It's morning somewhere

...Despite the end of the June 1-to-Nov. 30 season, hurricanes could still form over the next few months. In fact, a tropical storm took shape in the Atlantic on Tuesday. But no hurricane has been known to hit the United States between December and May...

LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) -- A University of Kansas religion professor apologized for an e-mail that referred to religious conservatives as "fundies" and said a course describing intelligent design as mythology would be a "nice slap in their big fat face."...
...During the weekend, Chancellor Robert Hemenway began a review of Mirecki's e-mail, which resulted in Mirecki's apology, issued Monday night. He called it "an ill-advised e-mail I sent to a small group of students and friends."...

THORNDALE, Texas (AP) -- A pack of six dogs mauled a 76-year-old woman to death as she worked in her yard, authorities said.

Lillian Loraine Stiles was riding on a lawn mower in her front yard Saturday when she was confronted by the dogs, described as pit bull-rottweiler mixed breeds, said Milam County Sheriff Charlie West.

Investigators think Stiles was attacked when she got off the mower and headed into her house.

IF it says it's from the US Central Intelligence Agency or Federal Bureau of Investigation, avoid it like the plague.

An e-mail is going around, claiming to be from the CIA or FBI. And if you open it using Windows, you'll be in big trouble.

It's being called the worst computer worm of the year, The Washington Post reported, and lots of people are falling for it.

The bogus e-mail claims the government has discovered you visiting 'illegal' websites and asks you to open an attachment to answer some official questions...

CRAWFORD, Texas - President Bush, under political pressure to change his Iraq policy, Saturday thanked the families of troops killed in the war for their sacrifice as peace activists gathered near his Texas home.

Bush, who is spending a six-day Thanksgiving break at "Prairie Chapel" ranch, paid tribute to more than 2,000 members of the U.S. military who have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan and assured their families Americans would be eternally grateful...

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) -- A black bear bit and clawed a hunter who had just shot it four times in what game authorities said appeared to be a first for the state.

Samuel H. Beauchamp, 47, said he was approaching the downed 320-pound bear in Rothrock State Forest in central Pennsylvania on Monday, the first day of bear-hunting season, when it came after him.

Beauchamp, of Newville, had just shot the bear with a .444-caliber rifle and was within 15 feet of it. He turned to run, but the bear put a claw around his hip and bit him twice, once in each thigh, before dying...

PORTAGEVILLE, Mo. (AP) -- Four people believed to be headed to a Thanksgiving family reunion were killed when their SUV crashed nearly head-on into a tractor-trailer, authorities said.

In August, hundreds of demonstrators camped off the winding, two-lane road during a 26-day protest led by a fallen soldier's mother, Cindy Sheehan. But a month later county commissioners banned camping in any county ditch and parking within a 7-mile radius of the ranch, citing safety and traffic congestion issues.

Freddie Mercury was born Farookh Bulsara in Stone Town, Zanzibar to Zoroastrian Indian parents Bomi and Jer Bulsara(Also known as Parsi). They had emigrated to Zanzibar so Bomi could continue his job as a middle-ranking cashier at the British Colonial Office. Mercury also had a sister, Kashmira...
...With a wide vocal range and a somewhat operatic technique, he was one of the most versatile and technically accomplished singers to work in the pop idiom. He was the composer of many of Queen's hits, including "Bohemian Rhapsody", "Somebody to Love", and "We Are the Champions"...

...Believing there's no God means I can't really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That's good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around...
...Believing there is no God means the suffering I've seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn't caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn't bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future...

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - U.S. forces mistakenly fired on a civilian vehicle outside a U.S. base today in a city north of Baghdad, killing three people, including a child, the military said.

Iraq’s foreign minister, meanwhile, was quoted as saying that tests were under way to determine whether the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed in a weekend raid in Mosul. The U.S. ambassador, however, said it appeared al-Zarqawi was not among the dead...

Although each will receive about $25 million before taxes, they all showed up to work Wednesday.

Machines will take over from humans as the biggest users of the Internet in a brave new world of electronic sensors, smart homes, and tags that track users' movements and habits, the UN's telecommunications agency predicted.

In a report entitled "Internet of Things", the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) outlined the expected next stage in the technological revolution where humans, electronic devices, inanimate objects and databases are linked by a radically transformed Internet...

...The vice president, not satisfied that the C.I.A. had already been implicated in four detainee deaths, was busy lobbying Congress to give the agency a green light to commit torture in the future. Dana Priest of The Washington Post, having first uncovered secret C.I.A. prisons two years ago, was uncovering new "black sites" in Eastern Europe, where ghost detainees are subjected to unknown interrogation methods redolent of the region's Stalinist past. Before heading south, Mr. Bush had been doing his own bit for torture by threatening to cast the first veto of his presidency if Congress didn't scrap a spending bill amendment, written by John McCain and passed 90 to 9 by the Senate, banning the "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of prisoners.

So when you watch the president stand there with a straight face and say, "We do not torture" - a full year and a half after the first photos from Abu Ghraib - you have to wonder how we arrived at this ludicrous moment. The answer is not complicated. When people in power get away with telling bigger and bigger lies, they naturally think they can keep getting away with it. And for a long time, Mr. Bush and his cronies did. Not anymore...

There's so much to stonewall at the White House that last week Scott McClellan was reduced to beating up on the octogenarian Helen Thomas. "You don't want the American people to hear what the facts are, Helen," he said, "and I'm going to tell them the facts." Coming from the press secretary who vowed that neither Mr. Libby nor Karl Rove had any involvement in the C.I.A. leak, this scene was almost as funny as his boss's "We do not torture" charade.

WASHINGTON -- Ninety-five bishops from President Bush's church said Thursday they repent their "complicity" in the "unjust and immoral" invasion and occupation of Iraq.

"In the face of the United States administration's rush toward military action based on misleading information, too many of us were silent," said a statement of conscience signed by more than half of the 164 retired and active United Methodist bishops worldwide.

President Bush is a member of the United Methodist Church, according to various published biographies. The White House did not return a request for comment on the bishops' statement...

...Public approval of the war has steadily declined since the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003. At the time, seven of 10 Americans said the U.S. did the right thing. By this October, only four of 10 Americans did, according to CBS polls...

Austin, Texas - I can't get over this feeling of unreality, that I am actually sitting here writing about our country having a gulag of secret prisons in which it tortures people. I have loved America all my life, even though I have often disagreed with the government. But this seems to me so preposterous, so monstrous. My mind is a little bent and my heart is a little broken this morning...
... "We do not torture," said our pitifully inarticulate president, straining through emphasis and repetition to erase the obvious...
...And that'll show 'em, won't it? Take some miserable human being alone and helpless in a cell, completely under your control, and torture him. Boy, that is some kind of manly, ain't it?...

Before the war, the President and his aides contended Hussein was concealing nuclear, biological and chemical warfare programs in violation of a U.N. ban. None have ever been found.

What happened to the dream of a democratic Iraq?
...Iraq has been the land of dreams for everyone except Iraqis- the Persian dream of a Shia controlled Islamic state modeled upon Iran and inclusive of the holy shrines in Najaf, the pan-Arab nationalist dream of a united Arab region with Iraq acting as its protective eastern border, the American dream of controlling the region by installing permanent bases and a Puppet government in one of its wealthiest countries, the Kurdish dream of an independent Kurdish state financed by the oil wealth in Kirkuk…

The Puppets the Americans empowered are advocates of every dream except the Iraqi one: The dream of Iraqi Muslims, Christians, Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen… the dream of a united, stable, prosperous Iraq which has, over the last two years, gone up in the smoke of car bombs, military raids and a foreign occupation.

...We spent more than 2 ½ hours on hold while experimenting with various tricks to bypass the phone menus, voice prompts and automated routing systems to reach a human. A few made it easy to get an operator. Others required a virtual tap dance of carefully timed number-pushing, or they trapped callers in an endless loop of options...

...Using the most common shortcut — pressing zero to bypass the system — causes some company phone systems to hang up on you. Others try to herd you back into line by feigning confusion if they sense you're trying to do an end run...

Grassy Butte United Methodist Church
Dickinson, ND

Brewers United Methodist Church
Kirksey, KY

'We The Gathered In His Name'
Gallatin, MT

Texico Assembly of God
Texico, NM

Loco United Methodist Church
Wilson, OK

Probe Downtown
Dallas, TX

Croom-A-Coochee Baptist
Webster, FL

...NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) - Pirates armed with grenade launchers and machine guns tried to hijack a luxury cruise liner off the east African coast Saturday, but the ship outran them, officials said...

...There has been a steep rise in piracy this year along Somalia's nearly 2,000-mile coastline, with 15 violent incidents reported between March and August, compared with just two for all of 2004, according to the International Maritime Bureau, a division of the International Chamber of Commerce that tracks trends in piracy.

In June, a U.N.-chartered ship carrying 935 tons of rice for Somali victims of the Asian tsunami was hijacked by pirates, who held crew members hostage for three months before releasing them...

...A U.N. auditing board, the International Advisory and Monitoring Board of the Development Fund for Iraq, has recommended that the United States reimburse Iraq up to $208.5 million for contracting work carried out by KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton, in the last two years...

...WHY: The work by KBR, paid for with Iraqi oil proceeds, was either overpriced or done poorly, the report said...

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - A new judge was selected to preside over Rep. Tom DeLay's conspiracy and money laundering trial Thursday, after a GOP judge became the second to step away from involvement in the case because of political contributions he has made.

Administrative Judge B.B. Schraub, a Republican who was to have selected the judge for the case, withdrew after Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle filed a request to have him removed. Two days earlier, District Judge Bob Perkins was removed from the case at DeLay's request because of his contributions to Democrats...

State documents examined by The Associated Press show that Jefferson's 2002 campaign treasurer, Bill Ceverha, also was the treasurer of DeLay's Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee. The PAC is a codefendant in DeLay's case. Ceverha was a defendant this spring in a civil trial brought by Democrats who lost state legislative races to Republicans in 2002.

Jefferson also was elected to his seat with the help of a $25,000 donation from the Republican National State Elections Committee, a group at the heart of the money laundering charge against DeLay. And he received $2,000 from a DeLay-run PAC whose executive director is a co-defendant...

...DeLay's contributions to Texas Republicans helped the GOP win control of the Texas House in 2002. Then, in a series of special sessions called by Perry, the GOP pushed through a redistricting plan crafted by DeLay that helped get more Republicans elected to Congress in 2004...

...The final decision to employ the tactic, which infuriated Republicans and exacerbated partisan animosity, was made in the Democratic leader's second-floor Capitol office Monday night, in a small gathering of his lieutenants. Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) considered the strategy to be so sensitive that only four of his colleagues knew what he intended when he entered the Senate chamber at 2:25 p.m. Tuesday, party aides said yesterday....
...But the notion of one party springing the rule on the other party without warning was so alien that senators could not cite a previous example. Republican leaders quickly denounced it as a stunt, an affront, a trust-killing slap in the face...
...Reid's aides said yesterday that their boss decided on the dramatic, attention-grabbing ploy because he was weary of GOP foot-dragging on a promised inquiry by the Senate intelligence committee into the Bush administration's handling of prewar intelligence on Iraq. "We'd had enough press conferences and requests, public and private," Reid spokesman Jim Manley said. "Now it was time to act."...
...But Reid did not have to start from scratch. His predecessor, former Democratic leader Thomas A. Daschle (S.D.), had considered going into closed session to discuss intelligence use and to spur the inquiry launched in early 2004. But he wanted the cooperation of Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.)...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration, battered by criticism over its hurricane response, is getting the nation prepared for a possible travel ban and other restrictions in the event of a worldwide flu outbreak...

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - Attorneys defending Republican U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay are hoping they can convince a judge that Democratic state district Judge Bob Perkins should not oversee DeLay's criminal trial...