New justice moves court back to right
Scientists find new horrors in the dark
UNITED STATES After weeks of turmoil, the Senate confirmed Trump nominee Neil Gorsuch as the Supreme Court’s youngest justice yesterday, filling a 14-month vacancy after the death of Antonin Scalia and restoring a rightward tilt that could last for years.
Gorsuch will be sworn in on Monday ( US time) and will quickly begin confronting cases of consequence, including one involving separation of church and state that the justices will take up in less than two weeks.
At 49, he is decades younger than several of the other justices — two are in their 80s and one is 78 — raising the possibility that President Donald Trump will have a chance to appoint more conservatives to a court that has been somewhat balanced in recent years.
Vice President Mike Pence was presiding as the Senate voted 54-45 in favour of Gorsuch, a veteran of Denver’s 10th US Circuit of Appeals whose conservative rulings make him an intellectual heir to Scalia, who died in February 2016. Republicans blocked Barack Obama from filling the seat all last year. REUTERS
The outcome was a major victory for Trump, his first big congressional win.
And it was cause for celebration for conservatives, who have often seemed willing to forgive various Trump failings next to the chance to win this lifetime appointment to the most important court on the land.
‘‘As a deep believer in the rule of law, Judge Gorsuch will serve the American people with distinction,’’ Trump said in a statement.
The judge won support from 51 of the chamber’s Republicans as well as three moderate Democrats up for re-election in states Trump won last fall: Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Joe Donnelly of Indiana.
GOP Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia, who has been recovering from back surgery, did not vote.
Gorsuch’s name was on a list of potential choices Trump produced during the campaign, and was vetted by conservative groups including the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation.
That unusual external review omitted consultation with Senate Democrats, contributing to bitter Democrat complaints about the way the whole process was handled.
Gorsuch is expected to join a conservative-leaning voting bloc of justices, making five on the nine-membercourt.
As soon as April 13, he could take part in his first private conference, where justices decide whether to hear cases — and some of them could involve gun rights, voting rights and a Colorado baker’s refusal to design a cake for a same-sex couple’s wedding.
Yesterday’s Senate vote was the final act in a corrosive political confrontation that began with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s decision immediately after Scalia’s death to hold the seat open for the next president to fill, rather than convene hearings for Obama’s nominee, Judge Merrick Garland.
Democrats seethed for months over Garland’s treatment, and under pressure from liberal activists fuming over the Trump presidency they mounted a filibuster on Friday to block Gorsuch.
McConnell, immediately responded, as expected, by leading his Republicans in a unilateral rules change to lower the vote threshold for Supreme Court nominees from 60 to a simple majority in the 100-member Senate.
That paved the way for Gorsuch’s confirmation vote yesterday. AP MEXICO In the hills of Baja California, Michael Wall and Jim Berrian found a creature that’s the stuff of nightmares for most people: a cave spider nearly the size of a tarantula.
For the two San Diego Natural History Museum researchers, it was an exciting windfall — an unknown arachnid as wide across as a softball.
‘‘This is the type of spider that a lot of people would shriek and run from,’’ Wall said of its thick, fang-like structures, hairy, inchlong body and legs stretching 10cm across.
Berrian, however, described it in more flattering terms. ‘‘I think it’s a really pretty spider,’’ he said. ‘‘The head and legs are kind of a chocolate brown.
‘‘The abdomen is a dull yellow. And it’s kind of plain, but very striking.’’
After confirming the spider as a new species, the researchers named it Califorctenus cacachilensis after the Sierra Cacachilas mountain range where they found it, and published the discovery in the journal Zootaxa last month.
There are 1.1 million species of insects and spiders that have been scientifically described, but an estimated 4 million species are yet to be identified and named, Wall said. So encountering a new type of spider isn’t necessarily unusual.
‘‘The odds of discovering a new species are pretty high,’’ Wall said. ‘‘But . . . generally, (most) new species discovered are ittybitty things that people don’t pay attention to, so given the size of this spider, that was surprising.’’
Berrian first saw shed exoskeletons of the species in a grotto in the Cacachilas during a 2013 expedition, and was on the lookout for a live specimen. Soon he and Wall found one in a nearby cave, and another in an abandoned mine shaft. Local ranchers with broad knowledge of the area’s wildlife hadn’t seen it before, but the researchers kept searching. They spotted more of them in the cement pit of an old outhouse and others in secluded crevices.
‘‘Once we knew that they were in these dark, reclusive places, we started targeting those and ended up finding more of them,’’ Wall said.
They located about two dozen, Berrian said, and brought back about eight specimens. TNS