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Greg Szymanski, The Arctic Beacon, via Rense.com, reports:

Don Stout looked up into the Midwestern sky one afternoon two weeks ago and saw a strange helicopter flying over his five-acre piece of land in rural Albany, Ohio.

Before he knew what happened, the 77-year-old long-time resident, law-abiding citizen and Korean War veteran had eight law enforcement officials swarm on his property, checking the place out for marijuana.

Never before having a run-in with the law, Stout said the heavy-handed looking group of law enforcement thugs “came and went without saying a word” after suspiciously looking at a large bush on his property not in the slightest bit resembling a pot plant.

“I’ve been here since 1994 and everybody’s knows me including the sheriff. I never smoked marijuana and they know it, but I think they just like terrorizing people,” said Stout in a telephone conversation from his rural home, adding he still hasn’t received an answer from anyone why law enforcement officials invaded his privacy and entered his land without a proper search warrant.

“It scared the hell out of me as eight or ten men swarmed my place. I was weeding my garden and the next thing you know, they were on my property, looked at this bush and left without saying a word. It was ridiculous, but the sheriff, the deputy sheriff and the game warden all raided my place for no reason and I am still looking for an explanation.”

Although Stout can’t pinpoint why authorities entered his property without a warrant, earlier that day he aired his strong opinions against President Bush, calling him an outright liar, on a free speech and truth-telling talk radio show on the popular WAIF AM770 local radio station.

Stout said he has been calling in regularly voicing his anti-Bush opinions, saying people in rural Ohio are finally starting to wake up to lies, deceit and treachery imposed on the American people by what he calls a “lying dog of a President.’

“I think he and the rest of his buddies are corrupt, down right crazy and Bush should be impeached plain and simple for lying to the people about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” said the former Korean War veteran, who lashed out at Bush for going to war illegally and in the process killing thousands of innocent civilians, including more than 1,700 GI’s.

“I think George Bush is a liar and is personally responsible for the deaths of many good young men in order that his rich buddies could profit from this illegal war.”
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Ad By Pizza Restaurant In New Zealand Named ‘Hell’s Pizzas’

Bloomberg reports:

Aug. 8 (Bloomberg) — Mongolia said 80 migratory birds were found dead in a lake, killed by an avian influenza virus, the World Organization for Animal Health reported.

Laboratory diagnosis yesterday of the wild ducks, geese and swans that were found on Aug. 2 has confirmed they died from `A’- type bird flu. The Paris-based animal health organization said in an e-mailed statement that it received the information today from Ravdan Sanjaatogtokh, director of the state veterinary services at Mongolia’s ministry of food and agriculture in Ulan Bator.
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In this photo released by ABC News, Peter Jennings is shown in Washington in 1983. Jennings, the suave, Canadian-born broadcaster who delivered the news to Americans each night in five separate decades, died Sunday, Aug. 7, 2005. He was 67. (AP Photo/ABC News, File)

Cal Mankowski, Reuters, :

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Peter Jennings, a high school dropout who rose to become prime-time anchorman for ABC News and whose career spanned five decades, has died of lung cancer at 67.

The Canadian-born Jennings, host of ABC’s “World News Tonight” since 1983, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. The newsman announced in April he had lung cancer and was beginning chemotherapy.

“Peter died with his family around him, without pain and in peace. He knew he’d lived a good life,” his family said in a statement.

Jennings was the last of a generation of long-serving lead anchors for major U.S. broadcasters.
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Steve Coll and Susan B. Glasser, Washington Post Staff Writers, report:

In the snow-draped mountains near Jalalabad in November 2001, as the Taliban collapsed and al Qaeda lost its Afghan sanctuary, Osama bin Laden biographer Hamid Mir watched “every second al Qaeda member carrying a laptop computer along with a Kalashnikov” as they prepared to scatter into hiding and exile. On the screens were photographs of Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta.

Nearly four years later, al Qaeda has become the first guerrilla movement in history to migrate from physical space to cyberspace. With laptops and DVDs, in secret hideouts and at neighborhood Internet cafes, young code-writing jihadists have sought to replicate the training, communication, planning and preaching facilities they lost in Afghanistan with countless new locations on the Internet.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports:

Washington, DC - Today the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a release announcing its new rule expanding the reach of the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). The ruling is a reinterpretation of the scope of CALEA and will force Internet broadband providers and certain voice-over-IP (VoIP) providers to build backdoors into their networks that make it easier for law enforcement to wiretap them. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has argued against this expansion of CALEA in several rounds of comments to the FCC on its proposed rule.
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Giles Tremlett in Madrid for The Guardian reports:

Forest fires raged across south-west Europe yesterday as a heatwave hit an area already parched by a severe drought that has dried up rivers and led to water restrictions in many places.

The emergency services were tackling dozens of blazes across Portugal, Spain and southern France as temperatures headed towards 45C.

The drought is the worst on record in Spain and Portugal. The Algarve region of southern Portugal has warned of water cuts.
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Dominick Jenkins, The Guardian, comments:

The idea that it was militarily necessary to drop the atomic bomb in 1945 is now discredited. The first exhaustive examination of Japanese, Soviet and US archives, by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, confirms the argument that Truman went ahead in order to get Japan to end the war quickly before the Soviet Union came into the Pacific war and demanded a say in Asia.
The use of atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not provide the US with the free hand it had wanted and has proved disastrous for the world.

It did not bring about surrender. With 62 Japanese cities destroyed by firebombs and napalm, Japan was not overwhelmed by the destruction of one more. The army minister, General Korechika Anami, told the supreme war council that he would fight on. What actually brought about surrender was the combination of the Soviet Union’s entry into the war on August 8 and the US decision to let Japan retain the emperor.

The use of the bomb led to an atomic arms race. Truman had been warned that the Soviet Union would interpret the use of the bomb as a threat but went ahead. After Stalin heard about the bomb from Truman at Potsdam, he said the US would try to use its atomic monopoly to force the Soviet Union to accept its plans for Europe, adding: “Well, that’s not going to happen.” The USSR exploded the atomic bomb in 1949 and the hydrogen bomb in 1953, far more quickly than Truman had believed possible.
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Susan Torres

Deborah Condon, irishhealth.com, reports:

A brain-dead woman, who was kept on a life support machine for almost three months to allow her unborn child to develop, has given birth to a baby girl.

Mrs Susan Torres (26) gave birth to Susan Anne Catherine Torres on August 2 by Caesarean section in Virginia, America. The baby, who is two months premature, weighed just one pound and 13 ounces and measured 13.5 inches long.

Mrs Torres, a researcher at the American National Institutes of Health, collapsed on May 7 of this year. She was rushed to hospital where she was diagnosed with stage four melanoma (cancer) and was declared brain dead, with no hope of recovery.
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