Morning Roundup: All about the Benjamins edition

Good morning, Houston. Looks like we'll have a tougher time cracking out those fake Benjamins next year: The $100 bill will soon be getting a high-tech makeover to thwart counterfeiters. The key feature: 650,000 tiny lenses embedded in each bill, which will magnify the printing so that the portrait of Benjamin Franklin appears to move up and down or side to side, depending on which way you move the bill. "It makes for a very compelling high security device," Douglas Crane, a vice president at Crane & Co. — the company that will produce the security device — said. We know what he means: We can't wait to get hold of one of these bills, turn it every which way and yell, "Dance, Franklin, dance!" And we know we can't be the only ones.

>> SWAT surprise: An HPD SWAT team spent the early morning hours today in a standoff with a woman believed to be holed up inside a south side home — but when police stormed the house, they discovered that no one was inside at all. Police responded to a call around 12:30 a.m. that the woman was in the house with a gun; later reports indicated that she might be suicidal and that she had two children, aged 3 and 18, with her. The SWAT team was called around 2 a.m. and remained in the standoff for more than three hours. At about 5:30, they broke a second-floor window and discovered that the house was empty. It's not clear yet where the woman and children are; according to police, she was in communication with her husband, a contractor in Iraq, but she never communicated directly with officers.

>> Will EarthLink layoffs affect Houston Wi-Fi?: EarthLink, the company hired by the city to develop Houston's citywide wireless Internet network, announced Tuesday that it will lay off nearly half its workforce in an attempt to scale back or change its model for developing municipal Wi-Fi. But will the news affect Houston's network, construction on which has already been delayed? Maybe not: EarthLink officials said they'll talk with leaders in other cities where the company is developing wireless networks about the city governments being those networks' primary subscribers, but that's a provision that has already been worked out here. Still, technology talk-show host Michael Garfield said he thinks the news isn't so great: "It's certainly going to slow the process down," he told the Chronicle. Mayor Bill White hasn't commented on the news from EarthLink, but said last week that he will seek compensation for any major delays in the project.

>> Oak Ridge councilman in hot water: Tony Butler, a city councilman in Oak Ridge North, has been publicly censured for sending an e-mail with racial content over the city's e-mail system — but Butler insists that he's not racist. The e-mail discussed U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee's call for hurricane names reflecting black culture: "Well, it appears our African-American friends have found yet something else to be [expletive] about," Butler wrote, going on to recount what KPRC describes as "a mocking, racially insensitive story that cannot be published or aired on television." (The odd thing is, Jackson Lee made the suggestion about hurricane names back in 2003. Maybe the news comes late to Oak Ridge North.) Some residents protested Butler's actions, and Oak Ridge North Mayor Fred O'Connor met with Butler last week and asked him to resign. Butler refused, leading to the censure from his City Council colleagues. For his part, Butler apologized for sending the message: "I did a very stupid thing," he told Channel 2. "I admit to that mistake. This one incident does not define me as a person."

>> Today's weather: If you're hoping for a break from the rain, don't hope too hard: Looks like we could have heavy afternoon storms through the end of the week. Today, expect a 60 percent chance of rain, mainly after 1 p.m., with a high temperature around 89; tonight, the rain chance will decrease as the temperature drops into the mid-70s. Expect basically the same forecast tomorrow and Friday, with less of a chance of storms over the weekend. The good news: That cooler weather we talked about earlier this week could hit in about a week. Highs in the low 80s and lows in he mid-60s? We'll take it!

But for now, we'll take a couple of old-style $100 bills in exchange for this morning's headlines. We know you can't wait to get rid of 'em ... right?