Blog Posts by Liz Goodwin, Yahoo! News

Here's our daily roster of stories that evaded full-on blog treatment:

• A federal court has issued an injunction against further federal funding for human embryonic stem-cell research in a rebuke to President Obama's guidelines on the issue. (Reuters)

• Texas Rep. Ron Paul has broken with his son, Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul, as well as most Republicans in supporting the proposed mosque and community center near Ground Zero. (CBS)

• The U.N. says the number of Pakistanis in need of basic shelter from floods has jumped from 2 million to 6 million. (BBC)

sb10067715cp-001A New York teacher's aide was recently busted for faking her own mother's funeral in order to score extra time off from work, reports the New York Post.

Supervisors became suspicious when Dawn Singletary produced a flier for her mom's funeral that misspelled the name of the purported place of interment, St. Mary Cemetery, as "cemetary."  That's a bad enough lapse for a professional educator — but Singletary's number was truly up when she was seen bowling with her very-much-alive mom in the Bronx. Singletary was dismissed shortly thereafter, and didn't contest the action. "There's nothing to defend because what I did was my fault," Singletary told The Post when asked about the incident. "The only person that got bit in the butt was me."

This latest report just compounds a recent  string of bad PR for New York teachers in local and national media. Earlier this month, the Post reported that a first-year Brooklyn teacher threw herself down the stairs in order to avoid a performance review. Ilene Feldman denied that she faked the fall, but quickly resigned after confronted with the report. Here's video of the fall:

103538726(3)Terrorists are using the controversy around the proposed mosque and community center two blocks from Ground Zero as propaganda, reports the Wall Street Journal:

A U.S. official on Sunday said the administration was taking the upswing in anti-U.S. chatter seriously. "Terrorists like al-Qaeda and its violent allies are motivated already to try to attack the United States, but when it comes to propaganda, extremists are pure opportunists. They'll use whatever they can," the official said.

The jihadists are also using a planned Koran-burning in Florida on Sept. 11 as fuel for anti-America bashing. "We are handing al-Qaeda a propaganda coup, an absolute propaganda coup," Evan Kohlmann, an independent terrorism consultant, told the Journal.

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At least four states with some of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the nation and a history of taking millions of dollars in federal abstinence-only education grants will probably not be applying for the funds this year.

Arkansas, Illinois, Oklahoma and Hawaii — which ranked among the 20 states with the highest teen pregnancy rates  in 2005 — will instead apply for a new stream of federal funding to teach comprehensive sex ed.

Collectively, the four states received over $20 million in abstinence-only education funds in 2008.

The Upshot contacted the health departments of 15 states that accepted Title V abstinence-only funds in 2008  and are ranked in the top 20 states for teen pregnancy. Twelve of them responded, though Texas' declined to say which funding stream they were applying for.

92630551The director of Bay County Animal Control in Florida, Jim Crosby, was forced to resign this week after an employee killed, butchered, and ate a pig named "Fluffy" that was in the facility's care.

The employee who slaughtered Fluffy, Ivan Rogers, was only given a stern reprimand for his actions, prompting some local officials to speculate that Crosby was asked to resign over the incident because of unrelated interagency conflicts. The Huffington Post has a great roundup of the local coverage here.

At least two people said they wanted to adopt Fluffy after the pig was turned over to the shelter in June when its owners couldn't care for it. That's when Rogers insisted he wanted to "adopt" it. =(

Former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez has come out against Republican proposals to amend the 14th Amendment, writing in the Washington Post that ending "birthright" citizenship will not discourage people from entering the country illegally.

"Because most undocumented workers come here to provide for themselves and their families, a constitutional amendment will not solve our immigration crisis," writes Gonzales, who served under George W. Bush. "People will certainly continue to cross our borders to find a better life, irrespective of the possibilities of U.S. citizenship."

AP080827056633Many political chat shows thrive on high-octane partisan shouting matches. But when they break out in the traditionally serene studios of PBS, they're something of an embarrassment.

That's apparently why journalist Gwen Ifill wrote an extended apology to her viewers after what was meant to be a friendly debate over the proposed mosque and Islamic community center near Ground Zero turned heated Monday night.

Iffil writes that she's received "a ton" of viewer complaints over the segment, which went well beyond the typically staid fare of "NewsHour."

The Democratic mayor of Teaneck, New Jersey, Mohammed Hameeduddin, began interrupting New York Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio with pointed questions while ignoring Ifill's protestations to stop.

"The discussion was loud, erratic and, frankly, kind of out of control," she writes. "It was not the NewsHour's style. More important, it did nothing to move the debate forward. I'm still kicking myself about it."

AP100804061750(2)Over at Politico, Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin say President Obama has definitively ended "the baby boomer-era culture wars." The evidence, they say, is that Republicans are focusing less and less on "morality-based" social issues like gay marriage, abortion, and illegal drugs that galvanized the social-conservative movement over the past 30 years.

The debate, they write, has instead shifted to "the very definition of what it means to be American," with conservatives arguing that Obama is steering the country toward a more European social-democratic model of governance.

The libertarian-leaning tea party, meanwhile, would face a message problem if it argued for government interference in social issues and restraint in everything else. Even Fox pundit Glenn Beck has expressed his ambivalence about gay marriage and abortion. "I believe what Thomas Jefferson said. If it neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket, what difference is it to me?" Beck said.