Link round-up for 21 July 2013

Sorry guys, winning an election doesn't mean you can do anything you want.

An unusual Dr. Who commemoration appears in Britain.

Another summer's worth of vapid, overpriced blockbuster movies are turkeying out.

Republican Ken Cuccinelli is running for Governor of Virginia on a platform of outlawing blowjobs (sent by Mendip).

Derek Black, son of the founder of the white-supremacist website Stormfront, renounces racism.

Gender-nonconforming boys get a place where they can just be themselves.   But haters gonna hate.

Will Boehner become the next big villain among Hispanics?

Republic of Gilead wraps up its coverage of a terrifying Christian revisionist-history conference.  An escapee from fundamentalism responds.

Colorado teabaggers need to think twice about shooting at drones.

By a slim 41%-to-38% majority, Americans agree with the Zimmerman verdict.  The ACLU urges Holder to back off double-jeopardy threats, while suggesting other options.

The Republican party -- less stupid than vicious and even sadistic.

Politics Plus has some revealing graphs on how the media cover the economy.

A prominent teabagger makes a blunt appeal for "racial purity".

Snowden's revelations may actually do some good.

Republicans' anti-abortion extremism spurs Texas progressives to action.

Atheists are even more under-represented among prisoners than we thought.

Michele Bachmann has spent her career fighting against reality. Maybe she just needs something to help relax and unwind.

Today's teenagers are smart and tough, but something needs to be done about the smoking.  The younger kids are saner than their elders too.

Obamacare will cut individual health premiums by about 50% in New York state -- and will eventually become the right wing's worst nightmare.

Britain's Parliament legalizes gay marriage in England and Wales.  Predictably, certain people don't like it.

The British government considers a posthumous pardon for Alan Turing (they should he asking for his pardon) -- background on Turing here.

The world's "oldest lunar calendar" is found in Scotland, which is apparently a pretty cool place generally.

Ireland legalizes some abortions, a small but significant step.

Yielding to popular rejection of GMO foods, Monsanto pulls out of Europe.

Invading Nazis learned to fear the quiet, flimsy, deadly planes of Russia's all-female Night Witches.

A new music video tweaks Putin's embrace of homophobia.

After opposition leader Alexei Navalny is railroaded, protesters occupy Red Square -- and get their man released.

The Russian military is staging its largest war games since the fall of the USSR.

People who dislike snakes should avoid Ilha Queimada Grande, inhabited by the world's deadliest viper species at a density of one serpent per square meter.

Interracial couples have become common in South Africa.

Religious violence has killed 717 people and injured 1,108 in Pakistan over the last 18 months (found via Lady Atheist, who notes that "this doesn't count people killed in drone strikes ordered by Americans who think God blesses the country").

Malala Yousafzai speaks at the UN.

A few months before pilgrimage season brings millions of visitors, a deadly new virus appears in Mecca.

In Dubai, a Norwegian woman is sentenced to 16 months in jail for being raped (why does anyone even go to these places?).

This new café in Muslim Indonesia may startle Western visitors.

As contamination from the Fukushima reactor has spread across the Pacific, the nuclear industry has been lying about it.

China's economic miracle ends in exhaustion and stagnation.

The CIA is funding research into planetary engineering to combat global warming, despite the objections of scientifically-illiterate Republicans.

Dutch scientists develop pavement that absorbs smog.

This jewelery from Italy is a bit crude, but not bad for 47,000 years ago.

Caitrin Nicol takes a detailed look at the minds of elephants.

Transitional fossils in human evolution?  If anything, we've got too many, not too few.

More than 40 sunken German U-boats, recently discovered off the coast of England, are being studied by archaeologists with modern technology.

Nashville in 1862 saw a successful experiment in legalized and regulated prostitution.

Massachusetts scientists take a major step toward a treatment for Down's syndrome.

Rates of dementia in the elderly are dropping fast.

Robots are beginning to revolutionize agriculture.

Spanish researchers use stem cells to regenerate the retina in mice.