We examine the extent to which galactic and extragalactic foregrounds can hamper the detection of primordial Cosmic Microwave background (CMB) anisotropies. We limit our discussion to intermediate angular scales, 10' theta 2 deg, since many current as well as future experiments have been designed to map CMB anisotropies at these angular scales. In

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We recently studied a small number of highly inclined spiral galaxies, and used their special geometry to determine absolute extinction values of the dust in their dust lanes. We apply a simple model of a uniform mixture of stars and dust to the data, and find that the extinction values in these galaxies are the same as those making up the Galactic

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