Place killed: World Trade Center. Resident of Floral Park, N.Y. (USA).

Charles Mendez will be honored by Scott Boone at the blog Speed of Thought.... This was the 2077th blogger to sign up for the 2,996 Tribute project.

The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.

He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing taxes on us without our consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these colonies:

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

New Hampshire: Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton
Massachusetts: John Hancock, Samual Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry
Rhode Island: Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery
Connecticut: Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott
New York: William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris
New Jersey: Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark
Pennsylvania: Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross
Delaware: Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean
Maryland: Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Virginia: George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton
North Carolina: William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn
South Carolina: Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton
Georgia: Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton

NEW YORK - Four Iraqi children with life-threatening heart defects left a Bronx hospital Tuesday after successfully undergoing open heart surgery. Through its Operation Iraqi Hearts, Montefiore Medical Center has performed such operations on more than 500 children around the world in the past 15 years.

"When you look into a heart, it's not a Muslim heart, it's not a Jewish heart. We are all the same," Dr. Samuel Weinstein, a pediatric heart surgeon, said earlier this month after the Muslim children — three boys and a girl, ages 6 to 14 — arrived.

One of the youngsters, 11-year-old Wsam Rabea, waited two years in Iraq to see a cardiologist, developing diabetes and a seizure disorder in the meantime. His father, a taxi driver in Kut, about 100 miles southeast of Baghdad, crisscrossed Iraq looking for the right doctors.

By the time the boy's heart valve blockage was diagnosed five years ago, when he was 6, he was given only a few years to live.

The children's families had first sought help from the U.S. military. Rotary Club's Gift of Life International helped Satryano arrange for them to go to Jordan for treatment. Doctors there determined they needed surgery in the United States.

The Rotary program paid for the hospital stays, along with the Rachel Cooper Foundation. An open-heart operation costs as much as $100,000.

The children and their fathers are being put up in the area until they return to Iraq, probably in about six weeks.

Fourteen-year-old Asaid Sibreai said: "We're happy we're going back home to Iraq to play with our friends."

NEW YORK (AP) -- Bowing to pressure from furious Sept. 11 families, Gov. George Pataki on Wednesday removed a proposed freedom museum from the space reserved for it at ground zero, saying the project had aroused "too much opposition, too much controversy."

He left open the possibility that a new spot at the former World Trade Center site could be found for the International Freedom Center, but officials for the proposed museum said they considered the project dead.

The decision followed months of acrimony over the International Freedom Center, with Sept. 11 families and politicians saying that the museum would overshadow and take space from a separate memorial devoted to the 2,749 World Trade Center dead and would dishonor them by fostering debate about the attacks and other world events.

"Freedom should unify us. This center has not," Pataki said. "Today there remains too much opposition, too much controversy over the programming of the IFC. ... We must move forward with our first priority, the creation of an inspiring memorial to pay tribute to our lost loved ones and tell their stories to the world."...

NEW ORLEANS, La. - A week after Hurricane Katrina, the levee break that caused much of the area's flooding was repaired (by the military), floodwaters began to recede and the mayor made his direst prediction yet: as many as 10,000 deaths in his city alone.

Louisiana officials said Monday afternoon that the repeated (military) helicopter droppings of 30,000-pound sandbags (by the military) into the football-field-wide break in the 17th Street canal leading to Lake Ponchartrain succeeded in stopping the water, and water was being pumped from the canal back into the lake. Some parts of the city showed slipping floodwaters as the repair neared completion, with some low-lying areas dropping more more than a foot...

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)

NEW ORLEANS - When night falls, Charlie Hackett climbs the steps to his boarded-up window, takes down the plywood, grabs his 12-gauge shotgun and waits. He is waiting for looters and troublemakers, for anyone thinking his neighborhood has been abandoned like so many others across the city. Two doors down, John Carolan is doing the same on his screened-in porch, pistol by his side. They are not about to give up their homes to the lawlessness that has engulfed New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

"We kind of together decided we would defend what we have here and we would stay up and defend the neighborhood," says Hackett, an Army veteran with a snow-white beard and a business installing custom kitchens.

"I don't want to kill anybody," he says, "but I'd sure like to scare 'em."

With generators giving them power, food to last for weeks and several guns each for protection, the men are two of a scattered community holed up across the residential streets of the city's Garden District, a lush neighborhood with many antebellum mansions.

The streets, where towering live oaks once offered cool shade, are now often impassable because of huge fallen branches and downed power lines. Lovely porches framed in wrought iron lay smashed. Many of the homes appear only slightly damaged, or even untouched.

[...]

The night is "black, black, black," Hackett says. "It reminds me of when I was in Vietnam, it reminds me of Dac To."

They have not had a problem staying awake. Each night there are gunshots in the distance, sometimes people walking through, an occasional car driving by.

"Last night I had to draw down on some people," Carolan says. A car with what sounded like a crowd of drunken, partying kids came through and stopped.

"I had to come out with a flashlight in one hand, pistol in the other," he says, crossing his arms like an X. "I said: `Who are you? Do you live here? What are you doing here?' They said, `We're leaving.'"

Hackett, who in his 50s, lives alone, with his two cats and a bunch of neighbor's pets that he is caring for. Carolan, 46, is keeping watch with his brother, wife, son, and 3-year-old granddaughter.

In the first few days, they were especially fearful. Looters smashed windows and ransacked a discount store and a drugstore a few streets over. Three men came to Carolan's house asking about his generator and brandished a machete. He showed them his gun and they left.

"It was pandemonium for a couple of nights. We just felt that when they got done with the stores, they'd come to the homes," Hackett says. "When it's not easy pickings, they'll go somewhere else."

Things have gotten quieter, the men say, but not quiet.

"What do you say, I'm a survivor," John Carolan says with a laugh, thinking of the reality TV show. "Hey, give me the million bucks now."

How long can Carolan and the others hold out?

Hackett has enough gas and food for a month. Carolan says they have weeks' worth of food and bug repellent, and he will siphon gas from left-behind cars to keep his electricity going.

BATON ROUGE, Louisiana (Reuters) - A civilian helicopter that was not involved in rescue operations crashed in New Orleans on Sunday and the two people on board were slightly injured, a state official said.

The helicopter crashed in the area of the Danziger Bridge, said Mark Smith, spokesman for the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.

"The helicopter came down hard and rolled over on its side and broke its blades off and broke its tail off," Smith told reporters in Baton Rouge.

"There were two civilians on the helicopter. Both sustained cuts and scrapes," he said.

It was not known why the helicopter was in the area, Smith said...