News to note.

Louisiana Governer call for Justice of the Peace to be disciplined for refusal of marrry a balck man to a white woman.

Interracial marriage case: Louisiana governor, U.S. senator call for official's ouster

NEW ORLEANS -- Louisiana's governor and a U.S. senator joined today in calling for the ouster of a local official who refused to marry an interracial couple, saying his actions clearly broke the law.

Keith Bardwell, a white justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish in the southeastern part of the state, refused to issue a marriage license earlier this month to Beth Humphrey, who is white, and Terence McKay, who is black. His refusal has prompted calls for an investigation or resignation from civil and constitutional rights groups and the state's Legislative Black Caucus.

Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal said in a statement a nine-member commission that reviews lawyers and judges in the state should investigate.

"Disciplinary action should be taken immediately -- including the revoking of his license," Jindal said.

Bardwell did not return calls left on his answering machine Friday.

Bardwell has said he always asks if a couple is interracial and, if they are, refers them to another justice of the peace. Bardwell said no one had complained in the past and he doesn't marry the couples because he's worried about their children's futures.

"Perhaps he's worried the kids will grow up and be president," said Bill Quigley, director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and Justice, referring to President Barack Obama, the son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas.

Obama's deputy press secretary, Bill Burton, echoed those sentiments.

"I've found that actually the children of biracial couples can do pretty good," Burton told reporters aboard Air Force One as it flew to Texas.

Humphrey and McKay were eventually married by another justice of the peace, but are now looking into legal action against Bardwell.

Humphrey said she called Bardwell on Oct. 6 to ask about a marriage license. She said Bardwell's wife told her that Bardwell would not sign marriage licenses for interracial couples.

Bardwell maintains he can recuse himself from marrying people. Quigley disagreed.

"A justice of the peace is legally obligated to serve the public, all of the public," Quigley said. "Racial discrimination has been a violation of Louisiana and U.S. law for decades. No public official has the right to pick and choose which laws they are going to follow."

A spokeswoman for the Louisiana Judiciary Commission said investigations were confidential and would not comment. If the commission recommends action to the Louisiana Supreme Court, the matter would become public.

U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said in a statement Bardwell's practices and comments were deeply disturbing.

"Not only does his decision directly contradict Supreme Court rulings, it is an example of the ugly bigotry that divided our country for too long," she said.

Tangipahoa Parish President Gordon Burgess said Bardwell's views were not consistent with his or those of the local government. But as an elected official, Bardwell was not under the supervision of the parish government.

"However, I am certainly very disappointed that anyone representing the people of Tangipahoa Parish, particularly an elected official, would take such a divisive stand," Burgess said in an e-mail. "I would hope that Mr. Bardwell would consider offering his resignation if he is unable to serve all of the people of his district and our parish."

Bardwell, a Republican, has served as justice of peace for 34 years. He said he has run without opposition each time, but had decided earlier not to run again. His current term expires Dec. 31, 2014.

(Associated Press Writers Mary Foster and Eileen Sullivan contributed to this report.)

You read that right.  I have concluded that it is in fact the time to apologize to Michael Vick.  I have had an epiphany that the outrage against Vick is in fact, just a reflection on the paradoxical hypocrisy of white hubris.

"I'm not a racist, you're a racist, for thinking I'm a racist!"

I apologize.  It is that simple.

To demand contrition from someone like Vick is in essence a demand for submission.  To a person like Vick, that is just a call for him to once again be obsequious to a master, and you cannot spell obsequious without IOU (The Simpsons; Forrester, Brent; "Homer vs. Patty and Selma;" 1995).

Must be why some people think that the *real* message of Christ is about power.

That is why many people are unwilling to even apologize or understand the long-term ramifications and pernicious ripple-effect that slavery and segregation have had through the institutionalized hegemony over blacks by whites.  Whites are just as unwilling to concede as much through an apology.

The irony is that, someone like Vick knows that what he did was wrong.  He will even say that publicly, and want to mean it.  On another level, however, that will only erode the will power of someone like Vick. 

The more that someone like Vick has to apologize for a crime no matter how gruesome, the more it is a reminder that no one has apologized for the crimes that still affect communities created in the aftermath of slavery—the type of communities that gave birth to dog fighting.  Someone like Vick knows that his actions are wrong, but would rather bust you in the mouth than to apologize to you.

I can already hear the churlish cries of derision, and the hate mail: "bleeding heart," "what, “you’re an idiot," "this is awful," "irrelevant," "(fill in the blank)," so on and so forth.  If you do resort to such gauche responses, then I do not care about what you think.

I would hardly qualify as those things, and particularly not a, "bleeding heart."

I would rather not waste time by articulating the winnowing of my quixotic political history, but instead reduce it by bowdlerizing it.  Frankly, I no longer wish to fight the windmill: the truth I have known yet fought or ran from faster than Vick to the end zone. 

Since 1999, I have been a talk-radio fiend of the highest order, inculcated with the sublimated racism and callous that has now exploded into the histrionic, "audacity of dopes," that can actually compare a black guy to Hitler.

I used to bring Limbaugh's books to school, as well as a radio.  I would even defend his comments about Donovan McNabb back in 2003.

Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly.  Yet, that is only the surface.  I like to say that I have been inside the belly of the beast.

As such, I have met quite a few bleeding brains.  I say that because their words now make me wonder if I am having an aneurysm.

Thus, I abjure.

I cannot condemn Michael Vick without considering the gruesome murder of James Byrd Jr. in 1998.

I think the thoughts that have lied beneath the Vick story are that many black people look at those acts of cruelty and think, "Hey that has been done to us."  At one time, people of African origin were treated like dogs and nothing more than property. 

That still happens.

The instance that stands out in my mind was the gruesome murder of James Byrd Jr.  There have been other instances where white people have treated non-white people as dogs, and instances where non-white people lashed back either immediately or over time.  To me, Byrd's murder in 1998 stands out the most.

I cannot conceive of a crime that is greater than the crimes committed by the institution of slavery, an institution that was in effect just codified genocide.  (On that note, other groups have been subjected to that oppression).

I cannot condemn Michael Vick without considering the destruction of countless lives through slavery and segregation and thus, the ability of a family to grow through the generations.

I cannot condemn Vick for hanging-around the misfits that collectively engaged in dog fighting, when I consider the reluctance by someone like Vick to abandon those that remain in the communities of perpetual squalor created in the aftermath of slavery and segregation.

Why though, should I apologize to Michael Vick?  After all, I never owned slaves; in fact, my family descended from the Azores Islands of Portugal, the North Country of England, and Scotland and immigrated to the US in the 20th Century.

The truth however is, slavery and segregation benefited white people, regardless of whether they owned slaves—just by the fact that those systems provided opportunities to whites to the detriment of blacks.

All you would get for being black was the knowledge that those who squandered those chances had taken them for granted.

All these blogs I have written in criticism of (fill in the blank), were just an escape from the truth: I in fact felt responsible for the behavior of Michael Vick.

I apologize.

LINK

Life sucks, but when you have good friends to share life with, it doesn't seem to suck as bad any more...

Peace and Love

What's At Stake:

• The Healthy Youth Act: Sponsored by Representative Chelsa Wagner (D-Allegheny), the Healthy Youth Act would amend the Pennsylvania school code to require public schools' health curriculum to include age appropriate, abstinence-based sex education which includes information on prevention of STIs and unintended pregnancies. Local school boards would decide which programs would best suit their districts, and parents would have the ability to opt out their students from instruction.

• The Notice Home Act: Sponsored by Representative Eddie Day Pashinski (D-Luzerne), the bill simply requires a notice to be sent home to parents to inform them if their student is to be enrolled in an abstinence-only-until-marriage program at a public school. The bill increases parental involvement by letting parents know what information is and is NOT being taught, can opt-out their child if they so choose, and can continue the discussion with further education at home.

• In 2008, a Center for Disease Control study shocked the nation with the announcement that one in four teenage girls today is infected with an STI.

• No abstinence-only-until-marriage program has been shown to help teens delay the initiation of sex or protect themselves when they do initiate sex. 

• NO standards exist for comprehensive sex education in Pennsylvania.

Campaign Expiration Date:
July 1, 2009

Did you know:

Nationally, one in four teen girls is infected with a
sexually transmitted infection (STI)?

Over 17,000 teens in Pennsylvania tested positive for chlamydia last year?

83% of Pennsylvanians support comprehensive sex education in schools?

 YOU CAN HELP pass sex education legislation here in Pennsylvania?

NOW is the time to make abstinence-based education which includes age-appropriate, medically accurate information about preventing sexually transmitted infections and unintended pregnancies the standard in Pennsylvania schools!

Two bills that would do just that have been introduced into the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. Please help build the momentum in support of this legislation by sending the email below to your Representative, William Keller, saying I SUPPORT SEX EDUCATION, DO YOU?

This legislation could move in the coming months, so please stay tuned to hear more about how the bills progress! Thank you for your continued support!

For two days, Margaret Jones lay at the top of a dank SEPTA stairwell near Eighth and Filbert Streets.

Subway commuters by the scores passed the 61-year-old woman, covered with three dirty blankets, her head propped on a plastic bag, a concern to no one but the other homeless regulars who hung out there.

They worried about Margaret, schizophrenic and diabetic. She wheezed heavily and, in her hot-pink cropped pants, was not dressed for the 25-degree January night.

"Miss Margaret, let me take you to the hospital," implored Tom Papineau, a middle-age homeless man.

"No, no," Margaret insisted. "Not the hospital."

She refused to budge.

Tom left the stairwell at the old Lit Bros. side foyer to get food. When he returned around 10, a homeless couple was fussing over Margaret. She was still on the floor, but her eyes were blank.

By the time a SEPTA officer bounded up the steps to help, her face had drained from tawny to gray. Kneeling beside her, he lifted her limp wrist, searching for a pulse.

Someone at the city morgue found a phone number in the pocket of Margaret's navy-blue jacket, and the next morning - Jan. 20, Inauguration Day - called it.

The number belonged to Inga Faye Jones, 41, a counselor who lived in Germantown.

"Is your mother Margaret Jones?"

"Yes," Inga answered. "Is she dead?"

"Yes."

Inga screamed.

In New York, Ira Mia Jones, 42, a Harvard-educated urban designer, was leaving a subway station when her sister called with the news.

Stricken, Ira fell backward, into the arms of a stranger.

Mental illness is an odyssey that, at its saddest, ends on the streets.

Margaret Jones had daughters who, even before they were teenagers, were trying to save her.

She had city caseworkers and doctors at almost every major hospital in Philadelphia involved in her care, on and off, for the last decade.

In her final days, she had police officers and homeless outreach teams looking for her.

And yet Margaret died - of natural causes exacerbated by hypothermia - on an icy night in a subway stairwell, a block from a shelter.

On Thursday, the city began an "internal review" of her case, which could conclude midmonth.

"We really want to understand what happened and if there was anything we could have done differently for this woman," said Arthur C. Evans, director of the Department of Behavioral Health/Mental Retardation Services, which handles mental-health care for low-income residents.

Margaret Jones, however, was no anomaly.

This winter, by city estimates, at least 300 people were encamped on the streets. Just since the start of January, 20 of them perished. She was No. 5.

For most of her adult life, Margaret had walked away from help. She wandered the country, taking off for Boston, Baltimore, New York, Georgia, South Carolina, Texas. During her "walkabouts," she survived on the streets or in shelters until someone - usually police - forced her to a hospital. From there, she might land in a residence for the mentally ill.

Margaret would stay for weeks, months, even years - but never long enough.

Last year, as her roaming grew more frequent, her daughters and city caseworkers agreed that Margaret needed to be in a long-term residence with the most stringent supervision.

In the last two decades, big psychiatric institutions such as Philadelphia State Hospital - Byberry, a name synonymous with abuse and neglect - have been replaced by a network of housing options. But for the type of restrictive facility Margaret needed, the city had only 140 beds operated by seven nonprofit agencies.

The waiting list, her family was told, was a few years long.

On Jan. 5, at the end of six months in the psychiatric unit of Albert Einstein Medical Center in the city's Logan section, Margaret was discharged to a Germantown personal-care home, essentially an 80-bed boardinghouse. It had minimal services for the mentally disabled, such as making sure they took their medication and kept treatment appointments. But residents were free to come and go.

On her first morning there, Margaret went out for cigarettes with $10 in her pocket.

She never returned.

A spokeswoman for Einstein, Judy Horwitz, declined to comment on Margaret's case, citing privacy. But according to Margaret's daughters, the hospital team believed their mother was stable, eager to leave, and willing to try a personal-care home.

Ira, out of the country on a two-week trip, was not consulted about Margaret's release. Inga went along with the hospital's decision.

She did it, she said, because her mother "wanted so badly to be free."

Margaret Jones had salt-and-pepper hair that stood straight up and a rough-hewn smoker's voice from a two-pack-a-day habit.

But in her youth, she had such striking looks and style that old friends still swoon at the memory of her sashaying down the sidewalk in South Philadelphia.

One of four children of a homemaker and a shipyard worker, Margaret had a flair for fashion. In the early 1960s, she left every morning for South Philadelphia High School in the dowdy skirts that her Baptist parents approved - then changed into flamboyant outfits that she secretly made herself.

Once, she showed up in a blue chiffon dress, blue stockings, blue shoes, and thick blue eye shadow. Another time, she wore a kimono-style dress with black slippers.

A good dancer, Margaret appeared a couple of times on American Bandstand. The show was notorious for excluding African American teens, but with her flipped shoulder-length hair and light skin, she could "blend" with whites, said Rita Wheelings, a friend from South Philadelphia. The young Margaret "put you in mind of Tammi Terrell," the Motown singer, also Philadelphia-born.

While in high school, Margaret caught the eye of James Edward Jones, a lineman for the electric company. They eloped at 19, to the lasting disapproval of her parents, who felt she had married beneath her.

For two years, Margaret took general classes at Temple University while working. She was a salesclerk for Fisher Bruce & Co., an upper-crust china shop on Market Street, and a floor model at stores like posh Nan Duskin. She drove a hearse, retrieving bodies for a funeral home, and even thought about being a mortician, so intrigued was she with the idea of dressing people and making up their faces.

But what Margaret quickly became was a mother, with two daughters born one year and four days apart.

Like many of his generation, James went off to Vietnam to fight. About two years later, he returned a changed man. Their relationship deteriorated, and Margaret took her girls to live with her sister in Detroit.

James tooled around South Philadelphia in a red Cadillac, wearing a big hat over a bigger Afro. On Oct. 8, 1973, while driving an acquaintance to West Philadelphia, James was shot and killed.

Margaret returned to Philadelphia, where her behavior turned erratic. "She was in tears all the time," Ira said. "James plagued her mind."

Depressed and prone to angry fits, Margaret was unable to sleep, tormented by voices who said her daughters were being beaten and bound.

After the girls began missing school, the city's Department of Human Services removed Ira, 6, and Inga, 5, from Margaret's custody. They were eventually placed in St. Joseph Hall for Girls in Germantown, a Catholic orphanage run by the Daughters of Charity.

Margaret visited, on good days arriving prim and polished in a demure suit. With medication, she could hold a job. She brought the girls armloads of gifts: porcelain dolls, puzzles, chemistry sets, pricey clothes like the matching white rabbit-fur coats.

On bad days, Margaret frightened even the orphanage staff, appearing on the steps wild-eyed and unwashed, lugging bags of her belongings. Some wanted to shield Ira and Inga from her, but activities director Harriett Atkerson, who befriended the girls, objected. "I told them the kids didn't care what shape she was in," she recalled. "They loved her."

Margaret couldn't take care of her daughters, but she didn't want anyone else raising them, either. She was livid when Inga, at 11, was sent to a foster family. "She wanted me to know that no one else was my mother," said Inga, who reluctantly returned to the orphanage.

Margaret had an even fiercer gravitational pull on Ira. While the staff found the girls to be uncommonly cheerful, Ira, below the surface, was wrestling with anger. At 12, she taught a younger girl how to start a fire in the orphanage - a stunt that put her in the Youth Detention Center for 18 months. Released to a halfway house, she fled in search of Margaret.

"I thought I could take care of her," Ira said. "I thought if I was a better daughter, she'd get better."

Margaret was working as a cleaning lady and living in run-down, unfurnished house in West Philadelphia. She bought Ira a cot, lamp, and tiny TV, and for a while life was blissful.

Mother and daughter stayed up all night, laughing, dancing, and singing pop tunes like "Ain't No Stopping Us Now." Margaret slept on the floor in her clothes, a habit from the streets. Ira would lie next to her, the two of them making shadow figures with their hands on the walls.

But over time, Ira began to notice signs of trouble. Margaret wasn't sleeping. She warned Ira, "Everyone is out to get us!" She scratched her wrists until they bled.

One day, Ira took her mother by cab to Misericordia Hospital in West Philadelphia and, after pleading with the doctors, left her at the emergency room.

High school was a rare time of stability for the girls.

Still wards of the state, they were placed in a Catholic group home in Ardmore. Inga went to West Catholic High School; Ira had a scholarship to Merion Mercy Academy in Merion Station.

The transition from a tumbledown home with her mother to a Main Line school with college-bound girls in uniform was jarring for Ira. "They had plans," she said. "I had nothing."

Few of Ira's classmates knew her background. "She was so upbeat," said Judy Straub, a friend from Merion Mercy. "She didn't want to dwell on it."

Once, Ira was on campus when she heard someone shouting her name from afar.

It was a disheveled Margaret, wearing a winter jacket despite the warm weather and hauling her dirty bags.

A guard raised his arms to stop Ira. "Don't go near her," he said. "I've called the cops."

"Please don't arrest her," Ira told him sheepishly. "That's my mom."

After that, students started dropping checks in Ira's locker. "I was embarrassed," she recounted. "I also thought, I always will defend my mom."

Margaret and her mother, Ira Mae Berry, had been estranged ever since she eloped with James. But when the girls graduated from high school, Ira Mae bought them a small brick rowhouse in the 1900 block of South 19th Street so the three could live together.

The girls became Margaret's caretakers. "I was the mom more than she was," Inga said. "I wasn't angry at her, but I was angry at the situation."

Inga worked variously as a bank teller, customer service representative, post office clerk, and counselor at a mental-health residence.

Ira enrolled at Temple University in architecture, paying for the $20,000 degree in part by selling gloves at Strawbridge's.

As a student, Ira stood out. Creative and skilled, she understood instinctively that architecture was not only about a building's look but its place within a community. And she understood something else: "that whatever she wanted, she'd have to make it happen," said Rebecca Williamson, one of her professors.

During this time, Margaret was being treated for her schizophrenia and paranoia through city-supported treatment centers. Medicaid covered hospital costs.

If she listened to the doctors, she could hold down a menial job. But for reasons no one understood, she would stop taking her medicine and act out. She picked through trash for food. She cranked up the heat to stifling. She called 911 every 20 minutes. She put out her cigarettes on the mattress.

"She challenged my compassion," Ira conceded. "You can hate a person like this."

Once, Ira grew so impatient that she smacked her mother in the face. "She was so surprised. I was so surprised," Ira said. "I told her, 'I disrespected you, and that's not the person I am. I'll prove it to you.' "

But Margaret's wanderlust was taking her farther and farther from the house on 19th Street. "It was like a jail to her," Inga said.

In 1993, Margaret used her government disability check to buy a bus ticket to Dallas. Police there found her roaming the streets, full of fury and fear, and took her to a hospital.

Deemed a threat to herself - the legal standard for involuntary commitment - she was put in a state hospital set on acres of green fields in Terrell, Texas.

Ira scraped together enough money to visit her mother twice during her two-year stay there. In the wide-open spaces, Margaret was happy. Until she suddenly wasn't.

Back in Philadelphia, the pattern repeated.

"She'd say, 'Ira, I'm going out for cigarettes.' A week, three weeks, a month later, she would call me and a doctor or nurse would get on the phone and say, 'Your mother's here,' " Ira recalled.

In 1996, Margaret ended up in Manhattan, where police took her to St. Vincent's Hospital. After four months, her mental state had improved enough for Ira to pick her up.

In 1997, Margaret took a bus to Boston and was committed to a state psychiatric hospital for the next three years. At Lemuel Shattuck Hospital, she seemed content.

Ira visited often, one day taking Margaret out to Cambridge. At Harvard Square, Ira told her, "Mom, wait here. I want to go look at a famous building" - a visual-arts center designed by Le Corbusier.

When Ira returned, she found her mother panhandling and boasting to passersby, "My daughter's going to go to Harvard."

In late 1998, Ira's visits came to an abrupt halt.

On a moonlit night, she was riding on the back of her boyfriend's motorcycle when they hit a car head-on on West River Drive. Ira broke her back and a leg.

In a body cast for eight months, she recuperated in the home of her orphanage friend Harriett Atkerson. In time, she used a wheelchair to resume classes at Temple, and graduated in 1999.

Ira's friends urged her to accept a scholarship for graduate school at the University of Illinois. They worried that her home life "was stalling her," said Oktavia Cherry, who had worked with her behind a counter at Strawbridge's.

Having come so close to death, Ira decided to go.

But that meant that the burden of caring for Margaret, back home from Boston, would fall on Inga's shoulders.

"I never had a chance to leave," Inga said. "I felt destined to take care of her."

Inga had her own mental-health issues. In 2000, she gave birth prematurely to a daughter who died at 38 days. Bipolar, she struggled with depression.

Margaret did not make it easier.

"I was working as a crossing guard," Inga said. "And people would tell me, 'I saw your mother sleeping in the Citizens Bank ATM lobby on Broad Street.' Or, 'I saw your mother in the yard of South Philly High.' . . . It was very scary for me."

As she moved like a pinball among hospitals, case managers for the city Department of Behavioral Health/Mental Retardation Services tried to find suitable housing. In 2003, they placed her in Homeward Bound, a campus-style residence in East Oak Lane for 20 homeless people with mental illness.

Those were rare "golden years" for Margaret, Ira said. Stable and content with her environs, she left only for an occasional panhandling trip to Center City. Mostly, she loved sitting in the lounge and loudly bragging about her daughter the architect.

Ira got her master's at Illinois and went on to teach at Columbia University. In New York, she met and married an Italian architect, Alessandro Cimini. In 2004, she entered the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

With even more to crow about, Margaret flaunted her "Harvard Mom" T-shirt. But when Ira graduated in 2006, she wasn't there.

Margaret was hospitalized, after pleading with a police officer to capture Osama bin Laden. She was sure the terrorist was hiding at St. Agnes Medical Center in South Philadelphia.

Ira and Inga were already worn down by a lifetime of chasing their mother. And the older she got, the more impossible it was to hold her.

In spring 2007, during an ambulance transfer from a hospital to a treatment residence, the attendant turned his back. She walked off.

Margaret eventually returned but, within a year, took off for Baltimore. There, however, her Medicaid insurance for services in Pennsylvania did not apply.

Sent back to Philadelphia last May, she was immediately committed to the Belmont Center for Comprehensive Treatment, a psychiatric facility affiliated with Einstein, and then to Einstein's hospital.

There she waited for a spot in a long-term residence with 24-hour supervision, comparable to the restrictions at a state hospital.

She was still waiting when Thanksgiving rolled around. Ira and Inga tried to cheer their mother at Einstein by bringing her a home-cooked meal of turkey, fried chicken, sweet potatoes, collard greens, and pies.

But Margaret was withdrawn. During dinner, she whispered to Inga, "I don't belong here."

Her hospital team agreed and discharged her Jan. 5 to a personal-care home, not to the secure facility that her daughters had hoped for.

At 6:29 p.m. Jan. 7, the operators of Kaysim-Court Manor in Germantown filed a missing-person report, according to police records.

Ira got word of Margaret's disappearance just as she returned from a Christmas trip to Italy to visit her in-laws.

"I've got bad news," Ira said she had been told by Todd Weinstein, her mother's social worker at Einstein.

"Let me come down to help," Ira insisted.

"No, we have it covered," she said Todd had told her. "Everyone's looking."

Ira hung up and repeated a prayer the orphanage nuns taught her.

Dear St. Anthony, please come around. Something's lost and must be found.

On Jan. 9, a SEPTA police officer recognized Margaret from the missing-person report. She was wandering the warren of halls and stairwells at the Market Street East station.

A homeless outreach team took her to the Hall-Mercer mental-health-crisis center at Pennsylvania Hospital.

She walked out.

Inga drove around the city, looking for Margaret at LOVE Park and City Hall, South Philly High and Citizens Bank on Broad Street.

She did not look in the stairwell near Eighth and Filbert.

Margaret Jones was laid out in a pink-and-gray casket at the Slater Funeral Home in South Philadelphia, in a room filled with the tropical scent of white and pink lilies.

She was dressed in a long, beaded ivory gown. Her lips were painted red, her hair tucked under a wig. In her hands were rosary beads, placed there by Ira.

About 40 people sat before the casket. Margaret's parents were dead, but a sister and a brother paid their respects. So did relatives of her late husband, James, and a contingent of Ira's coworkers at a Harlem development nonprofit.

Ira spoke, though not of the pain she felt at the way Margaret died. It was a far cry from what she had imagined, that at the end she would be there to hold her hand.

"My mom had a troubled mind," Ira told the mourners. "But because of my relationship with her, it made me a better person."

After the service, a police-officer friend of Ira's turned on his patrol car's flashing lights and led the procession to the city limits. Seven cars continued on to Mount Zion Cemetery in Collingdale, Delaware County.

There Margaret was buried beside James, to wander no more.

Dear friends,
This week, on his first visit to Africa, Pope Benedict said that "AIDS cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems".

The Pope's statement is a huge setback to decades of hard work on AIDS prevention, education and awareness. With powerful influence over more than 1.1 billion Catholics in the world, and with 22 million HIV positive Africans, these words could dramatically affect the AIDS pandemic and put millions of lives at risk. Worldwide pressure on the Vatican is starting to show results - sign our urgent petition asking the Pope to immediately stop speaking out against condoms:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/pope_benedict_petition

Everyone is entitled to their own religious and personal beliefs, and the Pope does advocate for other AIDS prevention methods such as abstinence and monogamy. But he holds enormous moral authority for millions, and the claim that condom distribution could make AIDS worse is spreading false information. It's untrue, and it's deadly.

The fact is, HIV and AIDS are prevented by condom use. There is no easy solution to the spread of this tragic disease, but condoms and education are the best known prevention combination and have not been found to increase risky sexual behaviour. That is why even priests and nuns working in Africa have questioned the Pope's misleading statements.

We may not be able to ask the Catholic Church to change its broader position, but we are asking the Pope to stop actively speaking out against prevention strategies that work. It's important that people of all beliefs, especially Catholics, show that they do not approve of the Pope’s dangerous statements. Sign below then spread the word to your friends and family - this petition could actually save lives:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/pope_benedict_petition

25 million people worldwide have already died of AIDS, and 12 million children have been left without parents. If enough of us join this outcry now, we could win an important battle in the struggle for a world without AIDS.

With hope,

Alice, Ben, Graziela, Ricken, Iain, Brett, Paula, Pascal, Luis, Paul, Veronique, Milena and the whole Avaaz team

Sources:

The Pope's statement opposing condoms (BBC):
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7951839.stm

European governments criticise Pope Benedict for his statement
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7950671.stm

Condoms 'aggravate' AIDS scourge, Pope says:
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/world/story.html?id=1399781

CNN Report on the Pope’s anti-condom position:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhxqvVmgEbg&feature=related

Vatican retraction of condom statement:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article5934912.ece

Growth of the Catholic Church in Africa, see:
http://www.zenit.org/article-18894?l=english and http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29777984/

South African Bishop supporting condom use:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29777984/

UNAIDS Report on the AIDS epidemic:
http://www.unaids.org/en/CountryResponses/Regions/default.asp

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One and a half million years ago, a few of our ancestors walked beside a muddy African river with powerful, modern strides - a gait that let them forage over long distances, paving the way for evolutionary advances that make us human.

The evidence, reported by a team that included Rutgers University in today's issue of the journal Science, comes from the rarest of anthropological discoveries - their footprints.

Among those who helped uncover the tracks, preserved for the ages when a gently flowing river changed course and covered them with sand, were Rutgers undergraduates. Supervised by scientists, they used brushes to clear away sand bit by bit, retreating to their tents at night after days under the merciless Kenyan sun.

"You realize these are made by our human ancestors," marveled Andrew Du, now a senior at the school's New Brunswick campus. "It's a pretty surreal experience."

The find has set off a small debate over whether the creatures who made these prints - believed to be Homo erectus - are truly the earliest "modern" walkers, as the authors propose. Other fossils show that by the time of these footprints, our ancestors likely had been spending most of the time on two feet for millions of years.

Yet there is no doubt that the new prints are a rare find, and that the creatures who made them were spending not most, but all of their time on two feet, said Nina Jablonski, head of the anthropology department at Pennsylvania State University.

Their long, efficient strides would have allowed them to stray from the wood's edge, crossing open spaces to find other sources of food and possibly do some hunting, said Jablonski, who was not involved with the research.

This would in turn allow for the continued development of a larger brain - a process that already was under way as early humans spent less time in trees, freeing up their hands to accomplish more complex tasks.

Harvard University anthropology professor Daniel Lieberman said the arched, springy feet that made these prints could even have allowed their owners to run for long distances - the first appearance, perhaps, of a trait that makes modern humans almost unique in the animal kingdom.

"Looking at these footprints, I get very excited," said Lieberman, who also was not involved in the research.

The authors of the research first discovered what they thought might be footprints in 2005, while digging a trench to study the site's geology.

They noticed some curious deformations in a layer about eight feet down from the surface, and suspected they were seeing the cross section of footprints, said anthropologist David R. Braun, who is affiliated both with Rutgers and the University of Cape Town, in South Africa.

He and Rutgers professor John W.K. Harris enlisted the help of numerous others from Kenya, the United States, and Britain. The lead author of the paper was Matthew R. Bennett, of Britain's Bournemouth University, who captured three-dimensional images of the prints with a portable laser scanner.

This enabled detailed analysis of foot dimensions and the amount of pressure exerted by different parts of the feet. Harris said several characteristics set these feet apart from those of an earlier human ancestor, the short-legged Australopithecus afarensis, whose 3.7-million-year-old prints were found in Laetoli, Tanzania, in 1978.

First, the big toes in the new prints are pointed in a direction that is more nearly parallel to the axis of the foot, enabling a stride with a powerful push-off. (An ape's grasping, thumb-like big toe, on the other end of the spectrum, is splayed out to one side.)

Also, the arches in the new prints are more pronounced than those of the earlier Laetoli prints, Harris said.

One of the excavators of those earlier prints, Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, questioned whether the feet of the two human ancestors were all that different. He said the authors of the new paper were overstating the supposedly "primitive" characteristics of the earlier A. Afarensis prints, making their new find seem more dramatic.

"The Laetoli foot is the foot of a biped," White said of the earlier prints. "It's a very human-like foot."

Countered Bennett: "It's all relative, isn't it?"

The new prints were dated in part by analyzing nearby bits of feldspar, a mineral formed by the cooling materials from a volcanic eruption.

The mineral contains potassium, which starts to decay slowly as soon as the material cools. The potassium decays into the element argon, which in turn is converted to another form of argon, said Braun, who graduated from Haverford College before getting his Ph.D. at Rutgers.

Scientists calculated the date when the mineral was formed by gauging how much of the decay had occurred.

The undergraduates who helped expose the prints included Rutgers students, among others.

Most of their food was in boxes and cans, brought in from Nairobi, but occasionally they bought goat or fresh fish from local people. The temperatures often exceeded 100 degrees, but any discomfort was outweighed by the thrill of discovery, said Du, the Rutgers senior. "It's basically an adventure," he said.

It is one he wants to continue after graduating. His planned career? Anthropology.