Boston.com:

Police around the country have arrested more than 400 people in the first nationally coordinated operation aimed at producers and sellers of methamphetamine, officials said yesterday. Police in more than 200 cities and the Drug Enforcement Administration took part over the past week in Operation Wildfire, which also resulted in the seizure of more than 200 pounds of the drug and 56 labs where it was made.

From the Seattle Times:

The 15-page indictment accuses Kevin Lamar James, 29; Levar Haney Washington, 25; Gregory Vernon Patterson, 21; and Hammad Riaz Samana, 21, of plotting the attacks, using guns and explosives, to "maximize the number of casualties to be inflicted." The six-count indictment names all four in a conspiracy to levy war against the U.S. government through terrorism and says the plot was hatched by James, an inmate at the California state prison in Sacramento and founder of a small prison gang of radical Muslims called Jam'iyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh, or JIS.

Radical Islam in our own prisons. Will it take another 9/11 for some of us to get serious about the threat?

Report from the Salt Lake Tribune:

More than 950 people were killed and hundreds injured Wednesday morning when rumors of a suicide bomber provoked a frenzied stampede in a procession of Shiite pilgrims as they crossed a bridge in northern Baghdad, government and hospital officials said.

Terrible tragedy, almost unimaginable. This is a horrible week for the entire world.

James Glassman has an opinion:

My daughter, her husband and their little baby managed to get out of the city ahead of the flood on Sunday, driving 14 hours into Texas with the few belongings they could stuff into their car. They have no idea what has become of their house and their possessions, not to mention their friends, their pets, their jobs, their way of life.

Tragedies happen, and my daughter and her family are happy just to be alive. Their losses and those of hundreds of thousands of other innocents deserve mourning, prayer and respect.

That is why the response of environmental extremists fills me with what only can be called disgust. They have decided to exploit the death and devastation to win support for the failed Kyoto Protocol, which requires massive cutbacks in energy use to reduce, by a few tenths of a degree, surface warming projected 100 years from now.

Katrina has nothing to do with global warming. Nothing. It has everything to do with the immense forces of nature that have been unleashed many, many times before and the inability of humans, even the most brilliant engineers, to tame these forces.

Giant hurricanes are rare, but they are not new. And they are not increasing. To the contrary. Just go to the website of the National Hurricane Center and check out a table that lists hurricanes by category and decade. The peak for major hurricanes (categories 3,4,5) came in the decades of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, when such storms averaged 9 per decade. In the 1960s, there were 6 such storms; in the 1970s, 4; in the 1980s, 5; in the 1990s, 5; and for 2001-04, there were 3. Category 4 and 5 storms were also more prevalent in the past than they are now. As for Category 5 storms, there have been only three since the 1850s: in the decades of the 1930s, 1960s and 1990s.

"It is what it is." While there appears to be an emerging scientific agreement that global warming is occuring, it is by no means decided what the probable cause is. Increased solar activity is a much more likely mechanism than is human-generated greenhouse gases.

Evacuation of the Superdome has been suspended after shots were fired at helicopters there in New Orleans.

The operation to bus more than 20,000 people to the Houston Astrodome was suspended “until they gain control of the Superdome,” said Richard Zeuschlag, head of Acadian Ambulance, which was handling the evacuation of sick and injured people from the Superdome.

He said that military would not fly out of the Superdome either because of the gunfire and that the National Guard told him that it was sending 100 military police officers to gain control. “That’s not enough,” Zeuschlag. “We need a thousand.”

Words fail me. Shooting at rescue helicopters is the act of a monster, not a human being.

Update: Fox News now reporting that a National Guardsman has been struck by a bullet at the Superdome.

Partisans left and right are wasting no time degrading themselves by pointing political blame for Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Leftists are attacking on multiple fronts, including

Global warming
President Bush not dropping everything and rushing to New Orleans to personally toss sandbags
The war in Iraq--taking up National Guard resources, diverting Corps of Engineers funds for shoring up the Louisiana coastline, etc.
Rightie bloggers not going 24/7 all Katrina all the time

Some of the things the righties are attacking about include:

Looters
The shaky leadership of the Louisiana governor and New Orleans mayor Cindy Sheehan (how she relates, I'm not sure)
President Bush's less-than-forceful response
The lunacy of building a major city on the coast below sea level
The list of leftie attacks shown above

I was going to link to some of this crap, but frankly it doesn't deserve it.

Note to everybody: IT WAS A FREAKIN' CATEGORY FOUR HURRICANE! Pull your heads out of your posteriors and get busy doing something helpful for a change, rather than trying to tear down your "enemies." There's plenty of time for the blame game--we've got a city to save! For crying out loud, we don't even have any idea how many people have died on the Gulf Coast. Give the partisan B.S. a rest for a while, OK?

MSNBC reports:

Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman said Wednesday the Bush administration has decided to release oil from federal petroleum reserves to help refiners affected by Hurricane Katrina.

The move, which was expected later in the day, is designed to give refineries a temporary supply of crude oil to take the place of interrupted shipments from tankers or offshore oil platforms affected by the storm.

Alabama Power says hurricane "worst ever."

"Very simply put, it's bad," spokeswoman Carrie Kurlander said. "Damage-wise, it's the biggest storm on record for us."

Though Hurricane Ivan knocked out power to more homes, 825,000 of them, Katrina was worse for knocking down poles and knocking out some high-voltage transmission lines. Katrina left 636,891 Alabama Power customers statewide without electricity at the peak outage, the second highest number ever seen. The peak in Birmingham was 230,367 customers without power.

Alabama Governor says Dauphin Island hardest hit.

Gov. Bob Riley flew over the coastal and southwest Alabama areas hardest hit by Katrina, with federal disaster aid in the pipeline. Riley said Dauphin Island was the worst-hit area to his eye.

"Houses have been absolutely demolished," he said. "A lot of the beach is gone."

Death toll along the Mississippi coast exceeds 100.

After sharing what he witnessed, he teared up. "It's hard," (Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour) said, "but I promise you Mississippi and the rest of the Gulf Coast will recover. It will cost a lot, but we'll rebuild, and the Coast will be bigger and better than ever."

Mississippi utilities struggle to restore power.

Utility companies were still scrambling this afternoon to assess damage to power lines, generators and other essential pieces of the state’s electrical grid. Officials from Mississippi Power, which serves nearly 60,000 homes and businesses in the Pine Belt area, said all of its 195,000 customers around the state were without electricity after the storm.
. . .
Other utilities were hit hard as well. By late afternoon, Entergy had nearly 270,000 customers in Mississippi without power -- almost 88,000 in the southern part of the state.

Reporters from the Biloxi paper (which is relocating operations to Columbus, GA) are continuing to work via this blog.

Bloggers are organizing to provide relief for Hurricane Katrina victims. You can view the list of participating blogs here.

Medary.com supports the Salvation Army--click on the link to go straight to their donation page. Their alternate donation page is here.