The Supremes: The Supreme court gave a backhanded win to advocates of gay marriage yesterday by deciding not to decide about the issue. The court turned down appeals from five states fighting lower court decisions to allow same-sex marriage. The ruling forces Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin to allow gay marriages. This jumps the number of states in which such marriages are legal from 19 to 24. This also means that six other states that have not appealed lower court rulings may soon be allowing gay marriages as well.

The Prize: The Nobel Prize for Physics has been awarded to two Japanese scientists and an American for the invention of blue light-emitting diodes that enable energy-saving sources of white light. So-called LEDs emit light that is brighter, cleaner and more energy efficient than the currently popular incandescent bulb. The Nobel committee said it’s the light source of the future.

The War: Coalition aircraft have struck Islamic State militants in support of Kurdish forces locked in battle over the town of Kobane in Syria. The Kurds have been slowly losing the fight. ISIS has captured several districts of the town and if it takes the whole thing will control a stretch of the Turkey/Syria border. Turkey has yet to intervene.

Outbreak: A Spanish nurse has become the first person infected with the Ebola virus outside West Africa. She treated a Spanish missionary who was infected in Sierra Leone and flown to a hospital in Spain. The missionary died. This case raises concerns about treatment of Ebola and its contagion because the nurse is reported to have entered the patient’s room only twice, once after he was dead.

In the states, freelance photographer Ashoka Mukpo, who contracted Ebola working in Liberia, was flown to the Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, to be treated in an isolation unit.

The Sports Page: Despite his checking into rehab, USA Swimming has suspended the greatest swimmer of all time after his second arrest for drunk driving in 10 years. The six-month suspension also disqualifies Michael Phelps from the world championships in Russia next August.

The Obit Page: Geoffrey Holder, the West Indian actor, dancer, and choreographer with a baritone island accent, has died at age 84. Holder was a great talent who was best known as the pitchman for 7Up soda in the late 70s and early 80s. “It’s the un-coalaaaa.” But he was much more than that. Holder won a Tony as the director and choreographer of the Broadway show The Wiz, an all-black adaptation of The Wizard of Oz.

>The regal actress Marian Seldes, a pillar of New York theater for more than 50 years in plays by Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett and, Edward Albee, has died in New York at age 88. She said acting defined her life. She set a record by never missing one of the 1,793 performances in the five-year run of “Deathtrap.”

Log Lady: Showtime has announced that it is reviving the landmark 1990 television series Twin Peaks. The mystery about the murder of the homecoming queen in a Pacific Northwest town is credited with pioneering high quality serial television that ultimately led to series like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad. They can bring it back, but we already know who killed Laura Palmer.

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