“From skull caves in southern Kenya to Mexico’s searing Chihuahuan desert, preserving sacred sites is key to slowing the loss of animal and plant species, environmentalists said on Saturday.

Experts have pinpointed a string of religious sites across the globe as pilot ecosystems where local customs have helped safeguard troves of biological richness.” (Yahoo! News)

Should We Have Known that President Bush would bust the budget?: “This week’s column is a question, a brief one addressed with honest curiosity to Republicans. It is: When George W. Bush first came on the scene in 2000, did you understand him to be a liberal in terms of spending?” — Peggy Noonan (WSJ OpinionJournal thanks to walker)

Urban Legends Reference Pages: “On Wednesday, March 1, 2006, at a hearing on the proposed Constitutional Amendment to prohibit gay marriage, Jamie Raskin, professor of law at AU, was requested to testify.

At the end of his testimony, Republican Senator Nancy Jacobs said: ‘Mr. Raskin, my Bible says marriage is only between a man and a woman. What do you have to say about that?’

Raskin replied: ‘Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You did not place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.’

The room erupted into applause.”

“Physicists announced Thursday that they now have the smoking gun that shows the universe went through extremely rapid expansion in the moments after the big bang, growing from the size of a marble to a volume larger than all of observable space in less than a trillion-trillionth of a second.

The discovery — which involves an analysis of variations in the brightness of microwave radiation — is the first direct evidence to support the two-decade-old theory that the universe went through what is called inflation.” (Yahoo! News)