Latest Science A new species seen in Phnom Penh

Latest Science A new species seen in Phnom Penh-It is exceptionally uncommon for undiscovered bird species to be found in urban contexts, but Oriental Bird Club council member Richard Thomas said that earlier in the year, he "went and saw this remarkable new tailorbird myself - in the middle of a road construction site". The authors of the paper suggest that O. chaktomuk inhabits a small area, made up largely of dense scrubland in the floodplain of the Mekong river - at the edge of which Phnom Penh lies.

Birdwatchers do not tend to target this kind of ecosystem because most of the species it supports are abundant and widespread elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

"The modern discovery of an un-described bird species within the limits of a large populous city - not to mention 30 minutes from my home - is extraordinary," said study co-author Simon Mahood of the Wildlife Conservation Society.

"The discovery indicates that new species of birds may still be found in familiar and unexpected locations."

Because of the small and shrinking nature of the birds' habitat, the team has recommended that the bird be listed as "Near Threatened" on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List.

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Breaking Supreme Court Set to Rule on Gay Marriage

Breaking Supreme Court Set to Rule on Gay Marriage-It's the big day for gay marriage.

Supporters and opponents braced Wednesday—the last day of the court's current session—for the Supreme Court's expected release of decisions on gay marriage. The rulings could give the final word on the law after years of battles—or leave the high court's views still murky.

The court was set to rule on California's Proposition 8 ban on gay marriage and the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act, which denied federal benefits to lawfully married same-sex couples. The session is expected to begin at 10 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time and rulings should be released shortly thereafter.

The rulings are set to come amid quickly shifting public opinion on gay rights and gay marriage. A poll this year by the nonpartisan Pew Forum on Religion and Public life found that 50% of Americans support gay marriage, up from 39% in 2008. When Proposition 8 passed in 2008 with 52% of the vote, only two other states permitted gay marriage. Today, 12 states plus the District of Columbia do so.

Moreover, many elected officials and public figures who had previously been noncommittal have thrown their support behind gay marriage. In May 2012, President Barack Obama, who had previously supported civil unions but not full marriage, said he now supported marriage as well. Former President Bill Clinton, who signed the Defense of Marriage Act, now says the measure is a mistake.

In both Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act, the underlying issue is gay marriage, but the specific legal questions differ.

Both cases came to the court in an unusual posture: The federal and state governments that normally would defend their challenged laws agreed with plaintiffs and lower courts that the measures violated the U.S. Constitution.

With the Obama administration declining to defend the Defense of Marriage Act, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives stepped in. And when California's governor and attorney general offered no defense of Proposition 8, the private citizens who sponsored the initiative came to defend the measure.

But the Supreme Court has long held that particular conditions must be met before a party can appear in federal court, among them that it possesses a definite interest in the outcome beyond a general interest in public policy. And the justices weren't certain that either the House or the Proposition 8 backers possessed the legal standing to appear. The court specifically asked the parties to address that question in the briefs and oral argument.

When it came to the merits of the cases, the challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act was the narrower gambit. While the challengers argued that the law violated constitutional principles of equal protection and due process, they also left room for the justices to decide the case without opining so broadly.

Family law traditionally falls under state jurisdiction, and it has been virtually unknown for the federal government to deny recognition to couples married in accordance with state law.

Standard methods of legal interpretation require the government to provide justification for discriminating against similarly situated parties, and gay-rights activists argued that no legitimate reason underlay the Defense of Marriage Act. To the contrary, as Justice Elena Kagan observed during oral arguments in March, the legislative record demonstrated that disapproval of homosexuality was a significant basis for enacting a statute designed to penalize same-sex couples.

When the Defense of Marriage Act was adopted 17 years ago, no state permitted same-sex marriage, so the law's impact was largely theoretical. But today, with a dozen states authorizing such marriages, the harm the measure inflicts on same-sex spouses has become clear. In the case before the court, New York resident Edith Windsor would have been exempt from a federal estate tax of $363,000 had her late spouse been male.

Federal district and appeals courts in New York ruled for Ms. Windsor. In parallel cases, lower federal courts in Boston reached the same result.

Paul Clement, the former George W. Bush administration solicitor general the House hired to defend the Defense of Marriage Act, argued that the federal government had good reasons for denying benefits to same-sex spouses, including maintaining a uniform federal policy regarding marriage across the country, endorsing the values of states that reject same-sex marriage, and, potentially, saving money by excluding married gay couples from tax and other benefits provided to heterosexual spouses.

Although Proposition 8 affected only California, the lawsuit challenging the voter initiative carried the potential of changing marriage laws across the country.

In May 2008, the California Supreme Court held that the state constitution's equal-protection provisions required recognition of same-sex marriages. By enacting Proposition 8 the following November, California voters eliminated that right by adding a sentence to the state constitution stating that "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."

In 2010, a federal district judge in San Francisco struck down Proposition 8 on broad grounds, concluding that such discrimination against gays and lesbians served no rational purpose.

The measure's proponents appealed to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where last year a Pasadena, Calif.-based panel agreed that Proposition 8 was unconstitutional, but for narrower reasons. Citing a 1996 Supreme Court opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Ninth Circuit found it impermissible to withdraw rights from a minority group while leaving them intact for others.

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Latest Breaking Bigger posts absorb cuts as Army downsizes

Latest Breaking Bigger posts absorb cuts as Army downsizes-In axing a dozen combat brigades in the face of steep spending cuts and the wind-down of two wars, the Army says it is trying to ease the sting by spreading it around.

But one post stands out on the list of 10 installations targeted in Tuesday's announcement of a major restructuring that has been a long time coming: Kentucky's Fort Knox. In losing the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, the famed post an hour south of Louisville will soon know what it's like to be an Army post without a combat brigade.

The elimination of 3rd Brigade means a 43 percent cut to Fort Knox's active duty force. That's far beyond the level of cuts elsewhere, but it could be a precursor to what other communities may feel if Congress allows billions in automatic budget cuts to continue next year, Army leaders warned.

"This decision will likely remove nearly 10,000 military employees and dependents from the area, which will have a profound economic impact not only on Fort Knox, but the surrounding region as well," Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear said in a news release.

Officials said they will slash the number of active duty combat brigades from 45 to 33 as the service moves forward with a longtime plan to cut its size by 80,000. As many as 100,000 more active-duty, National Guard and Reserve soldiers could be lost if Congress does not restore funding, the Army said.

Gen. Ray Odierno, Army chief of staff, said one additional brigade will likely be cut, but no final decisions have been made. "I know in the local communities it will have its impact," Odierno said. "But we've done our best to reach out to them so they understand what the impacts are. We've tried to make it as small an impact as possible for as many communities as we could."

Larger installations with other brigades will, as Army officials noted, be better able to absorb the losses as the Army reverts to pre-9/11 troop levels.

Fort Campbell, on the Tennessee-Kentucky line, will remain the home of the 101st Airborne Division and other units despite losing the 4th Brigade Combat Team, which like Fort Knox's 3rd Brigade, currently has soldiers deployed to Afghanistan. Fort Bliss and Fort Hood in Texas are losing brigades but, thanks to reassignments of many of those troops, will suffer net losses in their forces of less than 10 percent. That's also true for Fort Drum in upstate New York and Fort Stewart in southeast Georgia.

Under the plan announced Tuesday, the Army will increase the size of its infantry and armor brigades by adding another battalion, which is 600 to 800 soldiers. Adding the battalion was a recommendation from commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan who said it would beef up the fighting capabilities of the brigades when they go to war.

Fort Benning, Ga., on the Alabama line, will even see a slight gain in the size of its force thanks to the changes.

Overall, however, the military's largest branch is trimming itself by 14 percent over the next six years, from a high of about 570,000 during the peak of the Iraq war to 490,000. Besides cutting the brigades themselves, which number roughly 3,500 to 5,000 troops apiece, the Army will eliminate thousands of other jobs across the service, including soldiers in units that support the brigades, and two brigades in Germany that have already been scheduled for elimination. And it will relocate thousands of soldiers and cancel $400 million in construction projects.

Odierno said Fort Knox scored the lowest in military value, but insisted the reduction was not the first step toward closing the post. He noted that about 4,000 civilians workers had been added there, as well as the Army's recruiting command.

The total workforce of Fort Knox is about 20,000, including active duty and civilians, post spokesman Ryan Brus said.

Fort Knox has only been home to the 3rd Brigade since 2009, when it was relocated under the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure. The governor questioned the fiscal savings when the Pentagon spent more than $500 million for new facilities for the brigade and improvements to the installation to accommodate their families.

"While I understand that the Departments of the Army and Defense must adjust to the current budget realities, this decision seems to focus on shorter-term savings at the expense of longer-term readiness," Beshear said.

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Latest Sports Williams Runs Winning Streak to 32 at Wimbledon

Latest Sports Williams Runs Winning Streak to 32 at Wimbledon- A reporter wanted to know whether Serena Williams contemplates adding more variety to her power-based game.

She did not take kindly to the question's premise.

"I don't only play hard tennis. Maybe if you want to get out there, I can show you, like, how I mix things up. I hit a lob today. I'm hitting slices and drop shots, especially more recently," Williams replied.

"Power's often extremely good to have in your game," she continued. "But if I were to sit here and hit every ball hard, my arm would fall off."

It's true that Williams does pound serves, up to 121 mph in the first round of Wimbledon on Tuesday. And her groundstrokes are big, too, enough for a 25-5 edge in winners against Mandy Minella of Luxembourg.

It's also true that Williams has been showing off a soft touch when needed during a winning streak that reached 32 matches — the longest single-season run on the women's tour in 13 years — with a 6-1, 6-3 victory over Minella.

That marked the top-seeded and top-ranked Williams' return to competition following a little break after winning the French Open on June 8 for her 16th Grand Slam trophy.

It was also her first match on a grass court since winning her fifth Wimbledon title and two Olympic gold medals back-to-back at the All England Club a year ago. That was the beginning of a stretch in which Williams has gone 75-3 and claimed three of the past four major championships.  Williams and the French coach who's been helping her for about a year, Patrick Mouratoglou, agreed that she did not have too hard a time setting aside the events of the previous seven days, which included a lot of saying "I'm sorry" — face-to-face with Sharapova, at a news conference, in two statements posted on the web — over things Williams was quoted as saying in a Rolling Stone story.

Williams made a negative reference in a phone conversation to a top-five player's love life (the piece's author surmised that it was about Sharapova) and an off-the-cuff remark about a widely publicized rape case in the U.S. that was perceived by some as criticizing the victim.

"It hasn't been a distraction," Williams insisted. "I'm just here to focus on the tennis."

Asked whether she and Sharapova had spoken in the preceding 48 hours, Williams said: "Oh, we're playing on opposite days, so we don't really see each other."

Indeed, the third-seeded Sharapova and Williams are on different halves of the draw and would meet only in the final. Sharapova, the 2004 Wimbledon champion, was scheduled to play her second-round match Wednesday on Court 2 against 131st-ranked qualifier Michelle Larcher de Brito of Portugal.

Other women slated to play on Day 3: second-seeded Victoria Azarenka, the two-time Australian Open champion who twisted her right knee in a first-round victory; 2011 Wimbledon winner Petra Kvitova; 17th-seeded Sloane Stephens of the United States.

Seven-time Wimbledon champion Roger Federer was to face Sergiy Stakhovsky on Centre Court, while 2012 U.S. Open champion and Wimbledon runner-up Andy Murray was placed on Court 1.

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Breaking Edward Snowden may be stuck in Russia

Breaking Edward Snowden may be stuck in Russia-Time may be running out for U.S. fugitive Edward Snowden to get out of Russia.

The former National Security Agency contractor has been holed up in the transit area of Moscow airport since Sunday, but Snowden may only have been given a Russian transit visa valid for three days, RIA Novosti cited a source close to the case as saying on Wednesday.

"Transit passengers who have a ticket for a connecting flight and documents necessary to enter a third country can get a Russian transit visa," the source was quoted as saying. "If Snowden has these documents, then he has the right to apply for a transit visa right in the airport, in the consular point, and could well have done that."

RIA Novosti reported that Snowden had booked two tickets for flights from Moscow to Havana on June 24 and 25, but did not board either flights. If he has not been able to extend his transit visa — assuming he has one, and that it is valid for three days — it may be about to expire.

It is not immediately clear what his legal travel status would be were his transit visa to expire. The U.S. has already revoked his passport.

On Monday, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said that Snowden had been given a refugee document of passage by the Ecuadorean government. Ecuador has confirmed that Snowden applied for asylum in the Latin American country.

"Cancelling Snowden's passport and bullying intermediary countries may keep Snowden permanently in Russia. Not the brightest bunch at State," WikiLeaks said on its Twitter feed late Tuesday.

Russia's President Vladimir Putin confirmed that Snowden was in an airport transit zone at Sheremetyevo International Airport. "It is true that Mr Snowden arrived in Moscow, which was completely unexpected for us. He came as a transit passenger, so he didn't need a visa or other documents. As a transit passenger, he has the right to buy a plane ticket and go wherever he wants," Putin said in Finland on Tuesday evening.

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Latest Australian PM Gillard ousted; Rudd takes over

Latest Australian PM Gillard ousted; Rudd takes over- Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard has been ousted as Labor Party leader by her predecessor, Kevin Rudd, in vote of party lawmakers hoping to avoid a huge defeat in upcoming elections.

The ballot took place on Wednesday three years and two days after Gillard ousted Rudd in a similar internal government showdown. It makes him leader of the party, but not prime minister.

Party official Chris Hayes says Gillard lost 57 votes to 45.

Rudd will likely have to demonstrate that he can command a majority of lawmakers in the House of Representatives before the governor-general makes him prime minister. If he cannot, opposition leader Tony Abbott could be asked to form a government or the elections could be moved up from September to August.

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Obama confronts Bush legacy in voting rights case

Obama confronts Bush legacy in voting rights case-President Barack Obama faced an uncomfortable truth Tuesday: He was powerless to stop George W. Bush’s Supreme Court from eviscerating the most consequential civil rights law of the past half-century.

The constitutional law professor sat by helplessly — “deeply disappointed” — as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a 5-4 majority opinion that tore down one section of the Voting Rights Act and effectively killed another. Obama, who voted against Roberts in 2005, could see it coming. Everyone in Washington could.

Roberts had written critically of the Voting Rights Act as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration, making arguments that he dismissed during his confirmation hearing as the work of a hired hand — but that stuck in the craw of civil rights activists.

“The judge was on the wrong side of history. He was on the wrong side of the Voting Rights Act, not just the letter but also the spirit of the act,” John Lewis, the Georgia Democratic congressman who was savagely beaten during a 1965 voting rights march in Alabama, told senators back then. On Tuesday, Lewis described Roberts’s opinion as a “dagger into the heart” of the law.

Obama is hardly the first president to govern at a time when the Supreme Court is controlled by justices appointed by the other party — but for a president with big ideas about the government’s role in protecting the disenfranchised, Bush’s moves loom as a particular obstacle, as Tuesday showed.

The irony, of course, is that it was Roberts himself who wrote what is surely the most important opinion of Obama’s first term, enshrining Obamacare as the law of the land. That same justice on Tuesday wrote the opinion striking down key parts of the Voting Rights Act — and could well play a major role in cases Wednedsay regarding gay marriage, barely a year after Obama spoke out in favor of it.

The historic pairing of Obama and Roberts — two singular talents of their respective parties at this moment in time — sets them up to be opposing forces on some of the most important issues of the day, long after Obama leaves office and the Roberts court lives on. That clash on Tuesday took the form of Roberts striking down key parts of a law central to the civil rights movement — perhaps doing more in one opinion to change civil rights protections than Obama could do singlehandedly as president to advance them, even by his presence as the nation’s first black president.

Likewise, Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.) knew the Roberts ruling was a sure thing — though the conservative Georgia Republican welcomed it as a sign of progress for the South.

“Today’s ruling should not come as a surprise,” Westmoreland said. “We no longer suffer from the voting rights issues we saw in 1965 that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court’s decision will not weaken the positive impact the VRA had on our country, nor will it diminish the importance of the Civil Rights Movement. It simply acknowledges the progress that has been made since 1965.”

The decision striking down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act — and effectively nullifying Section 5 — did little to settle the political debate over whether minorities still need the federal government to ensure access to the polls in states and counties that have a history of racial discrimination. But it ensures that Bush’s record on civil rights will be seen at least as much through the prism of his court picks as his signature on the 2006 Voting Rights Act extension, the fourth renewal of the law since its original enactment in 1965. The Roberts legacy outlived the law.

“There is no denying,” Roberts wrote, “that the conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions.” He was joined in the decision by another Bush appointee, Samuel Alito, conservatives Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, and swing voter Anthony Kennedy.

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