 party at the Republican convention, and appeared in a video in which he and Jack Kemp urged blacks to vote for George H. W. Bush. In November 1988, his Ponzi scheme crashed and the Franklin was shut down by the National Credit Union Association and the FBI.

All run-of-the-mill scandal stuff, and uncontroversial in the basic facts, except that as King was climbing into the upper levels of the national Republican hierarchy, Omaha was boiling over with rumors that he was also running a pedophile ring, pandering children out to rich and powerful men in Omaha, even flying the children to Washington, Los Angeles and New York for orgiastic, abusive parties with even richer and more powerful men.

"We are at War. Somebody is Going to Pay." George W. Bush, Sept 11th, 2001.

Eleven years later, we are still at war. Bullets, mortars and drones are still extracting payment. Thousands, tens of thousands, millions have paid in full. Children and even those yet to be born will continue to pay for decades to come.

On a single day in Iraq last week there were 29 bombing attacks in 19 cities, killing 111 civilians and wounding another 235. On Sept 9th, reports indicate 88 people were killed and another 270 injured in 30 attacks all across the country. Iraq continues in a seemingly endless death spiral into chaos. In his acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination for President, Obama claimed he ended the war in Iraq, well... not quite.

The city of Fallujah remains under siege. Not from U.S. troops, but from a deluge of birth defects that have plagued families since the use of depleted uranium and white phosphorus by U.S. forces in 2004. No government studies have provided a direct link to the use of these weapons because no government studies have been undertaken, and none are contemplated.

Dr. Samira Alani, a pediatric specialist at Fallujah General Hospital, told Al Jazeera, "We have all kinds of defects now, ranging from congenital heart disease to severe physical abnormalities, both in numbers you cannot imagine. There are not even medical terms to describe some of these conditions because we've never seen them until now." The photographs are available on line if you can bear to look at what we have wrought. George W. Bush will loudly proclaim his "Pro-life" bona fides, and he'll tell you he believes "that every child, born and unborn, ought to be protected in law and welcomed into life." Apparently, "every child" doesn't apply to the children of Fallujah, and the "law" doesn't apply to George W. Bush.

Clashes have flared after Italian police dispersed a crowd of protesting Italian workers. Around 600 demonstrators gathered in Rome to pressure the government to re-open a recently closed aluminium plant in Sardinia.

­Police used extensive force to push back the workers, who were trying to enter the Ministry of Economic Development in Rome, where government officials were meeting with labor unions and executives from the firm Alcoa Inc.- who own the plant. Talks centred around trying to save jobs, but meanwhile an angry mob set off large firecrackers and threw missiles at police lines to make their message heard.

Profit-losing US-based Alcoa, plans to shut down the factory by November unless a buyer is found. The only interested candidate, German hedge fund Aurelius, pulled out of negotiations with the Italian government in August.