Today the House of Commons considered several amendments to the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill during the Report Stage of the legislation.

The bill would legalize marriage for same-sex couples in England and Wales.

After almost six hours of debate during which over 70 Members of Parliament aired their views, the British House of Commons approved the Equal Marriage bill by a vote of 400 to 175.

In a huge victory for religious freedom, gay and lesbian couples wishing to include religious content in their civil partnership ceremony or wishing to have their ceremony solemnized in a welcoming place of worship may legally do so. But the Anglican Church is still forbidding ceremonies in their churches.

The S&P downgrade was intended to encourage political elites to focus on austerity at the expense of jobs and growth.

Hey what do you know? We actually had a modest gain in jobs this last month. The economy gained 117,000 jobs according the statistics released this morning. That is actually better than the number that analysts were predicting, which was around 85,000.

Unfortunately that is all the good news there is on this. The economy needs 150,000 new jobs a month just to keep up with the rate of population growth, so if you are a glass half empty person, we came up 33,000 jobs short of what we needed to break even.

Other countries get results from voting. We don’t. Here are two things you can do.

I am a lifelong sports fan. I learned the language of Baseball probably before I could even walk and the language of Basketball soon thereafter. I’m fluent in American Football and can make myself understood in Hockey. I also have varying degrees of fluency in a number of the “minor” sports here in the US, such as Bowling (though I’m not as fluent in speaking Candlepin or Duckpin as I am in the more conventional Tenpin most of us are familiar with.

In their book Gaming the World, Andrei Markovits and Lars Rensmann use the languages of sports to offer a unique perspective on globalization. This is not a book that will be used to settle arguments on sports performances at the neighborhood pub. However, I can see it being used as the foundation of a Sociology class on Sports in Society, as part of a Cultural Anthropology class, or as part of an elective Political Science course work. (in all cases with some necessary supplemental information)

Why are we here on earth? What the meaning of existence? What is man’s purpose? What started the Universe? Where was God during the Holocaust? What is Truth? Should people have sex before marriage? What is the best way to find happiness? Where is the afterlife? Where are the voices in my head coming from? [...]