Veteran Sydney, Australia, radio broadcaster John Laws apologized Nov. 18 for calling “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” star Carson Kressley a “pompous little pansy prig” and a “pillow-biter.”

The attack aired Nov. 3 on radio station 2UE.

Writing in the gay weekly Sydney Star Observer, Laws said: “My intentions were humorous and satirical and this is how I believe people who heard my show that morning would have reacted. ... I do apologize to you for any distress my words might have caused, especially if you might have come to believe I was condoning or supporting any form of verbal or physical violence directed at gay men and lesbians.”

A Philippine Army major, Ferdinand Ramos, has been placed on “technical arrest” for allegedly forcing male military trainees to fellate him and each other and engage in other gay sex acts, the Asian News Network reported Nov. 22.

Ramos was chief of civil-military operations at Camp O’Donnell in Tarlac province, a position from which he has been suspended.

Investigators will determine if Ramos violated Article of War 96 which deals with conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.

The alleged actions came to light after a trainee gave a videotape to a TV investigative-reporting program. The show aired parts of the tape in which Ramos apparently forced a trainee to fellate him and made male trainees have sex with each other, Asian News Network said.

Some 10,000 people marched in Buenos Aires’ 13th Pride parade Nov. 20.

“It was much more fun than I would have ever thought,” said first-timer Mariano Lago, 27. “We carried the big, big, big pride flag for a while, then went to dance along this truck all over Avenida de Mayo.”

The parade’s theme was “All of society for the right to diversity – civil unions for the whole country.”

Two hundred anti-gays protested in front of the Metropolitan Cathedral.

“We have nothing against them and we didn’t come to attack them, but we’re not going to let them take the Catholic Church,” one of the protesters told the daily newspaper Clarín.

During last year’s parade the cathedral was spray-painted with graffiti reading “Church = dictatorship”, “Rapist priests” and “Nazi priests.”

The vandals chanted, “Here is the repression of the Holy Inquisition.”

To date, civil unions have been enacted only in Buenos Aires and in Río Negro province.

About 20 percent of Australian lesbian couples have children living with them, a study presented by the federal minister for family and community services has found.

The report, Diversity and Change in Australian Families, also found that 5 percent of gay-male couples have kids living with them, the Sydney Morning Herald reported Nov. 24.

Research author David de Vaus of La Trobe University suggested there are 28,144 lesbian couples and 41,535 male couples in Australia, which has a population of 19,913,144. Single gays and lesbians with children were not included in the study.

De Vaus also found that gay and lesbian couples are more educated than their heterosexual counterparts – with coupled gay men twice as likely as coupled straight men to have a college degree. Coupled gays and lesbians also make more money than coupled straight people. Thirty percent of coupled gay men are in the highest income brackets compared with 23 percent of coupled straight men. Twenty-three percent of coupled lesbians are in the highest income brackets compared with 7 percent of coupled straight women.

Forty percent of the coupled gays and lesbians have no religious affiliation compared with 15 percent of coupled heterosexuals, according to the Sydney Morning Herald’s summary of the data.

Norway’s parliament Nov. 18 rejected a bill to make the nation’s marriage law gender neutral. Norway already offers gay registered partnerships that grant every right of marriage except access to adoption. The bill was opposed by Prime Minister Kjell Magne, Bondevik’s Christian Democratic Party and by right-wing parliamentarians.

Hackers disrupted proceedings in the Italian Senate in late November by using a computer worm to display hard-core gay porn on Senate computers, Britain’s The Register reported.

The Rbot worm redirected computers to naughty sites.

The Register said the attack may have been retaliation for the firing of Senate vice-presidential assistant Dario Mattiello after photos were leaked showing him at a gay bar.

Jamaican dancehall music star Sizzla, barred from entering the United Kingdom due to his anti-gay lyrics, will not apologize for them, the BBC reported Nov. 25.

“They’ve got to apologize to God because they break God’s law,” he told the BBC’s 1Xtra station. “Why must I apologize to corruption? How can I do that? I sing ‘fire burn for homosexuals’ and sometime in some street I walk, I see them and me no touch them. If I don’t like what you’re doing, I don’t come there, if you don’t like what I’m doing or what I say, you don’t come where I’m at.”

Sizzla was banned from the U.K. while police and government agencies examine lyrics such as “fire fi di man dem weh go ride man behind,” which means “burn the man who rides a man from behind.”