How strange a year was it? Here's how strange:
Of course, not all the events of 2008 were bizarre. Some were depressing. The only U.S. industries that had a good year were campaign consultants and foreclosure lawyers. Everybody else got financially whacked. So, we can be grateful that 2008 is almost over. But consider this....just because the year is ending doesn't mean our troubles won't continue.
The Federal Reserve is expected to vote Thursday on credit card reforms that may relieve customers faced with late fees, universal defaults and shorter payment periods, Reuters reported.The new rules, which were proposed earlier this year, are expected to prohibit credit card companies from increasing rates at will, with some exceptions, and to ban universal default, which permits changing card terms if the borrower defaults on another bill.
The rules are also expected to ban double-cycle billing, where card companies reach back to earlier billing cycles to help calculate interest charged in the current cycle.
Consumers will also likely see easier-to-read tables on monthly statements.
Credit card companies that initially resisted the changes, however, warn borrowing limits may be reduced and interest rates charged on credit cards will rise for borrowers.
The new rules need the approval of the Federal Reserve, the Office of Thrift Supervision and the National Credit Union Administration, all are expected to act on Thursday.
It usually goes something like this: you open a beautifully wrapped box only to find one of those tacky holiday sweaters with snowmen on it. Or maybe it's a desk lamp made completely of peanut brittle. Or something super useful, like that battery-operated singing fish that hangs on your wall. Even as you smile and say "thank you," you tell yourself, "This goes in the regifting pile." The problem is-and come on, you know this-regifting is a major faux pas. It makes you look like a complete ingrate should the gift-giver find out. And if the new receiver discovers your thoughtless attempt to pawn off a piece of junk, you'll quickly be in your social circle's proverbial doghouse.
After years of expecting a little something extra around the holidays, most people in the mutual-fund world are getting nothing extra for Christmas this year. That said, it's my job to fill some of those holiday stockings. It's the annual Lump of Coal Awards, my holiday tradition of finger-pointing at the bad boys and girls of the fund business, the ones who should get nothing more than an inky chunk of carbon from Santa this year.
The Lump of Coal Awards recognize managers, executives, firms, watchdogs and other fund-world types for action, attitude, behavior or performance that is misguided, bumbling, offensive, disingenuous, reprehensible or just plain stupid.
With the average equity fund down by more than 40%, it would be easy to carpet-bomb the entire industry with insults this year, but the losing actually has made it harder to pick "winners" -- the buffoons and miscreants who added insult to injury by blunder, ignorance or arrogance.
The 2008 Lump of Coal Awards go to:
1. Bruce Bent, co-founder of the first money-market fund and chairman of the Reserve Funds.
Category: Forgetting that talk is cheap
For years, Bent railed against money funds holding anything riskier than Treasury bills and bank certificates of deposit. He ridiculed competitors for buying commercial paper, short-term corporate debt that's routinely unsecured.
But in 2006, when Reserve's money funds were lagging the field in yield, Bent's firm started buying the same things he once described as "garbage." Reserve's money-fund yields climbed the charts.
Meanwhile, Bent continued ranting well into 2008 about the horrible investment behavior of others, ignoring the fact that his funds had become the most dangerous of the bunch.
Holding $785 million in Lehman Brothers paper, Reserve's Primary fund was forced in mid-September to "break the buck," after that debt was officially declared as garbage in light of Lehman's financial troubles.
2. The Investment Company Institute
Category: Doing too little, too late
The money fund crisis came into full bloom in mid-September. The ICI -- the fund industry's trade association -- established its money fund working group in November, long after the focus of the economic crisis had moved on to other parts of the financial world.
3. DWS Investments
Category: Forgetting why investors gave them money in the first place
When DWS decided to close its miserable small-cap value fund, logic dictated that it move the assets into DWS Dreman Small Cap Value Fund, a sister fund in the same asset category and with a similar investment style.
But DWS Dreman Small Cap Value (KDSAX) was -- and remains -- closed to new investors, so DWS instead folded the fund into DWS Dreman Mid Cap Value Fund (MIDVX) .
As a result, investors wound up in an asset class they didn't pick, missing out on David Dreman's top-rated small-cap issue and getting his below-average mid-cap fund, thereby enduring a much larger loss on the year.
4. Every 2010 target-date fund
Category: Missing the bulls-eye
At the very time that investors most needed life-cycle and target-date investing to work, it failed.
Target-date funds are all-in-one portfolios built to age with an investor, so that the closer they get to the target date, the more conservative they become. As such, 2010 funds -- built for investors less than two years from hitting retirement age -- should be a comparatively safe haven.
Instead, the average 2010 fund is down nearly 30% this year. See related story on target-date funds' losses.
5. Oppenheimer's target-date funds
Category: The year's most off-target performance
Oppenheimer is dead last in its peer group for funds targeted for 2010, 2015, 2020 and 2030. By comparison, Oppenheimer 2025 is a star, standing next-to-last in its category. And Oppenheimer 2040 and 2050 didn't launch until March, but since their inception date, both rank dead last in their peer groups too. With performance like that, Oppenheimer may not be running "life-cycle funds," so much as "death spiral funds."
(Second place in this category goes to AllianceBernstein. Were it not for Oppenheimer's misery, Alliance Bernstein would be dead last in every target-date category tracked by Lipper Inc..)
6. Fritz Reynolds of Reynolds Blue Chip Growth Fund
Category: Faking his way to the top
Reynolds runs the top-performing "multi-cap core" fund in the Lipper database, and the top large-growth fund tracked by Morningstar Inc. The average competitor is down about 41.5% this year, but Reynolds Blue Chip Fund (RBCGX) has lost just 5%. You'd think that would earn him kudos and not coal, but Reynolds topped those stock-picking categories by being mostly in cash; for much of the year, he's been 0% in blue-chips and 100% in cash.
Worse yet, with a 2% expense ratio, when Reynolds goes all to cash in current market conditions, he's virtually dooming shareholders to a loss. If Reynolds was so convinced it was time to hit the sidelines, he should have told shareholders to sell his fund, park the cash in an account paying a bit of interest, and then asked them to re-up when he thinks it's time to buy again.
7. Dreyfus Emerging Markets
Category: Opening the doors and punching new visitors in the face
Dreyfus Emerging Markets Fund (DRFMX) re-opened to new investors the first week of December. Even in a troubled economy, solid funds re-opening to new money attract a lot of interest, mostly from people who had previously been kept out.
But the Dreyfus fund reopened less than two weeks before it is scheduled to pay out a 38% capital gain. In short, anyone who bought in when the fund re-opened will get kicked in the teeth with a big fat tax bill on the money they invested.
8. Regions Morgan Keegan
Category: Not knowing when to quit
Two former high-fliers, RMK's Select Intermediate Bond Fund (MKIBX) and Select High Income Fund (MKHIX) , may have been the industry's biggest travesties over the last two years.
Manager James Kelsoe -- the Lump of Coal (Mis)Manager of the Year in 2007 -- had a huge slug of money in subprime paper, so that both bond funds lost more than 50% last year, then watched things go from bad to worse in 2008.
High Income is down nearly 80% and Intermediate Bond has lost 85% this year. For every $1,000 invested in the funds at the start of 2007, there's less than $100 left now. You'd be hard-pressed to find two funds more deserving of liquidation,
Regions Morgan Keegan finally got rid of Kelsoe, but inexplicably kept the funds open, with a new subadviser running the money.
9. Ron Fielding of the Oppenheimer Rochester Municipal funds
Category: Sticking to your guns when they're aimed at your own feet
The Rochester funds have traditionally flown high on the muni-bond performance charts, largely because of Fielding's penchant for diving headlong into the riskiest portions of the bond market - notably sectors like tobacco, housing and airlines - to capture extra yield. As a result, Fielding's funds - and he's ultimately responsible for 18 Oppenheimer-owned issues - took on a lot more credit risk than the competition.
Results have been a horror show. Most of the Rochester single-state funds are down more than 35% this year, and Oppenheimer Rochester National Muni Fund (ORNAX) is down 48% this year, which is far more abysmal than the average stock fund in 2008.
Fielding has remained bullish, but a combination of redemptions and the continued credit crunch is likely to make things worse before they get better, which in turn could cripple the entire Oppenheimer family. Oppenheimer's target-date funds are suffering because of their bond exposure through Fielding's National Muni portfolio.
What passes for the holiday season began before dawn the day after Thanksgiving, when a worker at a Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, N.Y., was trampled to death by a mob of bargain hunters. Afterward, there were reports that some people, mesmerized by cheap consumer electronics and discounted toys, kept shopping even after announcements to clear the store.
President-elect Barack Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is expected to preach at a Macon revival and will preach Monday through Wednesday at St. Paul AME Church. It will be his second visit to the Georgia city. Wright also spoke at St. Paul last year.The Chicago minister drew headlines in the presidential campaign for remarks on racial injustice, conduct of the American government and U.S. foreign policy. Obama resigned from Trinity United Church of Christ during the campaign after inflammatory comments by Wright from the pulpit became a campaign issue.
Dozens of banks and a handful of insurers have applied for funds from the Treasury Department as part of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. The Treasury Department has transferred capital to many of these companies. More are expected to announce their participation in the coming weeks.
(Click to enlarge)
...and guess what? No SUVs!
Two explorers conducting underwater surveys of Lake Ontario have uncovered an aquatic mystery - a rare 19th-century schooner sitting upright 500 feet under the waves. Jim Kennard and Dan Scoville located the 55-foot long dagger-board ship unexpectedly this fall using deep scan sonar equipment off the lake's southern shore, west of Rochester.
The ship is the only dagger-board known to have been found in the Great Lakes. Kennard said vessels of this type were used for a short time in the early 1800s. The dagger-board was a wood panel that could be extended through the keel to improve the ship's stability. The dagger-boards could be raised when the schooner entered a shallow harbor, allowing the boat to load and unload cargo in locations that would not otherwise be accessible to larger ships.
The shipwreck was found upright and in remarkable condition considering it had plunged more than 500 feet to its resting place on the bottom, the men said.
The schooner's origin is a mystery so far.
The name of the schooner is unknown and there are no documented accounts of a dagger-board schooner sinking in Lake Ontario.
The explorers suspect the schooner was being converted to a barge or other sailing craft by its owners and perhaps broke free from its moorings in the ice or during a violent storm and was carried far out on the lake before it eventually sank.
The men found it on the very last survey run of the season. A faint image of something protruding from the bottom showed up at the very edge of the display screen, and another run was made to obtain a better image and the position of the object.
The two explorers returned to the site two weeks later and used a remote operated vehicle to explore and photograph the shipwreck.
It appeared from the video survey of the shipwreck that the schooner had been stripped of all useable items such as anchors, iron fittings, cabin with contents, and tiller, Kennard said.
During the past several months, the explorers have been seeking help from Great Lakes maritime historians to learn more about the schooner.
The dagger-board schooner is one of the older ships discovered in Lake Ontario and the Great Lakes.
In May 2008, Kennard and Scoville discovered the British warship HMS Ontario, which was lost in 1780. The Ontario is the oldest shipwreck ever found in the Great Lakes and the only British warship of this period still in existence in the world.
There are estimated to have been over 4,700 shipwrecks in the Great Lakes, including about 550 in Lake Ontario.
MICHELLE
Walter & National Geographic sources contributed to this article.
The Enlightenment was not, as is often assumed, exclusively secular. In fact, religious Protestants, Jews and Catholics played a key role in imagining a tolerant, but believing, society. However in the past centuries this has evolved into a fungus of irresponsibility and intolerance of the faithful, particularly because it is the only way angry, burnt, damaged people can revolt against traditional values. It has little to do with tolerance, diversity; it has everything to do with damaged goods and the dead weight of the Liberal Left.In the recent presidential campaign, religion and religious belief appeared to be playing as large a role as they did in the last two presidential elections. Obama’s efforts to cleanse the Democratic Party of its supposedly anti-religious bias and show that belief can have a place in it by softening the Party’s platform on such key issues as abortion, alluding to the Bible, speaking in biblical cadences and referring to his own faith, and perhaps even in his choice of Joe Biden, a Catholic, as his running mate, have been countered by McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin, who seems to be in the process of quickly recapturing and energizing the religious right with her own, and her daughter’s, “pro-life” choices. Though Ronald Reagan no longer sits in the White House or directs campaign strategy, his legacy survives.
These appeals to religion are of course rooted in the rough and tumble of daily politics. Republicans want to continue to break the large umbrella alliance of Catholics, blacks, Jews and unions on which the Democratic Party has relied for a majority ever since the New Deal. Democrats want to win back some of the groups that have defected and also make inroads into the Republican strongholds of the suburban and ex-urban megachurches.
Yet lurking just beneath the surface of this struggle, or perhaps informing it without usually being articulated, is the presumption that there is a fundamental opposition between the secular and religious in American politics and life, that the separation of Church and state is designed to expunge religion from state and politics rather than to find a mutually enriching manner for the two to coexist, and that this fundamental opposition can be traced back to the “Enlightenment.” The Enlightenment as the source of secular culture and secular politics is the great specter of twenty-first century American politics. There is a presumption, apparently shared by all points on the political spectrum, that the Enlightenment was exclusively secular. The image is, as Evan Derkacz recently put it, that “the Enlightenment was essentially a bunch of proto-Marxist rebels who longed to sit at cafes and discuss Dawkins’ latest book.” There is also a strong sense that there was something conspiratorial about the Enlightenment and that its contemporary adherents continue to be conspiratorial—that they aim to impose their radical secular views on everyone else by whatever means.
There are, of course, good reasons that so many people hold this view of the Enlightenment as the source of secularism (there are few, if any, good reasons to see it as being conspiratorial). Scholars propagated such a notion for a long time, and it was the view that was taught in American colleges and universities. Certainly since WWII, the main scholarly books that students read on the European Enlightenment offered just such a view e.g., Ernst Cassirer’s magisterial The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932; translated 1951), Paul Hazard’s European Thought in the Eighteenth Century (translated 1954) and Peter Gay’s The Enlightenment (1966-1967). This view of the Enlightenment had an admirable pedigree. Cassirer (1874-1945), Hazard (1878-1944) and others championed the Enlightenment as a counterweight to the fascist ideologies that wreaked havoc on Europe and many other parts of the world during the 1930s and 1940s. For them the Enlightenment guaranteed that there was in fact an alternative to the horrors they had witnessed and thus the promise of a brighter future. Peter Gay (b. 1923), an émigré from Nazi Germany, not only championed the Enlightenment in opposition to the Nazism he had experienced firsthand, but also saw it as inspiring the American liberalism with which he had come to identify. His two-volume history, a bestseller that won the National Book Award, appeared at the apogee of 1960s liberalism. His idealization of the Enlightenment of Hume and Voltaire as the seedbed of modern liberalism was the equivalent, in realm of cultural history, to modernization theory—that all societies everywhere were moving toward urbanism, industrialization and democracy—that then ruled the social sciences.
It takes a long time for such a powerful, regnant and, one should add, cogent view first to crack and then to crumble. Yet the view of the Enlightenment as a purely secular phenomenon has indeed cracked and crumbled. Since the 1980s such notable historians as J.G.A. Pocock (Johns Hopkins), Dale Van Kley (Ohio State University), Derek Beales (Cambridge University) and Jonathan Israel (Institute for Advanced Study) have conducted a long-term campaign against it. They have taken issue with individual aspects. Pocock, for example, has argued repeatedly and eloquently against the notion of a single, secular Enlightenment, proposing the notion of a “family of Enlightenments” and demonstrating the importance of what he called the “Protestant Enlightenment” in England, Holland and Switzerland. Dale Van Kley has restored religion, and particularly Jansenism, the major Catholic reform movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to our understanding of the French Enlightenment and the origins of the French Revolution. Beales has shown the centrality of the Catholic Enlightenment to such an epitome of “enlightened absolutism” as Joseph II in the Habsburg monarchy (not to mention his mother, Maria Theresa), and has also recovered the vibrant intellectual and artistic life of Europe’s Catholic monasteries, many of which were plundered and destroyed during and after the French Revolution. Finally, Jonathan Israel has offered a monumental and encyclopedic synthesis of the Enlightenment that recognizes the religious beliefs of its central figures.
Building on these works, I have always argued that the time has come to discard the still popular, if threadbare and outmoded notion of an exclusively secular Enlightenment. The time has come to let go of this false specter and to recognize that the Enlightenment was a spectrum of opinion that included a distinctly religious Enlightenment.
All of the religions participated in, and contributed to, the making of the religious Enlightenment. Its creators all shared the same motivation: they wanted to articulate a version of their religion that could support a religiously plural society. That was, after all, the challenge that faced Europe after the end of the religious wars and throughout the period from the Glorious Revolution in England (1688) to the French Revolution (1789). How could members of different religions live in harmony and peace in a shared society and build a common polity? Religious Enlighteners renounced polemical sermons and disputation literature and instead devoted themselves to arguing for toleration of other religions on religious grounds.
Time and again our current notions of toleration have wrongly been attributed to secular thinkers and a secular Enlightenment. In fact, religious thinkers—Protestants, Jews and Catholics—played a key role in imagining a tolerant but also a believing society. The religious Enlighteners saw no tension or contradiction between fervent belief and a fervent commitment to toleration. For them the two went hand-in-hand. They made use of the most potent ideas of the time, the natural law theory that recognized the autonomy of individuals, but they used a religious version of it. They started not with the idea of individuals as thinkers, political beings, or property owners, but with individuals as members of churches (or, for that matter, synagogues). As members of churches individuals were endowed with the right of freedom or autonomy: they could, and should, be taught, consoled, and exhorted yet they were not to be coerced in any manner. Freedom and toleration in the church were to be the basis for freedom and toleration in society.
Perhaps the foundational characteristic of the religious Enlightenment was that its members advocated a new idea of “reasonableness.” They did not espouse a notion of “rationality” that excluded belief. That was a myth scholars who championed the myth of a secular Enlightenment disseminated. Instead, the religious Enlighteners developed an ideal of “reasonableness” that included belief. Reason for the religious Enlighteners was entirely compatible with the authority of scripture, revelation and miracles. They would not accept truths contrary to reason, but they did acknowledge revealed truths and mysteries “above” reason. Similarly, they recognized the validity of testimony and of verifiable traditions in interpreting scripture.
While endorsing reason and revelation, the religious Enlighteners also embraced the latest in philosophy in science. They accepted the heliocentric universe and Newtonian physics. They used the philosophies of Locke and Descartes, Leibniz and Christian Wolff. In fact, they welcomed the new philosophy and science as a means to rearticulate their faith. They did not, however, treat the Bible as a source of science, since they understood it to be the source of salvation. They acted on the saying that Galileo had made famous: “the Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.”
The religious Enlighteners have largely been forgotten by history. They have been written out of the canon of the secular Enlightenment and have therefore escaped the attention of historians and literary scholars. Yet figures as Bishop William Warburton (1698-1779) in England, Jacob Vernet (1698-1789) in Geneva, Siegmund Jacob Baumgarten (1706-1757) in Prussia, Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) in Berlin, Joseph Eybel (1741-1805) in Austria and Adrien Lamourette (1742-1794) in France were well-known and important figures in their day. In fact, most of them were public figures who were known not only, or not just, as theologians but also as writers on politics, history, literature and aesthetics. The religious Enlighteners saw no contradiction between writing about belief and writing about supposedly secular subjects. For them all those subjects belonged to the purview of the Enlightenment.
Moreover, the religious Enlighteners were not isolated individuals but members of identifiable movements in their respective religious traditions. Moderation in England, “enlightened Orthodoxy” in Calvinist Geneva, the “theological Enlightenment” among German Lutherans, the Haskalah in the German-speaking lands, and reform Catholicism in Austria and France, were all substantial movements of religious renewal and reform that had a significant impact on their respective traditions and on the larger society, since all of them gained a form of state sponsorship.
While a revision of our understanding of the Enlightenment might seem an interesting academic exercise, it is in fact highly relevant to contemporary politics. If we can exorcise the abiding specter of an exclusively secular Enlightenment, we can begin to overcome the false polarity of secular liberalism versus faith-based conservatism. We will be able to see that liberalism can equally be faith-based, and that many contemporary debates can be conducted both without and within the realm of faith. We will also be able to see that the so-called “culture wars” were waged on same fallacious grounds of an anti-religious Enlightenment. In short, recognizing the existence of the religious Enlightenment can change the nature of current political and cultural dialogue by liberating us from a specter that haunts our culture.
In Seattle, the Mars Hill Church, one of the fastest-growing evangelical churches in the country, grew to 7,000 members this fall, up 1,000 in a year. At the Life Christian Church in West Orange, N.J., prayer requests have doubled — almost all of them aimed at getting or keeping jobs.
Like evangelical churches around the country, the three churches have enjoyed steady growth over the last decade. But since September, pastors nationwide say they have seen such a burst of new interest that they find themselves contending with powerful conflicting emotions — deep empathy and quiet excitement — as they re-encounter an old piece of religious lore:
Bad times are good for evangelical churches.
“It’s a wonderful time, a great evangelistic opportunity for us,” said the Rev. A. R. Bernard, founder and senior pastor of the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn, New York’s largest evangelical congregation, where regulars are arriving earlier to get a seat. “When people are shaken to the core, it can open doors.”
Nationwide, congregations large and small are presenting programs of practical advice for people in fiscal straits — from a homegrown series on “Financial Peace” at a Midtown Manhattan church called the Journey, to the “Good Sense” program developed at the 20,000-member Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill., and now offered at churches all over the country.
Many ministers have for the moment jettisoned standard sermons on marriage and the Beatitudes to preach instead about the theological meaning of the downturn.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses, who moved much of their door-to-door evangelizing to the night shift 10 years ago because so few people were home during the day, returned to daylight witnessing this year. “People are out of work, and they are answering the door,” said a spokesman, J. R. Brown.
Mr. Bernard plans to start 100 prayer groups next year, using a model conceived by the megachurch pastor Rick Warren, to “foster spiritual dialogue in these times” in small gatherings around the city.
A recent spot check of some large Roman Catholic parishes and mainline Protestant churches around the nation indicated attendance increases there, too. But they were nowhere near as striking as those reported by congregations describing themselves as evangelical, a term generally applied to churches that stress the literal authority of Scripture and the importance of personal conversion, or being “born again.”
Part of the evangelicals’ new excitement is rooted in a communal belief that the big Christian revivals of the 19th century, known as the second and third Great Awakenings, were touched off by economic panics. Historians of religion do not buy it, but the notion “has always lived in the lore of evangelism,” said Tony Carnes, a sociologist who studies religion.
A study last year may lend some credence to the legend. In “Praying for Recession: The Business Cycle and Protestant Religiosity in the United States,” David Beckworth, an assistant professor of economics at Texas State University, looked at long-established trend lines showing the growth of evangelical congregations and the decline of mainline churches and found a more telling detail: During each recession cycle between 1968 and 2004, the rate of growth in evangelical churches jumped by 50 percent. By comparison, mainline Protestant churches continued their decline during recessions, though a bit more slowly.
The little-noticed study began receiving attention from some preachers in September, when the stock market began its free fall. With the swelling attendance they were seeing, and a sense that worldwide calamities come along only once in an evangelist’s lifetime, the study has encouraged some to think big.
“I found it very exciting, and I called up that fellow to tell him so,” said the Rev. Don MacKintosh, a Seventh Day Adventist televangelist in California who contacted Dr. Beckworth a few weeks ago after hearing word of his paper from another preacher. “We need to leverage this moment, because every Christian revival in this country’s history has come off a period of rampant greed and fear. That’s what we’re in today — the time of fear and greed.”
Frank O’Neill, 54, a manager who lost his job at Morgan Stanley this year, said the “humbling experience” of unemployment made him cast about for a more personal relationship with God than he was able to find in the Catholicism of his youth. In joining the Shelter Rock Church on Long Island, he said, he found a deeper sense of “God’s authority over everything — I feel him walking with me.”
The sense of historic moment is underscored especially for evangelicals in New York who celebrated the 150th anniversary last year of the Fulton Street Prayer Revival, one of the major religious resurgences in America. Also known as the Businessmen’s Revival, it started during the Panic of 1857 with a noon prayer meeting among traders and financiers in Manhattan’s financial district.
Over the next few years, it led to tens of thousands of conversions in the United States, and inspired the volunteerism movement behind the founding of the Salvation Army, said the Rev. McKenzie Pier, president of the New York City Leadership Center, an evangelical pastors’ group that marked the anniversary with a three-day conference at the Hilton New York. “The conditions of the Businessmen’s Revival bear great similarities to what’s going on today,” he said. “People are losing a lot of money.”
But why the evangelical churches seem to thrive especially in hard times is a Rorschach test of perspective.
For some evangelicals, the answer is obvious. ”We have the greatest product on earth,” said the Rev. Steve Tomlinson, senior pastor of the Shelter Rock Church.
Dr. Beckworth, a macroeconomist, posited another theory: though expanding demographically since becoming the nation’s largest religious group in the 1990s, evangelicals as a whole still tend to be less affluent than members of mainline churches, and therefore depend on their church communities more during tough times, for material as well as spiritual support. In good times, he said, they are more likely to work on Sundays, which may explain a slower rate of growth among evangelical churches in nonrecession years.
Msgr. Thomas McSweeney, who writes columns for Catholic publications and appears on MSNBC as a religion consultant, said the growth is fed by evangelicals’ flexibility: “Their tradition allows them to do things from the pulpit we don’t do — like ‘Hey! I need somebody to take Mrs. McSweeney to the doctor on Tuesday,’ or ‘We need volunteers at the soup kitchen tomorrow.’ ”
In a cascading financial crisis, he said, a pastor can discard a sermon prescribed by the liturgical calendar and directly address the anxiety in the air. “I know a lot of you are feeling pain today,” he said, as if speaking from the pulpit. “And we’re going to do something about that.”
But a recession also means fewer dollars in the collection basket.
Few evangelical churches have endowments to compare with the older mainline Protestant congregations.
“We are at the front end of a $10 million building program,” said the Rev. Terry Smith, pastor of the Life Christian Church in West Orange, N.J. “Am I worried about that? Yes. But right now, I’m more worried about my congregation.” A husband and wife, he said, were both fired the same day from Goldman Sachs; another man inherited the workload of four co-workers who were let go, and expects to be the next to leave. “Having the conversations I’m having,” Mr. Smith said, “it’s hard to think about anything else.”
At the Shelter Rock Church, many newcomers have been invited by members who knew they had recently lost jobs. On a recent Sunday, new faces included a hedge fund manager and an investment banker, both laid off, who were friends of Steve Leondis, a cheerful business executive who has been a church member for four years. The two newcomers, both Catholics, declined to be interviewed, but Mr. Leondis said they agreed to attend Shelter Rock to hear Mr. Tomlinson’s sermon series, “Faith in Unstable Times.”
“They wanted something that pertained to them,” he said, “some comfort that pertained to their situations.”
Mr. Tomlinson and his staff in Manhasset and at a satellite church in nearby Syosset have recently discussed hiring an executive pastor to take over administrative work, so they can spend more time pastoring.
“There are a lot of walking wounded in this town,” he said.
And the voters of Silverton (pop. 7,400) elected as mayor Stu Rasmussen, 60, an openly transgendered, longtime resident who previously served as mayor while a man but who now sports breasts and dresses exclusively as a woman (especially miniskirts and cleavage-enhancing tops). Actually, Rasmussen still describes himself as a man and lives with his longtime girlfriend, but explained his switch as just his particular "mid-life crisis." [Los Angeles Times, 11-20-08]
"I'm really sorry. ... I thought he was just tired," said Lynne Stewart, who was arrested in West Melbourne, Fla., in October and charged with stealing items from a 56-year-old, unconscious man who in fact had just suffered a fatal heart attack during sex with Stewart. She blamed her larceny on a cocaine binge that impaired her judgment such that (according to a police commander) she had sex with 20 men that weekend. (However, she was not charged with prostitution. Said the commander, "No, she just likes sex.") [WESH-TV (Orlando), 10-15-08]
Lame: A woman being interviewed for jury duty on a murder case in Bronx (N.Y.) Supreme Court in October asked to be excused for the reason that she was once murdered, herself, by her husband (but had somehow been revived by a doctor). (She was dismissed from the jury, but on other grounds.) [New York Post, 10-8-08]
In a recent report of DUI excuses in the Swedish newspaper Nerikes Allehanda, a 56-year-old woman had asserted that, though she had been drinking, her driving was not affected because she had remembered to keep one eye closed so as not to be seeing double. [The Local (Stockholm), 10-30-08]
Strange Justice: The Saudi Arabia delegation to the United Nations sponsored a conference on religious tolerance in November. (Not only does the kingdom employ a police force "on the prevention of vice and the promotion of virtue," but it is accused of widespread internal discrimination against disfavored Islamic sects.) [International Herald Tribune, 11-11-08]
Janice Warder, a former Texas judge and now the incoming district attorney for Texas' Cooke County, was accused in March by a Dallas judge of having improperly withheld evidence in a 1986 case to secure a murder conviction. (The Dallas judge ordered a new trial.) [Dallas Morning News, 9-26-08]
Patricia Howard filed a lawsuit against her USA Environmental employer in 2006 (just recently unsealed by a judge) for subjecting her to dangerous work during 2003-2005. The workplace was in Iraq and involved detonating surplus munitions to prevent their falling into insurgents' hands, but that was not the "danger" she feared. Rather, the munitions were located in abandoned football-field-sized warehouses that had long been home to pigeons. Foot-high piles of feces had dried and turned to powder, and Howard charged that the company's respiration protection was nearly useless, subjecting workers to Hantavirus and other diseases. [St. Petersburg Times, 9-15-08]
Veteran Massachusetts thief Robert Aldrich applied for compensation because his latest arrest happened to have been illegal, and a state law permits recovery for lost income during wrongful incarceration. However, in November, a Suffolk County judge turned him down as she was unable to find any "income" that Aldrich might have earned during his six wrongful months in jail except from more burglaries or for home-improvement money that Aldrich admitted he earned "off the books" so as to evade taxes. [United Press International, 11-5-08]
"I would like an apology," explained Michael Wax, who was ejected in July from the Borgata Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City because of customers' complaints about his body odor. "There's no question I stink. ... I do have an odor. I've been playing for 17 hours," said the 440-pound man. Nonetheless, Wax filed a complaint with the Casino Control Commission, claiming that he should not have been so rudely treated in front of other patrons. [MSNBC-AP, 7-30-08]
Ms. Hang Mioku, 48, is winding down her 20-year obsession with cosmetic surgery, having been at one time bulked up with enough silicone in her face to earn the nickname "the standing fan" because her head was so large compared to her legs. Hang moved from South Korea to Japan for better access to surgery and said she had convinced herself that each procedure in her odyssey only made her more beautiful than the last. When finally no surgeon would treat her, she began injecting cooking oil. Finally, she was talked into face-reduction surgery (removal of 260 grams of foreign substance from her head and neck) but, according to a November report in London's Daily Telegraph, she remains grotesquely misshapen. [ABC News-Daily Telegraph (London), 11-14-08]
One of the items in a November seized-contraband auction by the Denver Police Department was a 1977 Oldsmobile Cutlass that was ultimately bought for $350 by a 19-year-old woman, but which is still evidence in an active murder investigation. Police eventually took back the car, which has bullet holes and a bloody interior and contained blood-stained clothing. Furthermore, a second shooting victim who was in the car survived and was among the bidders at the auction. He dropped out, but did later sell the winning bidder his spare key to the car for $40. [Denver Post, 11-20-08]
The quasi-religious "philosophical" group Summum has been on the 360 Degrees radar since 1988, when leader "Corky" Ra and his small band in Utah began offering to mummify household pets for $7,000, or create statues of them for $18,000 (though the price is considerably higher today), with an eye toward future mummification of humans, as illustrative of its core precept that "the soul moves forward" even though the body is memorialized. In November, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments that a city park in Pleasant Grove, Utah, must allow Summum to place a monument with "The Seven Aphorisms" next to the existing monument of the Ten Commandments. (Summum's Aphorisms shore up the soul-movement belief by recognizing, for example, such properties as psychokinesis and the constant vibration of bodies.) The court is expected to rule later this term. [CNN, 11-11-08]
Recent Public Appearances: Arkansas City, Kan., September (Jesus on the ceiling of the One Stop Body Shoppe weight-loss clinic). Pittsburg, Texas, August (Jesus on the body of a moth). Goshen, Ind., July (Jesus in the facial fur of the family cat). High Ridge, Mo., July (Jesus on a Cheeto). Arlington, Texas, September (Mary on a grape). Pompano Beach, Fla., November (Jesus on a slice of French toast). Gulf Shores, Ala., September (Jesus in the drywall of a home under construction). Arkansas City: [KTLA-TV (Los Angeles), 9-19-08] Pittsburg: [KLTV-TV (Longview, Tex.), 8-27-08] Goshen: [WNDU-TV (South Bend), 7-30-08] High Ridge: [KTVI-TV (St. Louis), 7-28-08] Arlington: [Dallas Morning News, 9-5-08] Pompano Beach: [KUSA-TV- NBC (Denver), 11-11-08] Gulf Shores: [WKRG-TV (Mobile), 9-19-08]
A New York Times dispatch from India highlighted the growing problem of intra-family frauds in which one member claims a living relative's land or wealth by swearing to the government that the relative is dead. According to the Times, the "deceased" had finally begun to fight back. An advocacy group, the Association of Dead People, helps aggrieved citizens figure out how to prove that they are alive, which can be difficult, given India's slow-moving bureaucracies. The association's founder said that he personally had tried to authenticate his existence by public actions such as running for office, filing lawsuits and getting arrested, but that he nonetheless remained officially dead. [New York Times, 10-24-00]
The art critic John Berger once wrote: "To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself." I'm pretty certain he never met Bettie Page, naked, nude or otherwise.
Yowza! The advertisement was for a short titled "Teaser Girl in High Heels," distributed by a New Yorker named Irving Klaw, who, with his sister, Paula, sold movie star photographs and very special specialty items through their downtown store and mail-order service. In the late 1940s the Klaws began shooting and selling their own bondage and fetish material, catering to the tastes of a loyal clientele: "Corset and Stocking," "Girls in Extreme High Heels," "Battling Girls." There was no nudity, just a lot of rope and kink. In 1952 Ms. Page started working for the Klaws and quickly became their most popular model. "She could do looks of real horror or happy shots with ease," Ms. Klaw said of the seminude cutie. "She was a natural."
Archaeologists have found what they say is the oldest brain ever discovered in Britain, or at least the shriveled remnant of one, in a decapitated skull that dates back more than 2,000 years. Inside the skull, the scientists found "a yellow substance which scans showed to be shrunken, but brain-shaped," according to a University of York statement.
"I'm amazed and excited that scanning has shown structures which appear to be unequivocally of brain origin," said Philip Duffey, a neurologist at York Hospital who scanned the skull.
The researchers do not claim the brain is the oldest in the world, as some news reports suggested.
The skull was found in a muddy pit unearthed during excavations on the site of the University of York's campus expansion at Heslington East and is thought to have been a ritual offering. Nobody is sure how the brain remained preserved for so long.
Here's how the noggin was first noticed: York Archaeological Trust dig team member Rachel Cubitt reached in and, while she cleaned the soil-covered skull's outer surface, "she felt something move inside the cranium. Peering through the base of the skull, she spotted an unusual yellow substance."
"The survival of brain remains where no other soft tissues are preserved is extremely rare," said Sonia O'Connor, research fellow in archaeological sciences at the University of Bradford. "This brain is particularly exciting because it is very well preserved, even though it is the oldest recorded find of this type in the U.K., and one of the earliest worldwide."
O'Connor called it the oldest brain found in Britain and "one of the earliest worldwide."
One might think the oldest preserved brains would come from Egyptian mummies , but the minds of mummies were typically removed and discarded.
"The brain was removed by carefully inserting special hooked instruments up through the nostrils in order to pull out bits of brain tissue," according to an Encyclopedia Smithsonian article on Egyptian mummies.
The mystery of the British brain's preservation could be cracked with more research. For instance, another oddity is that there was no skin or other tissue remaining, Duffey said.
"I think that it will be very important to establish how these structures have survived, whether there are traces of biological material within them and, if not, what is their composition," Duffey said.
It is not unheard of for soft biological tissue to be preserved over long periods of time. In 2005, scientists announced they had discovered 70-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex blood vessels . And the 5,200-year-old "Iceman" mummy , found in 1991 in the European Alps, has yielded a wealth of tissue.
MICHELLE
The next major battle over evolutionary theory is likely to occur not in the United States but in the Islamic world or in countries with large Muslim populations because of rising levels of education and Internet access there, as well as the rising importance of biology, a scientist now says.
As with Christians and Jews, there is no consensus or "official" opinion on evolution among Muslims. However, some of them say that the theory is a cultural threat that acts as a force in favor of atheism, says Hampshire College's Salman Hameed in an essay in the Dec. 12 issue of the journal Science. This is the same beef that some Christians have with evolution.
A general respect for science in the Islamic world means scientists have an opportunity to counter anti-evolution efforts, such as the "Atlas of Creation," a glossy 850-page color volume produced by Muslim creationist Adnan Oktar who goes by the name of Harun Yahya.
Numerous university scientists and members of the media received copies of this book as an unsolicited gift in 2007:
"There is a standard narrative that science and Islam are compatible, but evolution is one thought that challenges this assumption," Hameed told LiveScience. "It's interesting to see how people respond to it and create their world view in response to that challenge."
Better education, the spread of Internet access and news about U.S. controversies over evolution are provoking some Muslims worldwide to start to ask whether Islam is compatible with evolutionary theory, Hameed said.
"Now is the time that these ideas are going to be solidified. We can shape it. There are positive ways to shape these ideas in which we can avert a mass rejection of evolution," Hameed said.
General confusion
Christian creationists believe God created animals, humanity, Earth and the universe in their original form in six days about 6,000 years ago, a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis in the Bible.
Muslim creationists have similar beliefs, based on the Quran, though they tend to be open to a wider range of interpretations. Scientists say, however, that evolutionary theory (the idea that all organisms evolved from a common ancestor) and the mechanism of natural selection explain the diversity of life on the planet.
The theory is well-supported by evidence from multiple fields of study. Evolution not only explains how early primates evolved to become human, but how one species of bird becomes two, and how viruses morph over time to resist drugs. Scientists can only speculate on where and exactly how life began on Earth, but fossil evidence dates the earliest life to about 3.7 billion years ago.
Hameed's essay, meanwhile, comes on the heels of an ABC "Nightline" interview this week with President Bush during which Bush said that he doesn't think that his belief that God created the world is "incompatible with the scientific proof that there is evolution," as well as a Philadelphia Inquirer story quoting EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson as saying he does not think there's a "clean-cut division" between evolution and creationism.
Scientists say that evolutionary theory
explains the diversity of life on the planet
Now, three years after the end of the Dover trial (the upshot: U.S. District Judge John E. Jones barred a Pennsylvanian public school district from teaching "intelligent design " in biology class, saying the concept is creationism in disguise), U.S. residents remain divided on evolution.
A Harris poll conducted in November found 47 percent of Americans accept Darwin's theory of evolution while 40 percent believe instead in creationism.
Scientists worry that those who ignore or dismiss the strong evidence for evolution might also be prone to a worrisome lack of critical thinking, and that over time, support for science and medicine in general could erode.
Muslims and evolution
The Muslim take on evolution diverges somewhat from the classic Christian creationist stance. For instance, Muslims generally accept the scientific evidence that the world is billions of years old, rather than 6,000 years old. Some scholars point to early evolutionary thinking among medieval Muslim philosophers who discussed common descent, Hameed writes.
These philosophers, along with Aristotle and others, were among numerous early thinkers to ponder evolution, although people should be "careful in terms of not going overboard" by crediting any of them with coming up with natural selection, the mechanism for evolution that Darwin arrived at, Hameed said.
Still, today, only 25 percent of adults in Turkey agree that human beings developed from earlier species of animals, whereas 40 percent of people in the United States agree with this scientific fact, Hameed writes. And Turkey is one of the most secular and educated of Muslim countries.
Hameed cites data from a 2007 sociological study by Riaz Hassan which revealed that only a minority in five Muslim countries agree that Darwin's theory of evolution is probably or most certainly true: 16 percent of Indonesians, 14 percent of Pakistanis, 8 percent of Egyptians, 11 percent of Malaysians and 22 percent of Turks.
Nonetheless, evolution is taught in high schools in many Muslim countries, although this is often in a very religious environment, Hameed says. Also, science foundations in 14 Muslim countries recently signed on to a statement in support of the teaching of evolution, including human evolution (it is human evolution that is often the sticking point for Muslims, rather than all evolution, he says).
The solution is for Muslim biologists and doctors to present evolutionary theory as the bedrock of biology and to stress its practical applications, Hameed writes, adding that efforts to link evolution with atheism will defeat efforts to help Muslims accept evolution.
MICHELLE
Science
A news report said a burglar who broke into a house claimed he was held captive by a "supernatural figure" for three days without food and water.Police official Abdul Marlik Hakim Johar told The Star newspaper the house's owners found the 36-year-old man fatigued and dehydrated when they returned from vacation Thursday.
He said they called an ambulance to take him to a hospital.
The man told police that every time he tried to escape, a "supernatural figure" shoved him to the ground. Abdul Marlik could not immediately be reached and other police officials declined to comment.
Lisa
The Star
The paradigm has shifted. Dating is dated. Hooking up is here to stay.
Van Johnson, whose boy-next-door wholesomeness made him a popular Hollywood star in the '40s and '50s with such films as "30 Seconds over Tokyo," "A Guy Named Joe" and "The Caine Mutiny," died Friday of natural causes. He was 92. Johnson died at Tappan Zee Manor, an assisted living center in Nyack, N.Y., said Wendy Bleisweiss, a close friend.
With his tall, athletic build, handsome, freckled face and sunny personality, the red-haired Johnson starred opposite Esther Williams, June Allyson, Elizabeth Taylor and others during his two decades under contract to MGM.
He proved to be a versatile actor, equally at home with comedies ("The Bride Goes Wild," "Too Young to Kiss"), war movies ("Go for Broke," "Command Decision"), musicals ("Thrill of a Romance," "Brigadoon") and dramas ("State of the Union," "Madame Curie").
During the height of his popularity, Johnson was cast most often as the all-American boy. He played a real-life flier who lost a leg in a crash after the bombing of Japan in "30 Seconds Over Tokyo." He was a writer in love with a wealthy American girl (Taylor) in "The Last Time I Saw Paris." He appeared as a post-Civil War farmer in "The Romance of Rosy Ridge."
More recently, he had a small role in 1985 as a movie actor in Woody Allen's "The Purple Rose of Cairo."
A heartthrob with bobbysoxers -- he was called "the non-singing Sinatra" -- Johnson married only once. In 1947 at the height of his career, he eloped to Juarez, Mexico, to marry Eve Wynn, who had divorced Johnson's good friend Keenan Wynn four hours before.
The marriage produced a daughter, Schuyler, and ended bitterly 13 years later. "She wiped me out in the ugliest divorce in Hollywood history," Johnson told reporters.
As a young actor, Johnson had a brief run with Warner Bros. and then got a screen test and a contract with MGM with the help of his friend Lucille Ball.
After a bit in "The War Against Mrs. Hadley," Johnson appeared with Lionel Barrymore as "Dr. Gillespie's New Assistant," as Mickey Rooney's friend in "The Human Comedy" and as a Navy pilot in "Pilot No. 5."
His big break, with Irene Dunne and Spencer Tracy in the wartime fantasy "A Guy Named Joe," was almost wiped out by tragedy.
On April 1, 1943, his DeSoto convertible was struck head-on by another car. "They tell me I was almost decapitated, but I never lost consciousness," he remembered. "I spent four months in the hospital after they sewed the top of my head back on. I still have a disc of bone in my forehead five inches long."
"A Guy Named Joe" was postponed for his recovery, and the forehead scar went unnoticed in his resulting popularity. MGM cashed in on his stardom with three or four films a year. Among them: "The White Cliffs of Dover," "Two Girls and a Sailor," "Weekend at the Waldorf." "High Barbaree," "Mother Is a Freshman," "No Leave No Love" and "Three Guys Named Mike."
Though he hadn't lost his boyish looks, Johnson's vogue faded by the mid-'50s, and the film roles became sparse, though he did have a "comeback" movie with Janet Leigh in 1963, "Wives and Lovers."
Also in the 1960s he returned to the theater, playing "Damn Yankees" in summer theaters at $7,500 a week. Then he accepted a two-year contract to star in "The Music Man" in London.
He explained why in an interview: "Because the phone didn't ring. Because the film scripts were getting crummier and crummier. Because I sat beside my pool in Palm Springs one day and told myself: 'Van, you'll be 45 this year. If you don't start doing something now, you never will.'"
For three decades he was one of the busiest stars in regional and dinner theaters, traveling throughout the country from his New York base. In the 1980s, Johnson appeared on Broadway in "La Cage aux Folles," late in the run of the popular Jerry Herman musical.
"The white-haired ladies who come to matinees are the people who put me on top," he said in a 1992 in Michigan, where he was appearing at a suburban Detroit theater. "I'm still grateful to them." Television provided some gigs ("The Love Boat," "Fantasy Island" and "McMillan & Wife"), and he also became a painter, his canvases selling as high as $10,000. In a 1988 interview, he told of an important art lesson:
"I was on the Onassis yacht with Winston Churchill. He got his canvas out and so did I. He was working away, and he growled at me, 'Don't just sit there and stare! Get some paint and splash it on!'"
He was born Charles Van Dell Johnson on Aug. 25, 1916, in Newport, R.I., where his father was a real estate salesman. From his earliest years he was fascinated by the touring companies that played in Newport theaters, and after high school he announced his intention to try his luck in New York. He arrived in 1934 with $5 and his belongings packed in a straw suitcase.
Johnson's tour of casting offices landed him nothing but chorus jobs. He went to Hollywood for a bit in the movie of "Too Many Girls," then was signed to a Warner Bros. contract.
"First the zenith, then the nadir," Johnson recalled. "Warner Bros. dropped me after 'Murder in the Big House.'"
The discouraged young actor was about to return to New York when Ball, whom he knew on "Too Many Girls," invited him to dinner at Chasen's restaurant.
"Lucille tried to cheer me up, but I just couldn't seem to laugh," he said in a 1963 interview. "Suddenly she said to me, 'There's Billy Grady over there; he's MGM's casting director. I'm going to introduce you, and at least you're going to act like you're the star I think you will be.'"
An ant species that originated in the Black Sea region has invaded more than 100 areas across Europe and is moving north. Scientists say if it is not stopped, it will reach northern Germany, Scandinavia and Britain and could invade the whole world.
The pest, called Lasius neglectus, destroys native ant species as it invades new territory. It has also invaded much of Asia.
Last week in the journal PLoS ONE, scientists presented the first thorough study of the intruder, which was discovered in 1990 after moving into Hungary.
"Its rapid spread through Europe and Asia [is] the most recent example of a pest ant that may become a global problem," the scientists write.
Ants rule
Ants thrive all over the world because they are very adaptive. Urban ants, for example, have adapted to the extreme heat of city living.
Scientists estimate there are about 20,000 different species globally. The combined weight of ants in the Brazilian Amazon is thought to be four times greater than the combined mass of all of the mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians there.
When they arrive in new locations, ants can be extremely aggressive and very detrimental to local flora and fauna.
For example, the non-native red fire ant causes about $750 million of damage in the United States every year, the authors of the new study point out. The Argentine ant has spread along thousands of miles of coastline in southern Europe, exterminating the natural insect fauna. In California, the Argentine ant armies have nearly wiped out all native ants.
Unbelieveable numbers
L. neglectus resembles the common black garden ant, but its colonies involve up to 100 times as many workers. It frequently settles in parks and gardens, the researchers say, and it quickly exterminates native ants.
"When I saw this ant for the first time, I simply could not believe there could be so many garden ants in the same lawn," said University of Copenhagen researcher Jacobus J. Boomsma, a co-discoverer of the ant.
L. neglectus live in networks of interconnected nests, with many queens that mate underground and don't fly. So how do they spread across a continent? They infest potted plants, and humans carry them far and wide, the researchers said.
"The future will therefore see many more ants become invasive, so it is about time we understand their biology and this study is a major step in that direction," said Jes S. Pedersen, who coordinates the invasive ant program in Copenhagen.
MICHELLE
University of Copenhagen
Two more banks, one in Georgia and another in Texas, closed Friday. Haven Trust Bank was closed by the Georgia Department of Banking and Finance and
Sanderson State Bank was closed by the Texas Department of Banking.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was named receiver of both.
Branch Banking & Trust of Winston-Salem, N.C., will assume Haven Trust's $515 million in deposits for $112,000, according to an agreement with the FDIC.
Haven Trust's four branches reopen on Monday as branches of BB&T, and its depositors will automatically become depositors of BB&T. The FDIC says they can access all their money over the weekend by writing checks or using ATMs or debit cards.
The Pecos County State Bank will assume all of Sanderson State Bank's deposits, including those that exceeded the deposit insurance limit, according to a company press release.
Over the weekend, depositors of Sanderson State Bank will have access to all of their money by writing checks or using ATMs or debit cards. Checks drawn on the bank will continue to be processed. Loan customers should continue to make their payments as usual.
A South Florida pizza delivery man fought back with the only weapon he had when a customer pulled a gun on him.A large, steaming hot pepperoni pizza.
Police said 40-year-old Pizza Hut deliveryman Eric Lopez Devictoria threw the pie at the gunman Wednesday afternoon, then ran for safety. Police said at least one shot was fired as Devictoria fled, but he was uninjured.
Ask them to do a trick and they'll give it a try. For a reward, sausage say, they'll happily keep at it.
But if one dog gets no reward, and then sees another get sausage for doing the same trick, just try to get the first one to do it again.
Indeed, he may even turn away and refuse to look at you. Dogs, like people and monkeys, seem to have a sense of fairness.
"Animals react to inequity," said Friederike Range of the University of Vienna, Austria, who lead a team of researchers testing animals at the school's Clever Dog Lab. "To avoid stress, we should try to avoid treating them differently."
Similar responses have been seen in monkeys. Range said she wasn't surprised at the dogs' reaction, since wolves are known to cooperate with one another and appear to be sensitive to each other. Modern dogs are descended from wolves.
Next, she said, will be experiments to test how dogs and wolves work together.
"Among other questions, we will investigate how differences in emotions influence cooperative abilities," she said via e-mail.
In the reward experiments reported in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Range and colleagues experimented with dogs that understood the command "paw" to place their paw in the hand of a researcher.
It's the same game as teaching a dog to "shake hands."
Those that refused at the start - and one border collie that insisted on trying to herd other dogs - were removed. That left 29 dogs to be tested in varying pairs. The dogs sat side-by-side with an experimenter in front of them. In front of the experimenter was a divided food bowl with pieces of sausage on one side and brown bread on the other.
The dogs were asked to shake hands and each could see what reward the other received. When one dog got a reward and the other didn't, the unrewarded animal stopped playing.
When both got a reward all was well. One thing that did surprise the researchers was that - unlike primates - the dogs didn't seem to care whether the reward was sausage or bread.
Possibly, they suggested, the presence of a reward was so important it obscured any preference.
Other possibilities, they said, are that daily training with their owners overrides a preference, or that the social condition of working next to a partner increased their motivation regardless of which reward they got. And the dogs never rejected the food, something that primates had done when they thought the reward was unfair.
The dogs, the researchers said, "were not willing to pay a cost by rejecting unfair offers."
Clive Wynne, an associate professor in the psychology department of the University of Florida, isn't so sure the experiment measures the animals reaction to fairness.
"What it means is individuals are responding negatively to being treated less well," he said in a telephone interview.
But the researchers didn't do a control test that had been done in monkey studies, Wynne said, in which a preferred reward was visible but not given to anyone.
In that case the monkeys went on strike because they could see the better reward but got something lesser.
In dogs, he noted, the quality of reward didn't seem to matter, so the test only worked when they got no reward at all, he said.
However, Wynne added, there is "no doubt in my mind that dogs are very, very sensitive to what people are doing and are very smart."
In another sign of the grim holiday season, KB Toys filed for bankruptcy protection for the second time in four years on Thursday and plans to begin going-out-of business sales at its stores immediately.The 86-year-old company said in a filing that its debt is "directly attributable to a sudden and sharp decline in consumer sales" because of the poor economy.
That a toy retailer filed for bankruptcy just before Christmas shows how bleak things have become, since such stores make up to half of their sales during the holidays. But analysts expect toy sales this holiday season to be flat or down slightly from last year's total of $10.4 billion, according to market research firm NPD Group, because consumers are cutting back amid the recession.
In response, toy retailers, including KB Toys, amped up their discounts. KB Toys had aggressively cut prices to entice cash-strapped shoppers, offering hundreds of toys for $10 or less. It also expanded its value program, which offers deals on new items each week, and offered "Buy 2, Get 1 Free" promotions.
But the deals weren't enough. In the filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware, KB Toys said that between Oct. 5 and Dec. 8 sales in stores open at least one year, a key retail metric known as same-store sales, fell nearly 20 percent.
The company said it considered its alternatives and decided the most viable way to cover its debt was to begin liquidating its stores via immediate going-out-of-business sales. KB Toys also plans to sell its wholesale distribution business, according to the filing.
Filing for Chapter 11 protection rather than Chapter 7 liquidation allows a company to retain more control over selling off assets. Under Chapter 7, the court immediately appoints a trustee to take over the case.
The company operates 277 mall-based stores, 40 KB Toy Works stores which are mainly in strip malls, 114 outlet stores and 30 short-term holiday stores. It has 4,400 full-time employees and 6,515 seasonal employees.
KB Toys, which says it has about $480 million in annual sales, said in the filing that it had debts between $100 million and $500 million and total assets in the same range.
Vendors top the list of unsecured creditors. The toy retailer owes Hong Kong-based toy manufacturer Li && Fung about $27.2 million, El Segundo, Calif.-based Mattel Toys $1.3 million and St. Louis-based Energizer Battery more than $728,000. Other creditors are Hasbro Inc. and the maker of Legos.
Pittsfield, Mass.-based KB Toys filed for bankruptcy in 2004 and emerged nearly two years later as a subsidiary of investment firm Prentice Capital Management, which owns 90 percent of the company's common stock. During that bankruptcy, KB sold its retail Internet operation to eToys Direct Inc., cut the number of retail stores from 1,200 to 650 and closed a distribution center.
Jim Silver, a toy analyst at timetoplaymag.com, said KB had been struggling since emerging from its first bankruptcy protection in 2005.
"Manufacturers were concerned about shipping to them over the last couple of months," he said. "This did not happen all of a sudden."
He said that the timing of the filing was a surprise, however, since he expected it in January. But as manufacturers balked at shipping "hot" holiday toys, their sales dropped off. KB Toys also suffered from deciding not to sell video-game consoles such as the Nintendo Wii, one of the few toy items selling well this year, Silver said.
"Their business model didn't work," he said. "They're selling closeouts, today people want the hot toys."
Prehistoric Flying Reptile Was Bigger Than a Car A fossil of a toothless flying pterosaur, with a body bigger than some family cars, represents one of the largest of these extinct reptiles ever to be found and has forced the creation of a new genus, scientists announced today.
Pterosaurs ruled the skies 115 million years ago during the dinosaur age . They are often mistaken for dinosaurs .
Mark Witton of the University of Portsmouth identified the creature from a partial skull fossil. Witton estimates the beast would have had a 5.5-yard (5-meter) wingspan. It stood more than a yard (about 1 meter) tall at the shoulder.
"Some of the previous examples we have from this family in China are just 60 centimeters [about two feet] long -- as big as the skull of the new species. Put simply, it dwarfs any chaoyangopterid we've seen before by miles," Witton said.
The finding also is significant because it originated in Brazil and is the only example of the Chaoyangopteridae, a group of toothless pterosaurs, to be found outside China. Witton has christened the new species Lacusovagus, meaning "lake wanderer," after the large body of water in which the remains were buried. The findings are detailed in the November issue of the journal Palaeontology.
He was asked to examine the specimen, which had lain in a German museum for several years after its discovery in the Crato Formation of the Araripe Basin in northeastern Brazil, an area well known for the its fossils and their excellent state of preservation.
However, he said that this fossil was preserved in an unusual way, making its interpretation difficult.
"Usually fossils like this are found lying on their sides, but this one was lying on the roof of its mouth and had been rather squashed, which made even figuring out whether it had teeth difficult," Witton said.
"Still, it's clear to see that Lacusovagus had an unusually wide skull which has implications for its feeding habits -- maybe it liked particularly large prey. The remains are very fragmentary, however, so we need more specimens before we can draw any conclusions."
The discovery of this pterosaur fossil in Brazil, so far away from its closest relatives in China, demonstrates how little scientists still know about the distribution and evolutionary history of this group of creatures, Witton said.
Polar Dinosaurs Endured Cold, Dark Winters Polar dinosaurs such as the 3.3-ton duckbill Edmontosaurus are thought by some paleontologists to have been champion migrators to avoid the cold, dark season. But a study now claims that most of these beasts preferred to stick closer to home despite potentially deadly winter weather.
While some polar dinosaurs may have migrated, their treks were much shorter than previously thought, University of Alberta researchers Phil Bell and Eric Snively conclude from a recent review of past research on the animals and their habitat.
Polar dinosaurs include hadrosaurs , ceratopsians, tyrannosaurs, troodontids, hypsilophodontids, ankylosaurs, prosauropods, sauropods, ornithomimids and oviraptorosaurs . This idea goes against a once-popular "Happy Wanderers" theory published in 1980 by paleontologist Nicholas Hotton III, who thought that long-distance migration allowed polar dinosaurs to escape the coldest winter temperatures.
Hotton and others suggested that some dinosaurs living near the North Pole followed the centrally shifting sunlight, or latitudinal "sun line" where the sun ceases to rise for part of the year, as part of their migration. That would mean the animals might travel as far as 30 degrees of latitude, or 1,980 miles (3,200 kilometers) each way, in order to survive and avoid the total darkness of a polar winter.
"There are strong opinions regarding dinosaur migration, but we decided to take a different approach, looking at variables such as energy requirements," Bell said.
A comparison of great migrators
Bell and Snively's study led them to conclude that some migrating polar dinosaurs could have traveled up to 1,800 miles (3,000 kilometers) round-trip -- only half of the distance suggested previously by Hotton.
For comparison, here are some of the roundtrip distances covered by some of today's migrating land animals, according to the Alberta team:
Caribou -- 3,420 miles (5,505 kilometers)
Reindeer -- 1,242 miles (2,000 kilometers)
Mongolian gazelle -- 683 miles (1,100 kilometers)
Wolf -- 447 miles (720 kilometers)
Elephant -- 347 miles (560 kilometers)
Giraffe -- 49 miles (80 kilometers)
Dinosaurs fine up there
Discoveries of large bone beds all over Western North America have suggested to paleontologists that many dinosaurs in this region traveled long distances. In order to sustain the herd, "it seemed to make sense that they would be moving to and from the poles ," Bell said.
While this view of migration is feasible for some species of polar dinosaurs, it does not hold for all, he said.
"Many types of dinosaurs were surviving in polar latitudes at the time, and getting along quite fine," Bell said. "They were not physically able to remove themselves from the environment for a variety of reasons and had to adapt to the cold, dark winters just as the rest of us mammals do today."
In fact, some evidence suggests polar dinosaurs tolerated the cold remarkably well and adapted to lasting through the tough winters, Bell and Snively write. Sauropods, theropods and ankylosaurs all endured three months of winter darkness, possibly foraging on tough stuff like conifers, ginkgoes, horsetails and ferns, rather than hibernating or burrowing, some research suggests.
The mean annual temperatures at the poles were warmer than they are today, around 41 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius), according to research noted by Bell and Snively. This meant more foliage was available for munching, and also blocked movement and left less wide open space for migration.
Also, it is now known that some small theropod dinosaurs, including some tyrannosaurs, had feathers that could have kept them warmer in colder climates. Among polar dinosaurs, that could apply to troodontids, ornithomimids and oviraptorosaurs, which are all theropods.
What about Edmontosaurus?
Edmontosaurus has been considered the "poster boy" of migrating dinosaurs, Bell and Snively wrote in their study.
Fossil evidence for the dinosaur spans some 807 miles (1,300 km) between Alaska and central Alberta, south to Colorado, although this doesn't necessarily mean the animals covered this distance. This distribution could just represent the animals' dispersal over time, the authors write, just as saltwater crocodiles are found in waters ranging from Australia to India although they do not migrate across those distances.
But given their size and physiology, dinosaurs would have been incapable of sustaining the effort needed to make the trip, Bell and Snively concluded.
"When we looked at the energy requirements needed to support a three-tonne [2,200-pound] Edmontosaurus over this distance, we found it would have to be as energy efficient as a bird. No land animal travels that far today," Bell said.
However, it is possible that Edmontosaurus regalis, one of the three known species of this dinosaur, had the metabolism and fat deposition rates required to make a 1,600-mile (2,600-km) round-trip journey, traveling at speeds between 1.2 and 6.2 mph (2 and 10 kph) -- a slow walking pace for a human, the Alberta team claims.
Bell and Snively's findings were published in the September issue of Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Paleontology. The work was supported by the University of Alberta and an Alberta Ingenuity Fellowship received by Snively.
Walter
Palaeontology, University of Alberta
Clean Your Plate Or Pay Up At NYC BuffetDidn't your mother tell you to clean your plate?
If so, you'd be a good candidate for the all-you-can eat special at Hayashi Ya.
The Japanese restaurant on Manhattan's West Side imposes a surcharge for wasted and unfinished food. A chalkboard sign in front of the restaurant advertises all you can eat for $26.95 per person. But the sign says there's a 30 percent surcharge for wasted or unfinished food.
Huge Stash of Marijuana Found in Ancient TombDuuuuuude! The world's oldest stash of marijuana has been found in far western China, according to an article in the Journal of Experimental Botany.
An ancient Caucasian people, probably the Indo-European-speaking Yuezhi whose fair-haired mummies keep turning up in Xinjiang province, seem to have buried one of their shamans with a whopping 789 grams of high-potency pot 2,700 years ago.
That's about 28 ounces of killer green bud, worth perhaps $8,000 at today's street prices, and enough to keep Harold and Kumar happy for a couple of days.
"It was common practice in burials to provide materials needed for the afterlife," lead author Ethan B. Russo, a practicing neurologist and prominent medicinal-marijuana advocate based in Missoula, Mont., tells the Canadian Press. "No hemp or seeds were provided for fabric or food. Rather, cannabis as medicine or for visionary purposes was supplied."
But the researchers couldn't tell if the weed was meant to be smoked or eaten. No pipes, bongs or rolling papers were found in the tomb.
The ancient Greek historian Herodotus relates how the Scythians, Iranian-speaking nomads who roamed the steppes to the west of the Yuezhi in the first millennium B.C., liked to throw marijuana onto bonfires to induce trancelike states. It's possible the buried shaman followed similar practices.
They claimed to have their own bus, gatecrashed parties across Britain, and engaged in extravagant orgies on washing machines. But now the Facebook Republican Army, a gang of twenty-somethings who targeted teenage celebrations advertised on Facebook, say they never actually existed.
Referring to themselves as "every parent's worst nightmare", their activities have been reported in the British press for almost a year, most recently this past week. For a while it seemed that no one's teenage children - or home appliances - were safe. But speaking to The Times, Steve O'Brien, their supposed ringleader, said that the lies had gone on too long.
"It was a bit of a laugh," the 25 year-old plumber from Brighton, on the Channel coast south of London, said. "But it is now getting to the stage where it could be damaging for my job. I am looking yobbish [loutish], and I want to set the record straight."
Earlier this week, three national papers reported that a $1.5 million home in Brighton had been "trashed" after gate-crashers swelled the numbers for the 16th birthday party of Georgina Hobday from 100 to 400. The "horror show" devastation included a broken shed window, a dirty carpet, and second hand accounts that someone may have headbutted a mirror.
Earthquakes can set off volcanoes by shaking up molten rock like champagne in a bottle until they explode, a study suggests. The research shows that volcanoes erupt up to four times more often after a large earthquake than they would without the seismic agitation.
The effects of an earthquake can be felt hundreds of miles from the epicenter and are powerful enough to wake dormant volcanoes. However, it can take so long for a surge of molten rock to build up enough pressure to cause an eruption that several months can elapse between the trigger and the volcanic explosion.
The link between volcanoes and earthquakes has long been suspected, but the new research has provided the first statistical evidence. Researchers at the University of Oxford identified the "champagne effect" after analyzing records of volcanoes and earthquakes in southern Chile, the region where Charles Darwin first speculated on the likely link in 1835.
The research team found that the pattern of eruptions over the past 150 years showed a noticeable increase for a year after large earthquakes.
"The most unexpected part of this discovery was the considerable distance from the earthquake rupture where these eruptions took place, and the length of time for which we saw increased volcanic activity," said Sebastian Watt, one of the researchers.
Google has published its annual round-up of most-searched terms, revealing that the public spent much of the year procrastinating on Facebook, energized by the Large Hadron Collider and obsessing about the downfall of a bank in Iceland. Each year the search engine giant compiles its "zeitgeist" list, uncovering the most popular keywords among billions of Google queries.
One of the fastest rising search terms of 2008 was "Large Hadron Collider'" reflecting the way in which the giant atom-smasher that promises to reveal the secrets of the universe captured the public imagination as it was switched on in September.
In the U.K., "Large Hadron Collider" outranked even "Obama," despite the American presidential election's domination of the airwaves and front pages for weeks before his election win on Nov. 4.
Globally, the president-elect was beaten by his vanquished rival for the vice-presidency, Sarah Palin. The governor of Alaska topped the worldwide list of fastest rising queries.
Obama was only sixth in the list of top climbers, just behind the late Heath Ledger, who played the Joker in the latest "Batman" movie. He died in January after taking an overdose of prescription drugs.
Russia and China are protecting gangs of criminals engaged in cybercrimes such as Internet fraud, blackmail and money laundering, a study said Tuesday.
Security firm McAfee's 2008 Virtual Criminology Report, subtitled "Cybercrime: The Next Wave," draws on interviews with senior staff at organizations such as Britain's Serious Organized Crime Agency, the United Nations and the FBI.
It found that a number of countries were providing "political cover" for criminals against attempts at prosecution by other nations.
"The cyber-kingpins remain at large while minor mules are caught and brought to rights," the report reads. "Some governments are guilty of protecting their in-country offenders."
The study found that Russia and China were among those harboring Internet criminal networks, and that they are "especially reluctant to co-operate with foreign law-enforcement bodies for reputation and intelligence reasons."
"A lot of it is corruption," said Dr. Ian Brown of the University of Oxford, one of the report's authors. "In Russia, it is in regional governments and police agencies -- there are connections between the cyber-criminals in those areas."
The report also sounded a warning about the growing threat of cyberterrorism, saying Internet hackers will soon become "powerful enough to launch attacks that will damage and destroy critical national infrastructure," including electrical grids, gas and water supplies and bank-payment systems.
They were driven from the Iberian Peninsula in one of Europe's notorious purges. But more than 500 years after the last Jews and Muslims were "ethnically cleansed" from Spain and Portugal, their ancestors are thriving.
Spanish film starlet Penelope Cruz or the Oscar-winning director Pedro Almodovar might originally be descended from Jewish stock. Equally, the tempestuous Portuguese football manager Jose Mourinho or the Nobel prize-winning novelist Jose Saramago may well have had Muslim ancestors.
These intriguing genealogical possibilities arose after a study found evidence that 19.8 percent of today's Spaniards and Portuguese have Sephardic Jewish ancestry. Another 10.6 percent have a genetic make-up that suggests they were descended from North African Moors.
The study found that the genetic signatures of Spaniards and the Portuguese indicate evidence of mass conversions of Sephardic Jews and Muslims to Catholicism from the 15th century.
In 1492 King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile completed the Reconquista (Recapturing) of the Iberian Peninsula by Catholic forces from the Muslim rulers who had held what is today Spain and Portugal since 711.
The Catholic monarchs then forced Jews and Muslims to convert to Catholicism or go into exile. Despite their best efforts to "ethnically cleanse" the Iberian peninsula, the genetic fingerprint of Jews and Muslims remains until today.
NC Man Tells Police Cat Shot Him
It turns out the cat wasn't the culprit after all. That information came to light after a man in Rockingham County claimed he was accidentally shot by his cat early Friday morning, reported WXII-TV.
Rockingham County Sheriff's Department spokesman Dean Venable said Charlie Banks Busick, 24, told police that as he was sitting on a loveseat in his home shortly before 1:30 a.m., his cat jumped onto his Glock .45-caliber pistol, causing it to fire a round into his hip.
Busick later changed his story and admitted that as he was getting up from the loveseat, his thumb accidentally hit the trigger, causing the gun to fire, Venable said.
Venable said a friend took Busick to the hospital to be treated for his wound. It wasn't immediately known if Busick was being charged with a crime.
Lisa
NY Times, Journal of Experimental Botany, Reuter's, University of Oxford, Google, McAfee, WXII-TV
Seeking the ultimate red carpet, or perhaps a chance to get a good word in for humanity to whoever might be Out There watching, the makers of the new movie "The Day the Earth Stood Still" arranged for it to be beamed into space on today, on the same day the movie opened here on planet Earth.
How much would you pay for a ;-)?A Russian businessman has trademarked the emoticon - or combination of punctuation marks - used to convey a wink in text messages and e-mail.
Oleg Teterin, president of the mobile ad company Superfone, said Thursday he doesn't plan on tracking down individual users following the decision by the federal patent agency.
"I want to highlight that this is only directed at corporations, companies that are trying to make a profit without the permission of the trademark holder," he said in comments to NTV.
Companies will be sent legal warnings if they use the symbol without his permission, he said.
"Legal use will be possible after buying an annual license from us," he was quoted by Kommersant as saying. "It won't cost that much -- tens of thousands of dollars."
He also said since other similar emoticons - :-) or ;) or :) - resemble the one he has trademarked, use of those symbols could also fall under his ownership.
Other Russian Internet entrepreneurs reacted to the effort predictably -
:(
"Imagine the next wise-guy who trademarks the 33 letters of the Russian alphabet and then says anyone who uses the Russian alphabet has to send him money. It's absurd," Alexander Manis, the director of a broadband internet and mobile company, told NTV.
Maksim Mashkov, owner of an Internet cafe and bookstore, said he doubted the trademark's legal basis since the symbol has existed in the public domain for years.
Indeed, Russia media said Teterin wasn't the first to try to trademark the symbol in Russia. Kommersant said a St. Petersburg court in 2005 agreed with an appeal from the German corporation Siemens, which was sued by a Russian man claiming he held the trademark.
Scott Fahlman, a professor at the Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, claims that he was the first to use three keystrokes - a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis - as a horizontal "smiley face" in a computer message 25 years ago.
Bank of America Corp. said this week it expects to eliminate 30,000 to 35,000 jobs over the next three years, as it faces a deteriorating economic environment and tries to absorb Merrill Lynch & Co.Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America said it hasn't yet completed its analysis for eliminating positions, and a final number will not be determined until early next year. It said the cuts will affect workers from both companies and all types of businesses.
Thursday's announcement of job cuts was hardly unexpected, considering the merger and the wave of job losses seen in the banking industry and in other sectors over the past few months. Bank of America and Merrill Lynch have already eliminated thousands of investment banking jobs over the past year, as have other banks, in an effort to lower costs as they face increasing defaults in mortgages, credit card debt and other loans.
Bank of America is considered one of the country's healthier banks, and its decision illustrates how widespread the wave of layoffs hitting the United States is. The nation lost more than half a million jobs in November alone.
New York-based Citigroup Inc. has been slashing jobs the most - by next year, Citigroup expects to have shrunk its work force by 75,000, or 20 percent, since its headcount peaked in late 2007.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. is shedding about 7,000 employees, or 10 percent, of its investment bank staff, and cutting 9,200 jobs at Washington Mutual Inc., the bank it acquired in September. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley, meanwhile, are reducing their staffs by about 10 percent.
The shotgun deal between Bank of America and Merrill, valued at $50 billion when it was initially announced in September, was struck as the solvency of investment banks was in grave doubt, and kept Merrill from a complete meltdown like the one suffered by Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., which was forced to file for bankruptcy. Shareholders of both companies voted to approve the deal last week and it is expected to close by Jan. 1.
Bank of America shares fell $1.78, or 11 percent, to close at $14.91 on Thursday, while Merrill shares fell $1.43, or 10 percent, to $12.67. In after-hours trading, Bank of America shares rose 12 cents to $15.03, and Merrill shares rose a penny to $12.68.
Will
Various Wire Services
Big Surprise Lands In Salvation Army Kettle
An anonymous donor left a holiday surprise in the Salvation Army kettles in Prescott, Ariz., a representative of the organization said.
The organization was counting the kettle collections Friday when members noticed 12 small bags with accompanying notes that read, "A little gold can go a long way. Merry Christmas."
Inside each bag was a piece of gold jewelry ranging in value from $40 to $275 - more than $1,000 total, KPHO-TV in Phoenix reported.
"It is nice to live in a community where our neighbors care so much about the needs of others," said Major Kyle Trimmer, a corps officer of the Salvation Army in Prescott. The organization plans to sell the jewelry by the piece at minimum retail value.
Santa Attacked By Large Cat At Pet StoreSanta Claus won't need rabies shots after all.
It turns out that a large kitty that drew blood after biting a volunteer Santa Claus at a charity event in New Jersey had been properly vaccinated.
The cat's owner, Christine Haughey, came forward and produced vaccination records after learning that 47-year-old Jonathan Bebbington, the Santa, might have to receive the shots.
Bebbington said the cat bit his wrist and hand Sunday after becoming terrified because dogs were nearby at the Santa Paws photo event for an animal-rescue group. The 25-year-old Haughey left after the attack. Haughey told WMGM-TV that her cat, Benny, is a mix between a house cat and a bobcat.
MICHELLE
KPHO-TV, WMGM-TV
Cancer will overtake heart disease as the world's top killer by 2010, part of a trend that should more than double global cancer cases and deaths by 2030, international health experts reported Tuesday.Rising tobacco use in developing countries is believed to be a huge reason for the shift, particularly in China and India, where 40 percent of the world's smokers now live.
So is better diagnosing of cancer, along with the downward trend in infectious diseases that used to be the world's leading killers.
Cancer diagnoses around the world have steadily been rising and are expected to hit 12 million this year. Global cancer deaths are expected to reach 7 million, according to the new report by the World Health Organization.
An annual rise of 1 percent in cases and deaths is expected -- with even larger increases in China, Russia and India. That means new cancer cases will likely mushroom to 27 million annually by 2030, with deaths hitting 17 million.
Underlying all this is an expected expansion of the world's population -- there will be more people around to get cancer.
The report is being released Tuesday by the WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer at a news conference with officials from the American Cancer Society, the Lance Armstrong Foundation, Susan G. Komen for the Cure and the National Cancer Institute of Mexico.
The "unprecedented" gathering of organizations is an attempt to draw attention to the global threat of cancer, which isn't recognized as a major, growing health problem in some developing countries, said John Seffrin, the cancer society's chief executive officer.
The organizations are issuing a call to action, asking the U.S. government to help fund cervical cancer vaccinations and to ratify an international tobacco control treaty.
"If we take action, we can keep the numbers from going where they would otherwise go," Seffrin said.
Other groups are also voicing support for more action. "Cancer is one of the greatest untold health crises of the developing world," said Dr. Douglas Blayney, president-elect of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Cuts Jobs; Stops Distribution In 22 CountiesThe Atlanta Journal-Constitution will reduce its circulation area to 27 counties around metro Atlanta and cut 156 jobs in its third cost-cutting move since early 2007.
The newspaper said Wednesday that effective Jan. 11 it will eliminate distribution in 22 counties: Banks, Butts, Dawson, Fannin, Gilmer, Greene, Habersham, Haralson, Heard, Jackson, Lumpkin, Morgan, Pickens, Rabun, Spalding, Towns, Troup, Union, and White in Georgia, and Cherokee, Clay and Macon in North Carolina. The move will reduce daily and Sunday circulation about 5 percent.
Pump Price Hits 5-Year LowThe price of gasoline keeps going down.
Analyst Trilby Lundberg said the average price fell 22 cents a gallon during the past two weeks to its lowest level in nearly five years. The average price of regular on Friday was $1.75 a gallon.
The all-time high was in July, when the price peaked at $4.11 a gallon.
'Christmases' Keeps Cash Registers Jingling
Movie crowds are staying in the holiday spirit, making "Four Christmases" the box office leader for the second straight weekend.
The Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn comedy earned $18.2 million. Next was the spooky "Twilight" with $13.2 million and "Bolt" with $9.7 million.
Rounding out the top five were "Australia," with $7 million and Quantum of Solace, with $6.6 million.
Media conglomerate Tribune Co. has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.The owner of the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Cubs, Wrigley Field and other properties has $13 billion in debt.
"Over the last year, we have made significant progress internally on transitioning Tribune into an entrepreneurial company that pursues innovation and stronger ways of serving our customers," Sam Zell, chairman and CEO of Tribune, said in a prepared statement. "Unfortunately, at the same time, factors beyond our control have created a perfect storm -- a precipitous decline in revenue and a tough economy coupled with a credit crisis that makes it extremely difficult to support our debt."
Severe reductions in advertising this year because of the recession has put pressure on the company. Most of its debt comes from the complex transaction in which the company was taken private last December in an $8.2 billion buyout led by Zell. Although the next major principal payment isn't due until June, analysts said Tribune has been in danger of missing lender-imposed financial targets.
The Wall Street Journal, quoting people familiar with the matter, said Tribune Co.'s cash flow may not be enough to cover nearly $1 billion in interest payments that are due this year. Tribune made the filing Monday in bankruptcy court in Delaware.
The company said it will continue to operate its media businesses during the restructuring, including publishing its newspapers and running its television stations and interactive properties. It added that it has sufficient cash to maintain operations.
As posted earlier on 360 Degrees, the Tribune Co. reportedly hired financial advisers ahead of the filing. The Chicago Tribune reported that its parent had hired investment bank Lazard Ltd. and law firm Sidley Austin as it considers its financial options.
Men tend to have reddish skin while women's is more green, according to a new psychological study.Michael J. Tarr of Brown University said in a news release that color is an important part of how people tell a man from a woman.
In the lab, Tarr's team analyzed 200 images of faces of white people from a databank in Germany. He then used a computer to analyze the amount of red and green pigment in the faces.
He found that men have more red in their faces and women have more green, contrary to prior assumptions.
"If it is on the more red end of the spectrum (the face) had a higher probability of being male. Conversely, if it is on the green end of the spectrum (the face) had a higher probability of being female," Tarr said.
Some women's faces are much redder and some men's faces are much greener, the researcher said, but Tarr concluded that people use the color of a face when trying to identify its gender. That is particularly true when the shape of the given face is ambiguous or hidden, such as tests he performed where most of the shape and details of face were blurred, but people were still able to correctly guess the sex of the person in the photo.
Tarr said the information has a number of potential industry or consumer applications in areas such as facial recognition technology, advertising and studies of how and why women apply makeup.
The 5.1-magnitude temblor struck just outside Ludlow on Interstate 40 in San Bernardino County, about 120 miles east of Los Angeles, the U.S. Geological Survey said. The initial reports measured the quake at 5.5 magnitude.
"The ground was rolling underneath but it was very light. Nothing," said Jeremy Chestnut, 20, who works at a Dairy Queen in Ludlow. "I was standing in front of an ice cream machine and it makes the ground shake, too."
The quake is the second one above a magnitude-5.0 to hit Southern California this year. In July, a magnitude-5.4 quake centered in the hills east of Los Angeles was the strongest to rattle a populated area of Southern California since the 1994 Northridge disaster.
In the town of Yermo, about 20 miles from Ludlow, a dozen people in Lee's Tavern didn't seem too concerned when the bottles began to rattle.
"Everyone said, 'Oh, it's an earthquake."' said Leon Lee, the bar's owner. "We didn't hardly feel anything, just some kind of vibration."
The quake struck 16 miles northwest of Ludlow, which has a population of 10, according to the 2000 U.S. Census.
The quake "is relatively shallow and if it were located in a more populated area it could be very damaging," USGS seismologist Richard Buckmaster said. "But it's out in the middle of the desert, in the middle of nowhere."
Across the Colorado River at the western Arizona border, Fort Mojave Tribal police dispatcher Jessica Hopkins said she felt a gentle rumbling.
Shaking was also felt in Las Vegas, said Scott Allison, a spokesman for the Clark County Fire Department in Nevada. He said there were no reports of injuries or damage.
"People were just calling 911 saying, 'Did I feel the earth move?"' Allison said.
The quake was just a few miles from where a 7.1-magnitude earthquake hit in 1999. USGS seismologist Lucy Jones said it was probably an aftershock of that shake. She said it's not uncommon for big earthquakes to spawn aftershocks years later. Southern California on average feels about three moderate earthquakes a year, but the region has been unusually quiet since the Northridge quake, Jones said.
Kelly Ghiloni, a spokeswoman with the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department, said she felt shaking for about 15 seconds but saw no major damage.
"There was some shaking, a little bit of rattling," Ghiloni said. "It was enough to wake you up and know there was an earthquake."
USGS geophysicist Rafael Abreu said the closest fault is the Lavic Lake Fault.
Will
U.S. Geological Survey
Tribune has hired bankruptcy advisers as the ailing newspaper company faces a potential bankruptcy filing, people briefed on the matter said.
A record one in 10 American homeowners with a mortgage were either at least a month behind on their payments or in foreclosure at the end of September as the source of housing market pressure shifted to the crumbling U.S. economy.The Mortgage Bankers Association said Friday the percentage of loans at least a month overdue or in foreclosure was up from 9.2 percent in the April-June quarter, and up from 7.3 percent a year earlier.
Distress in the home loan market started about two years ago as increasing numbers of adjustable-rate loans reset to higher interest rates. But the latest wave of delinquencies is coming from the surge in unemployment.
Employers slashed 533,000 jobs in November, the most in 34 years, catapulting the unemployment rate to 6.7 percent, the Labor Department said Friday.
"Now it's a case of job losses hitting more across the board," Jay Brinkmann, chief economist of the Mortgage Bankers Association.
The U.S. tipped into recession last December, a panel of experts declared earlier this week. Since the start of the recession, the economy has lost 1.9 million jobs.
Job losses are already having an impact in rising delinquency rates for traditional 30-year fixed rate loans made to borrowers with strong credit. Total delinquencies on those loans rose to 3.35 percent in September from 3.07 percent at the end of June, the Mortgage Bankers Association said.
There were some modest signs of stabilization. The number of loans that entered the foreclosure process totaled 1.07 percent of all loans in the third quarter, flat from the second quarter.
Though that number likely reflects changes in state laws that delay or extend the foreclosure process and efforts to work out or modify loans that could still fall back into foreclosure.
WSB Radio Co-Anchor/Host Dies Of Heart Attack On BirthdayMike Kavanagh, the award-winning "Money Matters Radio Talk Show" host on News/Talk 750 WSB, died Saturday after suffering a heart attack at his home in suburban Atlanta. He had just turned 57 that day.
WSB Radio news director Chris Camp said Kavanagh was on vacation when he passed away. Camp said Kavanagh had a heart attack while putting up holiday decorations. Camp said Christmas was Kavanagh's favorite time of year.
Kavanagh's 18-year career at WSB Radio included 15 years as co-anchor of "Atlanta's Evening News" on News/Talk 750 WSB alongside Lisa Campbell before hosting "Money Matters."
"Mike was an incredible talent, my longtime co-anchor, but most of all, my dear, dear friend. I will miss sharing our stories, and hearing about how much he loved Grace. There will never be another Kavanagh," Campbell told WSB Radio.
"Mike had a way of making you feel like things would be ok -- that as bad as things have been for folks in the past year, things would get better."
Kavanagh's long and respected journalism career included work in the early days of CNN both as a radio anchor for daily business news and as a TV anchor for "CNN Headline News." His career spanned the country, including stops in Washington, D.C., and New York.
He was part of a noted team that backed up consumer advocate Clark Howard and was a recipient of the prestigious Edward R. Murrow award.
"He cared about every last person he dealt with about what would happen to them financially," said Howard. "Especially in this last year, he would shepherd people through the crisis. After a while that can begin to wear on you," Howard told WSB Radio.
Sunny von Bülow, 76, Focus of Society Drama, Dies
H. M., an Unforgettable Amnesiac, Dies at 82Jan Kemp, UGA Whistleblower, Dies At 59
Jan Kemp, the University of Georgia professor who publicly criticized the school for allowing athletes to continue playing sports and stay in school after they failed remedial classes, has died. She was 59.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Kemp died of complications from Alzheimer's Disease on Friday at an Athens nursing home.
Kemp was fired from the university in 1982. She sued in federal court the following year, claiming she was targeted because she protested UGA's preferential treatment of athletes. The jury awarded her $2.57 million in 1986, though that was later reduced to $1.08 million.
U.S. Marks 74th Anniversary of Pearl Harbor AttackWith an eye on the immediate aftermath of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, thousands of World War II veterans and other observers today commemorated the 67th anniversary of the devastating Japanese military raid.
The theme of the event - "Pacific War Memories: The Heroic Response to Pearl Harbor" - was something of a departure from the past.
Usually, the commemoration focuses on the attack on the USS Arizona, Pearl Harbor and several other installations on Oahu. But this year's remembrance ceremony centered more on the months following the raid, said Eileen Martinez, chief of interpretation for the National Park Service.
"We're moving into the Pacific War, the first strike back," she said.
To that end, one of two keynote speakers were Thomas Griffin, a surviving member of the pilots and crew who answered the Pearl Harbor attack four months later with an aircraft carrier-launched bomber raid on Tokyo.
The B-25 mission, led by Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle, inflicted little damage on Japan but boosted morale in America and led the embarrassed Japanese government to launch an ill-fated attack on Midway Island.
The other keynote address was delivered by Admiral Robert F. Willard, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
Sunday's commemoration featured a performance by the U.S. Pacific Fleet Band, morning colors, a Hawaiian blessing, a rifle salute by the U.S. Marine Corps and a recognition of those who survived the attack.
At 7:55 a.m., when the attack began 67 years ago, a moment of silence was observed. The destroyer USS Chung-Hoon will render honors to the USS Arizona, which still lies beneath the harbor with its dead. Almost 2,400 Americans were killed and nearly 1,180 injured when Japanese fighters bombed and sank 12 naval vessels and heavily damaged nine others on Dec. 7, 1941. The Arizona, which sank in less than nine minutes after an armor-piercing bomb breached its deck and exploded in the ship's ammunition magazine, lost 1,177 sailors and marines. About 340 of its crew survived.
Other major installations on Oahu, such as Wheeler Field and Kaneohe Naval Air Station, also were attacked.
This year's ceremony comes weeks after construction began on a new visitor's center for the USS Arizona Memorial. The existing center, which was built 28 years ago on reclaimed land, is sinking. Officials have said it will be unusable in a few years.
This year's event will be held a half-mile away at Kilo Pier of Naval Station Pearl Harbor, the site for next year's commemoration as well. The new visitor's center is scheduled to open Dec. 7, 2010.
Nearly seven decades have passed since 89-year-old Dallas Harvey witnessed the horrific attack at Pearl Harbor, but the brutal images remain emblazoned in his memory as if not a day had gone by.
In an interview with Telegraph.com, Harvey - who was a 21-year-old medic on the USS Argonne repair ship on the day of the attack on Dec. 7, 1941 - spoke of a harbor full of black smoke and chaos aboard the ships. The water was burning, the oil had spilled out from the ships and it looked like the whole harbor was on fire, Harvey said.
Three planes that I recall came over and dropped bombs on the naval air station on a small island in the bay ... the third plane flew over our ship, then I saw the red dots (of the Japanese sun insignia) on the wings, and learned that the attackers were from Japan, Harvey told the Telegraph.
"I was almost positive we would be prisoners by nightfall," Harvey told the Telegraph.
He added that he suppressed many painful memories from the surprise morning attack by the Japanese in Hawaii, including the grim task of unloading hundreds of bodies from the destroyed ships onto the dock.
I blocked that part out until 50 years later, when I went to the 50-year reunion ... I had a total blackout.
Harvey, one of the last living survivors of the attack that killed 2,402 and wounded 1,282, says he bears no ill will toward the Japanese. He retired from the Navy after 30 years of service and lives with his family in Southern Illinois, according to the Telegraph.
Will
The Large Hadron Collider, whose inauguration as the world's biggest particle accelerator was cut short by an electrical accident last September, will run again next summer, but not at its full design strength, the project director said Friday. 
IS there life left in the dead parrot sketch?
It is a common sentiment in a society where many of us strive to look and feel decades younger - to prove to ourselves and the world that we are healthier and more vital than our parents were at our age. We've all heard it: 60 is the new 50, the new 40 and so on.But often, we need a little help. Sometimes, a lot of help.
As the baby boomers march toward retirement, Botox, wrinkle fillers and hormones of various kinds have become big business. Medco's latest drug trend report shows, for instance, that human growth hormone use grew almost 6 percent in 2007.
The list for age-defying tactics is endless. Want six-pack abs? There's a surgical procedure to create fake ones. How about drastically cutting your calorie intake to slow the aging process? There's a group of die-hards that swears by it.
This search for eternal youthfulness certainly isn't new. "In 1,500 B.C. people were ingesting tiger gonads to rejuvenate them," says Dr. Gene Cohen, a George Washington University expert on aging. But for a generation of adults who've been weaned on the modern marketing message - that for a price, you can have it all - the quest is taking on a new urgency.
There is, of course, much to be said for taking good care of yourself. Eating healthy and exercising your body and your brain regularly are considered tried-and-true tactics for staying young. Protecting yourself from harmful sun rays is another. Even flossing teeth is a habit that, according to research on people who live to 100, might extend life.
But that's generally where the consensus ends.
Many in mainstream medicine and elsewhere worry that we're becoming too focused on treatments with short-term benefits that have potentially dangerous side effects and scant, if any, evidence that they'll help in the long run. In doing so, they wonder if some people are actually jeopardizing their chance at a long, healthy life, both physically and emotionally.
"The quest to live forever and the desire to avoid diseases and not suffer" is understandable, says S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor and longevity researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
"There's a large industry of people trying to sell to people what doesn't yet exist and they're making gobs of money doing it -- much to the dismay of those of us who are vigilant about protecting public health," he says.
There also are concerns that this obsession is sending the wrong message to younger generations. Surveys from cosmetic surgery trade groups suggest that sizable numbers of people, even in their 20s, are getting cosmetic procedures.
And a fall 2007 survey from TRU, a research firm that specializes in the teenage demographic, found that a quarter of young people, 12 to 19 - and a third of girls in that age group - are interested in having cosmetic surgery to improve their appearance.
Michael Wood, vice president and director of syndicated research at TRU, was a bit startled by the results.
"There's no doubt that the celebration of youth and looking younger has certainly accelerated in the last 10 years, five years even," Wood says. "And this is a generation that's growing up with that at a very young age."
The effect has been palpable, says Neil Howe, a respected generational expert who has written extensively about "millennials," young people who are coming of age in this century.
"I guess even young isn't enough anymore," Howe says. "It's got to be 'perfect' young."
Alex Sabbag, a 23-year-old Chicagoan, has felt the pressure, both self-imposed and societal.
"I'll age until I'm 25. Then I'm over it," she said to co-workers during a lunchroom conversation that turned to the topic of Botox.
She was only partly serious. But she says she's also accepted that we live in a society where being well put-together and youthful gives you status.
"We all buy into it," Sabbag says. And plastic surgery and other cosmetic procedures are part of it.
She's never had anything done, though wouldn't rule it out in the future. She also vividly recalls how her mother left home for several days, when Sabbag was in elementary school, and returned after having a facelift.
For a group known as the Calorie Restriction Society, youthfulness isn't found in hormones. It's reducing food intake to, in some cases, near-starvation levels. But the claims are much the same -- "lots of energy" and feeling "sharp," says Brian Delaney, a 45-year-old California-born writer now living in Sweden. He's the president of the group that claims about 2,000 members worldwide and many more followers who use the method in hopes of markedly increasing their longevity.
By cutting daily calories to about 1,900, roughly half the recommended amount for someone his height and age, and exercising every day, Delaney has shrunk himself to about 140 pounds. He says his blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar levels have improved dramatically. At 5 foot 11, he admits he's "scrawny," which he calls the main drawback.
Hunger and wearing extra clothes to stay warm - because of little body fat or, he claims, an effect of slowed aging - are barely annoyances for Delaney. He says he eats sensibly, replacing junk food with lots of fruits and vegetables, no meat, and two meals daily - no lunch. Breakfast is often "a hearty bowl" of granola, with fruit, nuts and soy milk; while dinner could be fish, rice, beans, a large salad and red wine.
Other than "tons of fine wrinkles" he blames on too much sun as a kid, Delaney says in most respects, "I look much younger" than 45.
It is a bragging right many strive for.
"When we were younger, we'd talk about someone who was 60 and that was old. And now my gym is full of women over 60 and they look phenomenal," says Renee Young, a 48-year-old businesswoman in New Rochelle, N.Y. "They don't want to be categorized as old."
But there's more to it than that. Youthfulness, she says frankly, is also a means of survival in the business world, including in her line of work, public relations.
"It feels like you're put out to pasture. No one wants to feel that how they look means that their ability to do anything is decreased," Young says. "If you have a younger look, you feel healthier. You feel that you're still in the game."
In the back of her mind is the fact that her own mother died when she was only 56. So five or six mornings a week, even when she'd rather pull the covers over her head, Young gets up and puts in two hours at the gym.
That's more than double the hour or so a day generally recommended for optimal health. And still, for her, that wasn't enough. She recently spent nearly $20,000 on a tummy tuck because, as she puts it, no number of abdominal crunches was going to make her as trim as she wanted to be. The result has been a makeover for her entire sense of self, she says.
"I made a commitment this summer. If I was going to go through all this surgery, then it was going to have to be part of a complete program," says Young, who's also getting more rest and eating healthier.
"I can definitely see the result." She, too, says she has not felt this good in years.
Using a cosmetic procedure as a motivator is worthwhile, and lucrative, to say the least, says Dr. Jonathan Lippitz. He's an emergency room physician in suburban Chicago who does cosmetic procedures, such as Botox and skin fillers, in a separate practice.
But it's also a "very slippery slope," with patients sometimes willing to take more risk than they should and some doctors who'll accommodate.
In his own practice, he says he finds himself continually walking a fine line in deciding which procedures he'll do - and which ones he won't.
"We all say, 'I want my hair different. I want my eyes different,' " Lippitz says. "This idea of being perfect is a problem, though, because it's not reality.
"I have people coming in and saying 'I want these lips.' I say, 'You can't have these lips.'
"I say, 'We'll work with what you have.' "
But what if what they have is just fine? These are the sorts of questions that trouble Dr. Michael Morgan, a dentist who does cosmetic work in another Chicago suburb.
He's been seeing more young, female clients walking through his doors. And even his own 13-year-old daughter asked if he would whiten her teeth, something he didn't think she needed. Nor did he consider it safe for her young teeth or "age appropriate."
"There's a consciousness about it. They are much more concerned with the appearance of their face. But there's also a social pressure," he says of the younger generation for whom he'll do the most conservative procedures, but no more.
He sounds a little sad when he talks about it.
"There's nothing wrong with wanting to look better. We want to look young. We want to look great," he says. "But part of that feeling has to come from within."
For those going to even greater lengths to try to keep aging - and ultimately death - at bay, there also are no guarantees. Calorie restriction guru Dr. Roy Walford succumbed to complications from Lou Gehrig's disease at age 79, closer to the average than the "extraordinarily long life" his followers talk about on their Web site.
Meanwhile, Dr. Alan Mintz, founder of Cenegenics, died at the relatively young age of 69 due to complications during a brain biopsy. Some research has suggested that human growth hormone injections can cause cancer. They've also been linked with nerve pain, elevated cholesterol and increased risks for diabetes.
Even so, Life, now the chief medical officer at Cenegenics, remains steadfast. Among other things, he points to studies that suggest that human growth hormone in low doses poses no cancer risk if there is no pre-existing cancer.
It started with one generous customer who inspired dozens of others to pay it forward at an Iowa Starbucks outside of Des Moines.When the man pulled up to the drive-through window to pay for his coffee, he also picked up the tab for the car behind him, KCCI-TV reported.
So, the next customer followed his lead.
This is not the first time it's happened, but it would usually only last for three or four customers before someone would say thanks and drive off without paying forward, but on Friday it just kept going. It could be just that time of year where people get caught up in the holiday spirit.
Whatever sparked the generosity in the Starbuck's drive-through, it quickly spread. Store manager Megan Rezek said it has happened before, but never quite like this.
"I've never seen it go on for as long as it did today," said Rezek.
As Rezek was working the window, she was keeping track of the customers paying it forward and was shocked to see it growing and growing.
"It was a really neat thing that it happened, and so of course, I paid it back too by paying for the next person behind me too," said customer Kate Gamble.
Starbucks is part of Gamble's morning routine, but this was a first. She was No. 50 to pay it forward.
"Just really nice to see the Christmas spirit of it and still having people do this kind of thing even with the economical crisis we've all been going through this year," said Gamble
The spirit was brewing again in the afternoon as people came through for a latte or mocha.
"I think it's great. I think it's great whenever people do something like that, especially when it's unexpected. So I decided to return the favor," said Kelly Spencer.
"It's such a simple thing. A cup of coffee is such a simple thing, but it means such a great deal to so many people that I don't know. It's so heartwarming. I just love it when that happens," said Rezek.
A total of 53 customers paid it forward. Rezek said that it likely would have continued, but as the morning rush slowed the last car had no one behind it in line. So it came to an end.
Atheists who are Pro-life 
Pearl Harbor Commemoration To Focus On US Response
There's a different focus to Sunday's 67th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Usually, the commemoration focuses on the attack on the USS Arizona, Pearl Harbor and several other installations on Oahu. But the theme this year is "Pacific War Memories: The Heroic Response to Pearl Harbor."
It will focus more on events following the raid that killed 2,400 Americans and destroyed or damaged more than 20 naval vessels on Dec. 7, 1941.
It has remained one of World War II's most enduring mysteries, one that resonated decades later after Sept. 11: Who in Washington knew what and when before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941?
In an interview, Mr. Hanyok said there were several lessons from the controversy that reverberate today. He said that some adherents of the theory that the message was sent and seen were motivated by an unshakable faith in the efficacy of radio intelligence, and that when a copy of the message could not be found they blamed a cover-up - a reminder that no intelligence-gathering is completely foolproof.
That war with Japan was anticipated is apparent from a separate memorandum to President Franklin D. Roosevelt dated Nov. 13, 1941, from William J. Donovan, director of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. The memorandum was found in the National Archives last year by the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group.
Montana might not be the best place to be this holiday season if you want to avoid drunken drivers.That's according to a report produced last month by Forbes.com studying each state's 2007 traffic fatalities involving legally drunk drivers.
Montana topped the list, with 106 fatalities, or 11.1 drunken driving-related deaths for every 100,000 people living in the 957,861-person state.
That number actually increased from 2006, when Montana reported 10.9 drunken driving-related deaths per capita.
Forbes pointed to the rural nature of the state as the main reason behind the numbers. Montana's population is spread across 146,000 square miles and 80 percent of travel in the state is on rural roads, according to the Montana Department of Transportation.
Coming in after Montana on the most drunken-driving related fatalities per capita were South Carolina, with 10.5 per 100,000 people. Mississippi (10.35), Wyoming (9.37) and Louisiana (8.57) rounded out the top five. The study looked at data released by the National Center for Statistics and Analysis involving accidents where at least one driver had a blood-alcohol content of 0.08 or more.
On the other end of the spectrum, Utah had the lowest per capita drunken driving-related fatalities, with 1.93 per 100,000 people in 2007. Finishing out the list of the five states with the lowest rates were New York (1.99), Massachusetts (2.26), New Jersey (2.29) and Rhode Island (2.36).
In 2006, Thailand announced it was blocking access to YouTube for anyone with a Thai I.P address, and then identified 20 offensive videos for Google to remove as a condition of unblocking the site.
Wong and her colleagues asked the Turkish authorities to reconsider their decision, pointing out that the original offending video had already been voluntarily removed by YouTube users. But after the video was taken down, Turkish prosecutors objected to dozens of other YouTube videos that they claimed insulted either Ataturk or "Turkishness." These clips ranged from Kurdish-militia recruitment videos and Kurdish morality plays to additional videos speculating about the sexual orientation of Ataturk, including one superimposing his image on characters from "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." "I remember one night, I was looking at 67 different Turkish videos at home," Wong told me recently.
Lego-Style Islamic Terrorist Figurine Sparks OutrageA Lego-style Islamic terrorist figurine has sparked outrage among Muslims and others.
The controversial toy mini-figure, made by American Will Chapman as part of his BrickArms line, is a masked militant with an assault rifle, grenade launcher and belt of explosives. The character is called "Bandit - Mr. White" and sells for $14.
Shocked by the plaything, British Muslim organization the Ramadhan Foundation has branded the figurine "absolutely disgusting." Chief executive Mohammed Shafiq said the toy is "glorifying terrorism."
"I don't think there's any difference between someone that shouts hatred through a megaphone and someone that creates a doll that glorifies terrorists," he said. "As a parent myself, I'm going to teach my children respect for the law and respect for each and every community.
"These are the lessons parents should be giving to their children -- not lessons about weapons and violence."
Father-of-three Chapman, whose company is based outside of Seattle, boasts on his Web site that his 9-year-old son gave him the idea for the toy line, which includes 31 different Lego-style weapons and 10 miniature militant figurines. Other fighters in the line include World War II troops, U.S. marines and a Nazi SS officer.
A man using a candy cane lawn ornament fended off a knife-wielding neighbor who had been attacking holiday guests at a Sacramento home. Police spokesman Sgt. Norm Leong said the man used the 2-foot-tall plastic ornament to subdue the attacker until officers arrived.
He said the 49-year-old suspect became intoxicated, went over to a neighbor's home on Thanksgiving and began waving a kitchen knife at people gathered on the lawn. He cut several peoples' clothing before one of them decided to fight back.
Police said the man with the knife was arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon. The guest who took up the candy cane was not arrested because police determined he acted in self-defense.
A Florida man is facing a domestic violence charge after authorities say he assaulted his girlfriend with a cheeseburger. An Indian River County Sheriff's Office arrest report says 22-year-old Vincent Gonzalez of Vero Beach and his girlfriend got into an argument as they sat in a car in front of their home.
Gonzalez wouldn't let her get out of the vehicle, so the woman threw his drink out of the car, according to the report. In response, Gonzalez allegedly grabbed her arm and smashed the cheeseburger into her face.
The pair emerged from the car, and authorities say Gonzalez again took the McDonald's sandwich and pushed it against his girlfriend's face. Gonzalez was released on $1,000 bond Wednesday.
The leader of a Wisconsin Salvation Army will lose his job if he goes ahead with plans to marry outside the organization. Capt. Johnny Harsh of Oshkosh is engaged to a woman who's not affiliated with the Salvation Army. They're planning to marry in June.
Harsh says he's well aware of the agency's rule that says an officer may only marry another officer of the organization. But he doesn't think it's fair. Salvation Army Advisory Board member Helen Lord Burr says the agency's rules are the same all over the world. Harsh became engaged after losing his wife, Capt. Yalanda Harsh, to complications of a heart attack last June.
A husband-and-wife team of burglars broke into about 60 homes around rural eastern Missouri, stealing guns, jewelry and other valuables and selling them to a jewelry store owner who then sold the stolen goods over the Internet, authorities said Thursday.
All three - Kibb Patrick Howard, 27, Carla Kay Howard, 26, and Michael Carl Sifrit, 42, face multiple state charges, and authorities are seeking federal indictments, Lincoln County Lt. Andy Binder said at a news conference. All three are jailed in Warren County, where the first set of charges were filed.
Police said they found about 100 stolen weapons and other stolen property at Sifrit's home in Fenton. Three guns and stolen jewelry allegedly were found at his S&S Jewelers in Warrenton, which police described as a front for the illegal sale of stolen guns and other stolen property.
Lincoln County detective Shannon Bowen said investigators were looking into reports that Sifrit sold some of the items on eBay. At the news conference, about four dozen confiscated rifles and shotguns were laid out on tables, along with bows and arrows, power tools, big-screen TVs, knives, VCRs, even an electric guitar.
"It was through good old-fashioned police work that we were able to locate these suspects," Binder said.
The Howards broke into homes in five counties -- Lincoln, Warren, Audrain, Montgomery and Pike, authorities said. All of the burglaries happened in the daylight over the past 45 days. The investigation began when witnesses started reporting seeing a man and a woman in a maroon Jeep Cherokee in the areas of the burglaries. Witnesses also reported seeing a tattoo on the woman's neck.
Binder said Carla Howard would knock on the front door. If someone was home, she'd make up a reason for being there, sometimes saying she was there to "pick up the puppies." If the home was unoccupied, Binder said, Kibb Howard would break in and take items like guns, jewelry and televisions.
Binder said the Howards have a residence in Laddonia but were found at a friend's home in Truesdale, where they were arrested on Tuesday. He said both confessed to the crimes to get money to feed their addiction to heroin. They allegedly told police they stole about 150 weapons.
Binder said Sifrit bought the goods knowing they were stolen. His home and jewelry store were raided on Wednesday. Authorities believe Sifrit has received and sold as many as 500 firearms and tens of thousands of dollars worth of stolen jewelry. Other suspects also may have sold stolen property to Sifrit, authorities said. The investigation continues.
For farmers, this stinks: Belching and gaseous cows and hogs could start costing them money if a federal proposal to charge fees for air-polluting animals becomes law.
Farmers so far are turning their noses up at the notion, which is one of several put forward by the Environmental Protection Agency after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that greenhouse gases emitted by belching and flatulence amounts to air pollution.
"This is one of the most ridiculous things the federal government has tried to do," said Alabama Agriculture Commissioner Ron Sparks, an outspoken opponent of the proposal.
It would require farms or ranches with more than 25 dairy cows, 50 beef cattle or 200 hogs to pay an annual fee of about $175 for each dairy cow, $87.50 per head of beef cattle and $20 for each hog.
The executive vice president of the Wyoming Farm Bureau Federation, Ken Hamilton, estimated the fee would cost owners of a modest-sized cattle ranch $30,000 to $40,000 a year. He said he has talked to a number of livestock owners about the proposals, and "all have said if the fees were carried out, it would bankrupt them."
Sparks said Wednesday he's worried the fee could be extended to chickens and other farm animals and cause more meat to be imported.
"We'll let other countries put food on our tables like they are putting gas in our cars. Other countries don't have the health standards we have," Sparks said.
EPA spokesman Nick Butterfield said the fee was proposed for farms with livestock operations that emit more than 100 tons of carbon emissions in a year and fall under federal Clean Air Act provisions. Butterfield said the EPA has not taken a position on any of the proposals. But farmers from across the country have expressed outrage over the idea, both on Internet sites and in opinions sent to EPA during a public comment period that ended last week.
"It's something that really has a very big potential adverse impact for the livestock industry," said Rick Krause, the senior director of congressional relations for the American Farm Bureau Federation.
The fee would cover the cost of a permit for the livestock operations. While farmers say it would drive them out of business, an organization supporting the proposal hopes it forces the farms and ranches to switch to healthier crops.
"It makes perfect sense if you are looking for ways to cut down on meat consumption and recoup environmental losses," said Bruce Friedrich, a spokesman in Washington for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
"We certainly support making factory farms pay their fair share," he said.
U.S. Rep. Robert Aderholt, a Republican from Haleyville in northwest Alabama, said he has spoken with EPA officials and doesn't believe the cow tax is a serious proposal that will ever be adopted by the agency.
"Who comes up with this kind of stuff?" said Perry Mobley, director of the Alabama Farmers Federation's beef division. "It seems there is an ulterior motive, to destroy livestock farms. This would certainly put them out of business."
Butterfield said the EPA is reviewing the public comments and didn't have a timetable for the next steps. No word yet on if the EPA will take up the matter regarding stinky people.
After more than 90 years, the Russian stars will no longer be all red. They'll be red, white and blue. The Kremlin-controlled lower house of parliament voted 389-2 Friday to replace Soviet-era red stars on military aircraft with ones bearing the three colors of the Russian national flag. The five-pointed red stars have adorned the planes since the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.
The State Duma made the move even though the red star was officially restored as a military symbol and brought back to the military's parade banners in 2002. The stars had remained on the planes all along, however.
But not all things Soviet have been abandoned. During Vladimir Putin's presidency, Russia also restored the old Soviet national anthem - albeit with new lyrics.
A woman is suing a Pennsylvania sports bar and restaurant, saying she got stuck inside a toilet bowl for 20 minutes after the seat broke. Kathleen Hewko of Delran Township, N.J., says she was in the bathroom at Starters Pub near Allentown when the handicapped toilet seat she was sitting on cracked and dumped her into the bowl.
Hewko says in her lawsuit filed in federal court in November that she had hip surgery prior to the Nov. 19, 2006, incident and was re-injured when the seat broke. The lawsuit names Starters and Kohler Co., the company that made the toilet seat.
Representatives from both companies were indisposed.
Officers are chasing loose pigs that escaped from an overturned semi on an Interstate 94 ramp in Maple Grove. The crash happened after 3 a.m. Thursday. The truck was carrying about 100 hogs, and about 10 were loose. Police and state troopers are trying to corral the pigs and keep them off the freeway.
The right lane of eastbound I-94 is closed in the area and traffic is slow in the left lane. The State Patrol says the semi driver suffered minor injuries.
The mother of a 15-year-old student at an alternative high school in Connecticut says she's suing because her son was strip searched. Heidi Burwell, the mother of a Pine Academy student, says her son was allegedly forced to remove his clothing after being accused of stealing money from a teacher this week.
The mother's lawyer says the teenager did not steal the money. Attorney Robert Berke says the school's principal ordered a strip search that was conducted in a restroom by two male teachers. The missing money was not found.
Ansonia police are investigating the incident. Superintendent of Schools Carol Merlone said the allegation also is being investigated by district officials. The school principal and the two male teachers did not return messages.
Lisa
WSB, KNBR, WGST, Associated Press, Washington Post
A Massachusetts-based oil executive is boldly predicting that pump prices might fall to $1 a gallon in early 2009."The oil market is a manic-depressive market. It tends to overshoot," said Joe Petrowski, CEO of Gulf Oil.
Petrowski, who has been studying the oil business since the 1970s when he wrote his Harvard thesis, said that the price of oil could sink to $20 per barrel, WCVB-TV of Boston reported.
"The market overshot last summer on the high side. Oil never should have gone to $147, but it did and it can," he said.
Petrowski is betting that the slide in oil prices will continue to fall dramatically and overshoot on the low side.
"There is a better than 25 percent probability that we'll see oil go as low as $1 a gallon sometime after the first of the year," he said.
Gulf Oil, which is based in Newton, Mass., is not an oil producer or a refiner. The company is a wholesaler that distributes fuel through a network of 1,800 Gulf gas stations throughout the Northeast. Dramatically lower gas prices would be quite a rebate check for consumers, Petrowski said. He said the drop may help ease the country out of the recession.
"The price of oil has a tremendous impact on discretionary consumer spending. I think it hurt us tremendously during July and August," Petrowski said.
That's when high gas prices prompted motorists to cut back their travel by 9 percent. But Americans are conserving as much as now.
"But long term, we need to have oil prices at an equilibrium price that will encourage new production, will encourage efficiency and will encourage alternative sources," Petrowski said.
Facing a state budget crisis in July, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger fired about 10,000 temporary and part-time workers and ordered the 200,000 permanent employees to be paid only the minimum wage of $6.55 an hour until the legislature passed a crisis-solving budget. However, a week later the State Controller John Chiang pointed out that state payroll records could not be changed to accommodate the cut because they were written in the antiquated COBOL computer language, and virtually the only state employees who knew the code were some of the part-timers Schwarzenegger had just fired. [Sacramento Bee, 8-5-08]
London's Daily Mail profiled two 10-children British families in October to illustrate the inconsistencies of government benefit awards. Sean and Anne Tate and their children live on Sean's truck-driver salary of the equivalent of about $23,000 a year, plus the government's standard per-child benefit. Harry Crompton has been out of work for 15 years, and his wife, Tracey, has never held a paid job, yet they receive the equivalent of $48,000 in various government benefits, which The Daily Mail said would require a tax-paying family to earn the equivalent of $68,000 a year to draw. The Daily Mail reporter also noted that the Tate home is immaculate and the Cromptons' home, messy. [Daily Mail, 10-17-08]
Two of Oregon's unique public health markers clashed dramatically for resident Barbara Wagner this summer when she was informed that the universal medical care available to everyone in the state (but with certain service restrictions) would not pay for her expensive lung cancer drug (because her five-year survival likelihood was poor), but was told, at the same time, that the state would pay for any necessary drugs under its Death With Dignity Law (i.e., suicide). [ABC News, 8-6-08]
The September mug shot of Michelle Allen of Middletown, Ohio, was possibly the Internet's most-circulated news photo of 2008, since she was inexplicably dressed in a full-body cow suit (with rubber teats) as she was allegedly disorderly in chasing children and interfering with traffic. (Alcohol may have been involved.) [WLWT-TV (Cincinnati), 9-30-08]
Shopper Amber Dibartolomeo, 23, was arrested in a Wal-Mart in North Bay, Ontario, in July and charged with selling crack cocaine inside the store. Police said they found $2,217 in cash on her, along with a can of pepper spray, and 27 grams of cocaine (one in her bra and 26 in her vagina). [North Bay Nugget, 9-18-08]
A restaurant owner in Rutino, Italy (near Salerno), told police in November that as he was negotiating over the building's lease with his landlords, one hit him in the head with a chair and two others kicked him repeatedly in the stomach. The landlords were not from La Cosa Nostra but were a priest and two nuns from the local Catholic order that owns the building. [Daily Telegraph (London), 11-3-08]
In the village of Pumaorcco, Peru, in September, a bus containing 14 British sightseers on holiday was held hostage for five hours by 50 natives wielding pickaxes and metal bars, who mistook them for personnel from a mining company that they believed were exploiting their land. The Peruvian guide finally negotiated their freedom but had to call for another bus, since the villagers completely destroyed the original. [Daily Mail (London), 9-13-08]
Bridgeport, Conn., police arrested Michael Smith, 47, in October for breaking into Holy Ghost Deliverance Church. Smith explained that he was passing the church, spotted a drum set through a window, and could not restrain himself from trying it out. According to a Boston Globe report, officers found Smith "in a spirited solo after the church's alarm system went off." [Boston Globe, 10-22-08]
Merle Sorenson, 48, had to be rescued from the Columbia River near Quincy, Wash., in October, where he nearly drowned after driving his Humvee off of a boat launch. He told the rescuers that he was trying to clean his tires and wanted to see how far he could drive the vehicle into the water but still be able to back out. [Seattle Times-AP, 10-31-08]
In August, an employment tribunal in Glasgow, Scotland, rejected the age-discrimination charge by 16-year-old Darren Mirren, whose complaint was that the Spotless Commercial Cleaning Co. in Glasgow, about a 20-minute ride from Mirren's home, had turned him down for a job because he didn't show up for a scheduled interview. Mirren implied that a person of his age could not be expected to find an address unless they gave him directions. [The Scotsman, 8-26-08]
In October in Vancouver, Wash., a 74-year-old man actually succeeded in his mission to unclog, with his hands, the garbage chute from his 10th floor apartment, but then he pushed too far. When rescue workers arrived, only the man's feet and lower legs were visible, with his wife holding on for dear life. [Seattle Times-The Columbian (Vancouver), 10-20-08]
In August, a 78-year-old woman apparently misread the signs at Arlanda airport in Stockholm, Sweden, and placed herself on a baggage belt, which led to a chute, but she was only slightly injured and did not miss her flight. [Agence France-Presse, 8-27-08]
People whose special land-use and zoning requests are turned down by the government or neighborhood associations sometimes retaliate defiantly, as News of the Weird has reported. In July in Bucks County, Pa., two men who were denied the right to tear down a house decided to paint it purple and pink, just to annoy the neighbors. [WCAU-TV (Philadelphia), 7-7-08]
In October in Olympia, Wash., a developer who was denied a permit for a grocery store decided instead to expand his adult video store next door into an "emporium." [Seattle Times-AP, 10-29-08]
In September in Potsdam, N.Y., a man wanting to build a convenience store was turned down and so installed a row of nine used toilets in his front yard, as "artwork." [WWNY-TV (Watertown), 9-10-08]
Failed Prayers: The 16 players for a soccer team called Midland Portland Cement, who were in Zimbabwe for a match in October, were told that a swim in the Zambezi river is a traditional ritual that would cleanse the team of evil spirits. However, only 15 players made it back, as there are crocodiles. [Reuters, 10-7-08]
Hundreds of visitors a day visit the Muslim shrine of Khan Jahan Ali in Bangladesh, where they bathe in a pond to wash away evil spirits and feed chickens to crocodiles to bring good fortune. "Normally, the crocodiles are very friendly," said a local police officer, but in August, Mr. Rubel Sheikh was eaten while washing away his evil spirits. [Daily Telegraph (London), 8-21-08]
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison said they had developed new technology that would detect breast-enhancement cheating at beauty contests. The researchers are veterinarians, and the relevant contests are of show cows at dairy exhibits, where the "cheating" involves making the cow's udders fuller, smoother and more symmetrical (in that 40 percent of the contestant's grade is based on udder integrity). Unlike their human beauty contest counterparts, though, cow udders are valued only for milk-producing potential. [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 9-28-08]
The genetic signatures of people in Spain and Portugal provide new and explicit evidence of the mass conversions of Sephardic Jews and Muslims to Catholicism in the 15th and 16th centuries after Christian armies wrested Spain back from Muslim control, a team of geneticists reports. 
Okay, Christmas/Hanukkah will be here soon so time to tidy up the list.
