From the News: UN Accepts Execution of Gay People

Here is some news that caught my attention this morning:

• The United Nations now accepts execution of gay people. In a vote yesterday, the United Nations removed a plea for gay people not to be executed. In a comment, Cary Alan Johnson, Executive Director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, says, “This vote is a dangerous and disturbing development. It essentially removes the important recognition of the particular vulnerability faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people—a recognition that is crucial at a time when 76 countries around the world criminalise homosexuality, five consider it a capital crime and countries like Uganda are considering adding the death penalty to their laws criminalising homosexuality.” Fascists corrupt the UN.
• Sweden has a new constitution. Among other things, the change strengthens minority rights and writes Sweden’s membership of the European Union into the national constitution. Good.
• The euro is a robust currency. I’m getting tired of the pessimists predicting the imminent collapse of the euro. They have done so since day one. So, it’s nice to read an optimist. “Europe is gripped by a sense of alarm, now that Ireland has become the second euro-zone country to ask for a bailout,” Sven Böll writes in Der Spiegel. “Pessimists claim that the crisis means the euro is finished. But that scenario is unrealistic—in reality, there is little to suggest that the common currency is about to disintegrate.”
• Sex in the Vatican. A new big-budget Canadian-Irish-Hungarian TV series centres on the notorious Pope Alexander VI.
• Vatican says everyone can use condoms to prevent HIV. A welcome shift in Catholic ethics.
• The drug that could prevent HIV. Media begins to write about the pill that could stop HIV. Time has an article about the latest development in the fight against HIV and AIDS. So does the New York Times here. Read more here, here, here, here, here, and here.