The plants were sunflowers

It may be the oddest tale to emerge from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Armed dolphins, trained by the US military to shoot terrorists and pinpoint spies underwater, may be missing in the Gulf of Mexico.

Experts who have studied the US navy's cetacean training exercises claim the 36 mammals could be carrying 'toxic dart' guns. Divers and surfers risk attack, they claim, from a species considered to be among the planet's smartest. The US navy admits it has been training dolphins for military purposes, but has refused to confirm that any are missing.

Dolphins have been trained in attack-and-kill missions since the Cold War. The US Atlantic bottlenose dolphins have apparently been taught to shoot terrorists attacking military vessels. Their coastal compound was breached during the storm, sweeping them out to sea. But those who have studied the controversial use of dolphins in the US defence programme claim it is vital they are caught quickly.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1577753,00.html

Police and downtown officials have long suspected that law enforcement agencies from outside the city were using the downtown neighborhood as a dumping ground for homeless people. Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Police Department ordered officers to stop out-of-area police cars they spotted dropping people off.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050924/ap_on_re_us/homeless_dumping_2

U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told France's Finance Minister Thierry Breton the United States has "lost control" of its budget deficit, the French minister said on Saturday.
 
"'We have lost control' -- that was his expression," Breton told reporters after a bilateral meeting with Greenspan.
 
"The United States has lost control of their budget at a time when racking up deficits has been authorized without any control" from Congress, Breton said.
http://www.rense.com/general67/greens.htm

Haroon Aswat – the man British Police believe was behind the London bombings – was working for MI6, it has been confirmed by leading U.S. and French intelligence asset/agents.
http://www.newcriminologist.co.uk/news.asp?id=-1677497717

Saudi prince takes News Corp stake
http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/article310838.ece

[SUSPECTS!]
LABOR has proposed unprecedented anti-terrorism laws which would allow police to lock down entire neighbourhoods and stop and search anyone without a warrant.

State and territory leaders are due to meet Prime Minister John Howard on Tuesday to discuss tough new counter-terror measures, including allowing suspects to be electronically tagged for up to 12 months.
http://www.thecouriermail.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,16721912%255E1702,00.html

The US military told an al-Jazeera cameraman being held at Guantánamo Bay that he would be released as long as he agreed to spy on journalists at the Arabic news channel, according to documents seen by the Guardian.

The journalist has been in the prison without charge for three-and-a-half years after being accused by the US of being a terrorist, allegations he denies. He claims that he has been interrogated more than 100 times but not asked about alleged terrorist offences. Instead, Sami Muhyideen al-Hajj says US military personnel have alleged during interrogation that al-Jazeera has been infiltrated by al-Qaida and that one of its presenters is linked to Islamists
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1578134,00.html

There is one forum open to those who don't trade. For access to the rest, one must post original amateur nudity or porn, or graphic pics of wartime gore. It's all presented as entertainment, all of it lurid, and all of it, whether painful or pleasurable, profoundly intimate.

It might be best not to speculate about why there is such interest among the troops to document and to leer at images of intense feeling. The graphic details of sex, and of traumatic amputation, are not matters that healthy minds share with the wider world. Surely there is some pathology at work here.

And surely, the website will confirm the worst fears of more conservative, religious Iraqis about just what the Americans are bringing to their country.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/26/baghdad_smut_and_pain/

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

For some months now America Online has been
treating GATA e-mail dispatches from YahooGroups
as spam and not just diverting them to AOL spam
mail folders but blocking them altogether. Weeks
of my appealing to and hectoring AOL about this
accomplished nothing; no one there would take
any responsibility for fixing the problem.

So I began maintaining a second e-mail dispatch
list for GATA supporters with AOL addresses
and have been sending GATA dispatches to them
from my own AOL address, bypassing the banned
Yahoo address. These e-mails seem to have been
delivered OK -- as long as they did not include
YahooGroups Internet links, which seem to have
been the trigger for AOL's e-mail blocking.
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=79182

Bel Aire officials probably will never look at sunflowers the same way again.

On Friday, Bel Aire Mayor Brian Withrow hired a consultant to look into a case in which police searched the home of a former four-term mayor looking for marijuana.

Police had seen plants in the backyard of Harold and Carolyn Smith's home and thought them to be pot. They took pictures.

They showed the pictures to an assistant district attorney. He also thought the plants were marijuana. So did the Sedgwick County district court judge who signed a search warrant.

When police went to the Smith house on Sept. 6 and examined the plants more closely, they realized their mistake.

The plants were sunflowers -- Maximilian sunflowers, specifically, grown from seeds the Smiths' son, a wildlife biologist, had given them
http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/local/crime_courts/12667830.htm