A Russian politician has called for a ban on Tim Cook, Advocate.com reported. Vitaly Milonov, a St. Petersburg city council member, expressed concern that the Apple CEO would bring an infectious disease into the country, shortly after Cook came out publicly in an op-ed in Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Milonov is known internationally as the author of a citywide ban on public images and demonstrations that call attention to LGBT issues, which was later expanded by President Vladimir Putin into a countrywide "gay propaganda" law.
In a related development, a monument erected to honor Apple founder Steve Jobs was taken down after the company's current CEO, Tim Cook, came out as gay, The Wrap reported. The iPhone shaped statue was constructed outside of a St. Petersburg college in January 2013 by a Russian group called ZEFS. The memorial was said to be violating the country's "gay propaganda" laws, according to a statement ZEFS published.
A Ugandan court has dismissed criminal charges against prominent LGBTI rights activist Samuel Ganafa, Gay Star News reported. The executive director of LGBTI rights group Spectrum Uganda Initiatives and three colleagues were arrested in November last year for "unnatural offenses," which is punishable by up to life in jail. The court dismissed the charges in early October, nearly a year after his arrest.
Appearing on ITV's The Jonathan Ross Show, former Welsh rugby star Gareth Thomas said he's found true love with boyfriend Ian Baum, according to On Top Magazine. When Ross asked Thomas about wedding plans, Thomas said that he was open to the possibility. Thomas publicly acknowledged he's gay in 2009 and retired from professional rugby in 2011. The 40-year-old Welshman is currently promoting his memoir, Proud, which Ebury Press is publishing.
A bill that would allow LGBTI people to have children through surrogates passed its first reading in the Israeli parliament as more same-sex couples travel abroad to use foreign surrogates, Gay Star News noted. The bill to amend the Surrogacy Law 1996 passed 55 votes to 15. Three members of the Knesset abstained.
A global LGBT-rights conference that formally opened in Mexico City drew hundreds of advocates from 50 countries, The Washington Blade reported. International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission Executive Director Jessica Stern, Ty Cobb of the Human Rights Campaign, Council for Global Equality Chair Mark Bromley and Chloe Schwenke of the D.C.-based Freedom House were among the nearly 500 people who attended the International Lesbian Gay Bisexual Trans and Intersex Association ( ILGA ) World Conference. Homosexuality remains criminalized in more than 70 countries; Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Iran are among the nations in which those found guilty of consensual same-sex sexual acts face the death penalty.
David Coburn—Scotland's UKIP ( UK Independent Party ) member of the European Parliament ( MEP ), who describes himself as "spectacularly homosexual" and a "great big screaming poof"—said that marriage-equality supporters are "equality Nazis" who are "rubbing people's noses in the dirt.," LGBTQ Nation reported. Coburn, who is openly gay, told Huffington Post UK that same-sex marriage, which comes into effect in Scotland Dec. 31, was "false bollocks" that "makes a mockery of the holy sacrament of marriage."
In the Netherlands, Henk Krol—a former president of COC ( Cultuur-en Ontspannings Centrum ), a Dutch affiliate of the gay organization ILGA Europe—is currently facing criminal investigations regarding allegations of fraud, LifeSiteNews.com reported. He is suspected of having embezzled subsidies his organization had received from the Dutch government. Those subsidies were given to an LGBT journal ( Gaykrant ) that claimed to have 60,000 subscribers, while it actually had only 3,000.
The United Kingdom's department of education has "clarified" a Twitter message which said it was "nonsense to say schools must teach gay rights," according to the BBC. After getting online backlash, the department said what was meant that it was nonsense to say schools were being forced to teach gay rights against their will. This referred to a recent headline about the newspaper's interview with Education Secretary Nicky Morgan that said, "Faith schools 'must teach gay rights.'"
In what some consider an extraordinary development, a second European scientific trial of pre-exposure prophylaxis ( PrEP ) has had its randomized phase closed early due to high effectiveness, just two weeks after the UK PROUD trial did exactly the same thing, according to AIDSMap.com . The closure of the second trial, IPERGAY ( which has six sites in France and one in Canada ), is considered significant not only because it adds confirmation that PrEP can be highly effective, but because it was testing an innovative, intermittent ( "on-demand" ) PrEP regimen. In this study, participants did not take PrEP daily, but only when they anticipated having sex.
An Egyptian court jailed eight men for three years over a video prosecutors claimed was of a gay wedding, which went viral on the Internet, Raw Story reported. Homosexuality is not specifically banned under Egyptian law, so the men, arrested in September, were convicted of broadcasting images that "violated public decency." The video, filmed aboard a Nile riverboat, shows what prosecutors said was a gay wedding ceremony, with two men in the center kissing, exchanging rings and cutting a cake with their picture on it.
A man has been arrested in Bangalore, India, after his wife realized one year into their marriage that he was gay and having relationships with men, the BBC reported. Senior police officials describe the arrest, which uses Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code ( IPC ), as a rare one. The penal clause, from a 153-year-old British colonial law, makes gay sex punishable with life imprisonment. Last December, India's Supreme Court overturned a high court verdict that had termed the archaic British law unconstitutional.
Three gay men lost their fight to overturn Singapore's ban on sex between males, as judges at the nation's highest court ruled that the 76-year-old law is constitutional, Bloomberg.com reported. In the 107-page decision, Court of Appeal justices Andrew Phang, Belinda Ang and Woo Bih Li stated that the "intensely controversial" challenge brought by the men is best debated before the city's parliament. The law, known as Section 377A, was retained in 2007 after a two-day debate in parliament where related provisions that made heterosexual oral and anal sex a crime were repealed.
Finland's top pro-hockey league has a message for gay players: Stay in the closet, Outsports reported. Recently, the official blog for Liiga ran a blog post by freelance journalist Ari-Pekka Kaipiainen, who blamed the media for asking when a gay player will come out. Kaipiainen's column's message was that gay players should keep their sexual orientation to themselves and also indirectly refers to being gay as only being a sexual act. When the Finnish newspaper Ilta-Sanomat asked the manager of the league's website about the ensuing controversy, it was told that "Liiga signs the blog entry," thus making that the league's official standing.
Same-sex Israeli couples who want to adopt came one step closer to doing so after a surrogacy bill passed its first reading in the Knesset, that country's parliament, according to The Washington Blade. The would-be law, which passed with a majority of 45 votes to 15, would mean the country's same-sex couples no longer have to go abroad to adopt, and would instead be able to have children via surrogates in Israel.
In England, soccer manager Roy Hodgson came under the glare of the media spotlight after he admitted he didn't know what "LGBT" stands for, Pink News reported. The coach, who had managed the England squad since 2012, was asked by student newspaper The Tab if the sport could do more to help LGBT players. Hodgson was reportedly perplexed at the acronym before answering, "It's not my world." He added that he had never encountered a gay player.
The 2015 naked calendar of the University of Warwick men's rowing team is out to combat anti-gay discrimination, The Huffington Post reported. The UK squad has been producing a nude datebook fundraiser since 2009. When it discovered that much of its audience was gay, the team figured it should direct its charity toward the LGBT community—and formed a charity called Sport Allies, "a programme to reach out to young people challenged by bullying, homophobia or low self-esteem," the squad's website states. Previous calendars have raised more than $300,000, and are now sold in 77 countries.
