11 August 25
Anas al-Sharif, an Al Jazeera reporter, was killed by an Israeli airstrike on Sunday night. This is the message he had prepared for his family, and his call for the world not to forget Gaza
This is my will and my final message. If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice.
First, peace be upon you and Allah’s mercy and blessings. Allah knows I gave every effort and all my strength to be a support and a voice for my people, ever since I opened my eyes to life in the alleys and streets of the Jabaliya refugee camp. My hope was that Allah would extend my life so I could return with my family and loved ones to our original town of occupied Asqalan (al-Majdal). But Allah’s will came first, and His decree is final.
I have lived through pain in all its details, tasted suffering and loss many times, yet I never once hesitated to convey the truth as it is, without distortion or falsification – so that Allah may bear witness against those who stayed silent, those who accepted our killing, those who choked our breath, and whose hearts were unmoved by the scattered remains of our children and women, doing nothing to stop the massacre that our people have faced for more than a year and a half.
I entrust you with Palestine – the jewel in the crown of the Muslim world, the heartbeat of every free person in this world. I entrust you with its people, with its wronged and innocent children who never had the time to dream or live in safety and peace. Their pure bodies were crushed under thousands of tons of Israeli bombs and missiles, torn apart and scattered across the walls. I urge you not to let chains silence you, nor borders restrain you. Be bridges toward the liberation of the land and its people, until the sun of dignity and freedom rises over our stolen homeland.
I entrust you to take care of my family. I entrust you with my beloved daughter, Sham, the light of my eyes, whom I never got the chance to watch grow up as I had dreamed. I entrust you with my dear son, Salah, whom I had wished to support and accompany through life until he grew strong enough to carry my burden and continue the mission. I entrust you with my beloved mother, whose blessed prayers brought me to where I am, whose supplications were my fortress and whose light guided my path. I pray that Allah grants her strength and rewards her on my behalf with the best of rewards.
I also entrust you with my lifelong companion, my beloved wife, Umm Salah (Bayan), from whom the war separated me for many long days and months. Yet she remained faithful to our bond, steadfast as the trunk of an olive tree that does not bend – patient, trusting in Allah, and carrying the responsibility in my absence with all her strength and faith. I urge you to stand by them, to be their support after Allah Almighty.
If I die, I die steadfast upon my principles. I testify before Allah that I am content with His decree, certain of meeting Him, and assured that what is with Allah is better and everlasting. O Allah, accept me among the martyrs, forgive my past and future sins, and make my blood a light that illuminates the path of freedom for my people and my family. Forgive me if I have fallen short, and pray for me with mercy, for I kept my promise and never changed or betrayed it.
Do not forget Gaza. And do not forget me in your sincere prayers for forgiveness and acceptance.
National Guard members near the White House. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
The move — which marks the first time in history that a president has federalized the district’s police force — was met with fierce condemnation from local officials, who quickly noted that official statistics show crime is on the decline.
Trump unveiled the action after describing the city in apocalyptic terms.
“I’m announcing a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor, and worse,” Trump declared at the start of a lengthy news conference in the White House press briefing room.
“This is Liberation Day in D.C., and we’re going to take our capitol back.”
He said he was invoking his authority under Section 740 of the district’s Home Rule Act, the decades-old law that establishes Washington’s local government.
The section Trump cited gives the president the power to order the D.C. mayor to temporarily hand over control of the Metropolitan Police force if he determines that “special conditions of an emergency nature exist.”
But his emergency control is set to expire after a maximum of 30 days, according to the statute. That can be extended, but only if Congress passes a law authorizing it.
While Trump has frequently complained about crime in the district, violent crime there has fallen to a 30-year low as of January, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Statistics from the Metropolitan Police Department also show that incidences of homicide, sexual abuse, assault with a dangerous weapon, robbery and overall violent crime have dropped by double-digit percentages so far this year.
Federal law enforcement presence in D.C. has nevertheless increased in recent days.
D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalbe called Trump’s actions “unprecedented, unnecessary, and unlawful,” and signaled his office will take action to challenge the administration.
“There is no crime emergency in the District of Columbia. Violent crime in DC reached historic 30-year lows last year, and is down another 26% so far this year,” Schwalbe said in an X post.
“We are considering all of our options and will do what is necessary to protect the rights and safety of District residents,” he said.
Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat who is the District of Columbia’s nonvoting delegate in the House of Representatives, called Trump’s actions “an historic assault on D.C. home rule,” and a “counterproductive, escalatory seizure of D.C.’s resources to use for purposes not supported by D.C. residents.”
“The administration is justifying the decision by misleadingly citing years-old statistics,” Norton said.
Trump, who has recently threatened to place Washington under federal control, said Monday morning that U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi is “taking command of the Metropolitan Police Department as of this moment.”
He also said that he will deploy the National Guard to “help reestablish law order and public safety in Washington, D.C., and they’re going to be allowed to do their job properly.”
Trump added, “You’re going to have a lot of essentially military, and we will bring in the military if it’s needed.”
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment on Trump’s actions.
She had previously pushed back on Trump’s characterization of her city.
“People are coming to our capital. They’re starting business in our capital, and they’re raising families in our capital. Any comparison to a war-torn country is hyperbolic and false,” Bowser said Sunday on MSNBC’s “The Weekend.”
Trump had teased his announcement on social media in the days leading up to the presser.
“Crime, Savagery, Filth, and Scum will DISAPPEAR. I will, MAKE OUR CAPITAL GREAT AGAIN!” Trump wrote on Truth Social earlier Monday.
On Sunday, he declared that “the Homeless” in D.C. will “have to move out, IMMEDIATELY,” while assuring that the government “will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital.”
The Trump administration has disputed that crime in D.C. is dropping. White House communications director Steven Cheung on Monday morning pointed to a police union’s reported accusation that crime statistics in D.C. have been manipulated.
Trump’s complaints about crime in D.C. ramped up after reports that Edward Coristine, one of the initial staffers on the White House’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, was assaulted there earlier this month.
Trump also signaled he plans to renew criticism of the cost of an ongoing renovation of the Federal Reserve headquarters, continuing his line of attack against the central bank’s chairman, Jerome Powell.
In another social media post, he wrote, “We are not going to allow people to spend $3.1 Billion Dollars on fixing up a building, like the Federal Reserve, which could have been done in a far more elegant and time sensitive manner for $50 to $100 Million Dollars.”
The Trump administration deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles in June to address civil unrest over federal immigration enforcement operations in the city.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has sued the administration, arguing that Trump’s actions were unconstitutional.
A trial on the suit in California federal court was set to begin Monday morning.
Ghislaine Maxwell exercising on the track inside FCI Tallahassee, where she is currently serving twenty years for for her role in the sex trafficking ring operated by Jeffrey Epstein. (photo: Matt Symons/MEGA)
A federal judge in Manhattan on Monday rejected the Trump administration's request to release grand jury transcripts from the Justice Department investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein's longtime confidant Ghislaine Maxwell.
The department asked the court last month to unseal the grand jury transcripts, which are generally secret, saying there was "abundant public interest" in the case. The unusual request was part of the administration's effort to tamp down the intense public blowback over its handling of the Epstein files.
But on Monday, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer said that there were no special circumstances to justify releasing the transcripts in Maxwell's case.
"Its entire premise — that the Maxwell grand jury materials would bring to light meaningful new information about Epstein's and Maxwell's crimes, or the Government's investigation into them — is demonstrably false," Engelmayer wrote.
He said the materials provide no new insight into Epstein or Maxwell clients, nor new information about the venue, new sources of their wealth, or the circumstances of Epstein's death.
"There is no 'there' there," the judge added.
Epstein died in a federal lockup in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. His death, which authorities have repeatedly said was a suicide, has fueled conspiracy theories about Epstein's abuse of underage girls and the actions of his associates.
President Trump and some of the top officials in his administration, including FBI Director Kash Patel, for years helped stoke those conspiracy theories.
They promised transparency on the Epstein matter, but in July the Justice Department and FBI released a memo that knocked down several of those theories and said no further materials from the Epstein investigations would be made public, touching off public outrage including from Trump's MAGA base.
In an effort to contain the fallout, the president, who knew Epstein, asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to seek the release of grand jury transcripts from the department's investigations of Epstein and Maxwell.
The department followed up by asking three federal judges — two in Manhattan and one in Florida — to unseal the grand jury transcripts from investigations into Epstein and his longtime associate, Ghislaine Maxwell. The judge in Florida, Robin Rosenberg, denied the request, saying 11th Circuit law doesn't allow for the release of such records.
Manhattan-based judge Engelmayer falls under the 2nd Circuit, where precedent allows for the public release of grand jury materials under certain special circumstances. In this instance, the judge said, that high threshold was not met.
Even if the transcripts had been released, expectations were low that anything significant would have emerged from them.
The DOJ has previously said in court filings that in the Epstein case, a single FBI agent was the only witness to testify before the grand jury. In the case against Maxwell, the department says the same FBI agent as well as a New York Police Department detective were the only two witnesses.
Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for charges of facilitating Epstein's abuse of girls.
Late last month, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who previously served as Trump's personal attorney, interviewed Maxwell behind closed doors to question her about Epstein.
The Justice Department has not provided any details on the meeting, who took part or what Maxwell said.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents make an arrest. (photo: Charles Reed/ICE/AP)
“This is just another example of the Trump administration and their fascist ICE agents — or whoever they are, because they’re unidentified — violating the rights and breaking the law that they’re supposed to protect,” says Ron Gochez, an organizer with Unión del Barrio.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.
As mass raids continue to terrorize communities nationwide, we look now at the grassroots response and the people who are organizing and fighting back. ICE has faced widespread backlash over the arrest of community advocates who have been swept up while documenting raids, including U.S. citizens.
In Los Angeles, a nurse and community activist was released from federal custody this weekend without criminal charge, after she was arrested early Friday morning while recording the operations of ICE agents. Amanda Trebach is a member of the group Unión del Barrio. She was participating in a peace patrol outside Terminal Island, a Coast Guard base that’s used by ICE and Customs and Border Protection as a hub to prepare and deploy agents for raids across California. Dozens of volunteers have routinely stationed outside Terminal Island to monitor the movement of the federal vehicles streaming in and out of the staging area. Terminal Island was once a thriving Japanese American fishing village that was demolished during World War II, its residents forcibly sent to internment camps.
Footage of Amanda Trebach’s arrest Friday morning shows two plainclothes, masked agents pinning her against the pavement as they kneel on her back to handcuff her. One of the agents is seen putting his knee on Trebach’s head for a brief moment as a person recording yells, “Get off her head!”
EYEWITNESS 1: Filming you.
EYEWITNESS 2: Get off her head!
AMANDA TREBACH: Get off me!
EYEWITNESS 2: Get off! Your knee is on her [bleep] head!
AMANDA TREBACH: Get off me!
EYEWITNESS 2: Get it off!
AMANDA TREBACH: Get off me!
ICE AGENT 1: Get back. Get back. Get back.
EYEWITNESS 2: Get off her head!
AMANDA TREBACH: Get off me!
ICE AGENT 1: Get back. Get back.
ICE AGENT 2: You better get back.
AMANDA TREBACH: Get off me!
ICE AGENT 1: Get back. Get back.
EYEWITNESS 1: This is public property, sir. This is public property.
EYEWITNESS 2: Streaming live, this is ICE beating her up. They’ve got a knee on her head.
ICE AGENT 1: Scoot back.
EYEWITNESS 2: I am where I need to be: 10 feet. So…
ICE AGENT 2: Can you guys get her in the van?
AMANDA TREBACH: Sir?
EYEWITNESS 2: You OK?
AMANDA TREBACH: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Amanda Trebach is a U.S. citizen. She was then forced into an unmarked, black van by at least six unidentified agents. Her release Saturday came amid pressure from activists and protests, with the National Nurses United union describing the efforts as, quote, “a testament to the power of organizing resistance and solidarity against the ongoing attacks by the Trump administration on our lives and livelihoods,” unquote.
For more, we go to Los Angeles, where we’re joined by Ron Gochez, high school history teacher, community organizer with Unión del Barrio, Amanda’s group.
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Ron. We don’t have a lot of time. Can you describe what happened and what continues to happen? Amanda is one example. And ultimately, while she was detained, what got her out?
RON GOCHEZ: Yeah, good morning. Thank you for having me.
What happened is another intimidation attempt by the U.S. government against Unión del Barrio and against the movement that’s defending our community. Amanda was doing what she’s done every single day, and that is to document cars going in and out of Terminal Island, which is a military base where ICE has been using for staging.
And so, when they — they had already identified her before. And when they saw her again, they strategically went at her, they attacked her, and they kidnapped her. And so, they threw her into an unidentified vehicle, they took her away, and then they actually came back with her in a different vehicle, and they unlawfully went into her vehicle and took her backpack. They seized her backpack from her vehicle, without a warrant, without her permission.
And so, this is just another example of the Trump administration and their fascist ICE agents — or whoever they are, because they’re unidentified — violating the rights and breaking the law that they’re supposed to protect.
AMY GOODMAN: Did they ever charge her?
RON GOCHEZ: As of now, she has not faced any charges. She was released because of the pressure of the community. They, themselves, the place we were calling that was holding her, said that they had received over 500 calls in that day. So, we organized the community. We mobilized people. The nurses’ unions, people from all over the country offered their support.
And we’re lucky — we’re lucky and happy to have Amanda free, but we know that there’s still thousands of our people who have been kidnapped, who are not free. And we’re fighting for the liberation of all of our community members who have been kidnapped by these masked, armed, violent men, who don’t identify themselves, who can do whatever they want. They drive around Los Angeles with no license plates. They’re just — they’re armed and dangerous. And that’s why we warn our community about their activity, so that the people can protect themselves, because obviously the police department doesn’t protect us. The politicians don’t protect us. Only the people, only we, ourselves, can organize and defend ourselves.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s astounding that they’re allowed to be masked. I remember when if a police officer covered their number on their shirt, there were grounds to punish them. That was just the number that would identify them on their shirt. Now they can be masked and hooded. Tell us about Unión del Barrio and what these peace patrols are that Amanda was on?
RON GOCHEZ: Yeah, when the second Trump administration was about to begin, we knew that we didn’t have the people power to cover all of Los Angeles, so we started training a lot more people, and we created a coalition called the Community Self-Defense Coalition. To now, there’s more than 70 organizations that are part of the coalition, and we’ve trained them all to do community patrols.
What that is is that we drive around our neighborhoods, we look for any type of suspicious vehicles or any type of ICE activity, so that we can document and then alert the community, so that our people have the chance to defend themselves, protect themselves and their families from being kidnapped. And so, this is peaceful work. We don’t advocate for violence. We don’t break any laws. We have a legal team who’s advised us on what we can and cannot do. So we’re really clear about what we’re doing. We train people, and we’re all over Los Angeles. And there isn’t — there isn’t a corner in the city where an ICE raid can happen where we won’t know about it in less than five minutes. And we can deploy our members to go to document and to defend the community. That’s the type of work that Amanda was doing heroically. That’s the type of work that we’re doing every day.
As a teacher right now, we’re getting ready to go back to school. This Thursday, school starts in Los Angeles, and there’s a lot of fear on the part of students, parents and teachers, and so we have to get our city ready, because we know that these ICE raids, although they did slow down a bit, they have continued, and we have to defend ourselves. We have to be organized in case anything happens near one of our schools.
AMY GOODMAN: We only have 20 seconds, Ron. I just talked to California Attorney General Bonta, who’s brought dozens of lawsuits against Trump. Yet your organization is accusing the California police of working with ICE.
RON GOCHEZ: Absolutely. You know, while the legal folks are fighting in the courtrooms, we’re fighting in the streets. And while they’re having winning battles in the courtroom, we’re winning battle in the streets. We know that what’s happening right now with the LAPD and sheriffs in Los Angeles is complete collaboration with these ICE raids. They protect —
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there —
RON GOCHEZ: They do logistical protection for the operations. So —
AMY GOODMAN: — but we’re going to do a Spanish interview at democracynow.org.
RON GOCHEZ: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Ron Gochez with Unión del Barrio. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.
Children accompany armed gang members in a march organised by gang boss Jimmy ‘Barbecue’ Chérizier in the Delmas neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, May 10, 2024. (photo: Pedro Valtierra Anza/Reuters)
Government says move aims to boost ‘fight against insecurity’ as armed gangs continue to carry out attacks across the country.
The measure will cover the West, Centre and Artibonite departments, the latter of which is known as Haiti’s “rice basket” and has experienced an increase in attacks by armed groups in recent months.
In a statement on Saturday, the government said the state of emergency would allow the Haitian authorities to “continue the fight against insecurity and respond to the agricultural and food crisis”.
“Insecurity has negative effect both on the lives of citizens and on the country’s different sectors of activity. Given the scale of this crisis, it is imperative to decree a major mobilisation of the state’s resources and institutional means to address it,” it said.
Haiti has reeled from years of violence as powerful armed groups, often with ties to the country’s political and business leaders, have vied for influence and control of territory.
But the situation worsened dramatically after the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moise, which created a power vacuum.
Nearly 1.3 million people have been displaced across the country, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said in June, while the United Nations estimates that 4,864 people were killed from October 2024 to June of this year.
Efforts to stem the deadly gang attacks, including the deployment of a UN-backed, Kenya-led police mission, have so far failed to restore stability.
While much of the focus has been on Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, where up to 90 percent of the city is under the control of armed groups, the violence has also been spreading to other parts of the country.
Between October 2024 and the end of June, more than 1,000 Haitians were killed and 620 were kidnapped in the Artibonite and Centre departments, according to the UN’s human rights office.
In late April, dozens of people waded and swam across the Artibonite River, which cuts through the region, in a desperate attempt to flee the gangs.
Meanwhile, the government on Friday appointed Andre Jonas Vladimir Paraison as interim director of Haiti’s National Police, which has been working with Kenyan police officers leading the UN-backed mission to help quell the violence.
“We, the police, will not sleep,” Paraison said during his inauguration ceremony. “We will provide security across every corner of the country.”
Paraison previously served as head of security of Haiti’s National Palace and was on duty as a police officer when Moise was killed at his private residence in July 2021.
He replaced Normil Rameau, whose tenure of just more than a year was marked by tensions with a faction of the Transitional Presidential Council, notably Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aime.
Rameau had repeatedly warned about the police force’s severe underfunding.
The change comes as Laurent Saint-Cyr, a wealthy businessman, also took over this week as president of the Transitional Presidential Council, which is charged with holding elections by February 2026.
A leatherback sea turtle. (photo: AZ Animals)
This summer’s hatchlings won’t be back on land for 30 years. It’ll take at least that long to know how global warming is changing them.
“Any eggshell that is over 50 percent counts as a hatched egg,” explained Kristen Zemaitis, who directed a team of volunteers with the Caretta Research Project. The team also investigated the unhatched eggs for signs of development. “Then we will categorize that by different stages to see the percentage of development in each egg.”
All that information tells the story of this nest, one that the Caretta team has been following for about two months since an adult turtle crawled up on the beach, dug a hole with her flippers, and laid these eggs. Whenever possible, these volunteer teams catalog the nesting mother as well, taking measurements and recording her tag number if she has one.
It’s an all-night, all-summer effort.
The Wassaw Island data makes up part of a vast mosaic of information collected by volunteers along all of Georgia’s 100 mile coastline, as well as the coasts of Florida, the Carolinas, and Virginia. Patrolling the beaches overnight or at dawn, they inventory thousands of sea turtle nests each year. Volunteers amass reams of data about nest locations, the number of hatchlings, the nest success rates, the details of the mother, and more.
The data-gathering effort began in the 1960s on just a couple of Georgia’s barrier islands. That led to successful attempts in the late 1980s and early 1990s to protect sea turtle adults from shrimping nets and nests from human interference.
All this work has allowed scientists to gain deep insight into the sea turtle population over time, tracking their long decline and the extraordinary resurgence of the hatchlings who were protected in the 80s and 90s and finally returned to nest in the last decade. It’s also helping researchers, armed with new technology, to monitor how turtles respond to the new threats posed by rising seas and temperatures. But it’s long, slow work — and much of today’s research likely won’t bear fruit for decades.
Like many turtles, loggerhead sea turtles’ sex depends on the incubation temperature of their nests — warmer incubation produces females. So as climate change progresses, there could be far more females than males. Exactly how problematic that will be for the sea turtles is difficult to predict, Zemaitis said.
Sea turtle reproduction is a numbers game: The turtles lay lots of eggs in lots of nests to increase the odds that some of their babies will survive the numerous threats stacked against them. The turtles mate out in the ocean, then the females lay six to eight nests in a season, roughly two weeks apart. Scientists know from DNA testing that the females often mate with multiple males, but they can also store sperm so they don’t have to find a male to mate with every time they lay a nest.
That means having fewer males than females won’t necessarily keep the females from nesting — but it could hurt the turtles’ genetic diversity.
“A population ecologist would tell you, you only need a couple males to populate, you know, as many females as they can get with, essentially,” said Zemaitis. “With fewer and fewer males, that just lowers the gene pool over the years. We don’t know what effect that will have.”
To help track the impacts, Caretta Research Project teams have been using thermometers inside sea turtle nests since around 2000.
They’re also part of a broader effort to track sea turtle DNA. University of Georgia researcher Brian Shamblin has been leading that work since 2008, and his project now collects DNA samples from turtle nests all along the coast from North Florida to the North Carolina-Virginia border. They know far more about the females since researchers can take samples from the mothers while they lay their eggs and from each nest, but Shamblin and his team are now working to get more genetic information about male sea turtles so they can better follow the shifting population.
But sea turtles take around 30 years to reach sexual maturity. Hatchlings that crawl to the ocean today won’t be back until the 2050s. Although researchers can’t draw conclusions from their current data, it will be critical decades from now.
“It’s important to collect the data now and we can look back 30 years and say, well, this is the temperature that they were incubating at, this is probably why we’re seeing this number of males,” said Zemaitis.
The same difficulty — having to move on turtle time — haunts research into the other major threat that climate change poses for sea turtles. Rising seas are eroding the beaches the turtles nest on, and could eventually render some historic nesting beaches unusable for the turtles.
“If we’re worried about climate change, we’re worried about sea level rise,” explained Shamblin. “How much wiggle room do we have in here for these females to choose new beaches to colonize?”
That’s a major focus of his work on turtle DNA. Although the Wassaw team patrols at night and can identify the turtles as they lay their nests, a lot of the data collection elsewhere happens in the morning after the mothers are gone. Shamblin uses DNA samples taken from each nest to match them with the turtles who laid them.
Conventional wisdom has long maintained that the turtles return to the beach where they hatched to lay their nests, but the reality is often less precise. Shamblin and his team use the DNA matching to track just how flexible the turtles are about where they nest.
So far, the answer is mixed. Some individual turtles stop at multiple beaches across different states in a single season, while others stick resolutely to the same stretch of sand. Some of the strongest site fidelity — meaning the same turtles consistently nest in the same spot — is on two islands in Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge, near Charleston, South Carolina. That’s cause for concern, Shamblin said.
“About 25 percent of all loggerhead turtle nests north of Florida are on those two islands,” he said. “So it’s a really high density nesting area. Those also happen to be two of the most erosional islands in the state of South Carolina.”
But there’s cause for hope, too, because some turtles do try multiple beaches, especially younger ones nesting for the first time. That means the population could gradually shift away from disappearing beaches as sea levels continue to rise. In Georgia, many of the beaches are less developed than in neighboring states, and they naturally share sand with one another, so it could become a destination for sea turtles as other beaches vanish — provided the turtles are flexible.
But, again, scientists won’t be certain for decades, which makes sea turtle conservation different from other challenges, said Mark Dodd, who leads the sea turtle conservation program for the Georgia Department of Natural Resources and has studied Georgia’s turtles for decades.
“We’re used to kind of working on a problem and fixing it in two or three years, feeling good about yourself, and moving on to the next thing,” he said. “With sea turtles it’s a long-term commitment. It’s one that, you know, it’s probably not going to be completely done in the course of my whole career.”
Even without the uncertainties of climate change, sea turtle hatchlings face long odds to survive. After a long night digging up several successful nests, the volunteers on Wassaw found one nest where no hatchlings made it out — possibly trapped by heavy rainfall compacting the sand, just one of the many natural hazards they face.
But in another nest, they found a straggler — a tiny, living sea turtle who didn’t make it out with its nestmates. As morning began to dawn over the ocean, Zemaitis set it down on the sand.
“We’re just gonna give him a little space to stretch his legs, stretch his flippers, get warmed up for the big trek to the ocean,” she said.
The hatchling, just an inch and a half long, used its teensy flippers to drag its way bit by bit across the beach toward the water. The first waves buffeted the hatchling about as they broke over its head. But eventually, to cheers from the watching volunteers and researchers, the turtle took to swimming. If it survives the predators and other dangers out in the wide ocean, this sea turtle could be back in 30 years to breed — even if it finds a coastline radically altered by climate change.
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