May 6, 2008

GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS
Republican evangelical support has peaked: analyst
Ed Stoddard/Reuters (05/05/2008)
Republican presidential nominee John McCain will almost certainly garner less of the evangelical vote in November than the almost 80 percent that President George W. Bush took in 2004, a former top Bush aide said on Monday.

A new faith in politics: Young Mennonites join world of politics
Charles Leroux/Chicago Tribune (05/06/2008)
The Amish remain non-voters who believe in the strict separation of church and state. However, some Mennonites, especially younger members such as those on the campus of church-founded Goshen College, are seeing an opportunity now to integrate politics into their lives in a way that furthers rather than diminishes their religion.

GOP fund-raiser wants apology
Kathleen Gray/Detroit Free Press (05/06/2008)
As presumptive Republican presidential candidate John McCain touches down in Michigan today for a fund-raiser and town hall meeting in Oakland County, some leaders in metro Detroit's Arab- and Muslim-American community are demanding an apology from the Arizona senator.

DEATH PENALTY
U.S. set for first execution since end of moratorium
Matthew Bigg/Reuters (05/06/2008)
ATLANTA - Georgia is set to execute a convicted murderer on Tuesday, the first U.S. inmate to be put to death since the Supreme Court ended a de facto moratorium on capital punishment last month. William Earl Lynd is due to die by lethal injection at a prison in Jackson, central Georgia, at 7 p.m. (2300 GMT) for shooting his girlfriend Ginger Moore three times in the head and face in December 1988, authorities said.

Death Row Inmates Plead for Humanity
Emily Friedman/ABC News (05/06/2008)
The grim and often haunting tradition of a doomed inmate's last words will resume today -- three weeks after the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of lethal injection April 16 -- when William Lynd will be led into Georgia's death house. Lynd, who has spent 17 years on death row for killing his girlfriend in 1988 with three shots to her face, will be the first execution in the United States in more than seven months. But what Lynd will say, should he decide to speak at all, is likely to include one of the many themes heard in the last statements made by the condemned.