Mark Foley Original Documents [Explicit]

"I hereby resign as the representative of the 16th Congressional District of Florida, effective today." Mark Foley's one-sentence statement faxed to Gov. Jeb Bush at 3:41 p.m, September 29, 2006.

Speaker Hastert Letter to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, October 1, 2006, (Washington, D.C.) Speaker of the House J. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) today sent the following letter to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales: Dear Mr. Attorney General:

Former Representative Mark Foley resigned from the House of Representatives on Friday, September 29, 2006, after improper and illicit communications between Mr. Foley and former House pages were made public. While the House of Representatives on that day voted to refer this matter to the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct for investigation, they do not have jurisdiction over federal law or over him upon his resignation from office.

As Speaker of the House, I hereby request that the Department of Justice conduct an investigation of Mr. Foley’s conduct with current and former House pages to determine to what extent any of his actions violated federal law.

This United States Congress image is in the public domain. This may be because it is an official Congressional portrait, because it was taken by an official employee of the Congress, or because it has been released into the public domain and posted on the official websites of a member of Congress. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image is in the public domain. This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons. The description on its description page there is shown below

As I am sure you are aware, there are two different and distinct communications at issue here. First, Mr. Foley sent an email to a former page of Representative Alexander in the fall of 2005. (e-mail 1), (e-mail 2), (e-mail 3)(PDF), (e-mail 4)(PDF), (e-mail 5), (e-mail 6)This email was determined to be “over friendly” by Representative Alexander’s office but was not sexual in nature. Second, based on media reports, there is a different set of communications which were sexually explicit instant messages (Foley's Instant Messages: Full Text [Explicit]) which Mr. Foley reportedly sent another former page or pages.(More Foley Instant Messages: Excerpts [Explicit]) These communications, of which no one in the House Leadership was aware to my knowledge, reportedly were sent sometime in 2003.

According to an Editor’s Note that appeared on the St. Petersburg Times’ website yesterday, the Times was given a set of emails from Mr. Foley to Representative Alexander’s former page in November of 2005. (See “A Note From the Editors” located at blogs.tampabay.com/buzz/, visited on September 30, 2006). The editors state that they viewed this exchange as “friendly chit chat” and decided not to publish it after hearing an explanation from Representative Foley. Acting on this same communication, the Chairman of the House Page Board and the then Clerk of the House confronted Mr. Foley, demanded he cease all contact with the former page as his parents had requested, and believed they had privately resolved the situation as the parents had requested.

Unlike the first communication, the second communication was a set of instant messages that contained sexually explicit statements and were reportedly generated three years ago. Last week, ABC News first reported these sexually explicit instant messages which led to Representative Foley’s resignation. These sexually explicit communications warrant a criminal referral in two respects. Initially, since the communications involve interstate communications, there should be a complete investigation and prosecution of any federal laws that have been violated. In addition, since the communications appear to have existed for three years, there should be an investigation into the extent there are persons who knew or had possession of these messages but did not report them to the appropriate authorities. It is important to know who may have had the communications and why they were not given to prosecutors before now.

Therefore, I also request that the Department undertake an investigation into who had specific knowledge of the content of any sexually explicit communications between Mr. Foley and any former or current House pages and what actions such individuals took, if any, to provide them to law enforcement. I request that the scope of your investigation include any and all individuals who may have been aware of this matter—be they Members of Congress, employees of the House of Representatives, or anyone outside the Congress.

[10:20 P.M. - MOTION TO REFER PRIVILEGED RESOLUTION - Mr. Boehner moved to refer the privileged resolution to the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct and the Chair recognized Mr. Boehner under the one-hour rule. Subsequently, Mr. Boehner moved the previous question on the motion to refer and by voice vote,

the Chair announced that the ayes had prevailed. Ms. Pelosi demanded a recorded vote on ordering the previous question on the motion to refer.

PRIVILEGED RESOLUTION SUBMITTED - Ms. Pelosi rose to a point of personal privilege and sent to the desk a privileged resolution.

10:40 P.M. - on ordering the previous question on the motion to refer the resolution Agreed to by recorded vote: 410 - 0 (Roll no. 513).]

Your attention to this serious matter is appreciated. I am also sending to the Department of Law Enforcement for the State of Florida a request to investigate whether or not any state laws were violated by Mr. Foley or anyone else with respect to this matter

Sincerely, J. Dennis Hastert, Speaker

A FEW Relevant Bills sponsored by Congressman Mark Foley

• Child Modeling Exploitation Prevention Act (Introduced in House)[H.R.1142.IH]
• Child Fingerprints Safekeeping Act of 2006 (Introduced in House)[H.R.5773.IH]
• Child Predator Act of 2005 (Introduced in House)[H.R.1355.IH]
• Protecting Our Children from Violence Act of 2005 (Introduced in House)[H.R.1223.IH]

LINKS:

• Letter Faxed to WPBF-TV in West Palm Beach By David Roth, Foley's attorney, on "need for immediate treatment for alcoholism and related behavioral problems"
• Joint Statement from Speaker Dennis Hastert, Majority Leader John Boehner and Majority Whip Roy Blunt on the Congressman Mark Foley Matter September 30, 2006
• Speaker Hastert Letter to Florida Governor Jeb Bush
• INTERNAL REVIEW OF CONTACTS WITH THE OFFICE OF THE SPEAKER REGARDING THE CONGRESSMAN MARK FOLEY MATTER
• Congressman Foley's MySpace profile
• OFFICES OF THE SIXTEENTH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT OF FLORIDA
• Project Safe Childhood, In his one-year anniversary speech, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales stressed the Department's commitment to protecting America's children from online sexual exploitation crimes by announcing Project Safe Childhood. This nationwide initiative, involving efforts by federal, state, and local law enforcement officials, formally began on May 17, 2006. The new Project Safe Childhood web site provides information to our community partners that will help protect our children from online exploitation and abuse. View Project Safe Childhood site

Technorati Tags: Mark Foley and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales or Dennis Hastert and Attorney General, or House of Representatives and Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, or Representative Alexander, and sexually explicit instant messages, or House pages, and Representative Foley or email

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Cosmic Contraceptive?

Stellar birth control in the early universe

Extremely massive black holes in the centers of galaxies may serve as 'cosmic contraceptives' in the early Universe, suppressing the birth of new stars.

The blue beam of light in this Hubble Space Telescope image of the nearby galaxy M87 emanates from a black hole which has a mass exceeding a billion times that of the Sun. Credit: NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), Usage Restrictions: with credit given.

New Haven, Conn. -- An international team of astronomers based at Yale and Leiden University in The Netherlands found that "old stars" dominated many large galaxies in the early universe, raising the new question of why these galaxies progressed into "adulthood" so early in the life of the universe.

Every year only a handful of new stars are born out of the gas that fills the space between the stars in galaxies like the Milky Way. To account for the large number of stars in the Universe today, about 400 billion in the Milky Way alone, it was thought that the "stellar birth rate" must have been much higher in the past.

Surprisingly, in this study appearing in the October 2 issue of Astrophysical Journal, astronomers using the 8.1m Gemini telescope in Chile report that many of the largest galaxies in the Universe had a very low stellar birth rate even when the Universe was only about 20 percent of its present age.

"Our new results imply that the stars in many large galaxies were born when the Universe was in its infancy, in the first few billion years after the Big Bang," said team leader Mariska Kriek, a PhD student from Leiden University and Yale. "The results confirm what some astronomers had suspected -- galaxies seem to have some method of 'birth control' that is very effective."

These new findings add to growing evidence that in big galaxies the formation of new stars was significantly suppressed after an initial period of vigorous activity. "These galaxies had a very violent early youth, but rose into stable adulthood well before many galaxies like the Milky Way were even in kindergarten," said Kriek."

The astronomers used the uniquely powerful Gemini Near Infrared Spectrograph, to analyze the light of distant galaxies simultaneously over many different wavelengths. They studied 20 galaxies so distant that their light had been traveling for nearly 11 billion years, or 80 percent of the age of the Universe.

"The unexpected finding is what was not found -- we expected to see a prominent signal from ionized Hydrogen, the tell-tale signature of star birth. Remarkably, for nine of the twenty galaxies that we observed, this signature is not seen at all," said Pieter van Dokkum, associate professor of astronomy and physics at Yale University. "It gives a firm limit on the stellar birth rate in these objects."

One suggestion is that enormous black holes in the centers of large galaxies may be responsible for suppressing star formation. When material spirals into a black hole, huge amounts of energy are released and are rapidly injected into the galaxy's gas. This energy injection may dilute the gas sufficiently to prevent future star birth.

"Evidence for the presence of these black holes is seen in several of the galaxies studied, lending support to the idea that black holes serve as cosmic contraceptives in the young Universe," said van Dokkum. ###

The research was funded by the Netherlands Foundation for Research, the Leids Kerkhoven-Bosscha Fonds, the National Science Foundation, and NASA. Other authors on the paper were Ryan Quadri, Eric Gawiser, David Herrera, Danilo Marchesini and C. Megan Urry from Yale; Marijn Franx, Edward N. Taylor and Stijn Wuyts from Leiden; Garth D. Illingworth, University of California, Santa Cruz; Ivo Labbe, Carnegie Observatories, Pasadena, CA; Paulina Lira, Universidad de Chile; Hans-Walter Rix, Max-Planck-Institute fur Astronomie; Gregory Rudnick, National Optical Astronomy Observatory, Tucson, AZ and Sune Toft, European Southern Observatory, Munchen, Germany.

Citation: Astrophysical Journal: (October 1, 2006

Contact: Janet Rettig Emanuel janet.emanuel@yale.edu 203-432-2157 Yale University

Technorati Tags: ASTRONOMICAL or GALAXY and Big Bang or stellar evolution and Astrophysics or supernova and black+hole or astronomers and neutron star or black holes and Milky Way galaxy or universe and deuterium or galaxy M87

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