The European Union Parliament adopted a resolution urging its 15 member nations to extend marriage rights to gay couples. The vote was 265-125 with 33 abstentions. The parliament also said it denounces the fact that some Member States still have a discriminatory age-of-consent provision for homosexual relations in their criminal codes as well as other forms of discrimination, in particular within the army” and called on Bulgaria, Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania and Romania to remove from their penal codes all laws which entail discrimination against lesbians and homosexuals.

A retirement house exclusively dedicated to gays will open its gates in Zurich. The project’s initiators stated that “what old people need most is the human contact”, and that the purpose of this house is to make old gays feel more at home. Such institutions have been successfully functioning for 5 years in Benelux.

Dutch national television news’ NOS-Journaal has reported that the new king of Morocco, Sidi Moulay Mohammed (Mohammed VI), is gay. The report has led to weekly anti-media demonstrations in the city of Utrecht, which has a large Moroccan population. However, NOS-Journaal Editor-in-Chief Hans Brom confirmed the information, which is otherwise “common knowledge” in Moroccan intellectual circles. Mohammed, aged 36, went to college in Brussels, Belgium, and regularly hung out in gay bars there. Gay sex is banned in Morocco by Article 489 of the Penal Code. The punishment is up to three years in jail and a fine of up to 1200 dirham (US$122).

Joerg Haider, the de-facto leader of Austria’s far-right Freedom party, is a closeted homosexual, according to recent reports released by British, German and Austrian newspapers. Haider, 49, resigned last month as the party’s official chairman and is considered to be a xenophobic, racist extremist. “We’ve known about Haider’s homosexuality for about 10 years,” the national gay group, Homosexual Initiative Vienna, said in a statement. “On the one hand we think it’s positive that the rumours are no longer capable of ruining a political career; on the other hand, an earlier outing of Haider would have been justified.”

Cristian Radulescu, MP and member of the Romanian Democrat Party, forwarded a bill to the Parliament. According to this bill, penalties for sex-related crimes should be aggravated. He suggests, among others, that the definition of rape should be extended to include sexual assaults committed against male victims, and that penalties for homosexual acts (which are already banned by Article 200 of the Criminal Law) should be increased. The Ministry of Justice forwarded last year to the Parliament a proposition for the change of the Criminal Law. Radulescu admitted that his bill had nothing to do with the Ministry’s proposition – which included the abolition of Article 200…

The German City of Dortmund hosts an exhibition, which reflects the persecutions suffered by gays during the Nazi regime as well as the way in which gays continued to be discriminated, after the World War II. The exhibition tells the story of the 5-10,000 gays who were sent in concentration camps and that of the thousands of gays and lesbians who were harassed because their sexual orientation. The governing Social Democratic and Green Parties introduced a bill to acknowledge Nazi persecution of gays and ask the government to review whether to annul convictions under a Nazi-era anti-gay law that remained on the books in West Germany until 1969.

According to an article published by the British magazine Nature, one’s fingers can provide information on his/her sexual orientation. Dr Marc Breedlove, the American author of the article, based his conclusions on a survey that he had made on 720 adults. By comparing the length of their second and fourth fingers, he noticed that the difference between them was significantly lower, in homosexually oriented people.