“A Belgian physician who refused to treat a Jewish woman with a fractured rib suggested she visit Gaza to get rid of the pain,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports.

A hundred years ago today, Germany declared war against Russia. In the years that followed, nearly 18 million people would die as a result of the war. This war is almost forgotten, but it might be important to remind ourselves of Europe’s history in our time, when Russia is occupying parts of Ukraine and the European Union and America are hitting back at Russia with sanctions.

“The Swedish government announced that it plans to remove all mentions of race from Swedish legislation, saying that race is a social construct which should not be encouraged in law,” The Local reports. Good news! But I’m a bit astonished by the fact that race is still mentioned in Swedish law.

It’s with great sorrow that I begin this Shabbat. Israel is at war with Hamas and things are getting worse with every news bulletin. The latest thing I heard was that an Israeli soldier has been kidnapped, about 70 Israelis have died, and more than 1,500 Palestinians have been killed. War is madness.

Finally, some good news! “Uganda’s notorious anti-gay law has been struck down by a court, who ruled that it was passed illegally,” Pink News reports.

“The growing threat to France’s mainstream political leaders posed by Marine Le Pen, head of France’s far-right National Front, has been underscored by an opinion poll putting her in the lead for the first time in the race for the next presidential election,” Financial Times reports. Yikes! Europe has had enough of racist fascists!

I’m not big on Pride events, but one thing I do like is to watch the parades. They are colourful and people are happy. Later today, central Stockholm will be taken over by this year’s Pride Parade. I wish I could see it live, but The Local has a guide for those of you who can.

“Germany is the world’s leader in penis enlargements, with five times as many people in the country undergoing the procedure than anywhere else in the world,” The Local reports.

“France is considering disbanding a radical Jewish group whose members clashed with pro-Palestinian activists during rallies over Israel’s offensive in Gaza,” Ynetnews reports.

“Serves them right,” the graffiti reads.

And what would you do if your neighbour across the street digs a tunnel from his nursery to your nursery in order to blow up your home or in order to kidnap your family? Amos Oz asks the questions in an interview for Deutsche Welle.

It’s always nice to see happy people. QX has posted pictures of Stockholm’s Gay Pride Parade on Saturday.

David Shulman of the New York Review of Books:

In the weeks since then we have seen organised lynch mobs of Israeli youths prowling the streets of Jerusalem at night in search of Palestinians who have the misfortune to be passing by. Many restaurants and bars in downtown Jerusalem employ Palestinian waiters and kitchen staff; they tend to get off work around midnight or 1 AM, when they have to go home to their neighborhoods. Those are the dangerous hours. Dozens have been attacked. On July 25, two Palestinian men, Amir Jalal Shweiki and Samir Mahfuz, both twenty, were beaten unconscious near the northeast Jerusalem neighborhood of Neve Yaakov. They are still in the hospital. There have also been unconfirmed reports of incidents where the police either stood by or joined in with right-wing thugs, for example on July 24 when two Palestinians, Amir Mazin Abu Eisha and Laith Ubeidat, who were delivering bread to stores on Jaffa Road in downtown Jerusalem, were savagely attacked.

These racists are doing Israel no good. It’s people like them that helps Hamas and others to portray Israel as an apartheid state (which is not the case).

I have added a so-called appcache (a contraction for application cache) in order to take advantage of some features normally reserved for web applications. This might, however, cause some problem in some browsers—especially old ones. This is new territory for me, so it might take a while before I get it all to work properly. Let me know if you run into some problem when loading this website.

And I just realised that I have spent another night doing everything but sleeping—and now I’m off to work. Why do I never learn?

Jim Burroway writes about Scott Lively, an extremist homophobe who helped to bring forward a genocide law in Uganda.

Last week we could read about a Belgian café banning Jews. Now we have a shop in Austria banning racists, homophobe, and assholes. I know which one I prefer!

“Spanish Police have arrested two teenage girls, 14 and 19, who were planning on joining jihadist forces in Iraq and Syria,” The Local reports. This is a growing problem in Europe. Why anyone would leave a liberal democracy with civil liberties for an Islamist cause is beyond me.

Hamas terrorists have posted pictures of dead Jews on Twitter in celebration, Gateway Pundit reports.

The Israeli army has found a Hamas manual on urban warfare that explains how the civilian population is intentionally sacrificed. It also reveals that Hamas knows the Israelis are committed to minimizing harm to civilians.

This guy asked the Internet to help him with some photoshopping. The result is hilarious.

The man, Omar Omeirat, a candidate for the town council of Filipstad in central Sweden, wrote on his Facebook page about “Jewish pigs”.

This is why so many innocent people die every time Israel must retaliate against Hamas. Unlike the impression one gets from Europe’s mainstream media, it has nothing to do with Israelis being bloodthirsty but everything to do with the complete immorality of Hamas.

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“President Barack Obama drew a diplomatic line at the first ever US-Africa summit at the White House this week by not inviting Zimbabwe’s brutal dictator Robert Mugabe,” Daily Mail reports. “But the guest list still included several other African leaders with only slightly better human rights records.” Amongst the dictators was Gambia’s Yahya Jammeh, who, in 2008, threatened to decapitate all gay people and, in 2009, abducted up to 1,000 people on charges of witchcraft.

“Dozens of Jewish children have been traumatised by a gang of teenagers who stormed a Sydney school bus and allegedly hurled racial abuse and threats,” Ynetnews reports. The teenagers threaten to slit the Jewish children’s throats whilst chanting, “Palestine must kill the Jews” and “Heil Hitler”.

Glasgow City Council will raise the Palestinian flag over the city chambers in solidarity with those affected by the conflict in Gaza. A statement from the Israeli embassy in London is spot on: “Whilst the Palestinian flag flies over Glasgow, the flag over Gaza is the green Hamas flag, which expresses the one-sided ideology of blind hatred, which the group shares with Al-Qaeda, Boko-Haram, ISIS and other radical Islamist entities around the world.”

“Russia is imposing a full ban on deliveries of beef, pork, fruit and vegetables, poultry, fish, cheese, milk and dairy products from the European Union, the United States, Australia, Canada, and Norway,” the Russian government announced a few hours ago. Yulia Bragina, a witty tweeter, wonder what the oligarchs will now do when there’s no good cheese and wine to celebrate the big oil bonuses with.

This is a fascinating, hands-on way of raising children.

“The definitive turnout for the elections is 42.5 percent, down from 43 percent at the 2009 EU elections and down from the estimated 43.09 percent announced on 25 May, shortly after polls closed,” EU Observer reports. It’s sad that people don’t take democracy more seriously. This is why extremists gain power in Europe. All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

“Pro-Palestinian protesters who staged a ‘flash-mob’ style theatrical protest over the weekend in Vienna are under investigation for hate speech,” The Local reports. One must admit that Hamas really has managed to get its propaganda across. The simplified image of evil Israelis killing Palestinian children is more effective than the fact that these children are deliberately used as human shields where Hamas fires its rockets into civilian communities inside Israel. It’s frustrating when you know that the thousands of Hamas rockets hurt Israeli children, too.

A beautiful painting by French post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne (1839–1906).

“Opposition party Venstre says that the large influx of asylum seekers streaming into the country—primarily from war-torn Syria—have conditions that are too generous,” The Local reports. “The party has vowed to make Denmark a less attractive destination if it wins back power at the next election.” Perhaps the people who made this suggestion should try to live as Syrian refugees in Europe for a while.

I did not take part myself, but some of my friends did. A few of them are seen in these pictures at QX.

“I had it in my head that I could not both be a feminist and be sexually open,” Roxane Gay writes and explains how she, as a teenager, thought that feminism equated with prudishness.

“A man with a fetish for rolling naked in cow manure has been sentenced to five years in jail after he threatened to kill a family when they tried to stop him from targeting their farm,” the Independent reports. You can’t make stuff like this up.

German tabloid newspaper Bild­ claims it’s the British who hug those desperately sought after sunbeds, not the Germans. In doing so, the Germans have debunked a popular myth amongst sunbathers in Europe.

“A former MP for Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia has been fined €10,000 for saying he would never hire a gay person,” The Local reports. I don’t like this. In a democratic country with free speech, one must be allowed to say things like this. It’s an altogether different thing to act on this opinion. It’s better to name and shame bigots. To fine them only makes them heroes in extremists circles.

The World Health Organisation has formally declared an international public health emergency in response to what it says is the largest and most severe outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in the nearly four-decade history of the disease. The New York Time writes about why we should be very frightened.

“Banning the purchase of sex is as illiberal as banning its sale,” The Economist writes. Considering that most people—at lest in Sweden—who argue in favour of such a ban hate liberalism as much as prostitution, I don’t think this argument will move them the slightest. The irony is that Scandinavian socialism and religious conservatism have the same moralistic outcome.

“Rafael Muñoz Perez, 27, and Ángel, 22, have posted videos on YouTube showing themselves posing with weapons after enlisting in the notorious pro-Russian Vostok Battalion fighting in the east of Ukraine,” The Local reports. The world is a mad place.

“A new anti-gay bill that would see gay people sentenced to death by stoning is under discussion in Kenya,” Pink News reports.

“North Korea has dropped an image of Kim Il-Sung, the country’s founder and ‘Great Leader,’ from a new banknote,” Deutsche Welle reports. Is the world’s only necrocracy about to give up on its dead leader?

“It is imperative that Europeans exhaust all non-military means of bringing pressure to bear on Moscow,” Der Spiegel writes in a leader. “The goal is deterrence, not escalation, and for that to work, the measures must be credible.”

Ever wondered how the woodpecker manages all that backing against wood? Now Daily Mail has the answer: Chinese scientists have found that the woodpecker body stores 99 per cent of energy from impacts as strain energy—the energy stored by an object which changes temporarily because of an applied force.

And the Iranian legal code does not differentiate between rape and consensual homosexual acts, which is why Iran executes people for being gay. With this attitude to human rights, I don’t know why Iran even bother to pretend it cares about international conventions.

I blogged on the topic yesterday, but the sunbed war is more severe than I thought.

“Authorities in Indonesia this week condemned the Islamic State—the Sunni extremist militants who have taken over large chunks of territory in Iraq and Syria, killing hundreds of innocent civilians in the process—and ordered a ban on YouTube videos that in any way endorse the jihadists,” Ishaan Tharoor of Washington Post reports.

If your followers seem inhuman, that might just be because they are.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy writes:

Anti-Semitism has always been about the notion of Jews having too much power. This has nothing specifically to do with Israel, let alone with anything this particular Israeli government has done. I’m quite sure the 1840s French writers holding forth about the Rothschilds weren’t reacting to anything the not-yet-existent Israel would do more than a century later. And it typically points—selectively—to real instances of Jews behaving badly. No, the deal with anti-Semitism is, it’s about highlighting Jews’ bad behavior; seeing only that; inventing some more; while at the same time ignoring good Jewish behavior as well as bad behavior on the part of non-Jews. We all know the refrain: Not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism. But the presence of legitimate criticisms often hangs out within a broader ideology that puts The Jew at the center of absolutely everything terrible that’s ever happened.

This is spot on.

“A 55-year-old man in western Sweden illegally purchased sex from two women—and then called police to complain about their ‘outrageous’ prices,” The Local reports. This goes into the folder of stupid things people do but you can’t retell because no one would believe it.

“In a directive publicised Tuesday, Israeli Interior Minister Gideon Saar told immigration authorities not to differentiate between married gay and straight couples,” Ynetnews reports. I’m a bit puzzled by this since I know gay couples that have settled in Israel. Perhaps this is merely a clarification. It’s good news in any event. Israel is the homeland of all Jews, both gay and straight.

Yesterday, in the streets of central London, extremist supporters of the Islamic State handed out leaflets promoting the establishment of a Caliphate and calling on Muslims to obey the caliph, Newsweek reports. This is worrying. The Islamic State is in fact a terrorist organisation responsible for an ongoing genocide of Iraqi Yazidis and Christians. The organisation is too extreme even for most extremists.

Itay Hod of the Daily Beast writes about these invisible men.

John Rossomando of the Algemeiner writes about the rise of Muslim anti-Semitism in Europe.

Norman Baker, Britain’s health minister, says laws should be introduced to legalise the widespread use of cannabis to relieve symptoms of certain medical conditions, such as the side effects of chemotherapy, the Guardian reports.

Takis Würger of Der Spiegel writes about Ludovic Mohamed Zahed, a French imam who has opened a gay-friendly mosque in Paris.

“As Western nations evacuate their citizens from West Africa’s growing Ebola outbreak, some Christian leaders have begun to speak of the virus as a curse from God,” Fredrick Nzwili of the Huffington Post writes. Horrific and alarming!

“The Pentagon has said a possible US mission to rescue Yazidis trapped on Iraq’s Mount Sinjar is less likely to take place after special forces assessed that there are fewer civilians trapped than previously feared,” Deutsche Welle reports. Fewer are not none. These people need rescuing from the terrorist organisation that wants to see them dead.

I was looking for something else when I came across this article at Daily Mail on how hot dogs are made. I’m glad I’m not eating the stuff.

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“A federal appeals court denied a request to block same-sex marriages from being performed in Virginia, and unless the Supreme Court intervenes, couples can begin to wed as early as next week, according to court filings and the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union,” Los Angeles Times reports.

“Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism are the second-largest religions in twenty, fifteen, and thirteen states respectively,” Yasmine Hafiz of Huffington Post writes. “Hinduism is the second-largest faith in two states, and the Baha’i faith in just one.”

“The newly-appointed leader of the Conservative party, Søren Pape Poulsen, came out as homosexual on Tuesday and said he couldn’t understand why his sexuality was such a big deal,” The Local reports. Good for him—and for Denmark, too.

“French courts have fined MP and Mayor, Gilles Bourdouleix, €3,000 for saying ‘maybe Hitler didn’t kill enough’ Roma,” EU Observer reports. A disgustingly offensive remark, but racist idiots should be named and shamed instead of punished in ways that only boosts their victimhood.

“The trucks are unlikely to represent a full-scale official Russian invasion, and it was unclear how far they planned to travel inside Ukrainian territory and how long they would stay,” Shaun Walker of the Guardian reports. “But it was incontrovertible evidence of what Ukraine has long claimed—that Russian troops are active inside its borders.” Putin wants war, there’s little doubt about it.

Follow Shaun Walker on Twitter.

Gilles Proulx is obviously an anti-Semite who believes in the myth about Jewish world dominance, but he’s also given proof of complete stupidity in other areas. He did, for example, lose his latest regular broadcast job in 2005 when he referred to a 14-year-old victim of a sexual assault as a “cow” and a “slut”.

From BBC News:

Ukrainian officials quoted by the Interfax agency said the cargo, bound for cities in eastern Ukraine held by pro-Russian rebels, was being checked.

Ukraine fears the convoy may carry military supplies for the rebels, an accusation Russia has rejected.

On Thursday, two reporters said they saw Russian army vehicles heading into Ukraine, into rebel-held territory.

Ukrainian security officials said that they had spotted a column of armoured personnel carriers and military lorries crossing into Ukraine.

So, Russia is denying what independent journalists have themselves seen.

“They arrived in vehicles and they started their killing this afternoon,” senior Kurdish official Hoshiyar Zebari told Reuters. “We believe it’s because of their creed: convert or be killed.”

“According to German media reports on Friday, the German foreign intelligence agency Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) intercepted at least one call during Clinton’s time in office as US Secretary of State,” Deutsche Welle reports. Everyone’s listening in on everybody. It’s just like the Cold War in one of John Le Carré’s spy thrillers.

“EU ministers at an emergency meeting Friday said a Gaza ceasefire must see Hamas and other Palestinian ‘terrorist groups’ disarm, as well as a ‘fundamental improvement in the living conditions’ for people in the Strip,” EU Observer reports. Good news! Most of what we normally hear from European leaders is one-sided Israel-bashing—sometimes to the extent that people seem unaware of the constant firing of rockets into Israel from the Gaza Strip.

“The situation in the Middle East should not be used as an excuse for simply abominable and unacceptable conduct… which is in fact what is happening,” Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis told BBC Radio 4 according to Jewish News. “Anti-Zionism is not necessarily anti-Semitism. However, anti-Zionism does create a context within which anti-Semitism can thrive. This is exactly what we are seeing.”

If you’re willing to take a photo of your bag of crisps and share it on social media, then you can have it for free at Copenhagen’s new Freemarket. I’m sure this will appeal to a lot of people. Personally, I tend to block people who post too many pictures of the food they eat.

“The foreign ministers of Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany are to hold an urgent meeting to address tensions in eastern Ukraine,” Deutsche Welle reports.

The Times reports some horrific news from France: a kosher supermarket that was recently put to the torch in anti-Jewish demonstrations.

“Allowing Hamas to open a Gaza seaport would only serve to allow Iran direct access to rearm the Islamic terror group,” Eliezer Marom, Israel’s former navy chief, says. And he is right. This is the reason why Israel can’t allow for a lifting of the blockade of Gaza. It all comes down to the Iranian threat to Israel.

“The British newspaper The Guardian rejected an advertorial piece penned by famed Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz,” the Algemeiner reports. “In the ad, Dershowitz refutes statements by many media outlets that all of the Gaza Strip is densely populated, a claim that has been used to justify the use of human shields by Hamas in the terrorist group’s recent conflict with Israel.”

“Demonstrators at an anti-Israel protest in Chicago held up signs equating the Swastika with the Star of David,” Dovid Efune of the Algemeiner writes about the rise of anti-Semitism.

The ECB must use all available means to fight deflation and bring the euro to a more competitive level, says France’s finance minister Michel Sapin. I think he is right. Europe is simply too expensive for its own good.

“Research carried out on elementary school-age children has revealed that drilling children on simple addition and multiplication may pay off,” Daily Mail reports. “According to the results, as children’s brains develop remembering sums helps them add up faster.” So, drill if you love ’em.

I can’t stop laughing at this hilarious video.

He’s been hiding from the Swedish judicial system at the Ecuadorian embassy in London because he’s afraid that answering questions about his alleged rape of a woman in Sweden will result in him being thrown into an American prison. Today, he called a press conference to reveal that he is now planning to leave the embassy. Why, when, and how? No such questions answered. It was just another meaningless act by this tedious drama queen.

“This year’s Perseid meteor shower was almost obscured by the ‘supermoon’ but one photographer still managed to capture a stunning image of the event,” The Local reports. Stunning, indeed.

“Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz Al al-Sheikh, the highest religious authority in the country, said on Tuesday the militant groups Islamic State and al-Qaida were ‘enemy number one of Islam’ and not in any way part of the faith,” Jerusalem Post reports.

The Times of Israel live-blogs the madness.

“Iceland’s meteorological office on Monday raised a volcano alert to the aviation industry to orange, the second-highest level, after recording more than 1,000 earthquakes in the area of the Bardarbunga volcano,” EU Observer reports.

The last time Iceland had a major volcano outbreak, my parents were trapped on a Spanish island for a week because no plane could fly over continental Europe. Next weekend, I’m travelling to Frankfurt. I really hope the volcano won’t halt that trip.

“Sweden has not actively taken part in a war since 1814—breaking even Switzerland’s record for peace,” The Local writes. This is something truly worth celebrating.

“Woman wearing Palestinian flag tries to enter house of worship in first demonstration of public hostility in Swiss city,” The Times of Israel reports. It’s obvious that some people simply refuse to differentiate between Jews in the diaspora and the State of Israel. Israel has embassies in all countries where people can protest things related to Israeli government.

“Despite a move away from the practice in the mid-1800’s, some strictly Orthodox Jews still use their mouths to suck the site of circumcision during a bris,” Kathryn Doyle of Reuters writes. It’s an absurd practice with very little ground in Halacha.

In a five-minute long video, the terrorist organisation kills the American photojournalist. There are no words strong enough to describe the complete lack of ethics amongst these cowardly fascists.

When asked about his vicious remark about children with Down’s syndrome, the “humanist” replied, “Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world.” I don’t know why people are surprised; much of the so-called Humanist movement is really nothing but social Darwinism disguised as rationalism.

The Supreme Court has issued an order to stop same-sex marriage in Virginia only hours before it would have become legal.

A new building is taking shape in Malmö. It’s called the Soprano.

Swedish comedian Aron Flam has written a superb article—in Swedish—about the anti-Semitism of Aftonbladet, Sweden’s largest tabloid newspaper.

“Luz Elena Sanín, a member of Spain’s Popular Party, recently claimed the country’s economic crisis was caused by subsidies for its gay citizens,” The Local reports.

“News agencies cited unnamed diplomatic sources late on Thursday who said the ceasefire plan being circulated by the three European Union countries included a lifting of the blockade on the Gaza Strip coupled with an international mission to monitor the flow of goods into the Palestinian territory,” Deutsche Welle reports. This would free Israel of the constant criticism whilst making these European countries responsible for any Hamas terrorism.

“A senior Hamas leader has said the group carried out the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teens in the West Bank in June—the first time anyone from the Islamic militant group has said it was behind an attack that helped spark the current war in the Gaza Strip,” Arab News reports.

“The Jew can only survive as a parasite,” Ibb Malmgren, a local councillor for the far-right Sweden Democrats wrote on a white-supremacy website. “The main difference between Germanic people and Jews is that the Germanics have a sense of honour and loyalty, which is why they don’t parasite on another state.”

It’s a few hours to go before Shabbat, but it’s getting closer. When looking for a poem suitable for Shabbat, I found this list of work that is prohibited for Jews on Shabbat. It doesn’t say anything about blogging.

1. Sowing
2. Plowing
3. Reaping
4. Binding sheaves
5. Threshing
6. Winnowing
7. Selecting
8. Grinding
9. Sifting
10. Kneading
11. Baking
12. Shearing wool
13. Washing wool
14. Beating wool
15. Dyeing wool
16. Spinning
17. Weaving
18. Making two loops
19. Weaving two threads
20. Separating two threads
21. Tying
22. Untying
23. Sewing two stitches
24. Tearing
25. Trapping
26. Slaughtering
27. Flaying
28. Salting meat
29. Curing hide
30. Scraping hide
31. Cutting hide up
32. Writing two letters
33. Erasing two letters
34. Building
35. Tearing a building down
36. Extinguishing a fire
37. Kindling a fire
38. Hitting with a hammer
39. Taking an object from the private domain to the public, or transporting an
    object in the public domain.

“In the first decision on same-sex marriage with statewide impact, a federal judge ruled Thursday that Florida’s gay-marriage ban is unconstitutional, ordering the state to allow the marriage of same-sex couples and to recognise legal marriages performed elsewhere,” Tampa Bay Times reports.

It’s not a flattering picture Adam LeBor of Newsweek gives of my hometown:

Malmo, Sweden’s third-largest city, is one of the most unsettling places in Europe for Jews. Anti-Semitic attacks tripled between 2010 and 2012, when the community, around 700-strong, recorded 60 incidents. In October 2012 a bomb exploded at the Jewish community centre.

Jewish leaders accused Ilmar Reepalu, who served as mayor between 1994 and 2013, of inflammatory comments. Reepalu called for Jews to distance themselves from Zionism, and claimed that the Jewish community had been “infiltrated” by the Sweden Democrats party, which has its roots in the far-right. Reepalu has denied being anti-Semitic. But his remarks provoked a storm of protest and he was forced to retract them. Hannah Rosenthal, the former US Special Envoy for combating anti-Semitism, said Malmo was a prime example of the “new anti-Semitism” where hatred of Israel is used to disguise hatred of Jews.

What he writes is correct, but I disagree with the statement that Malmö is one of the most unsettling places in Europe for Jews. There are places with far greater problems than Malmö. Overall, this is a good city for Jews. What made Malmö special was the racist mayor who never missed an opportunity to blame Jews for everything—including neo-Nazism. By doing so, the city’s top politician legitimised anti-Semitic violence carried out by a radical few on the far left. But this mayor has now resigned and the new one is an outspoken supporter of the Jews in Malmö.

(Photo by Dnalor 01.)

I want under the mistaken impression that McDonald’s restaurants looked pretty much the same all over the world—I was wrong.

Dahlia Schweitzer: “My religion has finally caught up with my sexuality. Both make me self-conscious but still defiant. Both are political choices. Neither should be.”

A total of 172 people travelled to Switzerland in 2012—double the 2009 number—to commit suicide with medical assistance, according to a new study reported by The Local. It’s about time that more countries allow for terminally ill people in pain to end their lives in dignity.

Francois Lubbe writes about an aspect of Israel that is often neglected. To me, it’s bizarre that some gay people march in Pride parades with anti-Israel banners in support of Hamas.

“IS is too dangerous to be allowed to gain ground while the rest of the world stands by,” The Economist writes in a leader. The newspaper is absolutely right.

Britain is very close to identifying the Islamic State terrorist with the English accent who beheaded American journalist James Foley, Daily Telegraph reports. Good news!

“The magnitude-6.0 quake, centered near the city of Napa, an oasis of Victorian-era buildings nestled in the vineyard-studded hills of northern California, ruptured water mains and gas lines,” Ellen Knickmeyer of the Associated Press writes.

Kyle Mantyla of Right Wing Watch writes about the latest rant from Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, a homophobic lobby organisation. It’s ironic that one crazy fundamentalist organisation uses another to show the dangers of liberalism. The truth is that the American Family Association and the Islamic State share much of the same archaic ideas about minority rights and human sexuality.

A Turkmen city in northern Iraq has been under siege by the Islamic State since June, Der Spiegel reports.

“Researchers reported stem cell transplants have been effectively used by Canadian doctors to help alleviate the symptoms of stiff person syndrome,” Toronto Star reports. This illustrates the dangers of religious opposition to stem-cell research.

“No less than 89 percent of the revenues comes from the 70 percent of pilgrims who come from abroad,” Arab News reports. Muslim pilgrimage is big business for Saudi Arabia.

All reviews of the comeback performance of Kate Bush seem to agree that she made a triumph. Personally, I’d love to see Kate Bush live.

The Guardian has some pictures here.

“Iranian military leaders on Tuesday vowed that Tehran would take military action against Israel in response to an alleged Israeli drone that was shot down in Iran on Sunday,” Washington Free Beacon reports.

A new book by Jeffrey Kluger states the mind of an animal is a far richer and more complex thing than most people know.

“A new poll by a Palestinian think tank shows that an overwhelming number of Gazans support or strongly support rocket attacks on Israel,” Ynetnews reports.

A team led by an Italian scientist has now come to the conclusion that the female erogenous zone known as the G-spot doesn’t exist. It’s great that scientists spend money on important, life-saving things.

During a visit to the Städel Museum today, I snapped a few photos of some favourite art pieces. Seen above is Corinne Wasmuht, Barrier (2008).

Georg Baselitz, Oberon (1963).

Walter Dahn, Großes Gelbes, Kopf quer (1984).

Günther Förg, Untitled (1986).

Daniel Richer, Gaggle (2007).

“The Prime Minister’s comments come after the results of the first poll since a second televised debate showed the No campaign’s lead was cut in half, to just six points,” The Scotsman reports. One thing I find fascinating about British politics is that there are now two very distinct nationalist movements. One is the UKIP, who wants to quit Britains membership of the European Union, and the other is the Welsh and Scottish nationalists who want to leave the United Kingdom and stay in the EU. Personally, I like the idea of smaller European nations joint together by a federalist structure within the EU. As Europeans we both need to recognise each other’s differences and the need for us all to work together. Therefore I like the EU motto, “United in diversity”.

European leaders has agreed to appoint Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk for the EU Council presidency and Italian Foreign Minister Federica Mogherini as the union’s foreign affairs chief, EU Observer reports. A fascinating fact about Tusk is that he speaks neither French nor English, which makes me wonder how he will communicate in the corridors of Brussels. Sign language?