National and State News-Friday, July 6th

UNDATED (AP) - At six-thousand-feet elevation, Stanley, Idaho, is routinely the coldest spot in the lower 48 states, but not this week. It was 91 degrees there yesterday, and could hit 93 today. And most folks there don't have air conditioning. Other parts of
the West are baking in triple-digit heat.

UNDATED (AP) - For the first time in 50 years, the major river basins in Texas are at flood stage. So any more rain could cause flash flooding, on top of earlier flood damage. There's some good news in hard-hit Miami, Oklahoma, where the Neosho River continues to drop.

UNDATED (AP) - Police in Australia have seized computer files and other materials from two hospitals in connection with the failed car bombings in Britain. An Indian doctor working in
Australia is among eight suspects arrested. Meantime, Muslim groups in Britain are launching an ad campaign to denounce terrorism.

WASHINGTON (AP) - An overwhelming majority of Americans surveyed say the government is not doing a good job of screening visitors at the borders. Seventy-seven percent expressed that sentiment in an A-P-Ipsos poll. Also, just two in five people believe the country could cope with an outbreak of infectious disease.

WHITE HOUSE (AP) - President Bush turns 61 today but he's been celebrating all week. There was a party at the White House on the Fourth of July that featured many of the pro golfers in Washington for a golf tournament created by Tiger Woods. The president also took in a baseball game last night between the Washington Nationals and Chicago Cubs.

PHILADELPHIA (AP) - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama says he thinks performance-based merit pay ought to be considered in public schools. Obama told the National Education Association's annual convention in Philadelphia that teachers' salaries should be increased across the board. But he told members of the nation's largest teachers union that there should also be fair ways of measuring teacher performance and compensating teachers
accordingly. Teachers at the gathering have expressed concerns about merit pay, an idea that is gaining favor among lawmakers -- including those currently rewriting the No Child Left Behind law. The teachers say they worry that linking their pay to their students' test scores would be unfair to teachers who have students from disadvantaged backgrounds. They also say it isn't fair to offer merit pay only to people who teach courses that are tested, like reading and math, but not to those who teach subjects like music or art.

PHILADELPHIA (AP) - An eleven-year-old Philadelphia boy accused of shooting a 13-year-old twice during an argument is being sent to a facility for pre-adolescents. A family court judge found the boy delinquent in the shooting and ordered him placed in Saint Gabriel's Hall in Audubon, about 20 miles northwest of Philadelphia. Authorities say the boy threatened the older boy in early May and then fired two shots into the victim's legs, perforating his
bowel with one. The boy's name wasn't released because of his age.

PHILADELPHIA (AP) - The woman who found the manuscript of Pearl S. Buck's novel "The Good Earth" among the belonging of her deceased parents says she is certain that her mother didn't steal the manuscript for personal gain. Susan Dempster talked to The Philadelphia Inquirer about the issue. Her mother, Helen Shaddinger, who died in 1995, had been
Buck's secretary for 25 years. Some who remember Shaddinger believe she might have been trying to guard her employer's valuable documents from dance instructor Theodore Harris, who met the widowed writer in 1963. Buck's son, Edgar Walsh, the administrator of her estate, says
Shaddinger had expressed suspicions about Harris and might have taken it upon herself to safeguard the manuscript.

AKRON, Ohio (AP) - Jurors resume deliberation in Ohio this morning in the trial of a Pennsylvania woman accused of hiring her lover to kill her husband. Forty-eight-year-old Donna Moonda of Hermitage faces the death penalty if convicted of the murder of Doctor Gulam Moonda, who was shot and killed along the Ohio Turnpike in 2005. A prosecutor says the defendant built her life on a series of lies, and, in his words "deceived every person in her life."
Donna Moonda is accused of hiring 25-year-old Damian Bradford of Monaca to shoot her husband. The two met in drug rehab. Bradford testified that Moonda offered her half of her husband's multi-(m)-million dollar estate if he killed Gulam Moonda. The defense has maintained throughout the trial that Bradford is a thug who acted alone. Jurors began deliberating late yesterday afternoon and asked to listen to a recording of Moonda's interview with the State Highway Patrol on the night of the killing. The panel was sequestered for
the night and is to take up the case again at 8:30 a-m.

ERIE, Pa. (AP) - A federal judge says a civil rights suit filed by one of Pennsylvania's most famous prison inmates can continue to trial. Thirty-four-year-old Lisa Michelle La mbert, who is serving a life sentence, has accused staff at the State Correctional Institution at Cambridge Springs of raping and assaulting her. Lambert was convicted of stalking and killing 16-year-old Laurie Show of Lancaster, who previously had a relationship with Lambert's boyfriend. The 1991 murder case was made into a T-V movie by the U-S-A cable network. Lambert's suit alleges that there were chronic problems of sexual misconduct with female inmates at the state prison. A federal judge says there's enough evidence to merit sending the lawsuit to trial, saying Lambert's suit paints a disturbing picture of the prison.

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) - Dominion Resources says it is extending until September an agreement to sell its West Virginia and Pennsylvania natural gas utilities to Equitable Resources.
Pittsburgh-based Equitable has agreed to buy the utilities for 970 (m) million dollars in March 2006. But the deal has run into scrutiny by regulators. Dominion serves 357-thousand customers in western Pennsylvania, while Dominion Hope serves 116,500 customers in West Virginia. The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission already has approved the Dominion Peoples Gas sale, but the Federal Trade Commission is seeking to delay it.

CHICAGO (AP) - Two Illinois congressmen want to ban cities from dumping raw sewage into the Great Lakes. U-S Representative Mark Kirk says sewage treatment plants discharge more than 24 (b) billion gallons of untreated sewage into the lakes each year. Congressman Dan Lipinski says that threatens the cleanliness of both drinking water and fish habitat. The two have proposed quadrupling the fine for dumping raw sewage to 100-thousand-dollars a day by 2027. They say that would give cities time and federal money to upgrade their systems.
The congressmen say Detroit has been the biggest offender. But the city Water and Sewerage Department says Detroit follows state and federal regulations with untreated water that is released into the Detroit River and flows into Lake Erie.