Six of the Best 320

The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill has just received its second reading in the Commons. Andrew Hickey celebrates the role of political activists in bringing about this landmark: "MPs will be taking the credit for this Bill, and the Act it will, with luck, become. They will be going on TV, doing interviews, and so on. But this would not be happening without the efforts of a fairly small number of people, most not in Parliament, who spent years of their life doing the groundwork that made this possible."

Bristling Badger on an appalling scandal: "Undercover police officers infiltrating protest groups stole the identities of dead children to create their fake identity. They would comb registries looking for someone with the same first name. They would visit the dead child's house and locality to get the details for the backstory. On the dead child's birthday, as the family would have been in sombre reflection on their tragedy, they would take activist comrades out to celebrate."

Jonathan Taylor on York Mix thinks HS2 is a colossal error.

Tavish Scott explains Up-Helly-Aa to The Scotsman.

io9 on why people in the United States are still dying from the bubonic plague.

The Last Places takes us underneath Whitehall: "Like the Pentagon, its better-known counterpart in the United States, Britain’s Ministry of Defence building is a fairly mundane, if gigantic, office block camouflaging a much more exciting subterranean realm of secret tunnels, bunkers, and - at least in the MoD’s case - a perfectly preserved Tudor wine cellar."