This week read about a panel discussion covering LGBT issues in Namibia, and TikTok censoring LGBT terms in Germany.

LGBT Issues In Namibia Are Still Divisive

At a panel discussion, Charles Moore, the British high commissioner to Namibia, said LGBT issues are "deeply emotive, and often divisive, across the world.

The Diversity Alliance of Namibia hosted the panel discussion titled "Changing Hearts" in Windhoek.

When it comes to LGBT issues, Moore believes that strong religious, cultural, and communal convictions must be considered.

According to The Namibian, Moore stated that the United Kingdom and many other countries feel that basic equality for all human beings is worth fighting for, regardless of gender, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation.

According to Moore, Namibia has an exceptional constitution that should be the envy of many African and international governments.

It's fine to not like, even to find it distasteful, if that's what you have been brought up to believe. But it's not fine to discriminate against those who do have a different sexual orientation or those who are disabled, just like it's wrong to discriminate against people of different tribal backgrounds, nationalities or color, Moore said.

TikTok Shadowbans LGBT Terms in Germany

Photo via Pixabay.

The popular social media app, TikTok, has been using a problematic word-filtering technique in Germany.

According to DW, the popular Chinese-owned social network has been censoring messages that contain German-language terminology pertaining to Nazis, LGBT culture, and tennis player Peng Shuai.

Words like "porn" and "sex" were censored, ostensibly to keep kids safe. However, words such as "gay," "queer," "LGBTQ" and "homosexual" were also blocked.

Users were able to submit the problematic terms, but they were hidden from others in a method known as shadowbanning.

Previous investigations have revealed that TikTok has banned phrases that are considered subversive or contentious in China, notably anything relating to Xinjiang province's ongoing human rights violations.

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From Equality Issues Still Divisive in Namibia to TikTok Shadowbanning LGBT Terms in Germany, This Week in Int'l LGBT News - SouthFloridaGayNews.com

The Government has backtracked on its long-promised policy to introduce a new law banning conversion therapy.

Boris Johnson and his predecessor Theresa May had long-promised to outlaw the practice and it has been one of the Governments flagship LGBT+ policies.

But Downing Street has now decided to explore non-legislative measures.

The decision led to accusations No 10 had let down those it promised to support and throws the upcoming LGBT conference, due to be held in the UK, into doubt.

i understands the Equalities Office was blindsided by the change in tact, which was revealed in a document leaked to ITV News.

Equalities Minister Mike Freer has repeatedly said the Government would bring forward the legislation telling MPs as recently as Wednesday that the Government was wholly committed to banning conversion therapy.

Just hours before the government confirmed the decision, Mr Freer had tweeted in support of banning the practice.

According to the document, Mr Johnson agreed with the plan not to introduce the legislation as promised.

A Government spokesperson said: Having explored this sensitive issue in great depth the government has decided to proceed by reviewing how existing law can be deployed more effectively to prevent this in the quickest way possible, and explore the use of other non-legislative measures.

Conversion therapy refers to any form of treatment that seeks to change someones sexuality or supress their gender identity.

Equalities Secretary Liz Truss said in written Government documents that she wanted to ban the coercive and abhorrent practice by introducing a new criminal offence and to ensure that conversion therapy is recognised appropriately when it is the motivation for an existing crime.

In the consultation on the issue, the Government wrote: Our intention is to bring forward a ban in the criminal law that is supported by additional civil interventions that will ensure these practices are ended. Our approach has been built on a detailed assessment of the existing legislative framework to identify gaps that currently allow conversion therapy to continue.

Liberal Democrat Equalities Spokesperson Wera Hobhouse MP said the u-turn was giving the green light to a form of torture in the UK adding: This is an utter betrayal of the LGBT+ community.

Conversion therapy should have been banned years ago, but the Conservatives are looking the other way on this abusive and dangerous practice, this is a complete injustice. The Government must ban it without dither or delay.

Labours shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said: Conversion therapy is no such thing. It is harmful, psychological abuse and it should be banned. The Conservatives have once again broken their promises. Only Labour governments can be trusted to deliver on LGBT+ equality.

LGBT+ charity Stonewall said the news coming after years of delay was devastating.

Conversion practices cause extreme and often lifelong distress to LGBTQ+ people. Countries around the world are acting to ban this homophobic, biphobic and transphobic abuse, and it is shameful that the UK government is not amongst them, they said.

We call on the governments of Wales and Scotland to make good their promise to end conversion practices in their own jurisdictions. LGBTQ+ people in the UK deserve better than this.

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Conversion therapy ban ditched as government abandons long-promised plan - iNews

For the Falkland islanders, the war in Ukraine brings back haunting memories of their own trauma four decades ago. Having themselves experienced a barbaric invasion by a big bully next door, they understand all too well what the people of Ukraine are going through.

I still feel that gun in my back, one islander told me recently, describing the day Argentine troops landed on Pebble Island and brutally rounded up the locals. Much has changed in the Falklands since 1982, nearly all of it for the better, yet the war remains seared in the memory.

This years 2 April is, therefore, hugely significant the 40th anniversary of the invasion. After two months of conflict and the loss of 907 lives, mostly Argentine, the Falklands were liberated and the aggressor sent packing. But while the anniversary is a chance to reflect, it will also be a day when islanders will shake their heads and sigh. Because the Argentine threat remains.

Landing at the islands Mount Pleasant complex today, its hard to imagine there used to be only the tiny Stanley airport. Before the war there were no roads to outlying communities. You rode on horseback, or drove across the hills, often getting bogged for hours or days. People rarely left and if they did, it was for good. The only industry of note was sheep farming, and that was a tough life. The population was shrinking.

Nobody wanted the war, but it changed everything. Afterwards, British money arrived. Roads were built. Stanley got a new hospital, school and the islands first swimming pool. Arrangements were made for children to study in the UK after the age of 16. A vehicle ferry linked East and West Falkland, and a modern telephone system was installed.

Crucially, Britain gave the islanders the rights to fish waters 150 miles offshore, something it had refused to do before for fear of upsetting Argentina. Fishing quickly became a huge source of income, and today is worth about 60 per cent of the economy. Tourism has boomed too, with cruise ships visiting Stanley. The islanders now have a European standard of living and more jobs than people to do them. The population has doubled, with newcomers from as far afield as the Philippines, Zimbabwe and New Zealand. A new port is being built, as well as a national sports facility. No wonder the mantra of the anniversary commemorations is Looking Forward at Forty.

But amidst it all is the giant, brooding presence of Argentina. Little did we imagine then that 40 years later tensions would still be simmering. We thought it was over that good had triumphed over evil.

If only. Argentina still feels the humiliation of defeat, covets the islands as much as ever and regards them as stolen, with a one-eyed version of history every bit as warped as Putins view of Ukraine. School maps propagate it and the slogan las Malvinas fueron, son y sern Argentinas (the Malvinas were, are and will be Argentine) is endlessly repeated. In Tierra del Fuego, the Malvinas crest is sewn into uniforms and sports kits.

Argentina knew it couldnt launch another invasion. The beefed-up British presence ruled that out. So it has pursued aggressive diplomacy instead. Just six years after the war, it persuaded the UN to request a negotiation. In 1994, it changed its constitution, incorporating the Falklands into one of its provinces; then Nstor Kirchner, elected president in 2003, declared sovereignty over the islands his top priority. When his wife, Cristina Fernndez de Kirchner, succeeded him, she pressured Gordon Brown, and tried to thrust a package marked UN Malvinas into David Camerons hands at the G20. To this day, and with no sense of irony, Argentinas leaders call Britain an aggressive actor.

Blatant though these tactics were, they were successful. Most of Latin America supports Argentinas claim. China and Russia do too, which tells its own story. Even within the EU, Argentina has advocates, not least Spain, which sees a chance to make trouble over Gibraltar.

But not content with this, Argentina has made every effort to bully the Falklands, something that Phyl Rendell, chair of the 40th Anniversary Committee, described to me as economic terrorism. Tactics have included banning flights from passing through Argentine airspace and pressuring the Mercosur bloc into closing ports to ships displaying the Falklands flag. Argentina has also banned energy companies active in the islands and threatened to arrest their executives, while targeting British natural resource companies with lawsuits. And it has lobbied loudly against Stanleys new port, declaring it a threat to its own port at Ushuaia.

While these tactics aim to hit the Falklands economically, Argentina has also stooped to a series of nasty pranks. Before the London Olympics, a film crew landed on the islands illegally to film an Argentine athlete training at clearly British landmarks, and in 2020 Argentina demanded a Falklands badminton team play as Islas Malvinas in an inter-national tournament. Some Argentine visitors wave their national flag around Stanley and write abusive comments in the church register.

Why all this absurd behaviour? The islanders say its envy that while the Falklands prosper, Argentina remains mired in economic turmoil. But thats a warning too. In 1982, a brutal administration tried to distract from economic problems by launching a war. For two months, until the moment of defeat, Argentines were fed stories of victory. Were winning! screeched the headlines, even as British forces surrounded Stanley. The junta soon fell after that, and Argentina became a democracy. But still problems mount, and still its government seeks to distract by keeping the issue of the Malvinas alive.

Understandably, then, the conflict casts a long shadow over the Falklands, and its people will be forever grateful to the British soldiers who liberated them. On my first work trip there, a decade ago, I went to places that had become familiar in 1982. I visited Goose Green, where Argentine soldiers shoved a hundred men, women and children into the tiny hall, incarcerating them in intolerable conditions for a whole month. I saw the spot where Colonel H. Jones fell. I visited the lonely war cemetery at San Carlos, before hiking across hills to see the wreckage of Argentine planes. I climbed Mount Tumbledown, from where British troops saw the white flag flying over Stanley.

But the other, peaceful, side to the Falklands always shines through: the wilderness and tranquillity. The islands are almost other--worldly. Theres hardly any crime, so people leave their houses and vehicles unlocked. The children roam safely. The air is clean. Theres no noise pollution. The scenery is spectacular, the wildlife incredible. On my last visit in January, a pair of huge turkey vultures swooped above Stanley, while sea lions snoozed on the quayside.

Yet this beauty is forced to sit alongside memories of conflict and subjugation. Perhaps thats as it should be. For so long as we refuse to forget, we remain determined to defend the rights of the islanders, and nations everywhere, to decide their own futures. Long may they be free to do so.

Read more here:

40 years on, war still casts a shadow over the Falklands - The Spectator

When Ryan Brady initiated a spring raptor count at the Northern Great Lakes Visitor Center while a student at Northland College in 1999, his ornithology professor, Dick Verch, had never documented a golden eagle near Ashland, Wisconsin.

The first bird Ryan spotted, on the very first day, showed the slightly V-shaped silhouette, small dark head, and dark tail of a migrating golden eagle. Both birders were thrilled.

In the second year of the project, Ryan counted almost 50 golden eagles during the spring migration season. In Duluth, the West Skyline Hawk Count spotted 41 GOEA in a single day on March 17.

Golden eagles are very similar in size to bald eagles, and can be confused with immature bald eagles who lack a white head and tail.

GOEA is the alpha code for golden eagles. Alpha codes are abbreviations of bird names that are employed by ornithologists as shorthand. These codes are established by The Institute for Bird Populations.

Now a conservation biologist in the Bureau of Natural Heritage Conservation, at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, Ryan Brady is still counting and researching birds in northern Wisconsin. Ryan told me recently that part of the uptick in golden eagle sightings is due to an increasing population. Biologists arent completely sure whats behind the increase.

Golden eagles were not quite as impacted by DDT as other raptors, because they prey mostly on mid-sized mammals like rabbits and squirrels, which dont accumulate DDT to the same degree that insects, small birds and fish do. So the banning of DDT alone cant explain their comeback.

Maybe wildlife protection laws simply mean fewer of them are getting shot? Maybe they are adapting to wintering in our human-dominated landscapes by eating our abundance of turkeys and roadkill deer? Still, humans (collisions with cars and structures and ingesting lead shot) are their largest source of mortality.

A portion of the increase in sightings may just be a result of looking more. With the proliferation of raptor counts like the one Ryan started, as well as trail cameras capturing the eagles presence at gut piles, people noticed more golden eagles. They got excited, started looking more frequently, and now we see a lot more eagles.

Right now, during their spring migration from early March through the first week in May, is the best and really the only chance for folks in northwest Wisconsin to see these big birds near home.

In the winter, some golden eagles hang out in the goat prairies of the Driftless Area of southwest Wisconsin and northeast Iowa, where they prey on wild turkeys, medium-sized mammals and carrion. Others spend time in the uplands of the Mississippi River corridor, the Ozarks and even the Gulf states.

During the summer, golden eagles breed in the Black Hills and western United States, but the ones who migrate through Wisconsin are heading to the Canadian Arctic to build their nests. Golden eagles are also found throughout Europe and Asia on the tundra, in boreal forests and in mountains. But as confirmed by Wisconsins recent breeding bird atlas, no golden eagles nest in Wisconsin.

On fall migration, golden eagles hit the shore of Lake Superior and follow it around to the west. Counters at Hawk Ridge in Duluth spot dozens in October and November, but the Northern Great Lakes Visitor Center is in Lake Superiors shadow.

Outside of this brief window of spring migration, golden eagles typically arent here.

So what about the dark eagles we see perched in white pines along our lakes and streams all summer long? Those are immature bald eagles who take four years to develop their white head and tail.

How can you tell what type of eagle youre seeing?

Season is your first criteria. Golden eagles arent here in the summer, while bald eagles of all ages are quite common. Habitat is another clue golden eagles hunt in the uplands and dont spend time around lakes and rivers like bald eagles do. Another place youll find bald and not golden eagles is eating roadkill along busy highways. Golden eagles do eat carrion, but they are more skittish and prefer to be on the backroads.

How about size?

Theres a popular myth that golden eagles are bigger than bald eagles. In fact, their weights and wingspans are similar, and both species exhibit sexual dimorphism in which females are larger than males. Golden eagles have smaller heads noticeable especially in flight.

There are variations in their feathers, too. Adult bald eagles have the classic white head and tail, of course. Immature bald eagles are mostly dark, with some white mottling.

If there is a big patch of white, it will be in their wing pits. In contrast, immature golden eagles have white patches on their wrists as you look up at them from below. While bald eagles hold their wings flat, golden eagles wings are angled up in a slight dihedral similar to a turkey vulture but without the vultures tipsy flight.

So when is the best time to see golden eagles in northwest Wisconsin?

Now! Just look up!

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'Tis the season to see golden eagles, population seems to be growing each year - Hudson Star Observer

THIS IS A BANNER YEAR for Shubigi Rao. Born in Mumbai but based in Singapore, the artist is representing her adopted country at the Fifty-Ninth Venice Biennale and participating in the Asia Pacific Triennial. Rao is also the curator of the Fifth Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which will open in December after a delay of two years. Yet for someone wielding such clout, Rao has a prickly relationship with authority and the vectors of power and knowledge. She has rarely bowed to the pressures of the art market, bucking convention with back-to-back multiyear projects that defy the churn of the commercial gallery system.

The first of these endeavors was not intended to last as long as it did. Beginning in 2003, Rao assumed the fictive alter ego S. Raoul. (A devotee of Jorge Luis Borges, Rao is equally indebted to philosopher Hans Vaihingers idea of useful fictions.) The inventor, theorist, writer, iconoclast and eccentric polymath provided Rao with the ambiguously gendered cover to publish a series of pun-rich, intellectually indulgent hand-bound books with titles like Flotsam: An Elucidation of Jetsam (2005) and Bastardising Biography: An Extraordinary Initiative (2006), all bearing the same mischievous author photo showing the artist smirking in the half-hearted drag of a pencil mustache. Among Raouls crowning achievements was a trio of turgidly pedantic coffee-table books, published in 2006 and parodying the output of an overconfident armchair expert: Notions of Art: Thoughts from a Dot, a navel-gazing selection of essays and ruminations on creative production; Art of the Americas: Secrets Unearthed from Levels Seven to Two, whose back-cover blurb touts it as the musings of a caged, barely lit but well-ventilated mind; and Art of the United Kingdom: The Burden of British Art, which consists of an extensive list of all the objects of non-British origin in the holdings of the British Museum. Raoul later dabbled in neuroscience for The Tuning Fork of the Mind (2008), an elaborate (and entirely fabricated) study of the degenerative effects of viewing contemporary art on the human brain. The accompanying installationcomplete with a devious DIY brain-wave scanner straight out of Lost in Space, with zany blinking lights and a hidden disk drive playing a soundtrack of dogs barking and toilets flushingeventually made its way to the 2008 Singapore Biennale, where the security team of a former prime minister ripped out its wires on opening day to ensure there was no bomb. (Incidentally, Rao felt that this ludicrous gesture completed the piece.) In 2013, the artist memorialized Raouls life and works in The Retrospectacle of S. Raoul, by Shubigi Rao, an exhibition organized by the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore. Its catalogue, Historys Malcontents: The Life and Times of S. Raoul, was a biography-cum-compendium lovingly rendered by Raouls ever-devoted protge, Rao.

The feeling was mutual. Raoul was purportedly a great admirer and collector of the artists work; in fact, as Rao pithily remarks, it was also what killed him. As the legend holds, Raoul died attempting to negotiate space in a cultural context; more specifically, he tripped over Raos River of Ink, 2008. The ambitious project saw Rao fill a hundred hand-bound books with a personal epistemology, compiling and categorizing all the knowledge she had gleaned from a life of reading. She then soaked these books in ink, saturating the pages beyond legibility. The work commemorated the razing of the House of Wisdom during the siege of Baghdad in 1258, when the rivers were said to have run black with ink, then red with blood. This act of unfathomable biblioclasm effectively decimated several centuries of thought, scholarship, and poetry; in doing so, it helped tip the scales, allowing other empires to eclipse the vast achievements of the Islamic Golden Age.

Intentionally or not, the work that killed poor S. Raoul would give rise to Raos next long-term endeavor, Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book, 2014. As always, the artist chooses her words carefully. In keeping with the agentive potential she assigns books, Rao explicitly labels her work a biography, rather than a history. Moreover, at a time when book banning has once again reared its ugly head, Raos use of the term banished angles for something else; what she sets out to survey are not just victims of cultural warfare but banished books, those presumably sent packing from their respective Edens.

Pulp teems with a deep love of the printed page, while openly embracing the complicated edges of bibliophilia and the darker legacies of print. If our history is anything to go by, Rao writes, all books are predestined ashes. And yet preservation efforts can have unintended consequences. Like Nabokov and his butterflies, print has a nasty habit of fixing to the page ideas that should remain in motion. The irony of folk tales bound in a book, on a shelf in a library, is an obvious example of the cessation of the evolving, the silencing of the collective oral, Rao argues. She also points to the tyranny of the textbook, a means of entrenching narratives in the service of empire. To avoid reproducing such hegemonies, Rao has designed her project to have multiple flexible installments. Like her body of work devoted to S. Raoul, Pulp was intended to span ten years, with research beginning in 2014 and a total of five volumes issued at two-year intervals thereafter, but Covid-19 has disrupted this timeline. As of now, the series consists of two published books, with the third set to debut as part of the artists presentation at the Singapore pavilion in Venice. The first volume, released in 2016, introduces several of the key thinkers and case studies that frame Raos inquiry. Some speak to violence against books as an act of war (such as the 1992 destruction of the National Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo); others reveal perversity in the fetishism of the printed page (such as in Leuven, Belgium, where rare books recovered from the 1914 bombing of the library are kept under glass and would turn to dust if anyone ever tried to read them).

In the introduction to the first volume of Pulp, Rao writes of the act of destroying bookspulpingas a means of turning things into a sterile mush. The artist pulls off a similar mastication, condensing thousands of references and observations, but Raos text never feels sterile; if anything, theres an aura of active contamination, amplified by the red ink of notes originally handwritten in the margins. Raos a wily writer, and you get the sense that she likes to flirt with danger. Her sentences wink and smirk; her presence is constant, and unlike S. Raoul, she never loses herself in academic jargon. Its easy to take issue with the figure of the artist-researcher (the entire S. Raoul project did just that). The position affords one just enough gravitas to feel justified in holding forth on history, theory, or politics, and just enough levity to evade accountability. Rao owns these privileges and limitations. She styles herself as a flaneur in her own brain, sharing asides on coelacanths and the Koh-i-Noor diamond and pausing to admire the sunset in the bear diorama at the American Museum of Natural History. An omnivorous curiosity impels her Arcades-style stroll through the wonders of the library. Flipping pages, she writes,

While Pulp I bristles with a thorny wit and plenty of Borges references, Pulp II (2018) marks a dramatic tonal shift. During the research process leading up to Pulp II, the artist came to understand that the stories she was collecting were not her own. Framing the book as a Visual Bibliography, Rao steps back as the ever-present author, clearing space for the voices of her collaborators. Prior to this volume, Rao hadnt been terribly interested in truth; she had always gotten more leverage from fiction. Here, a series of vignettes acquaint us with all-too-real figures, ranging from the anonymous librarian who misclassifies a controversial paperback as rare so as to protect it from abuse, to the team behind Public Library, a digital shadow archive advocating for open access through mindful piracy, to firsthand accounts of the human chain that librarians and volunteers formed to rescue books from Sarajevos burning library, risking their own lives so that the cultures recorded on those pages might endure. If Pulp I had time for inside jokes, Pulp II seems staggered by the unexpected power of the narratives it contains, essentially reminding us that libricide matters only because we cling to books as a means of survival beyond the body.

The Biennale provides a fresh context and wider audience for Pulps pandemic-delayed third release, which seeks to reclaim agency for the printed word. With limited travel opportunities, Rao had to adjust her way of working; no longer the flaneur, following one avenue to another, she had to lay out a direct path in advance. Focusing on Singapore and Venice as historical publishing hubs, Rao takes up the case of two vanishing languages: Cimbrian, which traditionally flourished in the highlands just north of Venice, and Kristang, which today has fewer than a thousand speakers sprinkled through Malaysia and Singapore. Cimbrian may persist on the page, but it has slipped out of vernacular usage, whereas Kristang, the last of the Portuguese creole languages to survive in Southeast Asia, encapsulates the geopolitical tensions and asymmetries of its region. Exploring other power imbalances in print, the artist makes room for the stories of women who write about other women (her decision to do so now has particular resonance, as Rao and curator Ute Meta Bauer will make up the Singapore pavilions first female-led team). Above all, Pulp III (2022) offers its author a chance to digest the research of the past five years. If, as Rao has argued, one negative feature of print is that it endeavors to ossify the fluid processes of knowledge production, the artists multivolume format has allowed her the space to evolve alongside her research.

Kate Sutton is coeditor of international reviews for Artforum.

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Kate Sutton on Shubigi Rao and her work at the 59th Venice Biennale - Artforum