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• Ida's Missing Link Status More Hype Than Reality - (Read)
• Who Is Supreme Court Nominee Sonia Sotomayor? - (Read)
• In Memoriam - (Read)

Important News Headlines

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IDA'S MISSING LINK STATUS MORE HYPE THAN REALITY - (Print)

BBC1 will be airing the documentary "Ida - Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor" on Tuesday evening, bringing continued attention to the lemur-like primate that is being hailed as another missing link in human evolution.

In her day, Ida swung from the jungle branches of sub-tropical ancient Germany and probably spent her days eating and hurling nuts at unfortunate passers by. Since last week, a cast of Ida's remains have resided at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where it has basked in the adoration of her public. Another cast will go on display at London's Natural History Museum Wednesday.

Ida's remains are nothing to sniff at; she is a remarkably well preserved fossil specimen. Not only are 95 percent of her bones present, but the outline of her fur can still be seen, and the scientists who have scrutinized her since 2006 have also been able to study her soft tissues and stomach contents. That's downright astonishing for a creature that is supposed to be 47 million-years-old. Lucy, the famous australopithecine from Ethiopia, was just 40 percent complete after an alleged mere 3 million years. Being preserved in a hunk of rock has certainly helped Ida age gracefully.

Her excellent quality is not all that makes Ida notable. Jørn Hurum, the paleontologist who has been studying Ida at the University of Oslo, exploded excitement in the scientific community with Ida's interesting set of characteristics. Ida is similar to a lemur, one of those monkey-type creatures that liked to "move it move it" in the animated film Madagascar. However, Ida is missing some basic lemur items, most notably a grooming claw and a "tooth comb" - a row of fused lower teeth. Unlike lemurs, she also has fingernails instead of claws and a talus bone on her foot. Because of these ape-like characteristics, paleontologists see Ida's kind, dubbed Darwinius masillae in honor of Darwin's 200th birthday, as a cross between earlier primates and apes.

"Now, for the first time, an incredibly complete early primate fossil has been discovered which provides us with direct evidence of an intermediate link between the human primate lineage and earlier mammals," states The Link website. "Ida is an example of a transitional fossil between primitive primates and the prosimian and anthropoid branches, the latter of which eventually led to humans ... She is the earliest, and one of the most significant links, ever found."

"This animal has front teeth incisors like ours, like monkeys and apes and humans do," said Philip Gingerich, director of the University of Michigan's Museum of Paleontology. "It doesn't have pointed incisors like tarisers and not combed incisors like lemurs. It also has toes, and if it's a lemur it should have a grooming claw, but it doesn't."

The Messel Pit, Germany
While a great deal of fuss is being made over her fingernails, what is perhaps just as interesting as Ida herself is the area in which she was found. Ida's cat-sized remains were discovered in the 1980s in a fossil-rich volcanic lake bed near the village of Messel, Germany. A host of interesting creatures have been discovered in the same area, including the giant squirrel-like Kopidodon that had opposable thumbs and big toes (and yet has not been presented as a potential human ancestor) and even four species of marsupials. It's interesting to know that other marsupials besides the ubiquitous road-squashed opossum have flourished outside of Australia.  Little horses and crocodiles also once lived in Messel, just as they did in ancient Texas.  The area has been protected for scientific study and could offer additional remarkable finds in the future.

A Missing Link?
Ultimately, though, Ida is still just an extinct primate. She couldn't do calculus or even basic algebra, and she never invented anything. The pop-science community has made a lot of noise in the press about Ida's missing link status, but not all scientists agree.

Prof Norman MacLeod and Dr Angela Milner, the Keeper and Associate Keeper of Paleontology at London's Natural History Museum, wrote for The Telegraph, "Ida lacks some of the features common to modern lemurs, but does not appear to possess any features unique to our own lineage of anthropoid primates. This renders Ida's evolutionary status ambiguous, at best."

Other scientists have echoed similar thoughts.  Primate expert Professor Matt Cartmill of Boston University said of Ida, "What remains to be shown is that this animal had features which link it decisively to higher primates."

Roger Thomas, secretary of the US Paleontological Society, notes that paleontologists debate which early primates they believe sprouted human kind. "According to one group of thought," he said, "we are descended from the same primates as lemurs. Another argument is that hominids evolved from another small primate, the tarsiidae."

Prof Cartmill added: "This specimen could settle that debate but, if I had to put my money on it, my expectation would be that they will not be able to tell one way or another."

The History Channel has declared that Ida will "change history forever." Yet, while B. Holly Smith of the University of Michigan's Museum of Anthropology believes Ida is significant, she has admitted that she considers History's claim a "wild exaggeration."

In the end, Ida may be just another branch on the messy human origins bush, the one paleontologists keep hoping will become a tree.

As Jonathan Wells pointed out, Ida actually demonstrates how desperate the evolutionary community is to find evidence of human evolutionary ancestry:

"When you listen to Darwinists, they claim their theory is as well established as gravity," Wells told WND. "If that were really the case, we wouldn't be getting these startling announcements that we finally found the proof that we need. There wouldn't be any controversy. This would be like someone running up and saying, 'Stop the presses. I just saw another apple fall from the tree; Newton was right!' In the evolutionists' own framework, it's nonsense. It demonstrates their theory is not as well established as they claim."

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WHO IS SUPREME COURT NOMINEE SONIA SOTOMAYOR? - (Print)

President Obama's first US Supreme Court nomination, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, has a richly inspiring personal story. Raised by a widowed mother in the Bronx projects, Sotomayor rose from her humble beginnings to serve for a decade on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and may soon become the nation's third female and first Hispanic Supreme Court justice. Judge Sotomayor's history is not irrelevant to her quality as a judge; we all pull from our experiences when making important decisions. The big question is, how does Sotomayor process controversial issues and what does her voting record tell us about the types of decisions she makes?

Sonia Sotomayor's father died when she was nine-years-old, yet Sotomayor's mother worked six-days-per-week in order to send her two children to Catholic school. Sotomayor attended Princeton University, where she graduated summa cum laude, and then went onto Yale Law School, where she became editor the Yale Law Journal. President Bush (41) nominated Sotomayor to the federal court in 1991 and she was promoted to the appeals court for the Second Circuit in 1997 by President Clinton. Now, at age 54, Sotomayor is in position to take her seat on the most powerful court in the land.

Liberals say that Sotomayor is a brilliant woman who is hardly a radical, and will likely vote much the same as David Hackett Souter, whose seat she will fill after his retirement.

Conservatives want to know how Sotomayor will approach the Constitution. She concerned conservatives by a statement she made when speaking at Duke University, saying, "All of the legal defense funds out there, they're looking for people with court of appeals experience" because "the court of appeals is where policy is made."  That statement presented her as a judicial activist. 

In explanation, Sotomayor answered her critics by saying, "On the Court of Appeals, you are looking to how the law is developing so that it will then be applied to a broad class of cases. So you are always thinking about the ramifications of this ruling on the next step in the development of the law."   She clarified that judges "don't make law."

Constitutional Originalists are still wary.  "Americans want the Supreme Court to make decisions based on the Constitution and not on some lawless standard that puts identity politics before the law," Judicial Watch said in a statement. "There is no room on the Supreme Court for someone who will put her feeling and politics above the rule of law."

Whether Sotomayor will follow the words of the Constitution - or whether she will try to bend the Constitution to her will - is the question people want answered. The best way to know her, though, is to look at the decisions she's made in the past. Sotomayor's substantial number of years as a judge give America plenty to sift through to understand what sort of jurist she will be.

Election Law:
In Gelb v Board of Elections Sotomayor ruled in favor of write-in voting on ballots. She was the first federal judge to do so, writing that "states cannot structure elections in a manner that favors candidates of established parties."

Affirmative Action:
In a famous case, which has since gone to the US Supreme Court (Ricci v. DeStefano), Sotomayor voted to side with the city of New Haven when it threw out standardized tests for firefighter advancement because too few minorities were able to pass it. The City decided to scrap the test because its results would have had a "disparate impact" on minorities, and there was concern about lawsuits over employment discrimination. In a fiercely split decision, Sotomayor voted in favor of the city and against the white firefighters who said their rights were violated.

First Amendment:
Yet, in Pappas v. Giuliani, Sotomayor voted to uphold the free speech rights of a NYPD employee who sent out racist materials through the mail on his own time. She argued that the NYPD could not terminate the employee, because he retained his First Amendment rights outside of work even if his speech was "offensive, hateful, and insulting."

Fourth Amendment:
In N.G. ex rel. S.G. v. Connecticut, Sotomayor voted against the strip searching of troubled adolescent girls at juvenile detention centers, and disagreed with the majority in doing so. She agreed that some of the strip searches had been lawful, but due to their severity, they should not be allowed "in the absence of individualized suspicion, of adolescents who have never been charged with a crime."

On the other hand, Sotomayor voted in Leventhal v. Knapek that a DOT employee's rights were not violated when his employer searched his computer, because the employer had reasonable grounds to suspect "work-related misconduct."

Abortion:
In Center for Reproductive Law and Policy v. Bush, Sotomayor voted in favor of President Bush's Mexico City Policy and against abortion rights groups. She argued that the government "is free to favor the anti-abortion position over the pro-choice position, and can do so with public funds." According to LifeNews, Sotomayor is "[t]he only potential Supreme Court justice who may provide hope for pro-life advocates."  Sotomayor has never decided a case on the constitutionality of abortion itself.

George Pavia, a New York lawyer representing major Italian clients called Sotomayor "liberal" 25 years ago, saying, "She is liberal, as am I," Pavia said. "Liberal without being a flaming type of do-gooder or anything of the sort. To call her a centrist would not be accurate. To call her wild-eyed would also not be accurate. She is far too rational, far too interested in the underlying facts."

The US Senate will do more to dig into the character and history of Judge Sotomayor, and will make the final decision on her confirmation.  In the meanwhile, her success in rising from fatherless child in the Bronx to US Supreme Court nominee deserves congratulations.

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IN MEMORIAM - (Print)

"It is, in a way, an odd thing to honor those who died in defense of our country, in defense of us, in wars afar away. The imagination plays a trick. We see these soldiers in our mind as old and wise. We see them as something like the Founding Fathers, grave and gray-haired. But most of them were boys when they died, and they gave up two lives, the one they were living and the one they would have lived. When they died, they gave up their chance to be husbands and fathers and grandfathers. They gave up their chance to be revered old men. They gave up everything for our country, for us. And all we can do is remember." - Ronald Reagan

It began on April 19, 1775 at the battle of Lexington and Concord. It was this famous revolutionary battle that was preceded by the midnight ride of Paul Revere and made immortal by the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote:

"By the rude bridge that arched the flood
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world."

The battle of Lexington and Concord marked the beginning of America's war for independence. It was then the blood of the first American patriots was spilled. From that day until this, many of our men and women have willingly given their lives for the cause of freedom – in many wars, on many continents, with varying degrees of support from the home front.

Today, in the Middle East, thousands of United States soldiers are fighting to protect the values and freedoms that we too often take for granted. Please continue to pray for spiritual healing for our nation, wisdom for our leaders, and safety for our soldiers fighting overseas. Also, in honor of Memorial Day, please take a moment to thank our military veterans and those in active military service for risking their lives for the cause of freedom.

Memorial Day has passed, yet the war continues.   The battle is not only made by the men and women in uniform, although theirs is a very visual struggle; the battle is fought every day by each of us as we lay down our own lives and put ourselves aside in the protection and nurture of our families and our communities.   The battle continues every day for the souls of men and women for whom Christ died.  As we walk on from Memorial Day into the summer, let's continue to remember those who have gone before us, and be inspired to love as they have loved, giving the last full measure of devotion to those causes that deserve it.

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CA's Same-Sex Marriage Ban Will Stand - May 26, 2009
The state Supreme Court has upheld a voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage, but also decided that the estimated 18,000 gay couples who tied the knot before the law took effect will stay wed. The decision Tuesday rejected an argument from gay rights activists that the ban revised the California constitution's equal protection clause to such a dramatic degree that it first needed the Legislature's approval. USA Today

Trouble With North Korea Only Beginning - May 26, 2009
President Obama, other world leaders and the UN Security Council strongly condemned North Korea's nuclear test Monday, while experts who have studied the isolated state for years warned that the US has few options and that more provocation likely lies ahead. On Tuesday, South Korea said it will join the US-led Proliferation Security Initiative, which began in 2003 to deter states such as North Korea and Iran from trade in missile and nuclear technology. North Korea has warned that it would consider the South's full participation in the program as a declaration of war. The Washington Times

Palestinian Christians Don't Feel Safe Anymore - May 25, 2009
Palestinian Christians are reeling from a series of grave desecrations this week that they say are indicative of intimidation tactics from the town's growing Muslim population. "Christians don't feel free anymore. Our way of life is changing while the Muslim population grows," a local Christian told WND. The Christian would only give his first name, Anis, for fear of Muslim retaliation if he speaks out. WorldNetDaily

Netanyahu Would Remove Illegal Outposts - May 25, 2009
Deeply concerned about the Iranian threat and eager for US support, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is willing to remove illegal outposts while allowing natural growth in existing West Bank settlements. "We are not in regular times," Netanyahu said. "The danger is approaching, and the most dangerous thing for a live organism is to not recognize the danger on the way." Israel's Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman disagreed, urging the government to ratify the road map. The Jerusalem Post

"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." John 8:32

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