Michael Yon;

Today, Muslims mostly filled the front pews of St John’s. Muslims who want their Christian friends and neighbors to come home. The Christians who might see these photos likely will recognize their friends here. The Muslims in this neighborhood worry that other people will take the homes of their Christian neighbors, and that the Christians will never come back. And so they came to St John’s today in force, and they showed their faces, and they said, “Come back to Iraq. Come home.” They wanted the cameras to catch it. They wanted to spread the word: Come home. Muslims keep telling me to get it on the news. “Tell the Christians to come home to their country Iraq.”

Though no longer the chief delinquent of Europe, and though not much thought is given to its strategic position, Germany is still Europe’s center of gravity, territorially contiguous to more nations than any state other than Russia, with compact interior lines of communication, Western Europe’s largest population, and Europe’s leading economy.
Facts like these assert themselves through every kind of historical fluctuation, even if America now sees Germany, the way stop for airlifters en route to Iraq and Afghanistan, as a kind of giant aircraft carrier with sausages. But Germany is no doubt the subject of far deeper consideration on the one hand by Russia and on the other by Jihadists.

Read the whole thing here. (link fixed – sorry!)

LaTimes;

A nation at the crossroads of South America, the Caribbean, North America and Europe, Venezuela’s location is ideal. Borders? Long, scantly populated and porous. Financial system? Large and with easy-to-evade governmental controls. Telecommunications, ports and airports? The best that oil money can buy. U.S. influence? Nil. Corrupt politicians, cops, judges and military officers? Absolutely: Transparency International ranked Venezuela a shameful 162 out of 179 counties on its corruption perception index. Chavez’s demonstrated interest in confronting criminal networks during his eight years in power? Not much.
While this situation has so far been rather invisible to the rest of the world, it is patently clear to those in charge of fighting transnational crime. Anti-trafficking officials in Europe, the United States, Asia and other Latin American countries are paying unprecedented attention to Venezuela. These officials are not particularly interested in Venezuelan politics or in Chavez’s policies. All they care about is that the tentacles of these global criminal networks are spreading from Venezuela into their countries with enormous power and at great speed.

Via Blackfive;

BAGHDAD: Former Sunni insurgents asked the U.S. to stay away, then ambushed members of al-Qaida in Iraq, killing 18 in a battle that raged for hours north of Baghdad, an ex-insurgent leader and Iraqi police said Saturday.

Heh,

“The throat cutters from Asscrackistan, or where ever they came from are in trouble, big trouble.”

Lose your war.
h/t

Muslims and Christians raising a cross at St. John’s Church in Baghdad.
“Michael Yon is making this photograph available to media outlets, such as print publications and cable and television news broadcasts, at no cost for a limited period of time. For more information, please contact us here.”
A link roundup at Instapundit.

… is disputed.
h/t

In Morris, Christiansen was waiting.

He is 77 years old, retired from the post office, and now works as an inventor and holds a few patents. Every day, he’d walk out to his mailbox hoping for a reply from Ephron. Nothing came. He sent Sherlock another letter, which Porteous had delivered. Weeks passed. No word. Did she know he was paying all this money to reach her? Finally, Christiansen wrote to Sherlock: “As you know, I have been trying to contact Nora Ephron, but for some reason she doesn’t answer my letters. Now I would like you to help me. I am sitting on the answer to a many decades mystery which has never been solved … No one was killed or injured in the caper but could easily have been … I hope you will think about this and let me know.”
Porteous was curious. He began to probe with e-mails. Christiansen would often type back late at night, he said, so his wife wouldn’t discover his secret relationship with D.B. Cooper. “Yes, I knew the culprit personally,” Lyle wrote one day. “He was my brother.”

Go towards the light…

WaPo comes right out and says it;

it’s looking more and more as though those in and outside of Congress who last month were assailing Gen. Petraeus’s credibility and insisting that there was no letup in Iraq’s bloodshed were — to put it simply — wrong.

Language warning, as is standard when a liberal feminist makes a startling discovery, a profanity-laced rant against the state of the world results:

Are you F—— kidding me? With relatively little training, men in my weight class can lift ONE HUNDRED POUNDS MORE THAN ME? Just a few months in, y’all can lift 274 lbs to a woman’s 174? 57% more? A HUNDRED POUNDS? Are you f——- kidding? That much more? I had no idea. You guys are that much stronger? Serious? I got genuinely angry. I still am. I didn’t know, and it is so UNFAIR.

In Iran.

Just think of it as Mental Health Day.

As a dog breeder who has occasionally been obligated to use them, I’ve always hated these things.

When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved implanting microchips in humans, the manufacturer said it would save lives, letting doctors scan the tiny transponders to access patients’ medical records almost instantly. The FDA found “reasonable assurance” the device was safe, and a sub-agency even called it one of 2005’s top “innovative technologies.”
But neither the company nor the regulators publicly mentioned this: A series of veterinary and toxicology studies, dating to the mid-1990s, stated that chip implants had “induced” malignant tumors in some lab mice and rats.
“The transponders were the cause of the tumors,” said Keith Johnson, a retired toxicologic pathologist, explaining in a phone interview the findings of a 1996 study he led at the Dow Chemical Co. in Midland, Mich.
[…]
Published in veterinary and toxicology journals between 1996 and 2006, the studies found that lab mice and rats injected with microchips sometimes developed subcutaneous “sarcomas” _ malignant tumors, most of them encasing the implants.
_ A 1998 study in Ridgefield, Conn., of 177 mice reported cancer incidence to be slightly higher than 10 percent _ a result the researchers described as “surprising.”
_ A 2006 study in France detected tumors in 4.1 percent of 1,260 microchipped mice. This was one of six studies in which the scientists did not set out to find microchip-induced cancer but noticed the growths incidentally. They were testing compounds on behalf of chemical and pharmaceutical companies; but they ruled out the compounds as the tumors’ cause. Because researchers only noted the most obvious tumors, the French study said, “These incidences may therefore slightly underestimate the true occurrence” of cancer.
_ In 1997, a study in Germany found cancers in 1 percent of 4,279 chipped mice. The tumors “are clearly due to the implanted microchips,” the authors wrote.

In the handful of dogs I’ve had them in (it’s usually mandatory for export), two migrated and one formed a substancial cyst over the chip. Two years ago I was shown a dog who had endured a foreign body reaction, her body scarred by long running rivers of infection that ran from the chip implantation site down her back and ribcage. They had been treating it for months.
Now, cancerous tumours. I can’t say I’m surprised.

“While I can well believe that al Qaeda has no clue about America—they rely on the MSM, after all—how does one explain the apparent mixup of the Vietnam chronology? It reads as if the evil Rumsfeld started the war and then the noble Kennedy was elected to stop it, but then he caved to the forces of monopoly capitalism. Except that the evil Rumsfeld—the Nixon/Ford Rumsfeld—came AFTER the noble Kennedy who fell from grace to make some money for his impoverished family.

Related – has anyone seen Rove lately?
This too – “There’s an echo in the room…”

Consider that CBC and CTV never miss an opportunity to broadcast any political setback for the Bush administration on Iraq and one is tempted to ask how they managed to miss this?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has backed down from demands for a withdrawal of our troops in Iraq by next spring.
Selling voters on cut and run was always tough, but now a new UPI/Zogby Poll finds that 54% of Americans believe the Iraq war is not lost.
Beyond the achievements of our forces, the public is obviously impressed that Iraq’s five top political leaders have agreed on a series of compromises, including oil wealth distribution and provincial elections.
Since Reid and other Democratic leaders now know that outright surrender is out, they’ve decided to try for whatever they can get. “I don’t think we have to think that our way is the only way,” Reid told the Washington Post, making it clear he now seeks an anti-war alliance with shaky Republicans.
“I’m not saying, ‘Republicans, do what we want to do.’ Just give me something that you think you would like to do, that accomplishes some or all of what I want to do.”

Close their eyes, perhaps?

Henry Payne;

In his conversation with The News editorial board last week, [Rep. John Dingell – D] made clear his objections to his own party’s misguided green agenda even as he touted his own environmental record in shepherding the 1990 Clean Air Act to passage. As head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Dingell is determined to pass GW legislation, but “I got to write a bill, and I got to write something that will work.”
The Clean Air Act, he says, is a prize example of a bill that worked. But “worked” is a relative term. When asked if the act de-acidified northeast lakes (the headliner problem that sold the1990 bill), Dingell frankly admits that he has no idea.
“I haven’t heard much about it,” he goes on. “It’s a long term problem. But now that they have legislation, the environmentalists have moved on to other things.”

Bill Roggio;

The degree to which Sunni insurgent groups have turned against al Qaeda and are working with US troops and Iraqi security forces is an underreported story in the war. Approximately 25,000 Sunni insurgents from groups such as the 1920s Revolution Brigades, the Jaysh Mohammed, and the Islamic Army of Iraq have turned against al Qaeda at the behest of their tribal leaders. “Tribe members and others who agree to support Iraq’s government have to sign a pledge form and consent to biometric scans of their fingerprints and retinas so their data can be kept on file,” USA Today reported on August 6. “They are also vetted by the Iraqi government.”
The strategy of turning the tribes and insurgent groups has been successful in Anbar, and is being applied inside Baghdad, Diyala, Salahadin, Ninewa, and Babil province. This is reconciliation at the micro level. Al Qaeda is threatened by this development and is actively targeting members of groups that have turned on them.

Lots more at the link.
(Via Newsbeat1)
Related –

U.S. Rep. Brian Baird said Thursday that his recent trip to Iraq convinced him the military needs more time in the region, and that a hasty pullout would cause chaos that helps Iran and harms U.S. security.
“I believe that the decision to invade Iraq and the post-invasion management of that country were among the largest foreign-policy mistakes in the history of our nation. I voted against them, and I still think they were the right votes,” Baird said in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C.
“But we’re on the ground now. We have a responsibility to the Iraqi people and a strategic interest in making this work.”