Being a sea turtle is difficult; sharks, fishermen and a dwindling habitat have all taken their toll. Using the beaches of war-ravaged Lebanon as a nesting site has not made life any easier. So it must have felt like the final straw when the foxes turned up.

Driven from the coastal hills by the 34-day bombardment last summer, the red foxes took refuge on the last wild beach in the country. There they discovered a tasty treat in the form of the eggs of the rare green and loggerhead turtles, midway through their five-month nesting season.

This year, the turtles have returned, but so too have the foxes. “The foxes are destroying nests,” said Mona Khalil, a conservationist who has become the reptiles’ champion.

Lebanon’s woes had already led to many ups and downs for the turtles. The Israeli gun boats that patrolled offshore during the

25-year occupation of southern Lebanon kept locals off the beach at night when the turtles come ashore to nest each summer between May and October.

More at the Telegraph

Already packing devastating power and expected to intensify further, Hurricane Dean began battering the south coasts of Haiti and the Dominican Republic on Saturday with howling winds and heavy rains as it churned northwest through the Caribbean.

Haitian authorities issued an alert for coastal communities where thousands of people live in flimsy shacks. All flights from the capital, Port-au-Prince, were canceled on Saturday and small boats were prohibited from leaving shore, the country’s disaster management agency said.

Elsewhere, alarmed tourists jammed Caribbean airports for flights out of Hurricane Dean’s path. In Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, an 11-year-old boy was killed by flying debris while watching large waves strike an oceanfront boulevard, the Dominican emergency operations center reported.

Dean was forecast to thrash Jamaica with 160 mph winds, or Category 5 intensity, up to 20 inches of rain, storm surge and large battering waves, with the onslaught beginning Sunday morning. The system, with hurricane-force winds extending 70 miles from its core, was to be directly over the small island nation by Sunday afternoon.

Latest coordinates and tracking maps here

A microphone lowered Saturday into a fourth hole drilled into a collapsed coal mine showed no signs of six men trapped for nearly two weeks, another blow in a rescue effort that has killed three other people.

“We did not detect any signals from miners underground,” said Richard Stickler, head of the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.

With underground tunneling halted, officials had hoped a fourth hole drilled into the mine would finally offer clues to whether the men were alive 1,500 feet below ground.

More at the Sun Sentinel

Freddie King
Going Down

A general strike is proposed for the United States on September11, 2007, the sixth anniversary of the 9/11/2001 attacks on New York City and Arlington, Virginia. The general strike movement has no clearly named leadership. It’s described as an Internet viral effort. Wikipedia defines viral efforts on the Internet as:

An object (or an idea) is viral when it has the ability to spread copies of itself or change other similar objects to become more like (it) when those objects are simply exposed to the viral object.

General strikes, more common in Europe, are events that shut down the normal operations of a city, state, or nation for a period of time. These strikes aim to force awareness and action on a single issue or broader set of concerns. The 9/11/07 General Strike has a central location - http://www.strike911.org/ - on the Internet, which is linked to and reproduced on a variety of other internet sites. The site states the rationale for the effort:

The General Strike is a national call to action, from citizens to other citizens. It is not about a single issue. It is not an anti-war protest, a civil rights protest, an election fraud protest. It is not about torture, surveillance, corporate media, the 9/11 coverup, or the environment. This strike is about all these issues and more.

We all have different concerns, but we all have the same concern: we are being lied to and this government does not represent us. Join other Americans in demanding truth, justice, and accountability.

This is our country.
And our world.
We just have to stand up.

More at Scoop

More information here

Unfortunately, the thugs in South Florida don’t seem to be at a loss for bullets.

Troops training for and fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are firing more than 1 billion bullets a year, contributing to ammunition shortages hitting police departments nationwide and preventing some officers from training with the weapons they carry on patrol.

An Associated Press review of dozens of police and sheriff’s departments found that many are struggling with delays of as long as a year for both handgun and rifle ammunition. And the shortages are resulting in prices as much as double what departments were paying just a year ago.

“There were warehouses full of it. Now, that isn’t the case,” said Al Aden, police chief in Pierre, S.D.

Departments in all parts of the country reported delays or reductions in training and, in at least one case, a proposal to use paint-ball guns in firing drills as a way to conserve real ammo.

Forgoing proper, repetitive weapons training comes with a price on the streets, police say, in diminished accuracy, quickness on the draw and basic decision-making skills.

“You are not going to be as sharp or as good, especially if an emergency situation comes up,” said Sgt. James MacGillis, range master for the Milwaukee police. “The better-trained officer is the one that is less likely to use force.”

The pinch is blamed on a skyrocketing demand for ammunition that followed the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, driven by the training needs of a military at war, and, ironically, police departments raising their own practice regiments following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The increasingly voracious demand for copper and lead overseas, especially in China, has also been a factor.

More at MyWay

Iraqis run this prison, but it just opened a month ago. Prior to that, I assume these prisoners were in one of the huge American run prison camps.

Rare footage from inside a Baghdad prison camp shows hundreds of inmates packed into wire-mesh tents, protesting their innocence.

“I have been jailed for two years and have never been put before a judge or court!” one prisoner is shown shouting.

The video pictures were given to Reuters Television on Saturday by the office of Sunni Arab Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi, who visited the Rusafa prison compound in eastern Baghdad with his Shi’ite counterpart.

Hashemi told the prisoners that the authorities were working to speed up their cases and he promised better treatment.

The footage showed row upon row of outdoor tents made of wire mesh and covered with white plastic sheeting, each about the size of a basketball court and housing dozens of inmates.

“We are not asking for food or water. Just free us. We have committed no crimes,” said one inmate.

Continue reading at Reuters

Hold the phone!!! He’s interrupting his vacation to meet with Canada’s Stephen Harper and Mexico’s Felipe Calderon in Quebec on Monday. Maybe he’s just fleeing the country in case Hurricane Dean hits…….. then he can ignore that one, too.

From the article at Yahoo: (nuff said)

“It’s not necessarily sexy stuff, but it’s essential to our security. It has to be done,” said Roger Noriega, Bush’s former assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs. “And it just so happens that Mexico and Canada have renewed themselves with the election of two right-of-center leaders who see the world a lot like Bush does.”

That anyone in the universe sees the world “a lot like Bush does” is such a scarey thought!

Gareth Porter does a fine job of taking apart the U.S. made up claims about Iran contributing to attacks in Iraq.

When a top U.S. commander in Iraq reported last week that attacks by Shiite militias with links to Iran had risen to 73 percent of all July attacks that had killed or wounded U.S. forces in Baghdad, he claimed it was because of an effort by Iran to oust the United States from Iraq, referring to “intelligence reports” of a “surge” in Iranian assistance.

But the obvious reason for the rise in Shiite-related U.S. casualties, - ignored in U.S. media coverage of Lt. General Raymond Odierno’s charge - is that the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr was defending itself against a rising tempo of attacks by U.S. forces at the same time attacks by al-Qaeda forces had fallen.

In his press briefing on Aug. 5, Odierno, the second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq, blamed the rise in the proportion of U.S. casualties attributable to Shiite militias on Iran “surging their support to these groups based on the September report” - a reference to the much-anticipated report by General David Petraeus on the U.S.’s own surge strategy.

Odierno claimed intelligence reports supported his contention of an Iranian effort to influence public perceptions of the surge strategy. “They-re sending more money in, they-re training more individuals and they-re sending more weapons in.”

He repeated the charge in an interview with Michael R. Gordon of the New York Times published on its front page Aug. 8 under the headline, “U.S. Says Iran-Supplied Bomb Is Killing More Troops in Iraq.” In that interview, he declared of Iran, “I think they want to influence the decision potentially coming up in September.”

More at Zmag

A little boy goes to his dad and asks, “What is Politics?”

Dad says, “Well son, let me try to explain it this way:

I am the head of the family, so call me The President.

Your mother is the administrator of the money, so we call her the Government.

We are here to take care of your needs, so we will call you the People.

The nanny, we will consider her the Working Class.

And your baby brother, we will call him the Future.

Now think about that and see if it makes sense.”

So the little boy goes off to bed thinking about what Dad has said.

Later that night, he hears his baby brother crying, so he gets up to check on him.

He finds that the baby has severely soiled his diaper.

So the little boy goes to his parent’s room and finds his mother asleep.
Not wanting to wake her, he goes to the nanny’s room. Finding the door locked, he peeks in the keyhole and sees his father in bed with the nanny.
He gives up and goes back to bed.

The next morning, the little boy say’s to his father, “Dad, I think I understand the concept of politics now.”

The father says, “Good, son, tell me in your own words what you think politics is all about.”

The little boy replies, “The President is screwing the Working Class while the Government is sound asleep. The People are being ignored and the Future is in deep shit.