Wind the clock back around 50 years in the past. You could not even imagine such a great popularity for the LGBT Pride events. Actually, if you think twice, the LGBT was not even a movement to be taken in consideration by most of the people. The human beings who were coming out were still regarded as weird, sometimes sick or even satanic. It was against the morals of the last century`s middle period to be a homosexual and the Western civilization is now happy to celebrate the fact that things have change in connection to the general view toward homosexuality. While homosexuals are still discriminated, offended or sometimes even outside the law in some parts of the world, when it comes to the Occident and the countries affiliated to the Western civilization and rapidly moving toward its way of representing the world, homosexuality has become largely accepted especially since the beginning of the 21st century. There is probably no better example for this situation that the fact that on Tuesday, Lonely Planet released travel guide for what it has come to be known as the LGBT Pride month.

And even if you were to take into consideration the location of the photograph featuring this article. The picture was taken in Bucharest, Romania, during a LGBT Pride event in January this current year. The woman in the picture is happy to present her jewelry, painted in the colors of the rainbow, the most famous symbol of the LGBT community.

You would not have been able to witness such a fact twenty or fifteen years ago in a South-Eastern European country like Romania is. But now, the people in Romania have changed their mind toward homosexuality and are rather prepared to embrace diversity than to convict it and pledge for traditional moral rules. At least that is the situation in the most important cities of the country, especially in the capital, Bucharest. And the younger generations are very open to this kind of subjects.

Lonely Planet has released, on Tuesday, their travel guide for the LGBT Pride month, to support the LGBT movement and to provide people with useful information for the ones who want to make a tour of the most representative LGBT Pride events in the world.

The travel guide can be downloaded from iTunes and it includes info like where you can sleep, eat or how the nightlife looks like in different locations.

Image Source: LA Times

Abortion has become one of the most discussed subject in the modern society. While many see abortion as murder and protest in order to release a message of conservative morals regarding the faith of an unborn child, others, whose views are more progressive, some might say, pledge for the legalization of abortion taking into account the right of one person to make a decision over their own body. The debate on this matter takes a huge amount of arguments, most significantly in the field of modern day applied ethics. And while philosophers and analysts struggle to demonstrate the legitimacy of one side, a federal appeals court has recently stated that the Idaho abortion law is unconstitutional.

On Friday, a federal appeals court has identified the 20 week abortion law functioning in Idaho as not according to the Constitution of the United States. The abortion law which has been recently struck down implied banning all the abortions in Idaho which would occur after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

This is not the first time such a ruling by a federal appeals court strikes down a law on abortion. Two years ago, the Ninth U.S. Court of Appeals, located in San Francisco stated that the abortion law which was by then functioning in Arizona was also not in agreement with the Constitution of the United States.

And in addition to that, Idaho is not the only state that currently bans abortion after the 20th week post to the fertilization. There are bout a dozen of such states in the USA. A similar law to the Idaho ruling on abortion has taken effect in West Virginia just a short while ago, following an override by the lawmakers of a veto by the governor of the state.

When it comes to the way in which sides are drawn in the Congress in connection to the matter of abortion, the situation looks like this: the Republicans tend to pledge for such past 20th week abortion restrictions, while the Democrats have a more open approach to the problem.

The House has also passed a 20th week abortion ban earlier in May, still most political analysts in the field reckon that the measure approved by the House will probably not become a law in the end.

The 20th week abortion law of Idaho was implemented in 2011. On one hand, the ruling allows mothers to choose abortion even after the 20th week post-fertilization when their lives are in danger, still emotional and psychological reasons are not to be taken in consideration.

Image Source: wsj.com

There is no doubt that you must remember the famous `Hope` poster that helped Barack Obama to build a nice electoral campaign. For all we know now, the `Hope` poster is reckoned as one of the essential symbols to the presidential campaign of 2008, which Obama has won and which granted him the historic position as the first black President of the United States, successfully fulfilling a fantastic change of paradigm in the American society regarding the problem of racial minorities and of the blacks more specifically. Now, the artist behind `Hope` poster says that President Barack Obama has disappointed him, in a statement delivering his opinions on the present reality of the Obama Administration.

According to the statement delivered by the artist Shepard Fairey, the man who designed the successful poster that highly contributed to Obama`s image as a presidential candidate, it looks like President Barack Obama has not yet met the ideal that the poster Shepard Fairy created promoted.

Shepard Fairey has recently talked about the present reality of the Obama administration in an interview with the magazine Esquire. Within the interview, Fairey has stated that most of the people who vote for Obama in the presidential elections of 2008, including himself as he said, were hoping that the Obama administration would embody a categorical change in comparison to the way in which George W. Bush had led the country as president. However, Fairey says, Obama has failed to do so. The artist has also added that President Barack Obama might be a victim of the political system of the United States.

“I’m not giving him a pass for not being more courageous, but I do think the entire system needs an overhaul and taking money out of politics would be a really good first step,”

the artist Shepard Fairey has said in a comment on the matter.

Fairey has also added that it is an unexpected fact that the drones and the advanced ways of spying have become symbols to the Barack Obama administration in the recent period of time.

Fairey has also given his opinion on the American citizens as voters. According to him, it is an unfortunate fact, but one that has to be admitted, that the U.S. voters are lazy and ignorant when it comes to voting. Fairy has urged the U.S. citizens, through the interview with Esquire, to research the candidates and make a legitimate decision when exercising their right to vote.

Image Source: ABC News

In the recent period of time, the United States of America have been trying to get to an agreement with the regime in Iran over the problem of nuclear weapons proliferation and policies. As Iran faces a strong economical embargo from the United States and not only, the government in Tehran might see the nuke discussions as an opportunity to avoid the economical embargo. Basically, the United States have promised to give up the embargo if Iran decided to follow clear policies regarding the nuclear weapons proliferation treaty of the United Nations. However, even if the situation may have been regarded as hopeful, at least at an official level, by the United States authorities and negotiators, it looks like tension levels are raising, as Iran begins espionage trial for US journalist, Jason Rezaian.

The espionage trial recently launched by Iran is a closed trial and it investigates the deeds of Jason Rezaian, a journalist for the Washington Post. The espionage trial has recently begun, more precisely on Tuesday. It has come to the attention of the international media, both on paper and on the world wide web. According to the most analysts in the field who are in connection to this matter, it seems that the closed trial launched by Tehran raises new questions on the matter of how much can the United States rely on Iran as a reliable partner for the nuclear weapons discussion.

According to the official national news agency of Iran, IRNA, the trial which has begun on Tuesday looks over charges of espionage by Jason Rezaian, who is also thought to have communicated information to the United States government, which is seen as hostile, according to the recently released statement. In addition to that, Jason Rezaian of the Washington Post is accused of propaganda against the regime in Iran. According to the Iranian law, such accusations, if confirmed by the closed espionage trial, could put Rezaian behind bars for a period of no less than 6 years.

However, even if the Rezaian trial has been launched on Tuesday, the Washington Post reporter has been detained by now for a period of 10 months. The newspaper for whom he works has criticized the behavior of the Iranian authorities in connection to the Jason Rezaian case in numerous occasions.

“No evidence has ever been produced by prosecutors or the court to support these absurd charges,”

said Martin Baron, the executive editor at Washington Post.

Image Source: heavy.com

The post 9/11 era is a delicate period in the history of the United States of America. In addition to that, it also represents a controversial period of time, and many voices, including such of American citizens, or you may say especially of the American people have started to raise questions in connection to the way the United States government deals with the problem of terrorists and of the terrorist threats to democracy, freedom and to the security of the USA. The PATRIOT Act is such a subject to both controversies and conspiracy theories and the astonishing amount of access that the US Intel has guaranteed by law to the online correspondence of the Americans and much more than that has started to irritate the people. However, at the moment the things seem to lose some heat, as NSA proceeds in closing data collection program, after a failure to reach an agreement with the US Senate.

While the senior US Intel and governmental organizations like the National Security Agency claim that recording information from telephones, messages and e-mails of the American citizens is a key factor in the battle that United States leads against terrorism world wide, it looks like the US Senate thinks otherwise. For instance, the Senate has recently declined to reauthorize the data collecting program run by the National Security Agency. Even if debates have gone for a long time in connection to this matter, the US Senate has not come up with a solution for the data collecting program in order to make it more acceptable to the American citizens, who claim that such a program is by all means not according to the Constitution of the United States. Nor did the US Senate vote to extend the data collecting program`s authorization beyond May 31.

The senior officials talking on behalf of the most important US Intel agencies, like the NSA, have claimed that not allowing the data collecting program to continue would lead to a gap in the collection of data needed by such agencies in order to protect the American people from the evil terrorists. Most analysts in the field have reckoned that an extension to the authorization for the data collecting program as it is by now is unlikely. They have added that the only viable option would be to reform the program in order to make it less privacy violating.

Image Source: Engadget

Have you ever wondered what controversial political figures had a pleasure in reading? Of course, most of the time you will not find Virginia Woolf, M. Eminescu or Kenzaburo Oe on their bookshelf, still it is a very interesting matter to find out what such figures who made history used to read. Most of the time, we do not even think of them as intellectuals or as people who got their ideas from the wrong books, assuming that they were only psychopaths who wanted to watch the world burn. That may be the case with the Joker and his fantastic motivation of being an `agent of chaos` as the character was portrayed by the eternal Heath Ledger, but that is without any doubts another story. For now, check out bin Laden`s bookshelf, to see what ideas inflamed his jihadi activity and hate on the United States.

The collection of English language books found in the bin Laden raid of 2011 have been recently released by the US Intel. After specialists have analyzed the bookshelf of Osama bin Laden, it looks like the former leader of al Qaeda read a lot of anti-US books, and also titles who covered conspiracy theories and which were written by left wing American intellectuals.

There was a total of 39 books written in English that were taken from the shelter in which Osama bin Laden was hiding, in Abbottabad, Pakistan, prior to the U.S. Navy SEALs raid that accomplished its mission by killing the terrorist leader 4 years ago.

The main subjects which these anti US books were covering were related to conspiracy theories in connection to hypothetically illegal activities by the CIA. The tomes were also connected to conspiracy theories on the activity of the Federal Reserve.

“Bin Laden’s bookshelf showed a generous tolerance for bad prose and an undergraduate’s faith in bad ideas,”

retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters said in a statement, commenting on the reading list of Osama bin Laden. Peters is also a writer and a contributor to Fox News.

The 39 English language books were found together with dozens of other documents, mainly written in Arabic. Recently, the US Intelligence has revealed all of the 103 documents captured during the 2011 raid, under the name of `bin Laden`s bookshelf`.

Among the favorite English language authors of the jihadi leader, there were Noam Chomsky, William Blum and Bob Woodward.

Image Source: Fox News

Hillary Clinton has become by now one of the most famous females of the world. Her notoriety comes from her former expertise and activity, but having her on the list of runners for the presidential elections of the next year has without doubts contributed to her being so well known all across the globe. Clinton is now one of the candidates who have the best chances of getting one of the most executive positions of our times, as President of the United States of America. During this campaign, Clinton has to begin getting involved as much as possible into communicating with people through the most popular means of social media. Since LinkedIn is surely on that list, the most recent news in connection to this matter announce that Hillary Clinton joins LinkedIn with small biz solutions, penned in an article released on connection to her joining the famous platform.

The presidential candidate has join the social platform LinkedIn on Thursday. This action represents another step of her strategy to grow her popularity by using the means of the social media. She has already done some things in order to achieve this target, and on LinkedIn Hillary Clinton has posted an article about how small businesses can be successful in the context of our present times. Political analysts have made the case that Clinton wants to get an advantage in the area of small biz against her rivals for the presidential race of 2016.

Within her article on small biz solutions, Hillary Clinton has offered a presentation of her father`s activity, since her father was an owner of a small business. In addition to that, Clinton gave her thoughts on the difficulties that small businesses have to face in their journey to success on the market.

“Hard work is no longer enough to guarantee opportunity. Credit is too tough to come by. Too many regulatory and licensing requirements are uneven and uncertain,“

Hillary Clinton has written in her post on LinkedIn, called “Four Ways to Jump-Start Small Business.”.

Clinton has also argued that the main obstacle in the way of the small businesses are the policies of the government. She added that she wants to be a president who has interest in small biz and sees it as a solution for the American economy.

Tax relief and access to capital are main targets for Hillary Clinton as a president, according to her campaign since the announcement she made in April.

Image Source: diginomica