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| GunsAmerica.com is the premier online auction and listing site for hunters, sport shooters, gun collectors, knives & swords, air guns, archery and outdoors accessories. There are almost one million devoted and passionate gun enthusiasts using and visiting our site every month, and for a good reason: We understand our customers and we are as equally passionate about our 2nd Amendment rights. We believe that gun owners and enthusiasts are among the proudest and most elite citizens of the great country, and we aim to maintain a very simple yet powerful community for us to interact and exercise our constitutional rights. What can I do on GunsAmerica.com? GunsAmerica.com is a classified listing and auction site where sellers can list items for sale and potential buyers can browse the listings and bid on the items. If someone bids on an item and wins it, the buyer and the seller contact each other and make arrangements for payment and delivery of the listed or auctioned item. We are very much like the classified ads in a newspaper in that individual sellers post the items for sale and individual buyers purchase the items. However, GunsAmerica manages the sale process, provides a convenient form of communication between buyer and seller, and offers rich, varied, and up-to-date information on the item being sold (often including a picture) and feedback on the buyer and seller. GunsAmerica.com does not directly sell any of the items listed on this auction site. All items are listed by third-party sellers. What’s different and better about the new GunsAmerica.com? GunsAmerica.com, established in 1997, was the first firearms marketplace on the internet. Since the beginning, GA has always been simple: similar to a newspaper classified ad, sellers can post listings for guns or related items, name a price and provide contact info- a simple yet effective facility to pair firearms and related item sellers with potential buyers. Over the past 9 years, the site has exploded in size and users. There came a point where there were tens of thousands of live listings at any given time. While this was great news for our buyers and sellers, it also posed a problem: The tens of thousands of listings needed to be refined into categories and subsections so that buyers looking for specific items can search and find them quickly and easily. Additionally, we wanted to expand and make GA a more robust site on other levels. We wanted to expand our selling options to include auctions. It’s no secret that online auction sites (think eBay) are so popular because of its dynamic pricing environment. The advantages for buyers and sellers include
Auctions also allowed us to build user feedback into the GA system. We felt that feedback would be a very important aspect of buying and selling on GA. Consistent positive feedback would let buyers know that sellers manage transactions well and that they care about their reputation. That being said, there were still inherent problems with the marriage of traditional auctions and firearms. Not all buyers are legally allowed to buy all guns- how can sellers make sure that only qualified bidders were bidding? To address these issues, GunsAmerica.com has developed a buying platform that is comprised of four main listing/auction types: | ||||||
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As an answer to frequent power outages in Baghdad, the Iraqi Electricity Ministry has granted a critical power plant contract to Iran. The infrastructure deal has caused concern in Washington that Iran will use the project to further penetrate Iraq with its intelligence and spy forces.
The Iranians will build a 160-megawatt plant in Sadr City, inside Baghdad, provide inexpensive electricity from the Iranian grid to southern Iraq, and build a power plant between Karbala and Najaf.
The Iraqi government has also awarded a contract for a $940 million, 1,300-megawatt plant to China.
One U.S. military official said that the military was concerned about any Iranian foray into Iraq.
“We are of course carefully watching Iran’s overall presence in Iraq. As you know, it’s not always what it appears. Their Quds force routinely uses the cover of a business to mask their real purpose as an intelligence operative,” the official said, referring to an elite unit used by Tehran to destabilize Iraq.
According to the New York Times, an international energy expert involved in Iraq’s electricity sector said he believed the Sadr City plant was originally Iran’s idea, and came to fruition despite initial disinterest from Iraq’s Electricity Ministry. Iraq’s Commission on Public Integrity, responsible for probing corruption, has already indicated it will look into the matter, according to the same source.
Iran’s influence in Iraq has burgeoned since America overthrew the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein; Iranian mullahs are mentors to many of Iraq’s Shiite leaders, some of whom lead Iraqi terrorist organizations. Iran has been a key facilitator of many of the weapons, intelligence and even militants themselves, flowing into Iraq.
The point is, Iran already wields massive influence over Iraqi politics, as well as national security.
Giving Iranian companies the opportunity to build key infrastructure will only serve to extend Iran’s presence inside Iraq and enhance its ability to counter efforts to construct a stable, pro-Western government in Baghdad. These latest developments will only strengthen Iran in its role as the king of the south.........................................................................................................................................................................
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Attack Iran and you attack Russia
By Pepe Escobar
The barely reported highlight of Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to Tehran for the Caspian Sea summit last week was a key face-to-face meeting with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
A high-level diplomatic source in Tehran tells Asia Times Online that essentially Putin and the Supreme Leader have agreed on a plan to nullify the George W Bush administration's relentless drive towards launching a preemptive attack, perhaps a tactical nuclear
strike, against Iran. An American attack on Iran will be viewed by Moscow as an attack on Russia.
But then, as if this were not enough of a political bombshell, came the abrupt resignation of Ali Larijani as top Iranian nuclear negotiator. Early this week in Rome, Larijani told the IRNA news agency that "Iran's nuclear policies are stable and will not change with the replacement of the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council [SNSC]." Larijani will keep attending SNSC meetings, now as a representative of the Supreme Leader. He even took time to remind the West that in the Islamic Republic all key decisions regarding the civilian nuclear program are made by the Supreme Leader. Larijani actually went to Rome to meet with the European Union's Javier Solana alongside Iran's new negotiator, Saeed Jalili, a former member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), just like President Mahmud Ahmadinejad.
In itself, the Putin-Khamenei meeting was extraordinary, because the Supreme Leader rarely receives foreign statesmen for closed talks, even one as crucial as Putin. The Russian president, according to the diplomatic source, told the Supreme Leader he may hold the ultimate solution regarding the endlessly controversial Iranian nuclear dossier. According to IRNA, the Supreme Leader, after stressing that the Iranian civilian nuclear program will continue unabated, said. "We will ponder your words and proposal."
Larijani himself had told the Iranian media that Putin had a "special plan" and the Supreme Leader observed that the plan was "ponderable". The problem is that Ahmadinejad publicly denied the Russians had volunteered a new plan.
Iranian hawks close to Ahmadinejad are spinning that Putin's proposal involves Iran temporarily suspending uranium enrichment in exchange for no more United Nations sanctions. That's essentially what International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohammad ElBaradei has been working on all along. The key issue is what - in practical terms - will Iran get in return. Obviously it's not the EU's Solana who will have the answer. But as far as Russia is concerned, strategically nothing will appease it except a political/diplomatic solution for the Iranian nuclear dossier.
US Vice President Dick Cheney - who even Senator Hillary Clinton now refers to as Darth Vader - must be foaming at the mouth; but the fact is that after the Caspian summit, Iran and Russia are officially entangled in a strategic partnership. World War III, for them, is definitely not on the cards.
Let's read from the same script
The apparent internal controversy on how exactly Putin and the Supreme Leader are on the same wavelength belies a serious rift in the higher spheres of the Islamic Republic. The replacement of Larijani, a realist hawk, by Jalili, an unknown quantity with an even more hawkish background, might spell an Ahmadinejad victory. It's not that simple.
The powerful Ali Akbar Velayati, the diplomatic adviser to the Supreme Leader, said he didn't like the replacement one bit. Even worse: regarding the appalling record of the Ahmadinejad presidency when it comes to the economy, all-out criticism is now the norm. Another former nuclear negotiator, Hassan Rowhani, told the Etemad-e Melli newspaper, "The effects of the [UN] sanctions are visible. Our situation gets worse day by day."
Ahmadinejad for the past two months has been placing his former IRGC brothers-in-arms in key posts, like the presidency of the central bank and the Oil, Industry and Interior ministries. Internal repression is rife. On Sunday, hundreds of students protested at the Amir-Kabir University in Tehran, calling for "Death to the dictator".
The wily, ultimate pragmatist Hashemi Rafsanjani, now leader of the Council of Experts and in practice a much more powerful figure than Ahmadinejad, took no time to publicly reflect that "we can't bend people's thoughts with dictatorial regimes".
This week, the Supreme Leader himself intervened, saying, "I approve of this government, but this does not mean that I approve of everything they do." Under the currently explosive circumstances, this also amounts to a political bombshell.
As if anyone needed to be reminded, the buck - or rial - stops with the Supreme Leader, whose last wish on earth is to furnish a pretext for the Bush administration to launch World War III. If Ahmadinejad now deviates from a carefully crafted strategic script, the Supreme Leader may simply get rid of him.
