COMMON DREAMS– As same-sex couples in New York prepare this weekend to tie the knot, their brethren in Massachusetts — the first state to legalize gay marriage — have some advice.

Enjoy the wedding because afterward, they will realize that there are 1,000 or so benefits gay couples can’t get because of the federal defense of Marriage Act: Joint federal tax returns, federal health plans for spouses, and access to spouses’ federal pensions.

“Let them enjoy their joy, but they will soon realize that their marriage is not being seen equally at the federal level,” said Dorene Bowe-Shulman, who married her longtime partner, Mary, in 2004 in Massachusetts, the first state to legalize gay marriage.

New York’s law takes effect at 12:01 a.m. on Sunday, with the state where the gay rights movement began more than 40 years ago joining five other states and the District of Columbia in legalizing same-sex marriage.

While many married gay couples are hoping for the repeal of the 1996 law, known as DOMA, the measure’s supporters are pushing back, arguing that marriage is a union between a man and a woman and that repeal would violate the views of most Americans.

“That definition of marriage has been the position of the nation for many, many years, with the raising of children and the benefit to those children from a male-female household,” said Carrie Gordon Earll, a spokeswoman at the advocacy group Focus on the Family.

DOMA says that traditional marriage “is something we value as a nation,” she said.

As gay couples prepare for their weddings in New York, the largest state yet to legalize same-sex marriage, their counterparts in Massachusetts are telling them that their push for equal rights doesn’t end with the ability to get married.

Dorene Bowe-Shulman and her partner were among a group of gay couples and widowers who filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of DOMA, which prevents the federal government from recognizing gay marriages.

Read more about Mass. Gay Couples to N.Y.: DOMA Still Denies You Benefits

© 2011 Associated Press

Join Al Franken to repeal DOMA! Sign your name to the petition: http://www.alfranken.com/index.php/splash/doma_0711

Photo by Flickr user Mad Hausfrau

POPULAR SCIENCE– A lot of the debate about when modern humans became modern humans has to do with the head–when our brains evolved into the functional equivalent of that of modern mankind. But while that particular argument continues, a team of UK researchers using a new kind of statistical technique have analyzed ancient footprints at a site in Tanzania and found that if our feet are allowed to tell the tale, our early ancestors were becoming human-like as much as two million years earlier than we previously thought.

The study relies on eleven well-preserved footprints at the Laetoli site in Tanaznia that the researchers subjected to a new statistical technique derived from methods used in functional brain imaging. Using this technique, they created 3-D average of the 11 prints there, comparing them with data obtained from the study of modern humans and living great apes.

The researchers also used computer simulations to model a variety of gaits–and the footprints they would have produced–for the likely maker of the Laetoli prints, a species known as Australopithecus afarensis. It was previously thought that this ancestor walked crouched over, putting pressure on the side of the foot and pushing off from the middle, like a modern ape.

Read more about Early Man Walked Upright 2 Million Years Earlier Than We Thought, Says New Analysis

© 2011 Popular Science

Photo by Flickr user Grabthar

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC– A blackspot tuskfish off Australia has its mouth full as it carries a cockle to a nearby rock, against which the fish was seen repeatedly bashing the shellfish to get at the fleshy bits inside.

A recent study in the journal Coral Reefs says the picture—snapped at a depth of nearly 60 feet (18 meters) in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef in 2006—is the first ever taken of a tool-using fish in the wild.

Professional diver Scott Gardner was just about out of air and swimming back to the surface when he heard an odd cracking sound nearby. Swimming over to investigate, he spotted the foot-long (30-centimeter-long) fish at work.

“When Scott showed me his photos, I said ‘Wow, this is quite amazing,'” said study co-author Alison Jones, a coral ecologist at Central Queensland University in Rockhampton, Australia.

Read more about Wild Fish Uses Tool.

© 2011 National Geographic

Photo by flickr user Wadjin

SALON– For much of the day yesterday, the featured headline on The New York Times online front page strongly suggested that Muslims were responsible for the attacks on Oslo; that led to definitive statements on the BBC and elsewhere that Muslims were the culprits.  The Washington Post‘s Jennifer Rubin wrote a whole column based on the assertion that Muslims were responsible, one that, as James Fallows notes, remains at the Post with no corrections or updates.  The morning statement issued by President Obama — “It’s a reminder that the entire international community holds a stake in preventing this kind of terror from occurring” and “we have to work cooperatively together both on intelligence and in terms of prevention of these kinds of horrible attacks” — appeared to assume, though (to its credit) did not overtly state, that the perpetrator was an international terrorist group. 

But now it turns out that the alleged perpetrator wasn’t from an international Muslim extremist group at all, but was rather a right-wing Norwegian nationalist with a history of anti-Muslim commentary and an affection for Muslim-hating blogs such as Pam Geller’s Atlas Shrugged, Daniel Pipes, and Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch.  Despite that, The New York Times is still working hard to pin some form of blame, even ultimate blame, on Muslim radicals (h/t sysprog):

Terrorism specialists said that even if the authorities ultimately ruled out Islamic terrorism as the cause of Friday’s assaults, other kinds of groups or individuals were mimicking Al Qaeda’s brutality and multiple attacks.

“If it does turn out to be someone with more political motivations, it shows these groups are learning from what they see from Al Qaeda,” said Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism researcher at the New America Foundation in Washington.

Al Qaeda is always to blame, even when it isn’t, even when it’s allegedly the work of a Nordic, Muslim-hating, right-wing European nationalist.  Of course, before Al Qaeda, nobody ever thought to detonate bombs in government buildings or go on indiscriminate, politically motivated shooting rampages.  The NYT speculates that amonium nitrate fertilizer may have been used to make the bomb because the suspect, Anders Behring Breivik, owned a farming-related business and thus could have access to that material; of course nobody would have ever thought of using that substance to make a massive bomb had it not been for Al Qaeda.  So all this proves once again what a menacing threat radical Islam is.

Read full article on Greenwald: The Meaninglessness of “Terrorism”.

Written by Glenn Greenwald

© Salon 2011

MSNBC– Astronomers have discovered the largest and oldest mass of water ever detected in the universe — a gigantic, 12-billion-year-old cloud harboring 140 trillion times more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined.

The cloud of water vapor surrounds a supermassive black hole called a quasar located 12 billion light-years from Earth. The discovery shows that water has been prevalent in the universe for nearly its entire existence, researchers said.

“Because the light we are seeing left this quasar more than 12 billion years ago, we are seeing water that was present only some 1.6 billion years after the beginning of the universe,” study co-author Alberto Bolatto of the University of Maryland said in a statement. “This discovery pushes the detection of water one billion years closer to the Big Bang than any previous find.” 

Read more about the Largest, Oldest Water Mass Discovered in Universe.

© 2011 MSNBC

Photo by NASA/ESA