“The UKIP leader has repeatedly claimed that ‘foreigners with HIV’ are causing a funding crisis within the NHS—despite his statistics being denounced as misleading and inaccurate,” Nick Duffy of Pink News reports.

This from the party that claims it’s not xenophobic. Like most Eurosceptic parties it is! What all these parties have in common is the idea that foreign nationals are causing problem simply by being immigrants. The truth, however, is that free movement of people beneficial to all—not least the British economy. Sure, there are those who abuse the system, but these violators can be found in any group of people, including Britons taking advantage of state benefits in other EU countries. To combat this problem, a system where people—all people—need to qualify for benefits can easily be put in place.

“A Russian legislator has accused Apple and the band U2 of violating the Russian law ‘against gay propaganda among minors’ by uploading U2’s latest album, Songs of Innocence, to iTunes customers worldwide,” Vladimir Kozlov of Billboard reports.

“A married mother has given birth to her second child,” Sara Nelson of Huffington Post reports. “It comes following approximately nine months of pregnancy, a condition commonly caused by an act of unprotected sexual intercourse.”

Hilarious!

William Ruto has told religious leaders he will not allow homosexuality to become legal, Naith Payton of Pink News reports.

Image: Conleth Brady (IAEA).

With five days to go until the British general election on 7 May, this is the latest poll of polls from BBC:

Conservative	34%
Labour	33%
UKIP	14%
Liberal Democrats	8%
Green Party	5%
Others	6%

One thing that is obvious is how very European Britain has become with a Green party at about 5% and a far-right party at about 15%. The British might think of themselves as something different from the rest of Europe, but these figures show something else.

Fabian Picardo, chief minister of Gibraltar, writes for Politico:

What applies morally to little Gibraltar, applies to all of Europe. Either we are a free and functioning market, winning and losing equally, or we fall apart, each seeking to pursue our own agenda instead of working for the broader benefit. It was common purpose, not short-term gain, that led to our forefathers sowing the seeds of postwar unity for a Europe focused on the benefits of fair commerce and free trade.

The European Parliament will discuss Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s recent comments about reintroducing the death penalty, Peter Teffe of EU Observer reports.

I’m seriously worried about civil liberties in Hungary. The past few years have seen a disquieting development in the country as the far right has become mainstream.

“Swedish police documents include the Palestinian flag among known terror symbols, it was revealed after officers shared internal material with a central Swedish high school where youths had previously left to fight in Syria,” The Local reports.

“Sweden’s largest military orchestra plays more than just marching tunes,” The Local reports. “The Royal Swedish Army Band starred in the King’s birthday celebrations last week, performing Swedish House Mafia’s ‘Don’t you worry, child’ in a clip that has since gone viral.”

Watch and listen to it here.

Read More

“‘Homosexual’ and ‘devil worshipping’ hairstyles have been banned in Iran, alongside tattoos, sunbed treatments and plucked eyebrows for men, which are all deemed un-Islamic,” Saeed Kamali Dehghan of the Guardian reports.

“Several people were stuck upside down 30 metres above the ground for 45 minutes on Sunday when a fairground attraction got stuck,” Dutch News reports.

Nightmare in broad daylight!

A new Russian report annoys Putin’s European allies as it describes them as neo-Nazis, the EU Observer reports.

No need for a costly report, I cold have told Putin that a long time ago.

Image: The logo of the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn.

“A federal judge today dismissed a Nebraska woman’s lawsuit against all ‘homosexuals’ on the grounds that it failed to request a specific remedy and relied on biblical verses in a secular court,” Sunnivie Brydum of the Advocate reports.

The student leaders who want their universities to join the BDS movement against Israel say that they are against all forms of racism, Sam Sokol of Jerusalem Post reports.

Yeah, right!

BDS stands for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions and the movement is run by the Palestinian BDS National Committee, an umbrella organisation with such members as the Palestinian National and Islamic Forces, a terrorist group.

Final Result of the British General Election on 7 May 2015 (Seats in the House of Commons)
Conservative Party	330	+24
Labour Party	232	-26
Scottish National Party	56	+50
Liberal Democrats	8	-47
UK Independence Party	1	+1
Others	23	0

Some key points:

• Conservative Party has won Commons majority of 12
• Ed Miliband quits as Labour leader
• Scottish National Party wins 56 of 59 seats in Scotland
• Liberal Democrats loses big and its leader, Nick Clegg, resigns
• UKIP gets 13% of vote but only wins one seat
• Nigel Farage quits as UKIP leader after missing out on seat

“I want to be the Rosa Parks of sex dolls!” Matt McMullen, atheist activist and sex-doll enthusiast, tells Vanity Fair.

The man and his vision of human-robot relationships are both bizarre and fascinating.

The new all-Conservative government f Britain wants to renegotiate the country’s relationship with the rest of the EU. Cameron’s key aims are:

• Give Britain an opt-out from the historic EU ambition to forge an “ever closer union” of the peoples of Europe.
• Create safeguards to ensure that changes in the single market cannot be imposed on non-eurozone members by the eurozone.
• Tighten access to in-work and out-of-work benefits for EU migrants.
• Hand greater powers to national parliaments to block EU legislation.

I think these aims are reasonable. The clause about “ever closer union” is overplayed by the development of the EU since the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957. And since Britain has an opt-out from the single currency, it makes sense to free them of any legislation put in place by the Eurozone. Abuse of benefits is a concern for all countries and should be addressed. However, the freedom of movement must not be tampered with. Europe needs more people moving across borders, not fewer. Greater powers to national parliaments where introduced in the Treaty of Lisbon but could be strengthened. Done right, stronger national parliaments could serve as the senate that is missing in the EU today. However, it is vital that EU legislation is the same for all. Too much nationalism on matters of common interest will undoubtedly lead to fragmentation and a rise of destructive nationalism.

“Nigel Farage has withdrawn his resignation as leader of Ukip four days after standing down when he failed to win his target seat of South Thanet in the general election,” Rowena Mason of the Guardian reports.

The news came two days ago, but I was too shocked to blog about it. I had hoped Farage and his foreigners-are-to-blame-for-everything rhetoric would be gone for good when he resigned.

“A secular blogger has been hacked to death in north-east Bangladesh, the third such deadly attack this year,” Saad Hammadi of the Guardian reports.

A horrific violation of basic human rights.

Nick Duffy of Pink News has made a table:

Name	Voted	Position
David Cameron	Yes	Prime Minister
George Osborne	Yes	Chancellor
Theresa May	Yes	Home Secretary
Philip Hammond	—	Foreign Secretary
Michael Gove	Yes	Justice Secretary
Michael Fallon	No	Defence Secretary
Sajid Javid	Yes	Business Secretary
Ian Duncan Smith	Yes	Work and Pensions Secretary
Nicky Morgan	No	Education Secretary
Chris Grayling	Yes	Leader of the House of Commons
Baroness Stowell of Beeston	Yes	Leader of the House of Lords
Liz Truss	Yes	Environment Secretary
Amber Rudd	Yes	Energy Secretary
Patrick McLoughlin	Yes	Transport Secretary
John Whittingdale	No	Culture Secretary
Greg Clark	Yes	Communities & Local Government Secretary
Justine Greening	Yes	International Development Secretary
Jeremy Hunt	Yes	Health Secretary
Theresa Villiers	Yes	Northern Ireland Secretary
Stephen Crabb	No	Welsh Secretary
David Mundell	Yes	Scotland Secretary
Oliver Letwin	Yes	Minister for the Cabinet Office
Mark Harper	Yes	Chief Whip
Robert Halfon	No	Minister without Portfolio
Priti Patel	No	Minister for Employment
Anna Soubry	Yes	Minister of State
Greg Hands	No	Chief Secretary to the Treasury
Matt Hancock	Yes	Minister of State for the Cabinet Office
Jeremy Wright	No	Attorney General
Boris Johnson	—	Political cabinet

“If you are a man and want to marry another man in this country and we catch you, no one will ever set eyes on you again, and no white person can do anything about it,” Gambian President Yahya Jammeh said during a press conference, Beenish Ahmed of Think Progress reports.

A Swedish comedian Abdishakour Mohamed Ali has claimed that he was abducted by the police after posting a video online identifying officers in a car which ran into a crowd of people in Stockholm on 30 April, The Local reports. Swedish police have denied the accusation on Twitter.

This story seem too bizarre, but who knows… The police have done unexpected things before.

See full list and more data at PlanetRomeo.

I was going through some old photos on my computer and came across this picture I took of Mao’s portrait at Tiananmen Square. One thing that fascinates me about communist countries is the necromancy and the worship of its former leaders as if they were gods. It’s quite difficult to tell communism and primitive religion apart.

At Slate, Saleem Haddad tells the story of how his grandmother experienced the Nakba, which is what Paletinians call the events in 1948 that resulted in 750,000 people leaving Israel. It’s a touching story of human suffering. However, what Haddad doesn’t say in his article, for obvious reasons, is that there were even more Jews forced to leave Arab lands at the same time.

In another article, published by Forward about a year ago, Nathan Weinstock explains how roughly one million Jews were expelled from Arab lands:

“I found out that the story we had been told—that the Jews left the Arab countries because they were Zionists—was for the most part wrong. True, they had an affinity for the Land of Israel—that is certainly correct—but the organised Zionist movement was very weak in the Arab countries. The great mass of Jews left under duress. They were expelled. They were subjected to such enormous pressure that they had no choice but to leave.”

At the Jewish Virtual Library, I found this data of Jewish refugees in the Arab World.

Year	1948	1958	1968	1978	2011	2014
Algeria	140,000	130,000	1,500	1,000	<50	<50
Egypt	75,000	40,000	1,000	400	100	<40
Iraq	135,000	6,000	2,500	350	7	5-7
Libya	38,000	3,750	100	40	0	0
Morocco	265,000	200,000	50,000	18,000	4,000	2,000
Syria	30,000	5,000	4,000	4,500	100	17
Tunisia	105,000	80,000	10,000	7,000	1,500	1,500
Yemen	63,000	4,300	500	500	250	<90
Total	851,000	469,060	69,600	31,790	∼6,200	3,704

“The close EU-Israel partnership in science and technology is more than just a success story,” Lars Faaborg-Andersen, the EU ambassador to Israel, writes for Ynetnews. “It is a model for the type of close relations we hope will continue and which we would like to see in more fields in the future.”

The stupidity of homophobes never stops delivering. Here are two yummy stories from the past few days.

1.

Brian Tashman of Right Wing Watch reports:

Anti-gay pundits such as Charles C. Johnson and the editors of WorldNetDaily are making hay over the news that the engineer of the fatal Amtrak crash in Philadelphia on Tuesday was a supporter of gay rights and may be gay himself.

Today on her radio program, American Family Association governmental affairs director Sandy Rios also mentioned the engineer’s sexual orientation, saying it was likely “a factor” the crash.

“Now I am not saying, I am not inferring to those of you that are gay rights activists and like to monitor this show, I’m not inferring that this accident happened because he was gay, but I do think it’s an interesting part of the story and you can bet it would be edited out,” Rios said. She then suggested that the engineer could have possibly been “going through some confusion that has to do with the very core of who they are,” and mentioned the story of an airline pilot who “put his entire plane at risk because he had an emotional, angry outburst to something that happened,” which she says was related to hormone therapy he was receiving.

Rios added: “I don’t know, but I think it is something to be discussed and I think it’s a factor and I doubt you will hear it anywhere else.”

Rios is partly right. No one else will report it because it’s ludicrous.

2.

“Caroline Dinenage, the MP for Gosport, was appointed by Prime Minister David Cameron this week as the minister for equalities at the Department for Education,” Nick Duffy of Pink News reports. “The move prompted concern due to her record on LGBT rights, as she told a Pink News reader in 2013 that the state has ‘no right’ to redefine marriage, and that ‘preventing same-sex couples from being allowed to marry takes nothing away from their relationship’.”

Equality is not this Equality Minister’s cup of tea.

“There is a strong consensus on the eurozone crisis among economists and political analysts both in Europe and the United States: for the eurozone to endure, it would need to develop into a fiscal union and, consequently, a political one,” Miguel Otero-Iglesias of Politico writes.

I’m strongly in favour of European federalism! Most of the problem with the current EU are due to the natural secrecy of intergovernmentalism.

“A year after a gunman murdered four people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, Jews across Europe increasingly fear for their safety and warn they are on the frontline of an Islamist war against democracy itself,” Lachlan Carmichael and Philippe Siuberski of AFP reports.

What troubling is that Islamist anti-Semitism has merged with ancient European anti-Semitism, which has made many people blind to the racism at the core of both Western and Islamic fascism.

Evan Hurst of Wonkette tells the scandalous story of Josh Duggar of the Family Research Council.

“Yes vote stands at over 62% against 37% for No side with a turnout of more than 60%,” the Irish Times reports.

	Marriage open to same-sex couples
	Same-sex marriage recognised when performed in certain other jurisdictions
	Court legalised or government announced intention to legalise
	Marriage recognised federally, not performed
	Civil unions
	Unregistered cohabitation
	Same-sex unions not legally recognised

Måns Zelmerlöw won the Eurovision Song Contest for Sweden just now.

Image: Ailura (Wikimedia Commons).

“The former Republican President staunchly opposed same-sex marriage during his time in office—even putting the case for a stronger ban in his 2004 State of the Union address, when he claimed: ‘Our Nation must defend the sanctity of marriage’,” Nick Duffy of Pink News reports. “This month reports have emerged that Mr Bush might have forgotten how strongly he fought against gay weddings—by offering to perform one.”

Image: Official photograph of former American President George W. Bush (Wikimedia Commons).

Mark Joseph Stern of Slate writes about “circumcision armageddon”. It’s a bizarre story of how the anti-circumcision activists—the so-called intactivists—are almost exact copies of the anti-abortion activists that picket health centres and spread graphic images of bloody children suffering from what is in fact a safe and legal procedure.

“If European monetary policy is run according to German national interests, huge structural imbalances will accumulate,” John Lanchester of the London Review of Books writes. “The Germans will then either have to pay to correct those imbalances, or agree that the euro should not be run primarily according to German national interests.”

“The obsession with gay rights and identity, and especially with homosexual marriage, seems to be characteristic of societies with low birth rates and declining global importance,” Charles Moore writes for the Spectator. “Rising societies with growing populations see marriage as the key to the future of humanity, so they think it must be between a man and a woman.”

There are several popular fallacies in this short text, the most important being that gay people are somehow unable to produce children. This is not true. To produce a child, one needs both sexes, but that does not require normative heterosexuality. In societies that accept same-sex families, these families tend to have more children. But yes, in homophobic societies, more gay people force themselves to led heterosexual lives, which might produce children, but children with at least one oppressed parent.