Teeny-tiny Rhode Island is a mouse's squeak away from becoming the 10th American state to legalize marriage equality. The state's House of Representatives voted its thunderous approval yesterday, and the governor has said not passing it would be a moral outrage—putting a fair amount pressure on a very reluctant Senate to follow suit and do right.

In Southwest-decorated New Mexico, meanwhile, a Republican lawmaker pitched a bill that would criminalize abortion after rape as "evidence tampering." Her bill (yes, that's right: "her") doesn't stand a chance in a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives.

President Obama is on his fifth chief of staff after four years, picking a favored foreign policy adviser. It's another piece of the usual second-term shakeup.

Republicans really hate that big-city liberals shoved another four years of Soviet-style Communism down their throats. So they want to change to rules and let their friends in the sticks—hillbillies!—win next time and forever.

Two years after Egypt shrugged off strongman Hosni Mubarak and sent him to a sick bed in jail, his former partners in cronyism are still doing pretty well: chauffeurs, classical music, country clubs, and nary a conviction. Meanwhile, protests and political convulsions continue to shake a country with a lousy economy now run by Islamists.

Antigovernment protests have spread to the United States vassal better-known as Iraq, where soldiers have shot and killed at least six demonstrators.

France is learning a difficult lesson in the middle of its aimless antiterror adventure in Mali: Invading a shell of a country propped up by fearless Islamists is, what's the word, difficile.

North Korea, after trying to slap America in the face with a maybe-nuclear-tipped gauntlet, is back to picking on someone closer to its starving, cooked-rat-fed borders: South Korea.

A tabloid is outraged that a Gawker-family writer took to Twitter and compared cold weather to the Holocaust.

The college football player with the imaginary dead girlfriend was maybe talking to a man pretending to be a woman. Or maybe he was talking to a woman pretending to be a woman. Such delightfully creepy drama!

Austerity works! If, that is, the idea is to tip your country back into recession. Britain, under the hard rule of Conservatives, is headed toward a triple-dip downturn.

ALL OF WHICH MEANS I HOPE THE UNITED STATES STAYS FAR AWAY FROM GREAT BRITAIN ON THE DANCE FLOOR.