Scrolling around...November 28, 2012

Washington state drafting same-sex marriage certificates
The Washington state Health Department will be changing marriage and divorce certificates in response to the same-sex marriage law that takes effect Dec. 6.

Words such as "bride," "groom," "husband" and "wife" will likely be gone. The department wants to use gender-neutral terms.


Is marijuana harmless?

Obamacare's many contraception lawsuits
War on women — meet war on religious employers.

The first battle played out in the voting booth.

Two-thirds of millionaires left Britain to avoid 50 percent tax rate
In the 2009-10 tax year, more than 16,000 people declared an annual income of more than £1 million to HM Revenue and Customs.

This number fell to just 6,000 after Gordon Brown introduced the new 50p top rate of income tax shortly before the last general election.

The figures have been seized upon by the Conservatives to claim that increasing the highest rate of tax actually led to a loss in revenues for the Government...

Catholics imprisoned in Mali for refusing to listen to Muslim sermon
Three Congolese Catholics have been imprisoned in Timbuktu for refusing to attend a Muslim sermon.

Earlier this year, the city and much of northern Mali fell under the control of Islamist rebels who have implemented shari'a with brutality. “Thieves have had their arms amputated, and smokers and drinkers have been whipped,” Agence France-Presse reported.

Nigeria car bombs kill at least 11 at church
Twin suicide car bombs exploded Sunday at a church inside one of Nigeria's top military bases, killing at least 11 people and wounding another 30 in an embarrassing attack showing the continued insecurity that haunts Africa's most populous nation.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks, but suspicion immediately fell on the radical Islamist sect known as Boko Haram, whose suicide bombers target Sunday worship services in what has become a weekly macabre routine in Nigeria...

CDC: HIV spread high in young gay males
...The government on Tuesday released new numbers that spotlight how the spread of the AIDS virus is heavily concentrated in young males who have sex with other males. Only about a quarter of new infections in the 13-to-24 age group are from injecting drugs or heterosexual sex...

Tab for Superstorm Sandy Repairs Grows-worse than Katrina
The focus of efforts to clean up and rebuild after superstorm Sandy is moving from flood-ravaged streets to the halls of power in Washington.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Monday increased his request for federal aid to $42 billion from an earlier estimate of $30 billion, adding $12 billion for rebuilding and projects that would protect against future storms and laying the groundwork for a fight in a busy lame-duck U.S. Congress scrambling to cut spending.

Mr. Cuomo's request, laid out first in a meeting with New York's congressional delegation and later to reporters, is the most comprehensive accounting to date of the fiscal toll from a storm that killed 60 people across the state. The tally includes some strikingly large numbers, prompting the governor to say that the financial impact from Sandy was worse than that of Hurricane Katrina...