Saturday, March 27, 2004

Lee Coggins took a red-eye flight to San Francisco, waited in the rain with a jubilant crowd and married her girlfriend Suzanne Robinson. Then, three hours after marrying, the couple turned around and traveled home to Durham, N.C., braced for indifference or perhaps hostility.

But instead, the couple -- one of the few gay couples from North Carolina to make the wedding pilgrimage -- became instant media stars.

After their Feb. 16 wedding, they were interviewed by NBC's "Today Show," the Herald-Sun in Durham and a statewide public radio program. Coggins wrote a first-person story about their nuptial adventures that appeared on the cover of the local alternative paper, the Independent Weekly.

And much to their surprise, people were nice. Really, really nice.

"I really had no idea," Coggins said. "People are coming up to us randomly, saying 'Are you the girls who got married?' "

At first, when people approached in the grocery store, the mall, the movies and at basketball games, they would flinch, Coggins said. But they got over that when strangers started sending gifts and asking, "Oh, my God, can we hug you?"

4:18 PM |

Wednesday, March 24, 2004

Confused by the twists and turns of the US gay marriage issue, Oregon's Benton County has decided to err on the side of caution and ban all weddings.

Until the state decides who can and cannot wed, officials in the county have said no-one can marry - even heterosexual couples.

They hit upon the plan to ensure that none of the county's 79,000 residents are subject to unfair treatment.

1:23 PM |

Tuesday, March 23, 2004

Those are just a few of the rumors collected by the staff of The Baghdad Mosquito, a daily intelligence document that chronicles the latest street talk in the Iraqi capital, however ill founded, bizarre or malevolent.

The Mosquito's staff includes 6 American intelligence analysts, 2 Arab-American translators and 11 Iraqis. One of the Iraqis is a doctor and one a university professor, but several come from some very tough neighborhoods. They are Sunni and Shiite and Kurd and Christian. Some of the women wear traditional head scarves; others work with heads uncovered.

The Mosquito began last fall after American military leaders realized that rumors themselves had become a security problem, and decided to fight back. It is distributed via e-mail to an elite group of military officers and policy planners and is posted on the military's classified Web server.

1:31 PM |

7:07 AM |

Monday, March 22, 2004

7:10 PM |