Some of California’s rougher characters are coming out to fight the fires sweeping up the west coast: over 2,500 California prison inmates join the professional and volunteer firefighters every year during fire season.  The prison work release is a unique, 60-year-old inmate firefighting program, and it’s been astoundingly useful: At the state’s biggest fire area, inmates account for over 10 percent of the crew.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that the program has proved a very healthy experience for all involved.  The inmates get $1 an hour and reduced sentences; California gets much-needed manpower to battle the flames. 

The temptation to escape doesn’t seem to pull too many convicts away from the fire lines, either; instead, the Monitor notes that the work “fosters new growth in their character.”Professional firefighters seem to agree with the Monitor’s assessment: “When the bell rings, they are firemen and they act like firemen,” said one crew specialist.  “The inmates, at least in our camp, really never let me down on a fire.”  Some of the inmates also use the skills and relationships from the fire season to prepare for their careers after release: nearly 5 percent of inmate firefighters make a career out of firefighting upon release.

This year, California desperately needs the extra manpower.  Only since June 21, rampaging fires have consumed more than 675,000 acres of land, goaded on by record-high temperatures and dry lightning storms.  While that alone isn’t a record for an entire fire season, it is an unprecedented start to a season that usually waits to peak until late August or early September.  The unusual timing prompted Governor Schwarzenegger to quip, “There really is no fire season anymore.”

As helpful as the inmate help surely is, there seems to be an ambivalent resignation among the local citizens.  One first-hand account from a blogger living near the blazes is stunning in its detachment from any notion to volunteer or assist the firefighters in any way.  This attitude stands in stark contrast to the community sandbagging efforts so recently seen throughout the Midwest as towns banded together to stem the tides of rising rivers. California’s inmates battle the flames—where are the jurors who put those men behind bars?

Suburbs are shrinking, giving way to high gas prices and low housing costs—or are they? Many major news sources have gone on record in the last few months declaring the death of suburbs—yet the latest census records show a continuing shift to suburbs.

“Strange days are upon the residents of many a suburban cul-de-sac,” wrote Christopher Leinberger in the March issue of the Atlantic Monthly.  Under the heading “The Next Slum?” Leinberger cites foreclosures and vandalism in suburbs of Charlotte, NC, and Sacremento, CA as a sign of the times for all of American suburbia.  “A structural change is under way in the housing market—a major shift in the way many Americans want to live and work,” claimed Leinberger.

“Suddenly, the economics of American suburban life are under assault,” wrote Peter Goodman for the New York Times in late June.  “Life on the edges of suburbia is beginning to feel untenable.”  The perspective remained unchanged in July: “Now the iconic white picket fence comes with a hefty price tag,” Helen Chernikoff wrote for Reuters.“While home prices in the suburbs have crashed, apartments in city centers are in demand.”

The news is different today, however: a census report from the last quarter of 2007 shows a continuing trend of population moving to the suburbs, even with the housing crisis in full swing and oil prices on their historic climb from $80 over $120 a barrel.  The Chicago Tribune reports, “Iowa’s population continues to grow, with suburbs leading the way.”  YumaSun.com notes, “Arizonans continued their march to the suburbs—and beyond.”

In an op-ed piece for the LA Times last week, Joel Kotkin said “Not so fast” to the suburban doomsayers.  “The ‘out of the suburbs, back to the city’ narrative rests more on anecdote than demographic or economic fact,” he wrote.  A crunch in prices just isn’t enough to move the kids out of school, he suggests.  “Suburbs remain home to a majority of Americans and a larger proportion of US families—and people aren’t leaving those communities in droves to live in cities.”

The Dow Jones Industrial Average might be showing a bear market, but Forbes magazine has some good news: it could be worse. 

A bear market is one that is 20% below its latest peak, which the Dow Jones reached on July 2, at 21% below its October 2007 peak.  However, citing rallies in the strength of the dollar and super major oil companies, Forbes reports that “bearish expectations for European rate rises and US employment were dashed by a dose of moderately favorable news.”

Much of the media attention to the economy recently has focused on the many weaknesses in the market.  Business analysts, however, are getting increasingly vocal with economic growth forecasts, noting in particular that economic downturns are part of the natural market cycle—and very good times to invest.  Consumer spending rose 0.4 percent in May, and has increased over 2 percent in the quarter.

“The numbers weren’t as bad as they could have been,” one New Jersey trading managersaid, referring to a report this week that shows62,000 jobs were lost in June.  “Some people had feared 100,000 in job losses or more.”  The unemployment rate held steady at 5.5 percent in June, despite a glut of media attention to the reports of job losses.

Meanwhile, although the soaring price of oil is causing crunches in the airline industry and elsewhere, energy shares are helping steady the US market.  “It was energy shares that supported Wall Street as stocks climbed out of their recent trough,” Reuters.com noted.

The dollar is also rebounding against the euro, despite fears leading into the July 4 weekend that an interest rate hike by the European Central Bank would hurt the dollar, which has been struggling recently.  The ECB’s decision to raise their rate to 4.25 percent was initially feared to be an aggressive policy against the dollar, but the ECB said on Thursday their move was non-aggressive, intending only to fight inflation.  Currently, one dollar trades for 1.57 Euros or 1.98 British pounds.

A California lawsuit filed on June 20 disputes whether state voters should be given a choice on gay marriage in November.  A petition to put “Proposition 8″ on the ballot gathered over 1.1 million signatures–nearly 3% of the state’s total population.  The proposal states, “Only a marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”

“As it stands now, the measure would make a very dramatic change in the law,” said one law professor from Santa Clara University.  ”It would say to thousands of married couples, ‘Your marriage is no longer recognized.’”  The lawsuit contends that the wording of the petition was unclear, thereby invalidating the signatures.  If the lawsuit wins, the proposition will lose its chance to be put to a vote this year.

The California Supreme Court allowed homosexual marriage beginning June 16, after the court overturned another proposition defining marriage as a relationship between a man and woman.  Since then, county clerks have been inundated with requests  for marriage licenses.  The Los Angeles Times reported that nearly 4,000 licenses were issued in the first two days after the court decision–nearly double statewide June average of 2,460.

McCain reportedly expressed his support for the ballot proposition in a letter to the website protectmarriage.com, a strong backer of Proposition 8.  ”I support the efforts of the people of California  to recognize marriage as a unique institution  between a man and a woman,” McCain writes in the letter, “just as we did in my home state of Arizona.  I do not believe judges should be making these decisions.”

Obama expressed his opposition to the ballot proposition, writing in a letter to a San Francisco homosexual club that he opposed “the divisive and discriminatory efforts to amend the California Constitution.”  The Los Angeles Times quoted one California government analyst, Bob Stern, as saying the measure did not amount to a constitutional revision, noting that a revision “must fundamentally alter the state constitution, as in, say, a major restructuring of the government.”

Voters decided in a landslide 2000 ballot that marriage should be limited to the union of a man and a woman.  Still, Stern expects voting on the current proposition–if carried to the election booths–to be close.

Get used to these gas prices, says the king of Saudi Arabia.  “Consumer countries have to adapt to the prices and the mechanisms of the market,” King Abdullah said on Tuesday.  American consumers don’t need to be told, apparently: June auto sales plummeted to new lows for almost all car manufacturers.

“We have nothing to do with the current sharp increase in crude prices,” said Abdullah.  He stated that if the US and other countries want to “ease the burden on ordinary consumers,” they should first lower their own taxation on oil.  This is true for many countries, but contradicts the findings of a previous study from the Saudi-led Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).  The study, released last month, found that US oil taxes contribute far less to the price of petroleum products than do the costs of production.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg.com noticed that Asian-based auto manufacturers Honda Motor Co. and Hyundai Motor Corp. reported the only increases in auto sales this June.  “Demand for fuel-efficient cars boosted sales,” claims the article, quoting several industry experts who pinned the industry slump on fuel prices and economic insecurity.

On the campaign trail, the Christian Science Monitor reports that McCain and Obama “Share energy goals, not methods.”  McCain supports nuclear power plants, offshore drilling, and federal financial incentives to promote alternative sources of energy.  The Monitor also reports that Obama favors a windfall profits tax on oil and gas companies, laws to phase out inefficient energy consumers like incandescent light bulbs, and provide federal grants to encourage the development of “clean-energy technology, from hybrids to biofuels.”

Neither candidate, it seems, is really contradicting Abdullah—or American consumers.  Getting used to it has never been a particularly American trait, but there seem to be few alternatives on the table.

Carbon emissions may be melting the arctic sea ice, but probably not from humans: ScienceDaily.com reports“evidence of explosive volcanic eruptions deep beneath the ice-covered surface of the Arctic Ocean.”  Volcanoes release “tremendous” blasts of carbon dioxide—and immense heat.

Twenty-two researchers from nine institutions and four countries collaborated on the report, published in the academic Nature journal’s June issue.   “The generation of magmas in the earth proved far more complicated than anyone imagined,” wrote Henry J. B. Dick, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), which fronted the report.  Researchers found volcanoes “as far as we could survey to the east,” samples of “abundant active hydrothermal venting in a region where current theory predicted their absence.”

The report coincides with recent media buzz about a comment from Dr. Mark Serreze of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center.  “I’d say it’s even-odds whether the [magnetic] North Pole melts out,” Serreze told Independent science editor Steve Connor.  The resulting article ran under the headline, “Exclusive: No ice at North Pole,” presenting the “unthinkable” disappearance of ice as “one example of the impact of global warming on the planet.”

It really is a problem, insists Andy Revkin, who keeps an environmentalist blog for the New York Times.  And it really is global warming, not volcanoes: “Keep in mind it’s two miles below the sea ice,” Revkin said in response to the reports of volcanoes along Gakkel ridge, “with thick intervening layers of water that don’t exchange much heat.”  ABC News thinks differently of water, apparently. “Less sea ice means more dark open water to absorb the heat, which melts the sea ice even further,”one article noted, declaring that the whole Arctic could experience it’s “First Ice-Free Summer This Year.”

Alaskans might be glad to hear that news.  “Unless you’re packing an auger, stay away from Rabbit Lake,” quipped the Anchorage Daily News on Thursday.  Two hikers found the northern lake, which is usually ice-free by late spring, was still iced over this week.  “This hasn’t been a normal spring,” wrote the Daily News.  “Anchorage’s official temperature has yet to hit 70 degrees in 2008.” 

North Korea is edging its way back into the international community, one nuclear plant at a time.  On Thursday, for the first time since 2003, North Korea gave China a “complete declaration of all nuclear programs,” purportedly disclosing all of the nation’s nuclear holdings.  The next day, North Korea demolished “the most visible symbol of its nuclear weapons program,” bringing down the cooling tower at the controversial Yongbyon nuclear power plant.  In between those two actions, President Bush promised to begin the 45-day process to remove Korea from the US list of terrorism-sponsoring nations and lift the trade embargoes that accompany it.

Hopefully this round of US presidential promises will be better than the last.  In 1994, President Clinton was lauded for solving the North Korean nuclear crisis by promising two new Light Water Reactor (LWR) power plants in return for closing the plutonium-based Yongbyon plant.  Yongbyon was closed in 1995, but the LWRs were still unfinished in 2002, when North Korea was accused of violating the NPT and President Bush named them part of an “Axis of Evil.”  With scant electricity apart from Soviet and Chinese imports, North Korea struggled to keep the lights on while the world’s economy boomed through the 1990s.

The Washington Post noted that the documents released Thursday “do not spell out the number of plutonium bombs in storage or make promises about what happens to them.”  The Wall Street Journal predicts that North Korean leader Kim Jong Il will “stick to his past pattern: Pocket the US concessions and then threaten proliferation or some other provocation unless we make more concessions.”

“There’s a long way to go here,” admitted Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, speaking at a press conference in Kyoto.  ”The fact of the matter is that the North Koreans are disabling.  They’re moving forward on verification.  And it’s been done without, yet, economic assistance or any major steps on the political front.”

During an election season that has made Christians more aware of racial divisions in the church, a new report from the Pew Forum underscores those divisions, identifying “Historically Black Churches” as one of the three main subsets of Protestant believers.  The rest of Protestant Christianity is separated into “Evangelical” and “Mainline,” an identification driven by theological differences.

The report represents the second half of a massive telephone survey conducted in the summer of 2007, among a representative group of 35,556 adults living in the continental US.  Previous studies absorbed the “Historically Black Church” sect, which constitutes about 7% of the 2007 survey respondents, into the division between Evangelical (26% of the whole) and Mainline (18%).  This report splits the Baptist, Methodist, Nondenominational and Pentecostal traditions by racial identity.

 Observing a comparison between the Historically Black and Evangelical churches, however, yields only the smallest of differences on the eight major issues identified by the Pew Forum.  On the item “Belief in God or Universal Spirit,” 90% of respondents in both churches responded that they “Believe in God: absolutely certain.”  The item “Literal Interpretation of Scripture” yielded another minimal difference: 59% of Evangelical Church respondents answered that Scripture is the “Word of literally true word for word,” compared to 62% of Historically Black Church respondents. 

However, this dogmatic similarity disappears in the political field.  Party affiliation begins the split, with Evangelical Churches showing 50% Republican, and Historically Black Churches showing 78% Democratic.  The only issue the two groups agree on is their “Views about government’s role in protecting morality,” for which both groups show about 50% answering “Government should do more to protect morality,” and just over 40% answering “Government is too involved in morality.”

The survey’s main finding focuses on the “non-dogmatic approach to faith” espoused by most Americans: “A strong majority of those who are affiliated with a religion, including majorities of nearly every religious tradition, do not believe their religion is the only way to salvation,” the Pew Forum noted.  The only groups showing a majority of respondents who declare their religion to be the only way to salvation are the Mormons (57%) and Jehovah’s Witnesses (80%). 

The report also “confirms the close link” between Americans’ religious beliefs and their social and political attitudes.  The report concludes that religion in America is “non-dogmatic, diverse and politically relevant.”  Apparently, it’s split not only by theological ideology, but by racial identification as well.

A 12-year-old Quebec girl has won an Orwellian court case against her dad after he grounded her from a school outing for posting inappropriate photos of herself online.  The father has filed an appeal to the Quebec Superior Court ruling, which found his punishment–grounding from an end-of-the-year school trip–too harsh for the circumstances.  The daughter launched her case using the court-appointed legal guardian from her parents’ 10-year custody dispute.

The court’s first surprise was its decision last week to hear the case, which the Canadian National Post explained as a “necessary move to ensure the child was not denied a significant rite of passage” for the preteen.  The girl’s lawyer, Lucie Fortin, believed the intervention was justified, because the forbidden school trip was “Something that would never happen again in the child’s life … the end of elementary school, it was the end of a stage in her life.”  Fortin decided the school trip was more important than “a question of going to the movies or not, or going online or not–because obviously, I wouldn’t have intervened in that.”

The circumstances of the case were fairly innocuous.  The girl used a friend’s computer to visit websites that were blocked at her dad’s house, and even posted images of herself that her father deemed inappropriate.  The court noted that this was not the first instance of the daughter’s disregard for her father’s rules, but determined that being grounded from a school trip was “too severe” a response.

The father’s lawyer, Kim Beaudoin, said in her appeal that the discipline was intended to protect the child.  “At her age, children test their limits, and it’s up to the parents to set boundaries,” she said.  “I think most children respect their parents and would never go so far as to take them to court, but it’s clear that some would, and we have to ask ourselves how far this will go.”  Her appeal is intended to “ensure that this case doesn’t set a precedent,” or else “parents are going to be walking on egg shells from now on.

“I’ve got six kids.  I certainly wouldn’t want a judge watching over everything I do, and I wouldn’t want my kids being able to run to the judge,” said one Ottowa lawyer.

Although the father has full custody, the daughter has gone to live with her mom since the beginning of the legal proceedings.  Her mother had allowed her to participate in the school outing, but the school requires both parents’ agreement.

Offshore drilling might actually be a rather popular idea among voters.  An  article on the front page of The Boston Globe said that “whatever the merits of the idea, most Americans agree with John McCain about ending the federal ban on offshore drilling.”  Citing a mid-May Gallup poll, 57 percent of those polled responded Yes when asked “whether you would favor … Allowing oil drilling in the U.S. coastal and wilderness areas now off-limits to oil exploration?”

“Idea of offshore drilling seems to be spreading,” admitted a New York Times headline Thursday, citing several politicians who have recently made calls for “cautious reconsideration” of the federal ban on offshore drilling.  Among the several politicians mentioned are Florida Gov. Charlie Crist and the chairman of the Senate Environment Preservation and Conservation Committee, Burt L. Saunders.

Seven coastal governors pledged on Friday to protect their coasts from offshore drilling, reported Fox News, citing tourism and offshore industries as the lead causes for opposition.  “It makes no sense for states to put our important beaches, fisheries and coastal habitats and multi-billion dollar tourism economies at such risk for so little gain,” said Mike Daulton, Director of Conservation Policy for the Audobon Society.  But the vice chairwoman of the Florida Tourism Commission, Nicki Grossman, said Wednesday that gasoline prices might trump the opposition to drilling.

The heavy-hitting support for lifting the ban is new to this month, with McCain changing positions on Monday the 16^th and President Bush calling on Wednesday for exploration of 3 million acres of ocean floor off the coast of Virginia.  Both men previously had expressed official support the 26-year-old moratorium on offshore drilling.  The spike in oil and gas prices, however, seems to have become a catalyst for politicians who find themselves friendlier toward offshore oil drilling than perhaps they could admit otherwise.