From BBC News:

Russian officials are coming under pressure to check if Disney’s new film Beauty and the Beast breaches the country’s law against “gay propaganda”.

Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky said action would be taken after the checks while an MP described the film as “shameless propaganda of sin”.

The live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast features Disney’s first ever gay character and love scene.

A Russian law prohibits the spreading of “gay propaganda” among minors.

The 2013 legislation, which has angered human rights activists and the international gay community, describes homosexuality as “non-traditional sexual relations”.

Last night, I visited the Vienna State Opera, where I saw a splendid performance of John Cranko’s ballet Onegin. The great thing about visiting theatres is not only what happens on stage but also the fine art on and in the buildings. It’s too bad that photography is prohibited in most parts of theses houses.

Turkey has announced a series of measures in retaliation for a Dutch decision to block its ministers from campaigning for de facto dictatorship. Turkey’s autocratic president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan accuses the Dutch of Nazism.

“Two senior White House officials suggested on Monday that President Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that President Barack Obama had tapped his telephone was not meant to be taken literally, arguing that Mr Trump had been referring more broadly to a variety of surveillance efforts during the 2016 campaign when he made the incendiary accusation,” Julie Hirschfeld Davis of the New York Times writes.

“The prospect of Geert Wilders emerging as the winner of Wednesday’s Dutch election was thrown into doubt by two polls on the eve of voting that showed his anti-Islam, anti-European Union Freedom Party slumping to fifth place in one survey and third in another,” Eddie Buckle of Bloomberg reports.

By this time tomorrow, we know for sure.

“Politicians on the right have welcomed a ruling by the EU’s highest court that allows companies to ban staff from wearing visible religious symbols,” Jennifer Rankin and Philip Oltermann of the Guardian report.

Good news! Two exit polls suggest Dutch liberals have comfortably beaten the extreme right.

“On the heels of a visibly awkward visit from the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, Donald Trump said on Saturday that Germany owed ‘vast sums of money’ to Nato and the US, even though the alliance does not stipulate payments to America,” Lauren Gambino of the Guardian reports. “His remarks prompted a former US permanent representative to Nato to reply ‘that’s not how Nato works’, and to add that increased European spending on defence was not a ‘favor (or payment) to the US’.”

“The Tories have gone easy on Corbyn and his comrades to date for the transparently obvious reason that they want to keep them in charge of Labour,” Nick Cohen writes for the Guardian. “In an election, they would tear them to pieces.”

It’s sad that the opposition to May’s inward conservatism is so weak and morally damaged.

I’m a big fan of dialogue. Much of my favourite literature is written either as plays meant for the stage or as discussions meant for philosophical reflection—or both. (A great, modern example of a combination of the two is Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.) And the Talmudic tradition—a dialogue spanning many generations—is what I like the most about Judaism. But why is dialouge so effectful in some philospical reasoning? Well, in the opening chapter of David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, I found this possible answer:

There are some subjects, however, to which dialogue-writing is peculiarly adapted, and where it is still preferable to the direct and simple method of composition.

Any point of doctrine, which is so obvious that it scarcely admits of dispute, but at the same time so important that it cannot be too often inculcated, seems to require some such method of handling it; where the novelty of the manner may compensate the triteness of the subject; where the vivacity of conversation may enforce the precept; and where the variety of lights, presented by various personages and characters, may appear neither tedious nor redundant.

Any question of philosophy, on the other hand, which is so obscure and uncertain, that human reason can reach no fixed determination with regard to it; if it should be treated at all, seems to lead us naturally into the style of dialogue and conversation. Reasonable men may be allowed to differ, where no one can reasonably be positive. Opposite sentiments, even without any decision, afford an agreeable amusement; and if the subject be curious and interesting, the book carries us, in a manner, into company; and unites the two greatest and purest pleasures of human life, study and society.

The Guardian has made a timeline of the Westminster attacks.

I took this photograph today when I drove by the hills. It doesn’t look like much, but its 3,300-year history is fascinating. Learn more about these hills at Guidebook Sweden.

“For some time, there has been speculation about when global oil demand may peak—not because we will run out of oil or prices will spike making oil unaffordable, notions that are now considered passé—but because we won’t be needing as much of the stuff as we thought we would,” Fereidoon Sionshansi of Energy Post reports. “And once the peak is finally reached—whenever that is—demand will begin to drop thereafter, perhaps precipitously.”

I’m an optimist. I think the problem with fossil fuel will solve itself as new technology becomes more efficient. In a near future, no one wants a car running on dirty fuel that makes the air unbreathable.

On this day in 1957, the EU’s six founding countries signed the Treaty of Rome, the beginning of the greatest project for peace and the free market Europe has ever seen. The treaty is now officially celebrated as the birth of the European Union. To mark the anniversary, EU leaders today signed a declaration pledging to work towards:

1. A safe and secure Europe,
2. A prosperous and sustainable Europe,
3. A social Europe, and
4. A stronger Europe on the global scene.

Andrew Rettman of the EU Observer writes:

RT Francais, a Kremlin-funded news agency, reported on Friday that Russia could help Le Pen to defend French people against terrorists and migrants.

A pro-Kremlin French-language website, called CrossCheck, also endorsed her anti-immigrant rhetoric by publishing a fake story in February that a north African man had attacked a French priest and that French media had hushed it up.

Other French-language Russian media sources have spread unsubstantiated claims that Le Pen’s pro-EU rival, Emmanuel Macron, had had a gay love affair and that he was controlled either by US banks or by Saudi Arabia.

“Luigi Binelli Mantelli, who led Italy’s armed forces from 2013 to 2015, told EUobserver that Russia’s attempt to gain a foothold in Libya was about bigger issues than oil, migrants, or terrorists,” Andrew Rettman of EU Observer reports. “He said Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s main objective was for Russia to ‘play a growing role as a global power, somehow overcoming even the US as a leader of the post-Cold War international order’.”

“Researchers at Rice University discovered that people who are lonely are likely to feel lousier when fighting a cold than someone would who is in a relationship or surrounded by a vast network of friends,” Daniel Steingold of Study Finds reports.