It's morning somewhere

...Now? Serin has $140,000 in credit card and credit-line debt and five houses in foreclosure. Last month, he started iamfacingforeclosure.com, a blog that's drawn both notes of condolence and expletive-laced condemnation...

New York's highest court ruled Thursday that social service agencies run by the Roman Catholic Church and other faiths must provide birth-control coverage to their employees, even if they consider contraception a sin...
...The 6-0 decision by the Court of Appeals hinged on whether Catholic Charities and the nine other groups are essentially social service agencies, not churches....
...The organizations "believe contraception to be sinful," the Court of Appeals said. "We must weigh against (their) interests in adhering to the tenets of their faith the state's substantial interest in fostering equality between the sexes, and in providing women with better health care."...
...The New York court said the fact that the organizations hire employees outside their faith was a critical factor and that they deserve the rights sought under the law....

Most private contractors keeping tabs on billions of dollars in governmental spending for the U.S. House Appropriations Committee have been let go.

With about 60 investigators gone, the shakeup leaves only 16 full-time employees in the unit, USA Today reported...

...Born Johannes Christiaan Martinus Augustinus Maria Duess, the son of a garage-owner from Nijmegen, he entered the oil world during the 1973 energy crisis...

...CENTCOM announced earlier this year that a team of employees would be "[engaging] bloggers who are posting inaccurate or untrue information, as well as bloggers who are posting incomplete information."

The email was not addressed to RAW STORY....

..."Now [online readers] have the opportunity to read positive stories. At least the public can go there and see the whole story," he insisted. "The public wants to hear these good stories."...

In other words, they are spending YOUR tax dollars to hire people to argue with you.

...And yesterday, Bangladeshi economist Muhammed Yunus and the Grameen Bank he founded in 1983 on the notion of microcredit were honoured with the Nobel Peace Prize...
...The bank gives small loans to the poor — overwhelmingly women — who would not qualify with a conventional bank due to lack of collateral. "Grameen" means "rural" or "village" in the Bengali language....
...More than 94 per cent of the borrowers are women and more than 98 per cent of the loans are paid back, the bank says...
...But the bank's interest rates of 20 per cent — significantly higher than the 10 per cent to 15 per cent charged by commercial banks — have drawn criticism. Yet, poverty has decreased in the country since the bank's founding...

...I don't know of a single family here that hasn't had a relative, neighbor or friend die violently. In places where there's been all-out fighting going on, I've interviewed parents who buried their dead child in the yard because it was too dangerous to go to the morgue...

...In many developing countries, between 80 percent and nearly 90 percent of sewage entering the coastal zones is estimated to be raw and untreated. These wastes contain bacteria and viruses that can contaminate marine species such as shellfish that are consumed by people, Nuttall said....

...Plastic is an even more visible environmental concern, killing more than a million seabirds and 100,000 mammals and sea turtles each year, according to previous U.N. reports.

Plastic bags, bottle tops and polystyrene foam coffee cups are often found in the stomachs of dead sea lions, dolphins, sea turtles and birds. Seagulls in the North Sea had an average of 30 pieces of plastic in their stomachs, according to a Dutch study in 2004...

AMEN
The only part of a prayer that everyone knows.

HYMN
A song of praise usually sung in a key two octaves higher than that of the congregation's range.

RECESSIONAL HYMN
The last song at Mass often sung a little more quietly, since most of the people have already left.

PEW
A medieval torture device still found in Catholic churches.

USHERS
The only people in the parish who don't know the seating capacity of a pew.

Researcher and author Graham Hancock presented his thesis that "supernatural" entities such as aliens and fairies are actually transdimensional beings that humans encounter during altered states of consciousness. The ability to shape-shift has been ascribed to both modern aliens as well as elves and other entities reported centuries ago, he detailed...
...As part of his experiential research, he traveled to South America and took the psychedelic plant mixture ayahuasca. During one such episode, he described a confrontation with an alien being, but rather than being an extraterrestrial, he suggested it inhabits another dimension that can only be accessed during an altered state.

...The longer the occupation of Iraq continues, more death and destruction are two things all of us can count on. Along with a broken, bleeding military that is being stretched even further each day, and the anxious families of those serving, whose nerves and hearts are also being stretched further each day.

...We want ideas to save our planet, to save the planet from the imperialist threat. And hopefully in this very century, in not too long a time, we will see this, we will see this new era, and for our children and our grandchildren a world of peace based on the fundamental principles of the United Nations, but a renewed United Nations...