Julia Harte with your morning fix.

A bill extending statewide hate-crimes legislation to protect gays, women and the disabled passed its first vote in the Pennsylvania General Assembly and was expected to pass in the House, though it may have more trouble in the Republican-controlled Senate.

Climate change will affect women in developing countries worst, because they do most of the agricultural work around the world and are hence most vulnerable to weather-related natural disasters, the United Nations Population Fund reported.

Half of all children in the United States will be on food stamps at some point in their lives, according to a new United States Department of Agriculture report. Forty-three percent of individuals receiving food stamps in Philadelphia are children.

CT scans of 22 Egyptian mummies several thousand years old, mostly priests or courtiers, show that they suffered from hardened arteries — proving the condition isn’t unique to modern humans, according to the cardiologist who headed the study.

Archaeologists have discovered an ancient fire pit and a variety of small tools from 3,500 years ago on the grounds where the SugarHouse casino is slated to be built, in what constitutes the largest single discovery of Native American artifacts in Philadelphia. When the dig is over, the site will become a parking lot for the casino.

Julia Harte with your morning fix.

Australian officials invented and issued a new fire alert, “catastrophe” level, to urge residents of South Australia to immediately evacuate their houses and avoid the deaths of people who linger when fires hit, trying to protect their property.

A 6-foot-high cross was burned outside the home of a white Western Pennsylvania family, after their black foster son’s high school football team lost a game.

The recession was smoothing historically tense relations between the white and black populations of an Atlanta, Ga., suburb, as job losses and economic hardship indiscriminately sent residents to welfare offices and food stamp lines.

President Obama’s bow to Japan’s Emperor Akihito over the weekend was provoking outraged online commentary, mainly from conservatives, who thought it looked like Obama was groveling to the foreign leader.

Several groups, including the N.A.A.C.P. and A.F.L.-C.I.O., were preparing to join together and call on Obama to create more jobs, specifically by spending more on schools and roads and financially relieving state and local governments to prevent more layoffs.

319 more employees in Pennsylvania state agencies will be laid off, announced Governor Rendell yesterday, bringing the total number of state government layoffs this year to 769.

Julia Harte with your morning fix.

A deer-culling expedition composed of USDA marksmen was preparing to run through Lower Merion for the next four nights to reduce the local deer population and prevent the transmission of Lyme disease. The deer carcasses will be donated to the local food bank.

The giant Irish deer — the largest species of deer that ever lived, with antlers nearly eleven feet across — went extinct about 10,000 years ago because of natural climate change that caused fewer plants to grow and starved the deer, scientists found.

Rather than hammer out a climate change agreement at the widely-anticipated Copenhagen conference in December, world leaders including President Obama agreed in Singapore over the weekend, they’ll just come up with a less specific, non-legally binding pact that will have to be fully realized at a later international conference.

Alaskan governor Sean Parnell was suing the federal government to get polar bears off the list of threatened species, claiming that protections on the bears’ habitat was preventing the state from developing lucrative offshore oil discoveries.

In anticipation of the impending healthcare bill, the pharmaceutical industry was raising the prices of drugs at the fastest rate in seventeen years: about 9 percent over the last year, which will add more than $10 billion to the nation’s drug bill this year.

Teachers routinely paid thousands of dollars to obtain teaching jobs in the public schools of northeastern Pennsylvania, according to the results of an FBI probe that began in the spring. So far, six school board members have been indicted for accepting bribes from prospective teachers.

Julia Harte with your morning fix.

Water cascaded through the streets of the Southwest Philly Eastwick neighborhood for three hours after a 30-inch water main broke around 3 a.m. this morning.

After an enormous 17,000-megawatt hydroelectric dam abruptly went off the grid last night, large parts of Brazil, including its two major cities, underwent a blackout for two hours.

The Vatican commissioned scientists from around the world to study the possibility of extraterrestrial life in the universe, and its implications for the Catholic Church.

For the first time, the Mormon Church has announced its support for gay rights legislation, specifically Salt Lake City laws that prohibit discriminating against gays in jobs and housing.

To mollify Iraqi officials upset about the fatal shooting of 17 civilians in 2007 in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square, the security contractor group Blackwater tried to pay off those officials with about $1 million in bribes, according to former executives of the corporation.

“Predatory towing” companies are marauding the streets of Philadelphia, according to the City Controller, charging residents exorbitant fees to get their vehicles back.

Julia Harte with your morning fix.

The Pennsylvania College of Technology in Williamsport, Pa., expanded its Weatherization Training Center with federal stimulus funds to teach students about the installation of green technology in low-income households.

The president of the Maldives, a collection of islands in the Indian Ocean that is the world’s lowest lying country and may be entirely submerged by rising oceans by the end of this century, censured rich countries for doing too little to stem climate change.

Marine scientists were summoned by the Environmental Protection Agency to study the Chesapeake Bay and understand why it remains polluted and unhealthy even after billions of dollars were spent to clean it up.

Though Democrats by and large celebrated the passage of the health care bill in the House of Representatives last weekend, a subgroup within the party vowed to fight an amendment inserted to avoid further delays in its passage: a clause that limits abortion coverage even for women paying for it by themselves.

The American Public Health Association is holding its annual meeting in Philadelphia this year, discussing topics such as H1N1, water safety and public health at the Convention Center.

Courtesy of Marion County

Have you ever had to report something stolen to the police? Would you ever tell the police that someone stole all of your weed?

Would you then drive around drunk and call 911 again, while vomiting?

This guy did.

Julia Harte with your morning fix.

Nidal Malik Hasan, the Muslim, U.S.-born major who killed at least 13 people in an  attack on the army base at Ft. Hood, Texas, yesterday, had been the target of ethnic harassment and due to deploy soon to Afghanistan, which he called his “worst nightmare.”

Partly in response to the recent deaths of five British soldiers, who were killed by an Afghan police officer they were mentoring, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown gave a speech informing the Afghan government that Britain would begin to withdraw support for the anti-Taliban fight if the country’s pervasive corruption was not more effectively dealt with.

Robert Sturman, a financial adviser who preyed on retired school teachers in Philadelphia and the surrounding suburbs with quasi-Ponzi schemes that netted him about $4.6 million, pleaded not guilty in U.S. District Court yesterday.

Spanish fishermen whose ship was seized by Somali pirates one month ago were urging their families to pressure the Spanish government to return two pirates captured the day after the hijacking, saying that their holders refuse to negotiate until those two men are returned.

Governor Rendell and U.S. representative Bob Brady reported that the striking Philadelphia Transit Workers Union is considering a revised contract offer from SEPTA, provoking speculation that the end of the strike may be imminent.

Ousted President Manuel Zelaya withdrew from a power-sharing deal that the United States had drawn up between Zelaya and interim leader Roberto Micheletti, saying the deal would be illegitimate unless Congress first voted to restore Zelaya to power.

Julia Harte with your morning fix.

Four female employees of the Pennsylvania-based Danella Construction Corp. won a $200,000 settlement from the company after alleging that the corporation did not provide workers with on-site portable toilets, forcing them to wear adult diapers to work or drive to find a restroom.

The president of the South African athletic governing body was suspended for lying to cover up the fact that Caster Semenya, the South African sprinter who set a record at the 800-meter event of the 2009 Olympics, had been tested to verify her gender.

To raise awareness and money for the underfunded U.S. Speedskating Team, which just lost its biggest sponsor, Stephen Colbert offered to become the team’s new primary sponsor and has already posted a fundraising link for the team on his Web site.

The Iraqi oil ministry struck its third major deal with a consortium of oil companies including Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell. If approved by the cabinet, Exxon and Royal will begin production soon in the Qurna oil field, where oil will be extracted starting at a rate of 280,000 barrels per day.

Following last week’s deadly Taliban attack against United Nations workers, the UN pulled some 600 personnel from Afghanistan: a discouraging sign for the national forces still trying to defeat the militant group.

Northeast High School in Philadelphia took several students out of class yesterday and confined them in the school auditorium for failing to follow the school’s dress code, on the first day the school had enforced the nine-year-old policy. Some students were sent to the auditorium simply for wearing brown shoes instead of black ones.

Julia Harte with your morning fix.

The Bedford County courthouse granted probation to two women convicted of theft, on the condition that they sit outside the courthouse for four-and-a-half hours yesterday, holding signs that read: “I stole from a 9-year-old on her birthday! Don’t steal or this could happen to you!”

The U.S. Supreme Court was preparing to hear a case over whether prosecutors may be sued for framing defendants before trial proceedings have begun.

The U.S. government has agreed to pay $1.26 million to five immigrant men who were rounded up, kept in conditions they allege to be inhumane and deported following the 9-11 attacks.

An opinion is expected soon in the first court case appealing the practice of “extraordinary rendition” — in which terrorism suspects are seized in one country but questioned in another. The case concerns a Muslim cleric whom 26 Americans are charged with abducting from the streets of Milan six years ago.

Anti-government protesters in Iran, who were demonstrating against government-sanctioned rallies to commemorate the takeover of the U.S. Embassy that resulted in the hostage crisis 30 years ago, were brutally beaten and sprayed with tear gas by state police.

A fire tore through the first car of an R-5 train already crowded by passengers displaced from their regular routes by the ongoing SEPTA strike. No passengers were reported injured.

Julia Harte with your morning fix.

Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania, was again among the highest-paid university presidents in the country with an annual salary of well over $1 million, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s salary survey released today.

Afghan president Hamid Karzai automatically won a second term today after his only remaining challenger from the fraud-ridden election in August dropped out of the runoff election planned for Nov. 7, saying he believed the runoff would be as corrupt as the original.

Bagram Air Field, the largest U.S. army base in Afghanistan, already houses about 24,000 military personnel and contractors but is still expanding with rapid construction projects costing millions of dollars, even as President Obama debates whether to send more troops into the country.

The Iraqi oil ministry signed an agreement with a consortium of companies headed by the Italian firm ENI to develop the Zubair oil field in southern Iraq, marking the oil ministry’s second major contract since the U.S. invasion. The group will extract 200,000 barrels of oil a day from the field, possibly eventually rising to 1.1 million barrels.

New York Waste Management has been paying townships and property owners in Philadelphia’s northern suburbs millions of dollars annually to dump about 2,500 tons of trash from New York City in their landfills every day.

Julia Harte with your morning fix.

A Daily News report found that of the $157 million Philadelphia has so far received in federal stimulus money, the city has spent less than $1 million and saved a paltry 52 jobs.

The lending branch of General Motors was begging the Treasury Department for a third infusion of taxpayer money, which would make it the only U.S. company to receive three rounds of aid and possibly make the government majority stakeholder in the company.

A $500,000 shower was among the ostentatious expenses racked up by French President Sarkozy during his European Union presidency — one of the costliest in history — and funded by EU taxpayers.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was found to be paying Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of Afghan president Hamid Karzai and suspected opium lord, to organize a paramilitary force in Kandahar that follows C.I.A. orders.

The former presenter of “Afghan Star” — that country’s version of American Idol — sought asylum in the United States after a documentary he produced about the show earned him death threats from extremists. He now works at Voice of America radio, and says “in America, I was born again.”

The Philadelphia-based Rhythm and Blues Foundation, which has provided cash assistance to R&B artists in need for twenty years, is now out of money itself because donations have dried up over the last year.

Julia Harte with your morning fix.

H1N1 vaccine was administered to 1,600 students throughout the Philadelphia School District yesterday, part of a city effort to avoid emergency rooms becoming flooded with people demanding the vaccine.

Drug makers have been rushing to market with medicines used to treat heart illness and cancer before adequately testing them first, according to a report out yesterday from Congress.

Israeli authorities and soldiers dangerously restrict access to water in the Palestinian territories, according to a new report from Amnesty International, leaving some Palestinians with only 5 gallons of water per day.

The Senegalese people were outraged to learn that their government gave an official from the International Monetary Fund a gift of $200,000 at his farewell dinner. Prime Minister Souleymane Ndene Ndiaye said it was a traditional African goodbye present.

The Church of Scientology in France was fined $600,000 for fraud after investigators accused the church officials of manipulating members into investing large amounts of money into questionable ventures and using “commercial harassment” to attract new members.

The third-place winner at Saturday’s National Sudoku Championship at the Convention Center, the country’s largest puzzle competition, may have cheated. Officials say that the suspect completed preliminary puzzles in record time, but appeared to have trouble on the simple opening calculations of the final-round puzzle, and may have used a fake name.

Julia Harte with your morning fix.

The Upper Darby township was preparing to release its first “bait” cars — cars equipped with GPS tracking devices and hidden cameras — to trace car theft in the area.

Kids in southern China were being ordered to salute passing cars, according to the latest in a long stream of Chinese bureaucratic edicts denounced by critics and local media as arbitrary and senseless.

Solar-powered and hybrid vehicles were racing 1,800 miles across the entire continent of Australia in the Green Power Challenge, one of the world’s first competitions for cars fueled by renewable sources.

In a region where women are 14 times as likely to die from childbirth as British women, one village in Malawi appeared to have eliminated the problem by maintaining a “bicycle ambulance” that ferries women entering labor 18 miles to the nearest hospital.

The president of Philadelphia’s Transit Worker’s Union vowed that a strike could be called by the end of the week — perhaps affecting the first local World Series game — if negotiations don’t result in wage and pension increases for SEPTA employees.

Julia Harte with your morning fix.

The ex-CEO of the Philadelphia Academy Charter School was preparing to be sentenced for stealing half a million dollars from the school, down to change he pocketed from vending machines, to pay for improvements to his home.

U.S. teaching schools are ineffective cash cows for universities, said Education Secretary Arne Duncan in a speech at Columbia University, where he urged stricter teacher-training programs that encourage “the lowest-performers to shape up or shut down.”

The United States was indicating that it would be open to sharing power with the Afghan government that results from the Nov. 7 runoff election, if doing so would improve the legitimacy of the new administration.

The former leader of a U.S. navy dog-sniffing bomb unit in Bahrain was censured for hazing sailors he thought were gay, forcing them to simulate sex acts and locking them in dog kennels with dog feces all over the ground.

The Republican candidate in Philadelphia’s upcoming District Attorney election was denounced by leaders in the Black political community after he denied the existence of any racial profiling in death penalty cases in the city.

The founder of Human Rights Watch accused the organization’s current leadership of being “biased against Israel,” arguing that the group had strayed from its original mandate to only examine authoritarian societies and was unfairly focused on Israeli human rights infractions.