Imagine your town flattened overnight. No power. No water. Families trapped in rubble. For days, you wait for help that never seems to arrive.

The first thing that hit me in Gulfport, Mississippi, wasn’t the sight. It was the smell. Raw sewage from flooded treatment plants. Rotting seafood from capsized shrimp boats.

Diesel and gasoline spilled across the water. All mixed together in water so thick with debris it didn’t move like water anymore.

One of my shipmates handed me a jar of Vicks VapoRub. “Put it in your nose,” he said. “It’ll help.” It didn’t help enough.

What I saw looked like a scene out of an apocalyptic film. Whole neighborhoods gone. Homes ripped from their foundations and carried into the bayou.

Those that remained were filled with mud several feet high. I went building to building on search-and-rescue, marking walls with spray paint — an “X” and a number telling the world how many people, alive or dead, had been found inside.

It was devastating. It was lawlessness. And at times, it felt like we were the only ones left.

USDA announces it will discontinue funding solar projects

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it will discontinue providing funds for solar and wind projects, through its Rural Energy for America (REAP) grant program. In recent years the USDA has provided over $4 billion to fund energy projects in rural and farming communities. 

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 added over $2 billion in funding for the program through Fiscal Year 2031. Post-IRA, over $1 billion in funds supported 6,822 projects from 2023 to 2025, contributing an estimated $2.75 billion to rural economic development.

For GREEP Zoom #236, our beloved Poet Laureate MIMI GERMAN opens with her usual brilliant verse from “Where Grasses Bend."

We commemorate the passing of the great RICHARD LEE who founded Oaksterdam University, devoted to the cultivation of cannabis / marijuana & its immeasurable power.

We then get updated by "America’s Mayor” HEIDI LAMPERT about the battle for democracy in Waldport, Oregon, the Mayberry of the deep west coast.

Long-time activist MICKI LEADER shares her concerns about whether the 2026 election will be cancelled.

From radio host LYNN FEINERMAN we hear charges about so-called “Christians” who so deeply love to trash the preachings of the actual Christ.

Grassroots campaigner DOROTHY REIK warns that people with no human feelings are taking over the world with the view that the non-rich are a “burden.”

Legendary journalist DAVID SALTMAN tells of a network cohort who received a kidney from an anonymous donor whom he then honored with a legendary poem.

The Palestine Chronicle is not a militant organization. It is a modest, independent publication, sustained by small donations and animated by a singular mission: to bear witness. It tells the untold stories of Palestine, documenting dispossession, resistance, and the endurance of a people condemned to silence. In a media landscape dominated by powerful conglomerates repeating the language of governments, the Chronicle insists on a journalism of proximity — grounded in daily lives, in the rubble of Gaza, in voices otherwise erased. Its true offense, in the eyes of its detractors, is not invention but truth.