[Quote:]

As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters – his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week – a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta.
Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers.
Instead, they have learned they are going to be community-relations officers for FEMA, shuffled throughout the Gulf Coast region to disseminate fliers and a phone number: 1-800-621-FEMA.

On Monday, some firefighters stuck in the staging area at the Sheraton peeled off their FEMA-issued shirts and stuffed them in backpacks, saying they refuse to represent the federal agency.
Federal officials are unapologetic.
“I would go back and ask the firefighter to revisit his commitment to FEMA, to firefighting and to the citizens of this country,” said FEMA spokeswoman Mary Hudak.

[..]

“They’ve got people here who are search-and-rescue certified, paramedics, haz-mat certified,” said a Texas firefighter. “We’re sitting in here having a sexual-harassment class while there are still [victims] in Louisiana who haven’t been contacted yet.”
The firefighter, who has encouraged his superiors back home not to send any more volunteers for now, declined to give his name because FEMA has warned them not to talk to reporters.

[..]

But as specific orders began arriving to the firefighters in Atlanta, a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew’s first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas.

[Quote:]

A mother was arrested Tuesday evening as she and her five children were walking stark naked down the street while carrying Bibles, police said.

“The suspect advised that God told her this morning that she should do this,” police said.

Police said they received “multiple calls” and officers who responded to 29th Ave and 15th St North “found the suspect walking with her five children” ranging in age from 5 to 15. None was wearing clothing.

All were taken to police headquarters for questioning. The mother was charged with child abuse and exposure of sexual organs. Police said her children will likely be released to the custody of a relative.

Just immagine what would happen if there was an error displaying that message …

More great alerts here…

[Quote:]

In the chaos that was Causeway Boulevard, this group of refugees stood out: a 6-year-old boy walking down the road, holding a 5-month-old, surrounded by five toddlers who followed him around as if he were their leader.

They were holding hands. Three of the children were about 2 years old, and one was wearing only diapers. A 3-year-old girl, who wore colorful barrettes on the ends of her braids, had her 14-month-old brother in tow. The 6-year-old spoke for all of them, and he told rescuers his name was Deamonte Love.

Thousands of human stories have flown past relief workers in the last week, but few have touched them as much as the seven children who were found wandering together Thursday at an evacuation point in downtown New Orleans. In the Baton Rouge headquarters of the rescue operation, paramedics tried to coax their names out of them; nurses who examined them stayed up that night, brooding.

Transporting the children alone was “the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, knowing that their parents are either dead” or that they had been abandoned, said Pat Coveney, a Houston emergency medical technician who put them into the back of his ambulance and drove them out of New Orleans.

“It goes back to the same thing,” he said. “How did a 6-year-old end up being in charge of six babies?”

[Quote:]

One of the charges (READ “lies”) Republicans make to excuse Bush’s criminal incompetence is that Louisiana governor Blanco had not filled out the right form, or said the right magic incantation or had not ceded jurisdiction to the feds and thus had prevented the sending of troops into New Orleans. Their claim is that the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 prevented such a deployment without the ceding of jurisdiction by the State. (This is of course, incorrect. “Somehow, in the past 125 years, the meaning of the Posse Comitatus Act has been stood on its head. Clearly the exposition above demonstrates that the intent of the act was not to preclude the Army from enforcing the law but instead was designed to allow the Army to do this only when directed to do so by the President or Congress.”) Moreover, that seems a difficult story to hold up in the face of the following:
More troops into New Orleans:

More active-duty troops are joining the Hurricane Katrina relief effort than originally planned, and a senior commander said Monday they likely will be needed for months, not weeks. Although the Pentagon said Saturday that 2,500 soldiers from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division were being dispatched to the New Orleans area, a spokeswoman for the division said Monday that 4,700 would be there by Tuesday. Also going are combat and support forces from the 1st Cavalry Division and 13th Corps Support Command at Fort Hood, Texas, plus about 2,000 Marines. The Pentagon originally said the 1st Cavalry was sending 2,700 soldiers, but division spokesman Capt. George Lewis said Monday that 1,700 were going, plus 100 support troops.
Thus the total for active-duty ground forces would be about 8,500, up from the 7,200 announced on Saturday. Twenty-one Navy ships also are participating, including the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman off the coast of Mississippi. The Air Force said Monday that its aircraft have flown more than 1,000 missions, including helicopter crews that have rescued more than 3,600 people and evacuation flights that have moved 2,600 medical patients.

So not only are national guard troops there, but regular Army, Navy and Air Force troops as well. Has Blanco signed over jurisdiction, as Republicans insist was required to deploy these troops? Well, no:

Blanco has refused to sign over control of the National Guard to the federal government and has turned to a Clinton administration official, former Federal Emergency Management Agency chief James Lee Witt, to help run relief efforts.

So, I guess Bush did not need to have Blanco sign over jurisidiction to deploy troops in New Orleans after all. Sort of surprising that the Republicans got that one wrong (READ “lied about it”) isn’t it? No it isn’t.

[Quote:]

As noted, the Washington Post got burned today by a “senior Bush official” who told them that Gov. Blanco of Louisiana had never declared a state of emergency in the site — a claim the Post printed as fact. Yet the claim was demonstrably false and by late afternoon the Post had been compelled to print a correction.

This week’s Newsweek contains the same false claim — and though their recital of the anecdote is unsourced, common sense suggests that someone or some operation fed them both the same line, which neither organization checked out before running.

Monday’s Times, not surprisingly, confirms that the White House damage control operation is being run by Karl Rove and Dan Bartlett.

Add it up.

I concur with Daily Kos on this:

There’s been some inspiring reporting coming out of the shattered towns of Louisiana and Mississippi — reporters showing their humanity on their sleeves, reporters not afraid to ask the impertinent but possibly live-saving questions, reporters more than willing to call out politicians on live camera when they spin away from or flatly lie on known facts. It’s been shocking to see, and a credit to them and their industry.

But why is that the exception? Why does it take day after day of reporting on struggles for food, struggles for water, searches for loved ones, searches that ended badly, and a lake full of bodies to wear a reporter down to the point where their voice shakes, their hands tremble, and they call out the officials who are lying to them right there, on the air, and make sure the whole world knows the actual truth?

Shouldn’t that be the default position of any journalist actually doing their job? Shouldn’t the search for the truth, and the outrage at the lie, be the very basis of actual reporting? Why should it take that momentary loss of control, that sudden spark of anger caused by unimaginable disaster, to get to that point of brilliance and duty?

How have we come to this point, where neutrality of journalism meant neutrality to the truth itself, meant reporting fact and lie alongside each other, in equivalence, without emotion, without remorse? Where reporting that an official has flatly lied is not even considered, by the top reporters of the top news outlets in this country, unless you are one of those few reporters knee-deep in a swirling eddy that contains the disintegrated remnants of a hundred thousand families, and of ten thousand lives?

Will there be a point, as a result of this crisis of nature, man and government, where this smell, this stink of loss combined with the acrid scent of government bluster and feint, will settle in the nostrils of the journalists even far from the scene in Washington, and they will carry forward with something resembling the integrity they once all claimed, in better times, to have?

[Quote:]

I am stunned by an interview I conducted with New Orleans Detective Lawrence Dupree. He told me they were trying to rescue people with a helicopter and the people were so poor they were afraid it would cost too much to get a ride and they had no money for a “ticket.” Dupree was shaken telling us the story. He just couldn’t believe these people were afraid they’d be charged for a rescue.

This says *so much* about the mindset in the USA… tragic.

[Quote:]

In a segment at the top of the show on the surge of
evacuees to the Texas city, Barbara Bush said: “Almost everyone I’ve talked to says we’re going to move to Houston.”

Then she added: “What I’m hearing which is sort of scary is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.

“And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this–this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them.”

Thank you, Barbara, for welcoming us to your pristine, utterly unused mind.

FEMA won’t accept Amtrak’s help in evacuations

FEMA turns away experienced firefighters

FEMA turns back Wal-Mart supply trucks

FEMA prevents Coast Guard from delivering diesel fuel

FEMA won’t let Red Cross deliver food

FEMA bars morticians from entering New Orleans

FEMA blocks 500-boat citizen flotilla from delivering aid

FEMA fails to utilize Navy ship with 600-bed hospital on board

FEMA to Chicago: Send just one truck

FEMA turns away generators (See entry from 3:32 P.M. by Ben Morris, Slidell mayor)

FEMA: “First Responders Urged Not To Respond”

At what point are they prosecuted for neglient manslaughter? Or even neglient homocide?

[Quote:]

Het is het Amsterdamse stadsdeel De Baarsjes niet gelukt om een gedragscode met alle drie de moskeeën in het stadsdeel overeen te komen. Tot nu toe is alleen de Turkse Aya Sofia moskee bereid de code te ondertekenen. De Marokkaanse Nour-moskee tekent het protocol niet.

De Turkse Aya Sofia moskee tekent de code maandag in het bijzijn van premier Jan Peter Balkenende. Het bestuur van de Pakistaanse moskee Ghousia Mashid staat achter de code, maar moet deze nog bespreken met de achterban.

Volgens woordvoerder van het stadsdeel Joke Padmos is de derde moskee, de Marokkaanse Nour-moskee, het inhoudelijk wel eens met de code, maar heeft het principiële bezwaren tegen het tekenen van een contract met de overheid. “De moskee wil niet buiten de wet om afspraken maken”, aldus Padmos.

De oplossing ligt voor de hand. Sluit gewoon geen enkele deal meer met de moskee. Subsidies, huurcontracten, ontheffingen, ijsvrij en parkeervergunningen, gewoon helemaal niets meer. Als je principiele problemen hebt met het tekenen van een contract met de overheid, geldt dat uiteraard voor alle contracten.

A military helicopter drops a sandbag as work continues to repair the 17th Street canal levee Monday, Sept. 5, 2005, in New Orleans. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)
[Quote:]

A week after Hurricane Katrina swept through, engineers plugged the levee break that had swamped much of the city and floodwaters began to recede, but along with the good news came the mayor’s direst prediction yet: as many as 10,000 dead.

Crews had put up metal sheets and dropped 3,000-pound sandbags from helicopters onto the 17th Street canal leading to Lake Pontchartrain to plug the 200-foot-wide gap, and water was being pumped from the canal back into the lake.

State officials and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers say once the canal level is drawn down two feet, Pumping Station No. 6 can begin pumping water out of the bowl-shaped city.

Some parts of the city already showed slipping floodwaters as the repair neared completion, with the low-lying Ninth Ward dropping more than a foot. In downtown New Orleans, some streets were merely wet rather than swamped.

“We’re starting to make the kind of progress that I kind of expected earlier,” New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said even before the plug of the break, which opened up a day after the hurricane and flooded 80 percent of the city.

[Quote:]

My mother always told me that when a person dies, one should not say anything bad about him. My mother was wrong. History requires truth, not puffery or silence, especially about powerful governmental figures. And obituaries are a first draft of history. So here’s the truth about Chief Justice Rehnquist you won’t hear on Fox News or from politicians. Chief Justice William Rehnquist set back liberty, equality, and human rights perhaps more than any American judge of this generation. His rise to power speaks volumes about the current state of American values.

Read the rest of this entry »

[Quote:]

New observations by the international Cassini spacecraft reveal that Saturn’s trademark shimmering rings, which have dazzled astronomers since Galileo’s time, have dramatically changed over just the past 25 years.

Among the most surprising findings is that parts of Saturn’s innermost ring – the D ring – have grown dimmer since the Voyager spacecraft flew by the planet in 1981, and a piece of the D ring has moved 125 miles inward toward Saturn.

While scientists puzzle over what caused the changes, their observations could reveal something about the age and lifetime of the rings.

Cassini-related discoveries were discussed Monday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s division of planetary sciences in Cambridge, England.

“I don’t think Saturn’s rings will disappear anytime soon, but this tells us how the rings are evolving and how long they might last, ” deputy project scientist Linda Spilker said in a telephone interview from England.

[Quote:]

Het Openbaar Ministerie en het Nederlands Forensisch Instituut (NFI) hebben jarenlang cruciaal DNA-bewijs achtergehouden in de zaak van de vermoorde Nienke Kleiss. Medewerkers van het OM wisten al jaren dat Cees B., die in eerste instantie is veroordeeld voor de moord op het 10-jarige meisje, nooit de dader kon zijn.

Dat meldde het televisieprogramma Netwerk maandagavond op basis van eigen onderzoek.

B. werd in 2002 veroordeeld tot achttien jaar cel en tbs. Hij kwam eind vorig jaar op vrije voeten, nadat Wik H., die vastzat op verdenking van andere misdrijven, de moord op Nienke in juni 2000 in het Beatrixpark in Schiedam had bekend. H. werd onlangs door de rechtbank in Rotterdam tot twintig jaar celstraf en tbs veroordeeld. De herzieningszaak van B. dient in november.

[..]

Een van de toehoorders bij zo’n presentatie was politiepsycholoog H. Timmerman, toen nog werkzaam bij het zogeheten cold-caseteam van de politie Groningen. Hij trok intern tevergeefs aan de bel. Het feit dat hij met Netwerk praatte, heeft geleid tot zijn ontslag.

Ontslag is voor deze mensen te goed. Dit is crimineel wangedrag en verdient lange opsluiting. Als hier niet minstens strafrechtelijk onderzoek wordt ingesteld, weten we het zeker: Nederland is een bananenrepubliek.