Nation in brief: Texas braces for rain; floods recede elsewhere

Residents in Texas braced for more rain and more flood damage Thursday while floodwaters slowly subsided in parts of Oklahoma and Kansas.

An estimated 1,000 homes in Texas have already been severely damaged or destroyed by the widespread flooding since late May. The slightest additional rainfall could cause flash flooding where rivers, lakes and reservoirs are already full to the brim.

“Unprecedented,” said Jack Colley, chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management. “Mostly this time of year we’re fighting wildfires … The problem with this is, the water won’t go away.”

The affected area covers 49 counties and 48,000 square miles from North Texas to the Rio Grande Valley, a section roughly the size of the state of Mississippi. Thirteen deaths have been blamed on the weather over the past 2 1/2 weeks in the state, Gov. Rick Perry’s office said.

BOSTON

Porn foes criticize Romney

Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney, who rails against the “cesspool” of pornography, is being criticized by social conservatives who argue that he should have tried to halt hard-core hotel movie offerings during his near-decade on the Marriott board.

“Marriott is a major pornographer. And even though he may have fought it, everyone on that board is a hypocrite for presenting themselves as family values when their hotels offer 70 different types of hard-core pornography,” said Phil Burress, president of Citizens for Community Values, an anti-pornography group based on Ohio.

“It certainly would have been wrong to impose his own personal beliefs if they were contrary to the financial interests of the company,” Marriott spokesman Roger Conner said of Romney.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.

Toilet to cost $19 million

In space, a loo costs a lot.

NASA has agreed to pay $19 million for a Russian-built toilet system for the International Space Station. The figure may sound astronomical, but NASA officials said it was cheaper than building their own.

“It’s akin to building a municipal treatment center on Earth,” NASA spokeswoman Lynnette Madison said Thursday.

Also, astronauts are familiar with how it works since it’s similar to one already in use at the space station. The new system will be able to transfer urine to a device that can produce drinking water.

The new system is scheduled to be delivered to the U.S. side of the space station in 2008. It will offer more privacy than the old toilet system, which will definitely be needed: The space station crew is expected to grow from three to six people by 2009.

PITTSBURGH

Robber, 76, gets house arrest

A 76-year-old woman who robbed a bank to help her troubled son pay off debts will serve her sentence at home, not in prison.

Marilyn Devine was sentenced Thursday to 23 months of house arrest followed by 20 years probation for using an unloaded pistol to rob a bank branch inside a supermarket in West Mifflin in March 2006.

Devine said she didn’t mean to hurt anybody and robbed the National City Bank to help her son, who had called her threatening suicide over his financial problems.

But several tellers told Allegheny County Judge Don Machen on Thursday that they were harmed.

“You don’t remember my face, but I’m haunted by yours, your pale blue eyes,” said Janelle Drecnik, 25, who was on her third day on the job when Devine stuck a pistol in her face.

Drecnik said she still has nightmares and must deal with “the ridicule of people laughing that I got robbed by a grandmother.”

From wire reports