SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Wednesday's ruling against Section 3 of DOMA by the Supreme Court left long-suffering members of the GLBT community jubilant and hopeful, but devastated religious conservatives who are opposed to promoting the rights of people they view as sexually immoral. Former Rep. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) has been one of the most newsworthy anti-gay politicians over the past decade. In 2003, he famously warned that relaxing the legal definition of marriage would open the floodgates to all manner of deviant behavior, including "man on dog" relations. Today, in protest of the Supreme Court's ruling and to illustrate the very dangers implicit in the decision, Rick Santorum announced that he will marry a dog.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- The U.S. Supreme Court delivered a watershed ruling on Wednesday by recognizing same-sex marriage in states where it has been legalized, striking down Section 3 of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which restricts the definition of wedlock as between a man and a woman for the purposes of receiving federal benefits. But anti-gay conservatives derided the ruling as a "dangerous precedent set by activist judges that will cripple the economy and immigration reform." Justice Antonin Scalia, in his dissenting opinion, blasted the decision. Legalizing gay marriage, he declared, discriminates against people who are opposed to it. In that same vein, he also cried foul on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 for overturning segregationist Jim Crow Laws. Scalia deemed those decisions equivalently abhorrent because they discriminate against racists who don't wants blacks treated as equal citizens.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- It comes as no surprise that conservative politicians continue to denounce the landmark Roe v. Wade decision. It comes as no surprise that these same congresspeople fight tirelessly to find ways of overturning the ruling. So Rep. Michael Burgess' (R-Texas) declaration that the Supreme Court should dissolve the 23- to 24-week abortion window it legalized in 1973 also seems par for the course. What stunned the nation this week was Burgess' reasoning -- that fetuses masturbate as early as 15 weeks into pregnancy and therefore feel pleasure. This also means they feel pain, he contends, which is the basis for his argument to ban abortions much earlier than the prevailing laws allow. Clearly, Burgess is seeking to rally support from religious conservatives who have made ending abortion their foremost political and moral cause. But like abortion, masturbation is also a sin.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- The National Security Agency (NSA) and the Obama administration have spent the last 11 days wiping egg from their faces after a federal contractor, Edward Snowden, brought to light a series of covert data mining operations orchestrated by the U.S. government against everyday Americans, without their knowledge or consent. Because the NSA targeted telecommunications and Internet service providers, which contractually assure users that their private communications are protected under the service agreements, the outrage has been widespread. But despite the backlash over these intrusive and legally questionable violations, the NSA has made a conciliatory gesture by offering its vast repository of personal intelligence as a free cloud storage and emergency backup service, competing directly with companies such as Google and Dropbox.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- When food is scarce, people in China engage in the socially acceptable practice of eating dogs as an emergency food source. But feasting on companion pets such as dogs is also a tradition dating back thousands of years. Dog meat is rich and particularly nice on cold days, say people who regularly partake of it in certain regions. The animals are also slaughtered for their hides, which capture a decent price when sold to markets in the country's fur industry. Animal rights advocates around the world have condemned the abuses. Now, legislators in the United States have voiced their disapproval of the Chinese government's complicity in the gruesome trade. "It's another example of unnecessary outsourcing to countries with cheap labor," said F. Chester Greene, a conservative politician and 2016 White House hopeful from California. "We need to stop China from continuing to take our jobs. There's no reason able-bodied Americans can't butcher pets and cook them up."

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Edward Snowden, the former Booz Allen Hamilton contractor whose work with the National Security Agency (NSA) provided him access to extremely classified U.S. intelligence, shocked the world when he exposed sensitive details about the Obama administration's warrantless wiretapping of private communications between innumerable U.S. citizens with no ties to terrorism. On Wednesday, the self-confessed leaker went on to allege that the U.S. government has also been undertaking enormous hacking operations against targets in China since 2009, part of more than 61,000 similar initiatives worldwide. But Snowden's revelations didn't end there. He rocked the boat again early Thursday morning from his self-imposed exile in Hong Kong when he showed the South China Morning Post evidence that Facebook was conceived as a government data collection tool, and that Mark Zuckerberg doesn't really exist.

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Apple Inc. kicked off its annual Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday in San Francisco, but despite unveiling some new products and a redesigned iOS (announcements that don't usually happen at this event), attendees confessed feeling underwhelmed. Many people said the keynote speech lacked substance, missed the standard "one more thing" surprise, and failed to deliver innovations targeted toward the community of developers. Some challenged that notion, but had only the death of Steve Jobs, Apple's founder and visionary, as an excuse. Attendees agreed the biggest problem was current CEO Tim Cook's "pathetic" whining about having no real direction anymore and his sad theatrics to convince developers that he was really Jobs incarnate, which included wearing Jobs' iconic black turtleneck and desperately staging a seance to plead with Jobs' spirit for help.

Tremaine McMillian. (Credit: WSVN-TV)

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- On May 30, Miami-Dade Police officers brutally wrestled 14-year-old Tremaine McMillan to the ground, pinning and choking the black teen who was armed only with a puppy. McMillan's mother recorded the aggressive response on her cell phone. Detective Alvaro Zabaleta justified the use of force, claiming that McMillan was exhibiting threatening body language, which included "dehumanizing stares" and "clenched fists." By all accounts, Tremaine was guilty of nothing more than feeding his puppy, a six-week-old Pit Bull mix named Polo, also injured in the tussle, and playing on the beach with friends. But according to Florida officials, McMillan's arrest provides yet another illustration of larger troubles plaguing the Sunshine State. "To put it bluntly, we're terrified of black people," the Florida GOP confessed Thursday in a press bulletin.

Photo courtesy Helen Sloan/HBO

SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- Although George R.R. Martin creates fantastically lush and detailed realms in his immense "A Song of Fire and Ice" series, a sprawling medieval epic set in the fictitious world of Westeros, the stories do not shy away from the gritty realities of life and death. Far more than sword and sorcery, "A Song of Fire and Ice" exposes readers to the complex, deadly geopolitics associated with empire building and conquest. But now Martin wants to bring his message of life, hard times, death and war to a younger audience. He announced on Tuesday plans to create a series of children's books that promises to "treat kids like the tough, intelligent beings they are and not lie to them about how the world really works." He has tentatively titled the new franchise "Everyone You Care About Will Die...Horribly...Butchered Before Your Sad Helpless Little Eyes."