The South Carolina website Independent Mail reported today that a 49-year-old Anderson county man assaulted his 18-year-old son with a baseball bat Sunday after the boy returned home from a gay pride parade.

An update on a story we first reported in March. This week, scientists report a massive Antarctic ice shelf  “the size of Northern Ireland” is on the verge of disintegration. The situation is especially troubling because this is the middle of the Antarctic winter and the rapid disintegration is undoubtedly a consequence of global warming.

What struck me when I have visited mega-churches from time to time is that they are really great big social service centers. You won’t see references to Jesus in a mega-church. I mean the trappings I associate [with church]are gone, the crosses and everything. What you will see is over here we have our battered women’s support group, over here we have our after-school activities. We have our group for the unemployed professionals and so on. They have really filled in where maybe there would have been public services or secular services at some other time. In the same way that Hamas, and I understand Hizballah also, gain a base by providing social services that people aren’t getting otherwise.

 “The tradition of the oppressed teaches
us that the ’state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but
the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with
this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring
about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the
struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in
the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current
amazement that the things we are experiencing are ’still’ possible in the
twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning
of knowledge–unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which
gives rise to it is untenable.”

There are some who believe the initial source of the rumors are those from Riley himself. It has long been rumored that Riley’s reason for running for Congress, and later Governor, was to pave a path for his son Rob Riley, a former SGA president and leader of the Machine at the University of Alabama. Rob Riley was on the infamous conference call with GOP operative Bill Canary and Dana Jill Simpson, when it was inferred that Canary would use Karl Rove and the Justice Department to investigate Riley’s former opponent, Governor Don Siegelman.

“The word is, according to multiple sources in Montgomery and elsewhere, that King was recently caught by his wife in a gay affair with a male aide and banished from his home. According to Tara Hutchison in the executive office of the governor they have heard of no plans in the works for King’s resignation. She said she had not heard that he had been kicked out of his home because of a gay affair. Governor Bob Riley’s press office had refused to return multiple phone calls from this independent press outlet even though some sources accuse Riley of perpetrating the leak. The attorney general’s press office also declined to return phone calls seeking comment.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and others immediately filed suit in Manhattan federal court and called for the law to be voided.

The book cites spiritual premises from all the major religious traditions which point to ‘brokenness’ as the point at which human consciousness encounters the divine.  As humans we yearn for control, but we are powerless.  We cling to constancy, but everything changes.  We long to be whole, to be filled, to be complete, but we often feel empty and lacking.  We go to great ends to avoid pain, and by so doing, create exceedingly complicated and painful situations for ourselves.  Perhaps at the most fundamental level, we search for some solution to avoid our inevitable mortality, or at least make some sense of our time here on earth.

Spherion’s decision to deny benefits to Amschwand-Bellinger turned on an odd set of facts. Spherion, which employs about 300,000 people, switched insurers after Thomas Amschwand was diagnosed with a rare form of heart cancer. The new policy did not take effect until an employee worked one full day. Spherion never informed Amschwand of the requirement.