California

ID chip helps bring cat home after 10 years

Call it Ted’s excellent adventure, with a high-tech twist: A cat with an ID microchip implanted under his skin was returned to his owner 10 years after he jumped out a window and vanished.

Chris Inglis’ sleek, black feline, Ted, was fitted with the chip back when the technology was still new in the early 1990s. But the cat was gone without a trace for a full decade before someone found him this week.

Ted — named for Keanu Reeves’ character in “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” — was brought to the Peninsula Humane Society’s animal shelter, which tracked down Inglis in San Carlos despite outdated information on the chip. The cat was found about 13 miles south of where Inglis used to live in Burlingame.

Where Ted spent those years remains a mystery.

Washington, D.C.

Judge sets deadline in Indian money case

A federal judge on Thursday said he would give the Interior Department another chance to account for money owed to American Indians, setting a 2007 deadline but expressing little confidence the department will act.

“It is not that the Court believes Interior is incapable of formulating an adequate plan for an accounting; rather, it is that the Court has no confidence that Interior is willing to actually implement an adequate accounting,” wrote U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth in his ruling.

At a 44-day trial earlier this year, attorneys representing more than 300,000 American Indians in the class-action lawsuit argued the Interior Department was incapable of accounting for the money that should have been paid to the Indians since the Indian trust fund was established in 1887.

Lamberth set strict deadlines to complete phases of the accounting, with a final tally reached by Sept. 30, 2007.

New York

Palestinian scholar dies

Columbia University literary scholar Edward W. Said, the nation’s foremost Arab intellectual and advocate for the Palestinian cause, has died after a bout with leukemia. He was 67.

Said was a leading member of the Palestinian parliament-in-exile for 14 years, stepping down in 1991. The university said Said died Thursday, but his publisher said he died late Wednesday.

He wrote passionately about the Palestinian cause and a variety of other subjects, including English literature — his academic specialty — as well as music and culture.

Said was born in 1935 in Jerusalem, then part of British-ruled Palestine, but spent most of his adult life in the United States.

He was consistently critical of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.

Alabama

Judge’s trial date set in monument case

Suspended Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore is scheduled to go on trial Nov. 12 on ethics charges stemming from his refusal to obey a federal judge’s order to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the state judicial building’s rotunda.

In setting the date Thursday, the Court of the Judiciary refused a request by Moore to delay the trial until the U.S. Supreme Court rules on his planned appeal in the monument case, which could take weeks or months.

Moore faces six charges of violating Alabama’s canons of judicial ethics for defying a federal judge who said the 5,300-pound monument was an unconstitutional endorsement of religion by government. The state Supreme Court’s eight associate justices voted to move it to a private area of the judicial building.

Washington, D.C.

Congress approves $368 billion defense bill

Congress unanimously approved a compromise $368 billion defense bill for next year, underscoring that despite differences over President Bush’s Iraq policies, there is a bipartisan consensus on the military’s role in the fight against global terrorism.

The Senate gave the measure final approval 95-0, a day after the House passed the measure 407-15.

The House and Senate also voted to keep federal agencies open next month, despite the failure of the Republican-run Congress to finish most of its routine spending bills on time.