US newspaper readers are in uproar over this photo. The Washington Post’s internal ombudsman has defended the newspaper’s decision to carry a front-page photo of a gay couple kissing. The newspaper printed the image last week on the first day gay couples in the district were able to apply for marriage licences. Couple Jeremy Ames and Taka Ariga are shown sharing a peck on the lips outside the DC Superior Court. But Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander said he received complaints from readers: "A few of the readers have engaged in rants, often with anti-gay slurs. One called me to complain about ‘promoting a faggot lifestyle’.” Read on…

When I met up with him an hour later, he had weathered his wardrobe crisis (he was in jeans and a beige T-shirt with musical instruments on it) but was still a nervous wreck. “I’m kind of scared,” he confessed. “Who am I going to talk to? I wish my boyfriend could come.” But his boyfriend couldn’t find anyone to give him a ride nor, Austin explained, could his boyfriend ask his father for one. “His dad would give him up for adoption if he knew he was gay,” Austin told me. “I’m serious. He has the strictest, scariest dad ever. He has to date girls and act all tough so that people won’t suspect.”

Austin doesn’t have to play “the pretend game,” as he calls it, anymore. At his middle school, he has come out to his close friends, who have been supportive. A few of his female friends responded that they were bisexual. “Half the girls I know are bisexual,” he said. He hadn’t planned on coming out to his mom yet, but she found out a week before the dance. “I told my cousin, my cousin told this other girl, she told her mother, her mother told my mom and then my mom told me,” Austin explained. “The only person who really has a problem with it is my older sister, who keeps saying: ‘It’s just a phase! It’s just a phase!’ ” Read on

• Australian Senate rejects gay marriage bill even ‘tho 60% of Aussies support it
• New Bill will allow British schools to teach that homosexuality is wrong
• France first country to delist Transgenderism as a mental illness
• Lithuanian law bans promotion of gay marriage & sexual relations between minors
• US congress renews PATRIOT Act, keeps abandoning civil rights
• US fesses up to potentially illegal spying, including peace groups and Planned Parenthood
• Texas stores blood samples of new born babies for massive DNA database
• Citibank closes bank account of gay social network, says content is “objectionable”
• Iceland’s new free speech laws for media after Swedish model pass first discussion
• US copyright lobby says using open source software makes you a pirate

After threatening to end its adoption and homeless services programs in Washington D.C. if the City Council approved gay marriage there, the catholic church’s charities unit is indeed dismantling its foster care program because they fear the city might somehow "force" the church to officiate gay unions and recognize same-sex partners of employees. However, maybe this has turned out for the best. The children, their families, and even the program’s semployees have found a new home — at the National Center for Children and Families, which is not affiliated with any religious institution. Which means these children will still have the services they very much need, without the intervention of a church that abandoned them to uphold discrimination and seeing how church institutions have sexually & physically abused thousands of kids it might be for the better.

• Papst befahl Bischöfen die systematische Vertuschung sexuellen Missbrauchs
• Amnesty International kritisiert CDU & FDP für Blockade von Diskriminierungsschutz
• Zensurgesetz tritt in Kraft, CDU & FDP ignorieren Petition von 134.000 Deutschen
• Rot-Rote Regierung in Berlin beschließt Programm gegen Homophobie
• Parlament schickt mehr Soldaten nach Afghanistan, gegen den Willen der Bevölkerung
• Zu links um Deutsch zu sein, Linksparteipolitkerin darf nicht eingebürgert werden

I know the protagonist is a bit too young for the average milkboys audience and the film starts out somewhat slow but it has a cute message at the end eventually so watch it till there  ;)

The laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools’ administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the a high school student was disciplined for "improper behavior in his home" and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines.

If true, these allegations are about as creepy as they come. Most kids have their laptop in their room while getting dressed, having private discussions with friends & family, and so on. And it’s hardly necessary to mention the habit of regular masturbation of the average high school student which in many cases will involve using the very laptop. The idea that a school district would not only spy on its students’ clickstreams and emails (bad enough), but also use these machines as AV bugs is purely horrifying.

Schools are in an absolute panic about kids divulging too much online, worried about pedos and marketers and embarrassing photos that will haunt you when you run for office or apply for a job in 10 years. They tell kids to treat their personal details as though they were precious. But when schools take that personal information, indiscriminately invading privacy (and, of course, punishing students who use proxies and other privacy tools to avoid official surveillance), they send a much more powerful message: your privacy is worthless and you shouldn’t try to protect it.

Sources: Text partly from Boing Boing, Photo released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License by bionicteaching and edited by Nimatek with a picture from the film 1984.