A petition of 14,000 signatures of people who support the legal recognition of same-sex marriages performed abroad in Australia was delivered to Australian Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young today.

For the first time in history, an openly lesbian activist has become a local councillor in Rome, the city of the Holy See.

And she wants to unite the LGBT population of the city to make the eternal city a gay capital in the style of London, New York or Berlin.

Imma Battaglia, 53, has been elected for the Sinistra, Ecologia e Libertà party, led by gay Puglia governor Nichi Vendola.

Battaglia organized the first official Italian pride in 1994. And she was also in charge of the World Pride 2000, organized in Rome in the year of the Catholic Jubilee.

Twenty people gathered in the IBM offices in the Jin Mao Tower, Shanghai's second tallest building, today start an effort towards more LGBT inclusion in China's workplaces. 

Business people from multi-national banks, legal firms and pharmaceutical companies met to learn about how to make their workplaces more comfortable for LGBT employees. However no purely Chinese companies showed interest in the topic.

A new TV serial about a woman who finds out her husband is having an affair with another man has garnered positive feedback from viewers and the LGBT community in the Philippines.

The first of 16 weekly episodes of My Husband's Lover was shown on Filipino TV last week (10 June) and received competitive ratings and a trending hashtag on Twitter.

LGBT voters in Rome are angry with the newly elected mayor because he failed to attend Saturday’s pride parade (15 June).

Despite being a left-wing and socially involved politician, Ignazio Marino from Partito Democratico (PD) said he could not go to the pride for ‘family reasons’.

He released a videomessage to the LGBT community, saying he stood for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender cause.

‘But this is not enough’, Andrea Maccarrone, LGBT association Circolo Mario Mieli’s president, told Gay Star News.

From 26 June 26 to 3 July, US President Barack Obama will be visiting Africa. The visit takes him to Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania.

According a statement released by the White House, Obama will use his visit ‘to reinforce the importance that the United States places on our deep and growing ties with countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including through expanding economic growth, investment, and trade; strengthening democratic institutions; and investing in the next generation of African leaders’.

Pride parades were held free of violence in the former Yugoslav republics of Slovenia and Croatia yesterday in a growing sign of acceptance of LGBT rights in the region.

Slovenian President Borut Pahor lead the Ljubljana Pride parade where around 600 people marched with the theme ‘Freedom and Solidarity are a Same-Gender Couple.’

Prior to the march organizers released a statement where they urged Slovenians to not let economic woes in Europe push social justice issues off the agenda.

The Gay Police Association of Scotland (GPA) launched today (15 June) a video featuring police officers and police staff from across the country discussing what it was like for them growing up as gay, lesbian or transgender.

Officers give a frank and candid accounts of their experiences including their perceptions of gay people, coming out to family members and friends and how their lives have changed since then.

A survey of just under 1,200 American adults who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender shows that 92% feel like they have become more accepted in the past decade.

But that doesn't mean it's been easy according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the experiences and attitudes of the LGBT population released this week.

The line in the advertisement says it all: 'celebrating our life in the free world.'

Gay immigrants from the former Soviet Union are putting the final touches on a Russian float that will be part of the 30 June New York City Gay Pride Festival.

The Catholic Church in Croatia is corruptly coercing people to sign a petition against same-sex marriage, Gay Star News can exclusively reveal.

Over 710,000 people have signed the petition – over one fifth of the population of the Eastern European country – demanding the government change the constitution to say marriage is defined as between a man and a woman.

But gay rights activists have accused the Catholic Church of immorally manipulating the public into signing their names to oppose same-sex marriage and also of encouraging violence.

Members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (religious police) raided a gay marriage party with over 80 participants in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, arresting five men.

The religious police backed by policemen and detectives, stormed a house in Mecca that was said to have held a gay marriage ceremony, yesterday (12 June), reported Al-Saudeh daily.

Five men were detained while the rest managed to flee to nearby mountains.