More than 50 structures destroyed while 12,000 homes are threatened
Los Angeles – With more than 12,500 homes threatened and 6,600 people under evacuation orders, the wildfires now raging east of downtown Los Angeles are threatening to make 2009 a grim fire season for California.
Weeks of hot, dry conditions have been exacerbated by the fact that brush and chapparal here has not burned off for 40 to 50 years, compounding the usual, yearly threat. There are now eight fires burning through southern California, and the fire near LA has taken the lives of two firefighters and reportedly critically burned three people.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Rhode Island will shut down its state government for 12 days and trim millions of dollars in funding for local governments under a plan Gov. Don Carcieri proposed Monday to balance a budget hammered by surging unemployment and plummeting tax revenue.
Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.
Officer threatens arrest: This ain’t America no more
America is not a Christian nation. We are, it is true, a nation founded by Christians, and according to a 2008 survey, 76 percent of us continue to identify as Christian (still, that’s the lowest percentage in American history). Of course, we are not a Hindu or Muslim, or Jewish, or Wiccan nation, either. A million-plus Hindus live in the United States, a fraction of the billion who live on Earth. But recent poll data show that conceptually, at least, we are slowly becoming more like Hindus and less like traditional Christians in the ways we think about God, our selves, each other, and eternity.
In a strange type of deja vu reminiscent of the spring of 2008, states ranging from Maryland all the way down to North Carolina are experiencing a damaged wheat harvest according to a Washington Post article from Thursday. Some of the crops were so badly damaged by excessive rain that not only can much of it not be sold for flour, but it can’t be used for animal feed, either.
A street preacher is at the centre of a row over freedom of speech after police threatened to arrest him for reading the Bible in public. 
