• Reuters: Sexy orchids do more than embarrass wasps?
• BBC News: Microwaves ‘cook ballast aliens’ (This one’s actually an interesting news story; brought me back to SimCity 2000. But whoever ‘writes headlines’ at the BBC ‘needs’ to ‘get help’. And ’stop using’ so many ‘damn’ quotation ‘marks’.)
• BBC News: Frigid robot eyes top tech prize
• BBC News: Life for wife murder over dog row
• BBC News: Boys sentenced over Goth murder (I think they meant murder of goth.)
• BBC News: Ronaldo in transvestite scandal (He wasn’t the one in the dress, but you’d never suspect it from the headline.)
• BBC News: Right bra ‘could halt breast ops’ (Are those anything like black ops? brown ops? the occasional beige ops?)

And of course, I noted this earlier, but can’t resist bringing it round once more:

• BBC News: Great tits cope well with warming

Great tits cope well with warming

It’s about birds (tits, like ‘tit-willow‘), of course, but who in this day and age is going to read it that way?

Hat-tip: Dan Savage

• Sometimes I think my viola-playing belongs in the Really Terrible Orchestra.
• Microsoft executives are not surprised to learn how awful Windows Vista really is.
• Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to be nominated for Vice President and current Clinton hench-person, believes that Obama has got this far only because he’s a black man.
• Some amusing British humour about the U.S. presidential election.
• Required reading: Daniel Gordis’s most recent dispatch regarding how Hayyim Nachman Bialik would be mortified by the State of Israel today.
• Iraq really didn’t have WMDs—can you friggin’ believe it?
• Chris Beam’s excellent insight that the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal is more likely to harm the Democratic Party than Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.

Now I can close all those tabs, and Firefox can stop memory-leaking (ha). Hat-tips all round.

The decision overturns a lower court ruling by a lower court, which said the state need not recognise conversions from Islam because of a religious ban.

Translation: Islam forbids apostasy, and many countries impose the death penalty if Muslims convert to any other religion (though see this recent article in the Guardian for a very interesting perspective on recent religious permissiveness in Egypt). However, it is very important to note that what is making the apostasy of these twelve Christians in Egypt possible is the fact that they were originally Christians before they converted to Islam:

This suggests that Egyptians born Muslim will still be unable to convert to other faiths and have those conversions recognised on their identity cards. Many Muslims believe that converting from Islam is wrong, and some believe it is punishable by death.

What a shame. It should be one’s own decision what religion to profess, if one wants to profess any at all, and the state has no business denying people the right to change their minds—and especially should not be allowed to execute them if they do. This issue goes to the heart of free speech and freedom of belief. This particular ruling is worthy of congratulation, but it is worth very little if total freedom of belief is denied.

Bad Astronomy, mentioned in the article but not linked to, has some terrific commentary and follow-up posts.