(This article originally appeared HERE in Voice of San Diego).

Word traveled fast through the Little Italy Mercato farmers market: Follow regulations — or else.

Every institution needs to be shaken up now and again, to clear the bureaucratic cobwebs and offer a fresh start.

In Dale Wasserman’s adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” that force comes in the person of new mental patient Randle P. McMurphy (Jeffrey Jones), a wisecracking wheeler-dealer who has feigned mental illness in order to get out of the work detail specified by his prison sentence.

Ivan “Max” Flores Acosta, 26, of New York City is the poster boy for what’s wrong with immigration reform in the United States, particularly in how it pertains to the LGBT community.

Acosta is one of an estimated 1 million LGBT adult immigrants living in the U.S. and he is one of an estimated 333,000 LGBT adult immigrants who are undocumented; the figures are provided by the Human Rights Campaign. Many of these immigrants are natives of nations where gays are discriminated against, persecuted, or even imprisoned, tortured or killed by homophobic regimes.

PARIS – France’s Senate today took a huge step toward approving marriage equality in the first of a series of votes on the proposed law.

After more than 10 hours of debate, the Senate voted 179-157 on Section 1 of the bill, which will remove all gender references on marriage applications.
The upper chamber did not change the language of the bill, which was approved 329-229 by the National Assembly on Feb. 12 with 10 deputies abstaining.