Society
LGBTQ Advocates Seek to Label Conservative Opponents as Hate Groups reuters
The Eliminate Hate Campaign seeks to draw attention to groups it sees as extreme and hateful against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people, accusing them of hiding behind ostensibly Christian or family values.
Society
Meet the Trump admin official paid to promote LGBT ‘rights’ around the world lifesitenews
The decision to preserve open homosexual Randy Berry as Special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBTI Persons was reported Monday by the homosexual newspaper Washington Blade. It is another blow to pro-family advocates who oppose the LGBT agenda and are counting on Trump to root out homosexual and abortion activists from the foreign affairs bureaucracy after eight years of Obama’s leftist policies.
“The Obama administration has systematically filled the ranks of State with LGBTQ and abortion activists,” Perkins wrote in December. “Unless the next Secretary of State is willing to resist and remove this embedded agenda, the promotion and protection of true human rights, like religious liberty, will continue to languish.”
Society
Boy Scouts of America to welcome transgender youngsters usatoday
The move marks a reversal of a policy in place for a century and is effective for the Boy Scouts scouting.org and the Cub Scouts. The organization vowed to recognize the gender a youngster lists on an application.
North Korea
North Korea Close to Having Nuclear-Armed ICBM: Official defensetech.org
North Korea now has an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, armed with a nuclear warhead capable of reaching the U.S. mainland, but they have yet to solve the “re-entry problem” that would burn up the warhead as it hits the atmosphere, a senior military official said Thursday.
Science
It's official: Your Periodic Table is now obsolete sciencealert
Get ready to ring in 2017 with a brand new Periodic Table iupac.org, because four more elements have officially been added to the seventh row: nihonium (Nh), moscovium (Mc), tennessine (Ts), and oganesson (Og).
Also see Periodic table expands with elements named after Japan, Moscow, Tennessee phys.org
Society
New survey finds more U.S. cities protecting LGBTQ rights in.reuters
Sixty U.S. cities earned perfect scores on a nationwide ranking of protections for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) people, despite an array of anti-gay efforts by state governments, the Human Rights Campaign said on Monday.
Also see Human Rights Campaign Releases 5th Annual Municipal Equality Index hrc w!
Thousands March in Paris to Repeal Same-Sex Marriage Law nbcnews
About 24,000 people took part in the demonstration, police said, far fewer than the several hundreds of thousands the group "Demo for All" mobilized in 2012 and 2013 in an unexpectedly strong show of opposition from conservatives, especially Roman Catholics.
Religious Liberty
We Have Been Warned theamericanconservative
Last year, the Baptist ethicist David Gushee david-gushee.squarespace was quoted by gay New York Times columnist Frank Bruni as saying that “Conservative Christian religion is the last bulwark against full acceptance of L.G.B.T. people.” Gushee has fully embraced gay rights, and doesn’t simply tolerate gay relationships, but affirms their goodness. Now he has written an extraordinarily important column laying out the future for Christians who reject the Sexual Revolution in its latest form.
Society
LGBT History Lessons Heading for California Classrooms abcnews.go
The State Board of Education cde.ca.gov unanimously approved those changes in classroom instruction Thursday to comply with the nation's first law requiring public schools to include prominent gay Americans and LGBT rights milestones in history classes.
Do you remember that lesson you learned in school about the danger of rulling parties of some, shall we say, "less free" nations projecting/rewriting history to suit its purposes?
Society
Canadian PM Justin Trudeau marches and dances in Toronto Pride parade 9news.au v
Thunderous applause greeted Mr Trudeau as he paraded down a main Toronto street on Sunday local time, waving a Canadian maple-leaf flag bordered with a rainbow.
Also see Syrian refugee marches beside Justin Trudeau in Canadian pride parade
Minimum Wage
Minimum wage goes up in City of LA, unincorporated areas of LA County asianjournal
The minimum wage in the City of Los Angeles and unincorporated areas of LA County is now $10.50 an hour. The city and county join the District of Columbia and 12 other cities, states and counties that boosted the hourly pay rates on Friday, July 1.
If they keep this up, soon I'll be making minimum wage :)
Society
President Obama Designates Stonewall a National Monument nbcnews
As the NYPD attempted to enforce a law making it illegal to serve alcohol to "homosexuals," the resistance of the bar patrons turned into an uprising - the Stonewall Uprising - an event now widely credited with sparking the modern LGBTQ rights movement in the U.S.
See also NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton predicts 2016 Gay Pride Parade to be largest in NYC history
Google to ban payday loan advertisements washingtonpost
The decision is the first time Google has announced a global ban on ads for a broad category of financial products. To this point, the search giant has prohibited ads for largely illicit activities such as selling guns, explosives and drugs, and limited those that are sexually explicit or graphic in nature, for example. Critics of payday lenders say they hope the move by Google and other tech companies might undercut the business which finds huge numbers of willing customers on the internet.
Ok - I can't say I have much good to say about PayDay lenders, BUT what I find interesting is Google has a) decided to discrimintate against a broad group by not allowing advertising from them, and b) done so from pressure from 'civil rights' groups.
Death
Dead could be brought 'back to life' in groundbreaking project telegraph.co.uk
A biotech company in the US has been granted ethical permission to recruit 20 patients who have been declared clinically dead from a traumatic brain injury, to test whether parts of their central nervous system can be brought back to life.
Future Tech
Mind-controlled drones race to the future businessinsider
"Three, two, one ... GO!" the announcer hollers, and as the racers fix their thoughts on pushing the cubes, the drones suddenly whir, rise and buzz through the air. Some struggle to move even a few feet, while others zip confidently across the finish line.
Climate Change
Milestone events at UN to kick-start action on new sustainability goals, climate pact un.org
“From a historical perspective, this will be a great day for the United Nations,” Selwin Hart, the Director of the UN Secretary-General’s Climate Change Support Team, recently said in reference to this coming Friday, when leaders from more than 160 countries are expected at UN Headquarters to sign the Paris Agreement, adopted last December at the UN climate change conference (COP21).
Military
Arms Control Groups Urge Human Control of Robot Weaponry nytimes
The report, which came from Human Rights Watch and the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic at the opening of a weeklong United Nations meeting on autonomous weapons in Geneva, potentially challenges an emerging United States military strategy that will count on technology advantages and increasingly depend on weapons systems that blend humans and machines.
The report from Human Rights Watch. Yes, that Human Rights Group. While I'm not keen on the idea of autonomous weapons roming the streets/skies, the argument in this report is a humanistic one with a loose appeal to the 'h'oly See for some moral guidance.
