This report from the World Health Organisation is really frightening. Humankind has gotten accustomed to the access of cheap antibiotics. So much so that we simply don’t think about what life would be without them.

The Daily Telegraph has more.

A leader in The Economist scrutinises the dangers of the weakened West.

Twenty-nine million Bulgarian Rumanians are after your job, says a mock sign by the Guardian’s Steve Bell. It pretty much sums up the xenophobic stupidity of the UK Independence Party and the European Far Right in general.

“Portugal in the coming days is expected to announce its exit from the EU-IMF bailout without further loans to cushion the transition,” EU Observer reports. “After three years of austerity measures linked to the €78 billion rescue, the government said it expects to have room to start reversing public sector salary cuts from 2015, while still sticking to the deficit reduction targets.”

I have a morbid fascination with violent crime. Taking from the popularity of crime fiction, I’m sure that I’m not alone. But what makes people commit these crimes? What makes a man kill another man? According to Dr Sohail, there are seven reasons for murder. Dr Mattiuzzi has blogged on the same topic and made a typology of violent offenders. There are many similarities between the two lists of killer characteristics, and from my seven years as a Swedish lay judge, I think I’ve met examples of them all.

Seen above is the 1551 painting The Murder of Abel by Italian artist Tintoretto (1518–1594).

“A new study has revealed two thirds of gay teens say they have contemplated suicide, with 80% bullied because of their sexuality,” Pink News reports.

“Austria’s Eurovision entry Conchita Wurst is facing a transphobic backlash online, with one petition calling the contest a ‘hotbed of sodomy’.” Irish Independent reports.

Hotbed of sodomy? Is that a bad thing?

I like the song and the video. If I didn’t really care much for the Eurovision Song Contest before, I do now. I’ll vote for Austria.

(Press photo of Conchita Wurst by Thomas Ramstorfer.)

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I’m listening to Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, with Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Karajan. José van Dam sings the part of Amfortas, and he does it superbly. If you have nothing else to do on a night like this, tune in on Spotify. It’s free.

“Prince Harry has said he might try relationships with men if he ‘changes his mind’ about women,” Pink News reports. I don’t think he’ll need to ask anyone twice.

“Belgian authorities have banned a planned gathering Sunday of far-right figures including the French comic Dieudonné,” Expatica Belgium reports.

In January, The New Yorker ran an article about the racist Dieudonné, a French not-very-amusing comedian.

Christian author Jeff Kinley does what Christians have done since the religion began, he predicts the end of humankind and sees signs of this looming doomsday in everything. What bothers me is that same-sex marriage is singled out the sign of this “pandemic Godlessness”. Extremists on both the religious and secular side of the argument seem to agree that the treatment of gay people is somehow the measurement of religiosity. But many of the most outspoken advocates of gay rights are religious, and some of the most bigoted homophobes are atheists.

It’s not often I get an opportunity to report something positive about Cuba, but here we go. The Washington Blade writes, “More than 400 advocates from across the world will travel to Cuba next week to attend the first international LGBT conference that will take place in the Communist country.”

The Guardian runs a series of photos of Hindu cows by Toni Meneguzzo.

“Referring to the laptop as a ‘machine spouse’, the former lawyer attempted to argue that he was in the same position as same-sex couples in the state who are also banned from marrying,” Pink News reports.

The two men debate the Baath Party.

Christian Davenport of the Washington Post writes about the growing problem of human-made debris floating about Earth. If we don’t do something about it, much of the technology we depend on could be lost or damaged.

So said the journalist Mathias Ståhle, who has made extensive research on political extremism, in a programme on Swedish television tonight. The victims sought out by the Extreme Left are not only Nazis but also liberals, conservatives, and regular people.

The Wall Street Journal has put together a number of opinion polls to see how Europe will vore in the election to the European Parliament later this month.

Human Rights Watch criticises Venezuela in new report.

The future is smarter.

The European Humanist Federation has a useful definition of populism on its website. It lists some recurrent features of European populism:

• it promotes direct democracy, claims a direct link between the government and the people and rejects the established political system;
• it offers immediate and demagogical solutions to people’s day to day problems;
• it spreads simplistic and antagonistic images such as the sovereign nation, the “sane” people vs. the “corrupted” and “technocratic” elites;
• it idealises the nation and its perceived traditions, fuelling the criticism of any supranational political system;
• it holds an anti-globalisation discourse aimed at protecting vulnerable people from the consequences of the competitive capitalist market.

It’s been take for granted that Hispanics in the United States are Catholics, but a new survey from the Pew Research Centre finds that only about 55% of the nation’s Latino adults identify as Catholic today. About 22% are Protestant—including 16% who describe themselves as born-again or evangelical—and 18% are religiously unaffiliated.

Today, on 9 May, the European Union celebrates Europe Day in commemoration of the Schuman Declaration.

Living beside an airport can make your stomach bigger, a Swedish study revealed, according to The Local.

Ah, so that’s why I’m big! It has nothing to do with the many calories I’m consuming.

Saudi Arabia has declared all atheists as terrorists, but in a comment for the Guardian, Nesrine Malik compares the situation for atheists in Muslim countries with that of gay soldiers in the American military:

In my experience, when it comes to atheism in the Muslim world, there is a conspiracy of sorts, akin to the “don’t ask don’t tell” principle on homosexuality in the US military—if a Muslim has lapsed, and no longer believes in God, there is no censure of that as long as one does not proselytise. Indeed, a 2012 poll by WIN-Gallup International found that up to 5% of Saudis polled identified as atheist, according to Sultan al-Qassemi, a number “comparable to the US and parts of Europe”

This might be a comfort to some, but the oppression of atheists in Saudi Arabia is unethical and an obvious violation of basic human rights.

“The digitally native generation has no idea what has been lost to the freedom of intimacy that has no fear of being recorded,” writes Tina Brown at The Daily Beast.

“The project—nicknamed the ‘China-Russia-Canada-America’ line—would run for 13,000km, about 3,000km further than the Trans-Siberian Railway,” the Guardian reports. “The entire trip would take two days, with the train travelling at an average of 350km/h (220mph).”

The Eurovision Song Contest is about to begin, and considering the rampant homophobia in Russia, it seems really important to cast a vote for Conchita Wurst, the beautifully bearded lady from Austria.

(Promotional photograph by Thomas Ramstorfer.)

That is the headline Wiener Zeitung chooses after Austria won the Eurovision Song Contest.

Michael Sam has become the first openly gay player drafted into the American National Football League.

Reuters reported this yesterday, but I had some problem with my website at the time and later forgot to mention it.

The world is getting better by the day now. A transgendered singer wins the Eurovision Song Contest, the American football league gets its first openly gay player, and Arkansas gets equal marriage rights for all.

It comes as no surprise to anyone that Russian politicians say things like this. In Russian propaganda, the Western “decadence” is an important ingredient and a thing they like to contrast to their own cavemanlike sexism, racism, and homophobia. To the rest of the world, Russian mentality is a thing of the past.

Meanwhile, a new Russian trend of homophobes posting pictures of themselves whilst shaving has emerged on Twitter.

“The highest court in the European Union decided on Tuesday that Google must grant users of its search engine a right to delete links about themselves in some cases, including links to legal records,” the New York Times reports.

I realise that it’s important to personal integrity to stop the abuse of some very personal information, but I see a much bigger problem in courts and governments deciding what people and companies can publish on the Internet. In this age, everyone must learn to live with the fact that there is some unflattering information floating about online. People must also learn not to judge others based solely on what they find online.

“Russian lawmakers have proposed creating their own version of Eurovision after Europe’s premier song competition was won by a bearded Austrian drag queen who promotes gay rights,” The Local reports.

There’s no end to Russia’s homophobic stupidity.

“A federal magistrate judge has ruled that Idaho’s ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional,” the Washington Post reports.

Schoolboys wearing skirts in symbolic protest against sexism outrage prominent anti-gay campaigners, The Local reports.

Brendan O’Neill:

Does objective reality—the fact that there are biological differences between men and women, and that the vast majority of humankind decides whether someone is a man or woman by those biological attributes—count for nothing in the face of one person’s wish to be known as something he is not? By the same token, can I now request that people refer to me as black even though I’m white? Who are you to say I am not black? I might feel black.

The bending of gender speaks to today’s speedily spreading cult of relativism. We live in such relativistic times, in an era so hostile to the idea that there are measurable truths or concrete realities, that it seems we can no longer even speak of “men” and “women”. There’s no such thing, apparently. There’s just a gender spectrum and you can choose where you feel you fit into it.

It’s fascinating how people who cling on to reality refuse to see reality. I mean, where exact tint makes the line between black and white people? And what, exactly, distinguish a male from a female? In the real world, sex and skin colour is not easily determined. This is obviously a problem for those, like O’Neill, who feel a need to label people into fixed categories, but nature has made people far too complex to be so easily classified. A simple rule is therefore to call people what they wish to be called.

I end this week with a photo of the Torah scrolls at the Sternberg Centre for Judaism in London.

Gay people should not be able to get married because Pocahontas married John Rolfe. This argument was actually made this week in a federal court in Richmond, Virginia. David Cohen at Slate has more.

Marathon Youth, a bronze statue of a young Hellenic man, made by the Praxiteles school about 340 BCE. It now stands at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.

Photo by Marsyas.

“I have nothing against homosexuals,” Iain McLaughlan, a UKIP member of Orton Waterville Parish Council in Peterborough, wrote on Facebook according to Pink News. “I think children should be protected from the promotion of homosexuality.”

The bigot’s favourite argument is always children’s right to protection from the loathed minority.

“Survey respondents identified Ukraine by clicking on a high-resolution world map, shown above,” the Washington Post reports. “Most thought that Ukraine was located somewhere in Europe or Asia, but the median respondent was about 1,800 miles off—roughly the distance from Chicago to Los Angeles—locating Ukraine somewhere in an area bordered by Portugal on the west, Sudan on the south, Kazakhstan on the east, and Finland on the north.”

It seems to be a trend in America. More and more judges realise that banning gay people from marrying is legalizing discrimination.

“A new study by the Anti-Defamation League found one in four adults believe a majority of negative Jewish stereotypes,” New York Daily News reports. “The survey also found that less than half of adults under the age of 35 have heard about the Holocaust.”

I wish I were in New York for this rare moment to see Lenore and Herbert Schorr’s private collection of one of my favourite twentieth-century painters.

Prince Charles has reportedly compared Russian president Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler. I second the Prince of Wales.

Americans would sooner support a presidential candidate who smoked cannabis or cheated on a spouse than elect an atheist, according to a new poll by the Pew Research Centre.

Americans have a very dim view on atheism. I don’t really get why.

A woman with beard was too much for God, apparently.

The Local runs an article about Carol Reed and Grahm Greene’s The Third Man. I love this classic film noir and would recommend it to anyone who hasn’t seen it. I never really thought about it until now, but a visit to the underground sewer system just might be something I would like to when I’m a tourist in Vienna.

“Within the union we can access the single market and also shape it so that it continues to benefit British businesses and taxpayers,” former British minister Kenneth Clarke writes in the Telegraph. “Those campaigning for an exit disregard the reality of Britain’s clout in Brussels at the nation’s peril.”

Meanwhile, the Europhobes gain big in the local elections.

“Elections for the European Parliament this week are likely to empower precisely those parties that want to destroy the European Union,” Tracy McNicoll writes.

Activists argue that if an animal has autonomy, then it is protected by the law.

“A Swiss assisted suicide group has expanded its services to help elderly patients who are sick but not terminally ill end their lives,” The Local reports.

“A gunman has shot dead three people at the Jewish Museum in the Belgian capital Brussels,” BBC News reports.

Seven people are dead and seven injured after a swift and deadly rampage by a gunman in southern California, NBC reports.

This has been a black day. First an attack on a Jewish centre in Belgium, and now this.

“Pro-Russia gunmen have all-but stopped voting in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine, but people are turning out in big numbers in the rest of the country,” EU Observer reports.

Too bad for Putin, but delightful news to the rest of us.

“Minutes after the polls closed, exit polls projected that front-runner businessman and politician Petro Poroshenko, who in the run-up to the election had been widening his big lead over second-placed contender former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, had managed to secure the necessary 50 percent of the vote needed to avoid a June run-off,” Jamie Dettmer of The Daily Beast writes.

Mmm… chocolate…

23:39 – The Green Party has overtaken the Moderates to become the second largest party in the EU election in Sweden.

23:36 – Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s centre-left block ahead in Italy.

23:29 – Liberals gain in the Netherlands whilst far-right Geert Wilders loses.

21:49 – The Green Party gains big in Sweden.

21:48 – The first results of today’s election to the European Parliament have emerged:

• The Austrian People’s Party has emerged the clear winner among Austrian parties.
• In France, the Marine Le Pen’s neo-Nazi National Front Party has won most seats.
• Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party is the biggest in Germany.
• The first poll from Sweden suggests a big loss for the Moderate Party whilst the racist Sweden Democrats and a new feminist party win their first seat.

That’s my take on yesterday’s election, where the Eurosceptic and xenophobic parties won big in many countries. It’s shameful. On the other hand, the radical right is not unique to Europe. It has also become a fixed feature in American politics where foreigners are also blamed for everything.

German gossip magazine Bild has posted some revealing pictures of the Duchess of Cambridge. This is precisely the kind of Internet shaming that Monica Lewinsky writes about in the June issue of Vanity Fair (not online yet).

Today’s my forty-second birthday, and I just had dinner with my parents. I’m so very blessed to have them both.

“Considered the finest baroque church in Vienna, as well as one of its most significant buildings, the almost 300-year-old church has recently become the target of unknown vandals,” The Local reports.

Why would anyone do such a thing? It’s so mediaeval.

The International Monetary Fund has declared on that Spain’s economic recovery is here to stay, The Local reports. Good news!