Ending Prostitution?

Harry Reid calls for an end to prostitution, why Obama changed his mind on DOMA and Google tweaks its algorithm. These discoveries and more.

On a regular basis, Truthdig brings you the news items and odds and ends that found their way to Larry Gross, director of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. A specialist in media and culture, art and communication, visual communication and media portrayals of minorities, Gross helped found the field of gay and lesbian studies.

The links below open in a new window. Newer ones are on top.

Harry Reid Calls for End to Prostitution With his state in the midst of a budget nightmare, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has taken up a new issue: prostitutes.

Why the Obama administration changed its mind about the Defense of Marriage Act The real surprise Wednesday wasn’t that the Obama administration decided it could no longer legally defend the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which mandates that the federal government not recognize same-sex marriages and stipulates that states need not recognize same-sex marriages from other states. It’s that it took so long to get here.

Sarah Palin Uses Alternate Facebook Account To Praise Sarah Palin A ghostwriter named Rebecca Mansour operates Sarah Palin’s Facebook page, but that doesn’t mean the former half-term governor is too busy for Facebook. In fact, Wonkette has figured out that Palin appears to have created a separate account with her personal Gmail address (contained in the scathing tell-all that leaked over the weekend).

A WikiLeaks Clone Takes On Higher Education WikiLeaks, scourge of governments worldwide, now has a copycat for academe. And the new group is itching to publish your university’s deepest secrets.

Glenn Beck Smears 35 Percent Of American Jews Last month, 400 rabbis signed an open letter from Jewish Funds For Justice to Rupert Murdoch requesting that Glenn Beck be sanctioned for his false claims that George Soros collaborated with the Nazis.

Town hall question: “Who’s going to shoot Obama?” Here’s the latest evidence that nothing has changed in post-Tucson America: A person at a Tuesday town hall with Rep. Paul Broun, R-Ga., got up and asked, “Who is going to shoot President Obama?”

Google Tweaks Algorithm to Push Down Low-Quality Sites Google said late Thursday that it had made a major change to its algorithm in an effort to improve the rankings of high-quality websites in its search results—and to reduce the visibility of low-quality sites.