“If you work for The Sun Herald, please contact the paper to let us know where you are.”

After some difficulty, the paper has posted aerial photos of Biloxi. And then there’s this editorial, with that classic Southern outrage: “We are not calling on the nation and the state to make life more comfortable in South Mississippi, we are calling on the nation and the state to make life here possible.”

“People regularly ask why I don’t play the Hüsker Dü songs, and it’s a good question. I think this tour those songs will be fine. I’ve sort of reconciled all that, putting my work into different drawers. In a sense I saw the uselessness of that. Now I look at my whole body of work, the different things I’m trying to do, and I come to the conclusion that it’s all about me, and it’s about what I do.

I suppose most of us knew all along that it was all about Bob, but I’m still glad that he’s doing older stuff again. His new album, Body of Song, is out on July 26.

It was a world in which neo-hippy mumbo-jumbo met hardline, expert protest technique. Activists met in circles – use of a table was regarded as too corporate – and indicated their approval or disapproval of decisions by waving both their hands in the air, hokey-cokey style (up for agree, down for disagree). But there was a more serious side. Surnames were never used and all talk of the direct actions that are inevitable were quickly closed down due to fears of infiltration.

Kunduz, Afghanistan – Like a frustrated hunter, the head of the local anti-drug squad keeps snapshots of the ones who got away.

One photo shows a prisoner wearing a flat, round pakol hat, standing in front of 10 pounds of opium packaged in plastic bags laid out on a table. Lt. Nyamatullah Nyamat took the picture on the February day he arrested the suspect. Hours later, the man was freed.

The stocky, plain-spoken cop glumly tossed another photo onto a desk in his basement office as if playing a losing hand of cards. In this one, a man in a white pillbox cap is handcuffed to a police officer and standing next to 62 pounds of opium. A local judge sentenced him to 10 years in prison. A higher court ordered his release.

One of Nyamat’s biggest catches, arrested with 114 pounds of heroin, a derivative of opium, hadn’t even appeared in court when the local prosecutor let him go in late March.

Nyamat said that was normal in Kunduz, a hub on one of the world’s busiest drug-smuggling routes.

In 2001, Kutztown decided to build its own network, hiring a Harrisburg-area tech firm to lay a fiber-optic ring around the town. Town officials gave the network a name, Hometown Utilicom, and by summer of 2002, the borough-owned utility was offering cheap, high-speed Internet access to any home or businesses within town limits. Today, the town has 791 subscribers, and 100 are college students.

Many of Kutztown University’s upperclassmen live not in campus dorms, but downtown, above the bars and shops. With 9,000 undergraduates, Hometown Utilicom is poised to cash in on the students who don’t live on campus and don’t feel like waiting to use computer labs.

Unfortunately, my mom can’t plug into Kutztown’s network because she lives outside town limits, but this is something that small college towns everywhere should be looking at. And small non-college towns, too.

He spent a year looking for the perfect oak to accompany his famous photograph of Comet Hale-Boppe in 1997 because he wanted the celestial event to be grounded in a Florida landscape. He built a special platform for his Nikon, a platform that would track the comet as the earth rotated. He used radio-triggered strobes to light up the wizened oak for 1/1000th of a second and kept the lens open another five minutes to capture the night sky.

“When I saw how the photo turned out, I cried,” he says.

This is why:

[Photo by John Moran]

Although I rather prefer Moran’s shots of some of Florida’s rivers and springs, overlooked beauties.

Not everyone gets to die like Laura Mankamyer — surrounded by love in her own home, at peace with the plans made, the care received and whatever lies ahead.

On her last day, she still heard stories about herself, smiled and ribbed others in a whisper. Her room with the big bay window looking out on the back yard in the Hunting Ridge development was still a living room, not a dying room.

From some combination of personal determination, family bonds, religious faith, Marine training, hospice care and a medical support team that helped her let go, she died the way virtually any rational person would want.

But then, death is so rarely rational.

A beautiful story of one woman’s fight with cancer.

As part of the nation’s homeland security effort, five Louisville International Airport police officers were sent to Texas over the past three years to become certified handlers of bomb-sniffing dogs.

Today, not a single certified dog or officer is patrolling at the airport, The Courier-Journal has found.

Three officers left the much-publicized program under questionable circumstances; one did not complete the federal government’s 10-week training program at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio; and another and his dog failed a required certification test.

This sounds like fine homeland security to me.

A member of our congregation is the cousin of Beth Stroud, the former United Methodist minister who was removed from ordination earlier this month by the church for “engaging in practices declared by The United Methodist Church to be incompatible with Christian teachings,” namely, being a lesbian.

Plainly, I believe this was the wrong thing to do. Rather than continue on with a polemic about rights and justice, let me quote from Beth Stroud’s sermon on Dec. 12:

I can see God’s future as clearly as if it had already happened, even though it is clearly still very much under construction. I see a United Methodist Church that could be a meeting ground for people with different experiences and theologies, rather than a battleground. I see sacred space for real, deep, true, compassionate listening to one another, which can lead to conversion and transformation. I see the possibility of the kind of growth and vision that we experienced when FUMCOG became a Reconciling Congregation, only on a much larger scale, through which some of the very people who have the most questions might become the staunchest advocates of a fully inclusive church. I can see the day when people will recognize that God blesses all loving families. It might not come today or tomorrow, but it will come.

The attractive thing about fundamentalism of all stripes is that it makes it easy to tell other people exactly where they’ve gone wrong. When you’re so busy focusing on the letter of the law, you can diminish the spirit that provides a real framework for growth, acceptance and achievement.

THE CENTRAL HIGHLANDS OF ETHIOPIA — Tihun Nebiyu the goat herder doesn’t want to marry. She is adamant about this. But in her village nobody heeds the opinions of headstrong little girls.

That’s why she’s kneeling in the filigreed shade of her favorite thorn tree, dropping beetles down her dress. Magic beetles.

“When they bite you here–” Tihun explains gravely, pressing the scrabbling insects into her chest through the fabric of her tattered smock “–it makes your breasts grow.”

This is Tihun’s own wishful brand of sorcery–a child’s desperate measure to turn herself into an adult. Then maybe, just maybe, her family would respect her wishes not to wed. She could rebuff the strange man her papa has chosen to be her husband. And she wouldn’t have to bear his dumb babies.

Tihun kneels in the dirt, eyes closed: an elfin figure whose smile is made goofily endearing by two missing front teeth. She holds her small hands over her nipples. She is waiting for the bugs’ enchantment to start. Seconds pass. But nothing happens. Eventually, she starts to giggle. The beetles have escaped–by crawling up her neck.

“It doesn’t work!” Tihun says, disgusted. She heaves an exaggerated sigh and squints out across the yellow-grass hills surrounding her world: “I will just have to run.”

But this is childish bluster. Tihun’s short legs can’t carry her away fast enough from the death of her childhood. Her wedding is five days away. And she is 7 years old.

But let’s all focus on the troubles presented by gay marriage, m’kay?

Sixty-two years ago a German submarine prowled the Hatteras waters. Its mission: Sink anything afloat.

U-701, commanded by a 29-year-old orphan from Hamburg named Horst Degen, was carrying out the Nazi plan to sever besieged Britain from its lifeblood of American war materiel. But on July 7, 1942, an Army bomber caught the U-boat cruising on the surface and sent it to the bottom, 22 miles east of Ocracoke Inlet.

At least five crew members made the U-701 their crypt. Now, with the wreck laid bare by shifting sands, the ship is a target again.

Souvenir hunters have stripped artifacts from the U-701 and have tried to enter the sub, which the German government considers a war grave. Sport divers and the U.S. government are trying to protect the site.

Joseph Schwarzer, executive director of the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum at Hatteras, said the U-701 should be afforded the respect the United States expects for its own hallowed ground. “How would we feel if someone tried to dig up Normandy?” he said, referring to D-Day memorials in France.

And in trying times like these, when it occasionally looks like things are going to hell, it is strangely consoling to recall that actually others before us also have traveled on what must have seemed to be the road to perdition.

At the Center for Public Integrity, we have found that nothing resonates more with the American people than the straight skinny itself about the powers that be. When we obtained a secret draft of the Domestic Enhancement Security Act of 2003, better known as “Patriot II,” we posted it in its 100-plus page entirety on our Web site, www.publicintegrity.org, over the objections of the Justice Department. Because of the public furor over some of its controversial provisions—including internal GOP frustration on Capitol Hill that the secretive Attorney General and his staff had kept them in the dark for nearly half a year—the draft bill was dead within months (although the Bush administration has been trying to push a few provisions separately).

Or, noticing that no one was terribly helpful or definitive about the awarding of billions of dollars in government contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, we decided to go to work, filing 73 FOIAs and, when necessary, successfully suing the State Department and the Army for the contracts. Six months later, our report, Windfalls of War, revealed all of the major known contractors and contracts, and the fact that Vice President Cheney’s former company, Halliburton, and its subsidiaries had gotten by far the most taxpayer money, some of them with no other bidders. Our approach now on any issue is to push back and appeal on any stonewalling that elevates our blood pressure. In other words, appeal early and often—it’s the principle of the thing, and you just might win.

Just in case you ever wondered why I liked working for him.

In the struggle for the soul of Islam, few things are as important as education reform. Terrorists can be defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan, but if nothing is done to end the intolerance and the teaching of hard-line Islam in classrooms, militants will have a never-ending supply of new recruits. Nowhere is this more evident than in Pakistan, whose schools were described as “incubators for violent extremism” by the Sept. 11 commission.

Little has changed inside the Darul Uloom Haqqania madrassa, where Maulana Samiul Haq still preaches the same anti-American rhetoric and praises Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

“He is a brave and courageous man,” says Samiul, the madrassa leader who scoffs at the idea of government reform at the school. “We will remain here no matter what.”

At public schools in Karachi, children as young as 5th graders still learn about the glories of jihad and martyrdom in textbooks the government approves. One 9th-grade student told a Tribune reporter that he dreamed of going to fight in a jihad when he grows up, if he could get his mother’s blessing.

Picking three counties that fit the conspiracy theory profile — staunchly Democratic by registration, whoppingly GOP by voting — two reporters counted more than 17,000 ballots over three days.

The conclusion: No conspiracy.

The newspaper’s count of optical scan ballots in Suwannee, Lafayette and Union counties showed Bush whipping Sen. John Kerry in a swath of Florida where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 3-1.

The newspaper found minor differences with the official results in each county, most involving a smattering of ballots that had been discarded as unreadable by optical scan machines but in which reporters felt the voter intent was clear.

Voting practices should be examined by newspapers with an eye toward ensuring transparency and accuracy. But the idea that rural, conservative Democrats, particularly in the South but elsewhere, simply couldn’t have voted for Bush in large numbers is demonstrably false.

Anything that surprises editors, anything we seem to have missed in the past, gets featured treatment. It’s how we do penance for underplaying a story one day that seems to block out the sun the next.

As always, Ron’s observations are on the mark.