Homosexual marriage has been legalized in Massachusetts and in a number of European countries. Canada and the Netherlands recognize polygamy as a form of civil union, and there has been one Dutch group marriage.

In Vancouver, seven Canadian women have decided to go for the next logical step: they plan to marry themselves.

Makes sense to me. That’s the kind of relationship that really is likely to make it all the way to “’til death us do part.”

Pyongyang: old houses hidden behind high-rises. Note highway traffic: pedestrians.

Here’s something we don’t see every day. Photographs of North Korea taken by visiting Russian web-designer Artemii Lebedev.

The original version (in Russian) is here. Use CONTROL + arrow keys to move forward and back through the photo pages here.

Ethnic tension marked by massive protests by members of the Azeri Turkish minority have broken out in Iran over the publication of a cartoon. The BBC reports:

Azeris said the cartoon, which was published earlier this month, compared them to cockroaches.

Reports from the cities of Ardebil, Naqadeh and Meshkin Shahr say Iranian security forces fired on demonstrators, killing at least five people.

Dozens of others were injured and hundreds arrested.

The cartoon was published in a state-owned newspaper.

It showed a succession of people attempting to talk to a cockroach in Persian.

Each time, the insect responded by saying, in Azeri: “What do you mean?”

Azeris are the largest ethnic minority in Iran, and the cartoon caused outrage among those who believed it suggested that all Azeris were stupid.

Thousands of people took to the streets in protest and, shortly afterwards, the newspaper was shut down and its editor arrested.

But that did not quell the anger. In the latest protests on Saturday, government buildings were targeted, and a number of banks and television stations burnt down.

The Azeri minority, resident largely in Northwestern Iran, make up more than 25% of the population of Iran, and are regarded as srong supporters of the fundamentalist Isaic regime. One Iranian blogger in Los Angeles views the fundamentalist regime as pursuing a policy of Turkification, and illustrates the relevant physical ethnic differences.

Chuck at YARGB is providing coverage, and has posted a very helpful ethnic map of Iran.

Gateway Pundit is collecting coverage of the rioting.

The 2006 climbing season on Mount Everest, with 9 dead already, seems likely to overtake the previous 1996 record of 12 fatalities. This climbing season featured a new kind of record as well, however, with reports of 40 climbers proceeding past a dying British climber on their way up.

Washington Times:

Mark Inglis, an amputee who conquered Mount Everest on artificial legs last week, yesterday defended his party’s decision to carry on to the summit despite coming across a dying climber.
As his team climbed through the “death zone,” the area above 26,000 feet where the body begins to shut down, they passed David Sharp, 34, a stricken British climber who later died. His body remained on the mountain.
Mr. Inglis, 47, a New Zealander, said: “At 28,000 feet it’s hard to stay alive yourself. He was in a very poor condition, near death. We talked about [what to do for him] for quite a lot at the time and it was a very hard decision.
“About 40 people passed him that day, and no one else helped him apart from our expedition. Our Sherpas (guides) gave him oxygen. He wasn’t a member of our expedition, he was a member of another, far less professional one.”..

About 200 people have died on Everest since the first expeditions in the 1920s. The corpses are stepped over by climbers traveling the most popular routes.

Sir Edmund Hillary, the first climber to summit Everest and a representative of a different era, condemned their action.

The New Zealand Press Association reports that Edmund Hillary has questioned the actions of Mark Inglis and others on the night British David Sharp, 34, died. “In our expedition there was never any likelihood whatsoever if one member of the party was incapacitated that we would just leave him to die,” Hillary, told the Otago Daily Times today.

Hillary said people have completely lost sight of what’s important and that the difficulties posed by operating at high altitude is no excuse. “I think the whole attitude towards climbing Mt Everest has become rather horrifying…people just want to get to the top, they don’t give a damn for anybody else who may be in distress and it doesn’t impress me at all that they leave someone lying under a rock to die.”

Yesterday’s Times reports Airbus has been trying to persuade Asian carriers that stand-up flying is the next solution to enhanced profitability.

Fausta denounces the idea.

And Airbus tells CNN, no, we wouldn’t think of such a thing, not us.

Perfidious, aren’t they?

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Hat tip to Franco Alemán.

The struggle of real New England Yankees against the cultural influence of lily-livered flatlanders continues. Put that motto on those signs!

link

I used to think this had already happened to my grandparents.

Newspaper reports earlier today of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s death were in error.

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Rumors are also circulating that Sharon has indeed died, but that the Israeli government has chosen to follow the example of the PLO regarding Yassir Arafat, and is concealing his death in order to conduct succession negotiations in private prior to the announcement.

RightWing News names the 20 Most Annoying Liberals of 2005. Personally, I think the MSM’s Katrina Coverage ought to be more like No. 2.

In Burlington, Vermont, the progress of leftist dementia is so extreme that one Judge Edward Cashman sentenced the confessed rapist of a seven year old girl to a punishment of 60 days in prison, stating that he no longer believes in punishment.

There was outrage Wednesday when a Vermont judge handed out a 60-day jail sentence to a man who raped a little girl many,many times over a four-year span starting when she was seven.

The judge said he no longer believes in punishment and is more concerned about rehabilitation.

Prosecutors argued that confessed child-rapist Mark Hulett, 34, of Williston deserved at least eight years behind bars for repeatedly raping a little girl countless times starting when she was seven.

But Judge Edward Cashman disagreed explaining that he no longer believes that punishment works.

“The one message I want to get through is that anger doesn’t solve anything. It just corrodes your soul,” said Judge Edward Cashman speaking to a packed Burlington courtroom. Most of the on-lookers were related to a young girl who was repeatedly raped by Mark Hulett who was in court to be sentenced.

The sex abuse started when the girl was seven and ended when she was ten. Prosecutors were seeking a sentence of eight to twenty years in prison, in part, as punishment.

The prosecutorial proposal was far too lenient as well. He should have been hanged, and left hanging for 60 days for the crows.

Hat tip to Michelle Malkin.

The expatriate edition of the Telegraph offers a fine collection of anecdotes of politically correct stupidity during 2005 in Britain and abroad:

• A market trader in Derby was banned from selling candles – unless they carried a notice warning that they can burn.

• A constable who saved the life of a man who was high on drugs by stopping him jumping from a window was reprimanded. PC Amerjit Singh, who had been summoned to a house in Cambridgeshire to prevent the potential suicide, had used “undue force” in holding the man back from killing himself. The man’s father complained.

• Labour’s election slogan – Forwards Not Backwards – sounded ironic to most Germans. The words were the East German government’s standard election cliché and slogan, just before the Berlin wall came down and Communism collapsed in 1989. Germans still use the term as a bad joke…

And so on.

James Lileks puts the year’s big stories in perspective. Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.