“Kosher marijuana could soon be available to Orthodox Jews in New York State,” Paul Berger of the Jewish Daily Forward reports.

“Austria’s parliament has passed a law banning foreign sources of financing to Muslim organisations and requiring imams to be able to speak German,” The Local reports.

“Mohammed Emwazi, the Briton identified as an Islamic State executioner, was once a star salesman for a Kuwaiti IT company,” Martin Chulov of Guardian reports.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insists that his plans to address Congress are not aimed at disrespecting President Barack Obama, even as he assails the American leader’s bid for a nuclear deal with Iran as a threat to his country’s survival, Julie Pace and Aron Heller of the Associated Press report.

I’m in New York and the weather is snowy, to say the least. This is the view from the window in the flat I’m renting during my weeklong stay.

I just came back from New York and a few days of sightseeing and time off blogging. Regular news aggregation will resume tomorrow.

“Arab foreign ministers have denounced anti-Saudi Arabia statements by Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom, saying Arab countries rejected them fully,” Gulf News reports.

“Sweden was right to criticise Saudi Arabia’s human rights abuses, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven has said, a day after Saudi diplomats barred the Swedish foreign minister from addressing the Arab League,” The Local reports.

The current honours system permits a woman to use the title Lady if she is married to a man with the title Sir, Nick Duffy of Pink News reports.

“The UN has drawn up radical plans for an ‘orderly relocation’ of thousands of Syrian refugees from southern Europe to richer countries in the north, and is pressing the EU to agree to a year-long pilot programme,” Harriet Grant of the Guardian reports.

Pernille Dreyer of Berlingske writes about a new report from Denmark says the country had 53 anti-Semitic episodes in 2014. In one such episode, a Jewish couple had to be escorted by security personnel when leaving IKEA after a group of three men had shouted racist threats towards them.

“Members of a Miami Beach synagogue are on edge after a man was allegedly arrested for yelling threatening comments,” Lauren Pastrana of CBS Miami reports.

“France said it would be wrong to launch the coin and took its reservations to the European institutions,” Michaël Torfs of Flanders News reports.

Several new studies suggest that the best way to get people to do good is to make them feel bad about themselves, The Economist reports.

Andy Towle of Towleroad has authored a tribute to the Queen of Pop.

Nick Duffy of Pink News reports:

Sodomy laws in the US were declared unconstitutional in 2003 by the US Supreme Court—but 13 states including Texas and Louisiana are yet to repeal their defunct legislation.

To this day, Section 21.06 of the Texas Penal Code states: “A person commits an offense if he engages in deviate sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex.”

Republican James White was asked why the law was still on the books—when he immediately moved to throw out defunct hair braiding regulations which were invalidated.

“With 95 percent of the ballots boxes counted, Likud opens five seat lead over Zionist Union with 29 mandates, Joint Arab List retains third place,” Yaron Druckman of Ynetnews reports.

“Violence broke out at the start of a demonstration against the inauguration of the new ECB building this morning,” The Local reports.

“Denmark’s five Eurocentric parties agreed Tuesday on a package that will ask Danes to vote on replacing the country’s current opt-out to the EU’s justice and home affairs with a new opt-in model,” The Local reports.

“A priest has been arrested in Burgos for performing repeated exorcisms on an underage girl suffering from anorexia,” The Local reports.

“Italy’s ruling Democratic Party is moving towards including same-sex adoption in its upcoming civil unions law, but only if one of the partners in a gay couple is the child’s biological parent,” The Local reports.

“A new analysis of Gallup survey data offers the most detailed estimates yet about where people who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender live,” the New York Times reports.

The best:

Metropolitan areas with the highest rates of gay residents
San Francisco	6.2%
Portland, Oregon	5.4%
Austin, Texas	5.3%
New Orleans	5.1%
Boston	4.8%
Seattle	4.8%
Salt Lake City	4.7%
Denver	4.6%
Hartford	4.6%
Los Angeles	4.6%

The worst:

Metropolitan areas with the lowest rates of gay residents
Birmingham, Alabama	2.6%
Pittsburgh	3.0%
Memphis	3.1%
Cincinnati	3.2%
Raleigh, North Carolina	3.2%
San Jose, California	3.2%
Houston	3.3%
Milwaukee	3.5%
Nashville	3.5%
Oklahoma City	3.5%

“The UK Independence party is facing a major crisis after the suspension of two parliamentary candidates within 24 hours and the resignation of a third who claimed there was ‘open racism and sanctimonious bullying’ in the party,” Rajeev Syal of the Guardian reports.

Why anyone is surprised by UKIP’s racism is beyond me. The party’s entire existence is based on xenophobia and the far-right dream of an idealised past.

“The per-capita death rate fell more than tenfold between the peak of the second world war and the Korean war, and then plunged an additional hundredfold by the mid-2000s,” Steven Pinker writes.

From BBC News:

A ceremony is taking place at the University of Leicester ahead of the reburial of Richard III.

The cortege is due to depart the university at about 11:40 and will pass places in Leicestershire associated with the former king, who died at Bosworth in 1485.

The coffin is set to reach Leicester Cathedral at 17:35 GMT, where he will be finally reinterred on Thursday.

It’s a fascinating story. The skeleton of the king, who reigned 1483–5, was found beneath a car park in 2012. Now, some 500 years later, he is getting a burial worthy a king.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

According to Theodore Schleifer of the Houston Chronicle, Senator Ted Cruz will tomorrow announce that he runs for president of the United States. This is bad for everyone, not least for the Republican Party and American conservatives. Cruz represents an out-dated conservatism based on bigotry and hostility towards all things modern.

In an article from October last, Luke Brinker of Salon writes:

Cruz was among the first GOP politicians to rush to the defense of Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson after he made crude anti-gay remarks in an interview with GQ magazine. Commenting on the controversy, Cruz wrote on his Facebook page, “The reason that so many Americans love Duck Dynasty is because it represents the America usually ignored or mocked by liberal elites: a family that loves and cares for each other, believes in God, and speaks openly about their faith.”

Those liberal elites, at it again—deigning to mock a down-home reality show star for speaking openly about his faith by equating gay people with terrorists and goat fuckers.

More recently, we saw Cruz going ballistic in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision last week to let stand a series of lower court rulings in favor of marriage equality. Calling the decision “tragic and indefensible” and “judicial activism at its worst,” Cruz vowed to introduce a constitutional amendment “to prevent the federal government or the courts from attacking or striking down state marriage laws.” It’s precisely the kind of debate the GOP, increasingly out of step with public opinion on LGBT equality, wants to avoid. But Cruz is determined to have it.

This week brought more anti-gay hysteria. Local and national conservatives have pounced on Houston Mayor Annise Parker—a lesbian and favorite right-wing target—after attorneys defending that city’s new LGBT non-discrimination ordinance subpoenaed sermons by anti-gay pastors opposed to the ordinance. Cruz joined the chorus of condemnation Wednesday.

“This is wrong. It’s unbefitting of Texans, and it’s un-American. The government has no business asking pastors to turn over their sermons. These subpoenas are a grotesque abuse of power, and the officials who approved them should be held accountable by the people. The mayor should be ashamed. And we should all be proud to stand up and defend the pastors who are resisting these blatant attempts to suppress their First Amendment rights,” Cruz said in a statement.

As the Huffington Post’s Paige Lavender notes, however, the mayor herself had nothing to do with the subpoenas, which were issued by independent attorneys working pro bono for the city and, at any rate, were pretty standard legal procedure.

But the Religious Right is wedded to the narrative the LGBT equality poses a fundamental threat to religious liberty and rights of individual conscience—Soon we could have to bake cakes! For GAY COUPLES!!!—and Cruz is savvy enough to know that religious liberty controversies are the next major gay rights battleground.

Image: Gage Skidmore (Wikimedia Commons).

The mainstream conservatives have thereby denied the far-right National Front an outright victory, France 24 reports. Good news! It’s sad enough that the backward xenophobes came in second place.

One of the things I took the time to study during my recent visit to New York was the architecture of the new supertall skyscraper on Park Avenue. This residential building is part of a trend that is about to transform New York’s skyline.

“The majority of these residential skyscrapers will be erected just south of Central Park on 57th street, now also known as Billionaire’s Row, where downtrodden millionaires are currently being forced to move elsewhere,” Janelle Zara of Architiser writes in her guide to New York’s new skyscrapers.

“In a meeting with representatives of minority communities in Israel on Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu apologised for the remarks that he made on Election Day about Arab Israeli voters,” Gil Hoffman of Jerusalem Post reports.

What Netanyahu said on election day was, “The right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are going en masse to the polls.”

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

“Bob Jones III, the controversial evangelical preacher and chancellor of Bob Jones University, has apologised for saying that gays should be stoned to death during comments made at the White House 35 years ago,” Ed Mazza of the Huffington Post reports. “Jones, who was the university’s president at the time, was delivering a petition to then-President Jimmy Carter against extending Civil Rights Act protections to gays.”

“Four years after a towering tsunami ravaged much of Japan’s northeastern coast, efforts to fend off future disasters are focusing on a nearly 400-kilometer (250-mile) chain of cement sea walls, at places nearly five stories high,” Elaine Kurtenbach of Phys.org reports.

Some people at Outrageous Acts of Science wondered what would happen if lava met ice—so they got some lava, got some ice, and began filming. Cool stuff!

Read More

“The United Nations today blocked a Russian-sponsored resolution which would have done away with benefits soon to be given to its gay staff,” Joseph Patrick McCormick of Pink News reports.

Patrick McGreevy, Hailey Branson-Potts, and Emily Foxhall of the Los Angeles Times report:

Over the decades, California has chiseled out some of its most colorful laws at the ballot box.

There have been proposed initiatives seeking to allow public school children be able to sing Christmas carols, to require drug testing of state legislators, to outlaw divorce and to divide California into six states.

But the proposed initiative submitted by a Huntington Beach attorney that would authorise the killing of gays and lesbians by “bullets to the head”—“any other convenient method”—is testing the limits of the state’s normally liberal attitude on putting even the most extreme ideas on the ballot if enough signatures are collected.

The attorney’s name is Matthew Gregory McLaughlin, NBC News reports.

Via the Office of the Attorney General in California, I found the full text of McLaughlin’s “Sodomite Suppression Act”. Read it here.

A quote:

Seeing that it is better that offenders should die rather than that all of us should be killed by God’s just wrath against us for the folly of tolerating-wickedness in our midst, the People of California wisely command, in the fear of God, that any person who willingly touches another person of the same gender for purposes of sexual gratification be put to death by bullets to the head or by any other convenient method.

“Cartoonists Bahadir Baruter and Ozer Aydogan, from the Turkish satirical magazine Penguen, have been found guilty of insulting Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a cartoon on the cover of the magazine’s August issue,” the Cartoonists Rights Network, an international human-rights organisation, reports. “The prosecutor alleged that the cartoon was insulting in that one of the men made a certain gesture implying Erdogan was gay.”

“Palestinian armed groups displayed a flagrant disregard for the lives of civilians by repeatedly launching indiscriminate rockets and mortars towards civilian areas in Israel during the conflict in July and August 2014,” Amnesty International says in a new report published today.

By announcing that he is gay, Tim Cook has become a global role model, Fortune writes.

Image: Valery Marchive (Wikimedia Commons).

A beautiful dragon by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849).

“Swedish poet and winner of the Nobel prize in Literature Tomas Tranströmer has passed away at the age of 83,” The Local reports.

Image: Andrei Romanenko (Wikimedia Commons).

“In short, history shows us that it would be exceptionally unwise not to support Greece in achieving a sustainable debt reduction,” the Danish economist Christen Sørensen writes for the EU Observer. “History also shows that democratic countries cannot keep on pursuing a policy that meets growing popular resistance.”

“In his photo series Swedish Dads, Johan Bävman documents men who take advantage of Sweden’s comparatively generous paternity-leave legislation to spend more time with their babies than the average father,” Lynzy Billing of BuzzFeed reports.

The pictures are beautiful in their simplicity. Take a look for yourself!

Labor sources have said they will lose New South Wales’s most marginal seat after a smear campaign alleged its star candidate was a supporter of paedophiles, Kirsty Needham of the Sydney Morning Herald reports.

With China, Qatar, Russia, and Saudi Arabia as members, the UN Human Rights Council name Israel as the world’s number one villain, Anne Bayefsky of Fox News reports.

It’s absurd!

“Ex-Scientologists and experts differ on when exactly they believe the church’s hold on the story of Scientology first started to slip, but they agree on the cause,” Jacob Siegel of The Daily Beast reports. “The simple answer is the Internet.”

“Israeli officials reiterated their concerns over the emerging deal on Sunday, warning that the reported terms would not do enough to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons,” Jonathan Beck of The Times of Israel reports.

Image: The Baker explosion, a nuclear-weapon test conducted by the United States at the Bikini Atoll in Micronesia on 25 July 1946.

I’ve often wondered how Sullivan managed to blog at the pace he did. Tom Kludt of CNN Money writes about a recent discussion with the former blogger, who now reveals that he lost friends and sacrificed family time to blogging.

Sweden’s media watchdog has given public broadcaster SVT a rap on the knuckles for labelling Britain’s UKIP an “extreme right-wing populist party” and the party now wants a public apology from the broadcaster, The Local reports.

I’m no fan of the leftist reporting at SVT, but UKIP is an extreme right-wing populist party!

“Apple CEO Tim Cook has written an editorial calling Indiana’s bill to protect ‘religious freedom’, which allows LGBT people to be discriminate against, ‘very dangerous’,” Joseph Patrick McCormick of Pink News reports.

“Anti-UKIP activists who last week protested Nigel Farage at a pub have now been targeted by far-right group Britain First, who vowed to protect the UKIP leader,” Joseph Patrick McCormick of Pink News reports.

“Indiana House Speaker Brian Bosma (R) said the legislature would act as soon as this week to ‘clarify’ the state’s new Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which grants individuals and businesses legal grounds to defend themselves against claims of discrimination,” Sarah Pulliam Bailey, Sandhya Somashekhar, and Mark Berman of The Washington Post report. “The fix, Bosma said, would make clear that the law does not allow people to discriminate against gays, as critics contend.”

“The conference, due to take place next month, described itself as ‘unique because it concerns the legitimacy in international law of the Jewish state of Israel’,” Haroon Siddique of the Guardian reports.

The event was cancelled after a petition by the Zionist Federation gathered more than 6,400 signatures.

Had it been any other country, this absurdness had been apparent to everyone. But for some reason (it’s not anti-Semitism, I’ve been told repeatedly), the Jewish people are the only ones whose independence and self-determination is legit to put in question.