@ÜberFacts: “Dogs will sneeze to tell other dogs that they’re playing, so when they’re playing rough it doesn’t turn into a fight.”

“Thousands of people turned up to anti-racism rallies in Sweden’s major cities on Friday afternoon following three arson attacks on mosques,” The Local reports.

Gay people fear a widening police crackdown on homosexuals in Egypt, Jay Deshmukh and Abdelhalim Abdallah of AFP report.

“Buckingham Palace has denied ‘any suggestion of impropriety with underage minors’ by Prince Andrew,” BBC News reports.

“The Dutch language contains many useless elements, making it laborious and complicated to use, according to research by linguist Sterre Leufkens,” Dutch News reports.

@ÜberFacts: “Pole dancing started in 1135 AD and was mostly done by men.”

“In just five months, the grassroots Alliance for Family (AZR) has collected more than 400,000 signatures (about 8% of the population) on a petition to restrict the family rights of gays,” The Economist reports.

“Public health official Yousuf Mindkar is working on a ‘clinical test’ that will allegedly reveal the sexual orientation of people who are trying to enter his country,” Carol Kuruvilla of the New York Daily News reports.

“More than 1.5 million people visited the former Auschwitz concentration camp in 2014, setting a record,” Jerusalem Post reports.

Two gunmen killed twelve unarmed journalist at French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo, BBC reports.

@GoSruthi:

“Two brothers and another man are identified as suspects in the attack on a newspaper office in Paris which killed 12,” Sky News reports.

Heavy has listed five things to know about each of the suspects:

1. Said Kouachi
2. Cherif Kouachi
3. Hamyd Mourad

The news comes from France 24.

“Sources tell AFP that 18-year-old Hamyd Mourad surrendered to police at 23:00 local time on Wednesday ‘after seeing his name circulating on social media’. ‘He has been arrested and taken into custody,’ another source told the agency,” BBC News reports.

Stephane Charbonnier: “I am not afraid of retaliation. I have no kids, no wife, no car, no credit. It perhaps sounds a bit pompous, but I prefer to die standing than living on my knees.”

Charbonnier was the publishing director of Charlie Hebdo who, alongside eleven others, were killed in the Paris shooting yesterday.

“Satirizing and mocking religion is sacred,” the European Humanist Federation says in a statement.

It’s a fascinating choice of word from an organisation that works for the abolishment of religion and a ban on religious practice. According to the Oxford Dictionary, sacred has four possible definitions:

• connected with God or a god or dedicated to a religious purpose and so deserving veneration
• (of writing or text) embodying the laws or doctrines of a religion
• regarded with great respect and reverence by a particular religion, group, or individual
• regarded as too valuable to be interfered with.

I assume the atheists mean sacred in the forth meaning, but even this definition is clearly linked to religion. I find it interesting that those who are normally fanatically against religion pick religious language when crisis occurs.

“Timur Isayev has collected evidence about gay and lesbian teachers, according to Vocativ, and sent it to their employers in an attempt to get them sacked,” Naith Payton of Pink News reports.

“Russia has reportedly banned transgender people, as well as those who suffer from ‘disorders of sexual preference,’ from obtaining driver’s licenses,” Curtis M. Wong of the Huffington Post reports.

A poll in 2014 found that on average French respondents thought 31% of their compatriots were Muslim, against an actual figure closer to 8%, The Economist reports.

“Islamists in Algeria shouted anti-Semitic slogans at a rally celebrating the slaying of 12 people in Paris,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports.

The news just came in via France 24. More details will be posted in later updates.

“A gunman has seized hostages at a kosher supermarket in Paris as police in northern France have cornered the two Charlie Hebdo massacre suspects,” BBC News reports.

The world is mad!

“Five people were killed, including the gunman, and four were left critically wounded after a hostage drama in eastern Paris ended with a police assault,” AFP reports.

It’s already Shabbat, but I have been so occupied with the developments in Paris that I haven’t been able to get that special Shabbat feeling until now. Anyhow, terrorism is awful, but evil hasn’t won until the day we stop leading our lives the way we want to. To celebrate Shabbat—or just enjoying a weekend—is to turn your back on those who think their terror will make us surrender our liberty.

“An al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen claimed responsibility late Friday for the deadly attack on a satirical newspaper in France this week,” Karl Vick of Time reports.

“18 months ago France had around 500,000 Jewish residents—the largest population in the EU—but this may now be below 400,000,” Martin Robinson and James White of Mail Online report.

Image: The Israelites Leaving Egypt by Scottish painter David Roberts (1796–1864)

Moments ago, Anna Kinberg Batra was elected new leader of the centre-right Moderate Party.

Image: Johan Fredriksson (Wikimedia Commons)

“The Tory leader made the claim during a Q&A in Wirral, when he was asked what things he was proudest of doing,” Nick Duffy of Pink News reports.

“There is no future for Jews in France as long as Europeans refuse to confront the tacit acceptance of violence by many of the continent’s Muslims,” James Kirchick of The Daily Beast reports.

The Daily Mail has an interesting portrait of Hayat Boumeddiene, the wife of the terrorist who killed several civilians at Paris kosher shop.

“Monkeys and humans seem to be prone to the same biases, and when it comes to money, they make the same kinds of mistakes,” David McRaney of Boing Boing reports.

“The British armed forces are to begin monitoring the sexuality of new recruits, in order to help tackle homophobia,” Nick Duffy of Pink News reports.

“Approximately 40 world leaders are joining record crowds for a huge Paris rally in honour of the victims of a three-day spree of violence that killed 17 people,” France 24 reports.

“She was born in the city of Malmö, on the south-western tip of Sweden, the sixth of eight children of August, a doctor, and his wife, Alvah,” Ronald Bergan and John Francis Lane of the Guardian write in an obituary. “Having been crowned Miss Malmö and then Miss Sweden, Ekberg went to the US in the early 1950s for the Miss Universe contest and stayed to appear in a number of Hollywood films.”

Image: Carl Lindström (Wikimedia Commons)

“A Dublin priest received a standing ovation from his congregation this week as he called for same sex marriage equality in Ireland and came out to his parishioners,” Cathy Hayes of Irish Central reports.

“In a statement issued as many world leaders gathered in the French capital Sunday to express solidarity with France and to vow renewed efforts to fight violent Islamic radicalism, the White House announced that its summit on the issue of homegrown terrorism will take place next month,” Josh Gerstein of Politico reports.

This is good news. What’s important is that the free and democratic world work as one against the extremists who want to destroy it.

“Swedish hit film Turist, known as Force Majeure abroad, lost out in the Best Foreign Film category at the Golden Globes, to a Russian drama,” The Local reports.

“The Twitter account for US military forces in the Middle East and South Asia was hacked on Monday,” Spencer Ackerman of the Guardian reports.

“France will deploy nearly 5,000 security forces and police to protect the 700 Jewish schools in the country,” Sophie Inge of The Local reports.

From France 24:

“Tonight, as far as I’m concerned, I feel like Charlie Coulibaly”, Dieudonné, who has several convictions for making anti-Semitic remarks and jokes, wrote in a post that has since been deleted from his Facebook page.

The comment was a play on “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie), the phrase that has become a rallying cry following the massacre of 12 people at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo last Wednesday. But it uses the last name of Amédy Coulibaly—the gunman who murdered four people at a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris on Friday.

Coulibaly, who prosecutors say was also behind the fatal shooting of a policewoman in the French capital on Thursday, was killed when police stormed the supermarket and freed the surviving hostages.

Disgusting!

“Angela Merkel has joined a Muslim community rally in Berlin to promote tolerance, condemn the attacks in Paris and send a rebuke to Germany’s growing anti-Islamic movement,” the Guardian reports.

“A new study from the MedUni of Vienna reveals that brain structure is significantly different between males and females—and that trans-gender individuals are something different too,” The Local reports.

“Cuba before Communism was a playground for those who could afford to play,” Chris Wild of Mashable writes in an introduction to a fascinating gallery of old photographs.

“A shockingly high number of gay and lesbian Mormons have undergone attempts to ‘cure’ themselves of their same-sex attractions,” Joseph Patrick McCormick of Pink News reports.

“A Lakewood minister refused to hold a memorial service on Saturday for a mother of two at his church because the woman was gay,” Jesse Paul of The Denver Post reports.

Some French Muslims think attacks in Paris were part of a plot masterminded by Jewish conspirator, Dana Kennedy of The Daily Beast reports.

The latest issue of French magazine Charlie Hebdo sees the surviving staff members mock the gunmen who slaughtered their colleagues, Ben McPartland of The Local reports.

The Oscar nominations for the 87th Academy Awards were announced in Los Angeles this morning, Joshua Rothkopf of Time Out reports. Here are some highlights:

Best Picture
American Sniper
Birdman
Boyhood
The Grand Budapest Hotel
The Imitation Game
Selma
The Theory of Everything
Whiplash

Actor
Steve Carell in Foxcatcher
Bradley Cooper in American Sniper
Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game
Michael Keaton in Birdman
Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything

Supporting Actor
Robert Duvall in The Judge
Ethan Hawke in Boyhood
Edward Norton in Birdman
Mark Ruffalo in Foxcatcher
J.K. Simmons in Whiplash

Actress
Marion Cotillard in Two Days, One Night
Felicity Jones in The Theory of Everything
Julianne Moore in Still Alice
Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl
Reese Witherspoon in Wild

Supporting Actress
Patricia Arquette in Boyhood
Laura Dern in Wild
Keira Knightley in The Imitation Game
Emma Stone in Birdman
Meryl Streep in Into the Woods

Foreign Language Film
Ida, Poland
Leviathan, Russia
Tangerines, Estonia
Timbuktu, Mauritania
Wild Tales, Argentina

British Jews feel a new sense of unease as a fashionable form of anti-Semitism spreads unchecked, Emma Barnett of the Telegraph reports.

A fresco from the Dura-Europos synagogue, one of the oldest synagogue in the Jewish diaspora, located in eastern Syria, showing Jews crossing the Red Sea pursued by the pharaoh.

The bill is similar to one introduced in Russia law last year, banning the “promotion of non-traditional sexual relationships”, Joseph Patrick McCormick of Pink News reports.

Image: Pattern (1945) by Jackson Pollock (1912–1956).

A Mormon man who has openly criticised the church for its anti-gay marriage position has been told he will be excommunicated unless he shuts up, Laurie Goodstein of the New York Times reports.

The Swedish town of Ystad is perhaps best known for Henning Mankell’s novels about fictional policeman Kurt Wallander, but the town deserves attention for more than this. It’s a picturesque town that is rich in culture. During a visit today, I snapped this picture of a placard on a house in the old centre declaring that King Charles XII of Sweden spent the night here twice, first in June 1700 and then in December 1715 to February 1716.

Adam Liptak of the New York Times reports:

The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to decide whether all 50 states must allow gay and lesbian couples to marry. The court’s announcement made it likely that it would resolve one of the great civil rights questions of the age before its current term ends in June.

Great news!

America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA calculated that in 2014 the world had its hottest year in 135 years of record-keeping, Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press reports.

Art has led the way in seeing mental illness not as alien or contemptible but part of the human condition, Jonathan Jones of the Guardian reports.

Image: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters by Francisco Goya (1746–1828).

The pictures depict two men thrown from the roof of a building as a crowd watches them fall to their deaths, Jacob Siegel of The Daily Beast reports.

This comes as no surprise. Violent homophobia is an essential part of radical Islamism.

The Happy Planet Index puts at the heart the idea that happiness is not necessarily about wealth, but living long lives with a high experience of well-being within the environmental limits of the planet, Sergiu George writes.

Click here to see all world maps.

“The attack on a Jewish supermarket, where four people were killed, is a chilling reminder of anti-Semitism, not just in France but the recent anti-Semitic prejudice that we sadly have seen in this country,” Theresa May, Britain’s home secretary, said at service to commemorate Jewish victims of Paris attacks, Josh Halliday of the Guardian reports.

I have written an article in Swedish about Björn Söder, Second Deputy Speaker of the Riksdag, and his nationalism, which holds that Jews cannot be real Swedes unless we completely assimilate. The article is published today by a brand new online magazine, MENA Tidningen.

Oliver Gee:

Just when you thought the Swedes were cold and ruthlessly efficient, the Swedish Hug comes along. This is how it works: If you talk to any Swede for more than five minutes, they automatically become your Hugging Friend Forever (HFF). You have to hug them every time you see them from that moment on (and again when you say goodbye). I’m serious.

Ireland’s cabinet has decided on a final question for the upcoming referendum on same-sex marriage, Nick Duffy of Pink News reports. The exact wording will be: “Marriage may be contracted in accordance with law by two persons without distinction as to their sex”, and voters will be asked to answer with either a yes or a no.

The European Central Bank launched what financial experts in the City of London call a “shock and awe” plan to pump €1.1tn into the eurozone in a last-ditch attempt to prevent the bloc from sliding into an intractable slump, Heather Stewart of the Guardian reports.

For five minutes pro-Palestinian protesters disrupted a vote at the New York City Council on a resolution commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz, CBS New York reports. As has been seen over and over, protesting against Israel is used as an excuse to attack Jews and mock victims of the Holocaust.

It’s been a dramatic weekend in European politics. After yesterday’s snap election in Greece, the far-left leader Alexis Tsipras has now been sworn in as the country’s new prime minister, with the new cabinet expected to be sworn in tomorrow, Το Βήμα reports. What this means is too early to tell, but the international currency market does seem to take the news from Greece at ease.

Sweden faced sharp criticism from the United Nations for the way it is tackling discrimination and violence against minority groups, The Local reports.

“If there’s no future for Jews in Europe, there’s no future for Europe,” Frans Timmermans, first vice president of the European Commission, said in a speech recently, Sam Sokol of Jerusalem Post reports.

The France’s president said something similar when he promised to defend French Jews from anti-Semitism:

President Francois Hollande appeared to rebuff Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s invitation for French Jews to emigrate, by promising on Tuesday to protect them from anti-Semitism and telling them: “Your place is here”.

“You, French people of the Jewish faith, your place is here, in your home. France is your country,” Hollande said in a speech to mark 70 years of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.

It pleases me to read these statements.

“I want to let you know I’ve decided to stop blogging in the near future,” the long-time blogger writes in a note to his readers.

It’s sad news. Sullivan has been a foremost blogger since 2000 and as such he has covered all major political events since. His blogging will be missed.

There’s something very captivating about the Dutch masters’ ability to bring everyday events like this onto the canvas.

Image: “Woman Hands Over Money to Her Servant” (1670) by the Dutch painter Pieter de Hooch (1629–1684).

On Swedish morning news, I saw a report on the growing cooperation between Putin’s Russia and Europe’s far-right movements. The programme focused on France’s Front National and its leader’s frequent visits to Moscow. I must admit that I know very little about France—I’ve always been an anglophile but never a Francophile. To me it’s absurd that any nationalist party in Europe would turn its back on democracy and European history to seek friendship with Putin’s hostile and land-grabbing Russia. So I decided to take close look at Le Pen’s party and found this article by Craig Willy. A table gave me a clear insight into the party.

When looking more into Russia and the possible common ground with France’s Far Right, I came across the paper “Beyond Putin: Nationalism and Xenophobia in Russian Public Opinion” by Theodore P. Gerber of the George Washington University. In simple terms, what Putin’s Russia and Europe’s nationalists—Le Pen, Wilders, Farage, Orbán, et alii—have in common is the hatred of the other. It’s an odd friendship based on ethnocentrism, isolationism, intolerance, and an opposition to multiculturalism, liberalism, and Europeanism.

I found this Der Spiegel interview with Marine Le Pen. I think I disagree with her on every issue. She represents everything harmful: protectionism, nationalisation of failing companies, xenophobia, closed borders, and a stop to immigration. She seems to admire national leaders who look after their own countries with no consideration of other—a sure recipe for war and poverty.

Top world scientists call on government to approve law allowing three-person embryos that would remove faulty mitochondrial DNA, Ian Sample of the Guardian reports.

American designer Rick Owens created a category all by himself by sending out three male models with their penises exposed by cutaway robes, The Local reports.

Image: Ramona Tabita (@ramonatabita).