Nearly a third of Uganda’s new HIV infections occur among 15-to-25-year-olds, who say that despite progress, stigma is still a problem. To raise awareness ahead of World AIDS Day on December 1, Uganda holds an annual fashion and a beauty pageant for young people infected with HIV and calls them the Young Positives. Halima Athumani reports from Kampala.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said people convicted of terrorism offenses should not be allowed out of prison early after it was revealed the London Bridge attacker was released from jail last year before the end of his sentence.

Wearing a fake suicide vest and wielding knives, Usman Khan went on the rampage on Friday afternoon at a conference on criminal rehabilitation beside London Bridge.

“I think that the practice of automatic, early release where you cut a sentence in half and let really serious, violent offenders out early simply isn’t working, and you’ve some very good evidence of how that isn’t working, I am afraid, with this case,” Johnson said on Saturday.

Dutch police on Saturday continued looking for an attacker who stabbed three teens on a street in The Hague that was crowded with Black Friday shoppers.

The victims, two 15-year-old girls and a 13-year-old boy, were treated in a hospital and released late Friday. Police said in a statement that they did not know one another.

The victims have spoken to detectives.

“We are using all our available means — visible and unseen — to find the suspect in this stabbing as soon as possible,” police said in a statement, as they appealed again for witnesses.

That included studying video footage from the area, where many surveillance cameras are located.

The attack in the Netherlands came hours after a man wearing a fake explosive vest stabbed several people in London, killing two, before he was fatally shot by officers. Police are treating it as a terrorist attack.

Dutch police say the motive for the stabbing in The Hague remains unknown. “We are keeping all scenarios open,” their statement said.

The stabbing occurred around 7:45 p.m. in an area teeming with shoppers and close to the city’s most popular nightlife centers.

Police cordoned off the area until deep into the night as forensics experts combed the street for clues.

The street was opened again Saturday.

Mass protests, a last-minute venue change and talk of climate tipping points are adding some unplanned drama to this year’s international talks on tackling global warming.

Delegates from almost 200 countries had planned to put the finishing touches to the rules governing the 2015 Paris accord, ironing out a few wrinkles left over from last year’s conference in Katowice, Poland, and setting the scene for a major review of their efforts in 2020.

But then Brazil pulled its offer of hosting the talks and stand-in Chile, rattled by anti-government protests, canceled five weeks before the meeting. Next, President Donald Trump served formal notice that the United States was quitting the Paris accord, delivering a symbolic blow to one of his predecessor’s signature achievements.

And scientists? Well, they didn’t have any good news either. Study after study published in recent months has underscored the rapid pace of global warming and the need to cut emissions of greenhouse gases as soon as possible.

Against that backdrop, the Dec. 2-13 meeting in Madrid has gained fresh urgency.

“We have to do more in less time,” said Spain’s environment minister Teresa Ribera, whose country stepped in on short notice to host the talks, saying it wanted to support “constructive multilateralism” in the wake of Chile’s announcement and the U.S. withdrawal.

Organizers expect around 25,000 visitors, including heads of state, scientists, seasoned negotiators and activists to attend the two-week meeting.

Carbon markets

The main items on the agenda include finalizing rules on global carbon markets and agreeing how poor countries should be compensated for destruction largely caused by emissions from rich nations.

Proposals to create a worldwide market for emissions permits have been around for decades. The idea is that putting a price on carbon dioxide — the main greenhouse gas — and gradually reducing the available permits will encourage countries and companies to cut their emissions, notably by shifting away from fossil fuels toward renewable energy sources.

The European Union and some other jurisdictions already operate limited emissions trading systems, but efforts to roll these out worldwide have been hampered by fears that the lack of robust and transparent rules could corrupt the market.

“It would be great news to finalize this issue,” said Ribera. But she warned that the “solvency and integrity of the system” was a concern. “If we cannot complete it correctly, it’s better to lay the ground for later completion.” 

That view was echoed by Yamide Dagnet, a former EU climate negotiator now with the Washington-based environmental think tank World Resources Institute.

Loss and damage

The question of compensating poor countries for environmental destruction, technically referred to as loss and damage, is also likely to be sensitive, Dagnet said. Attributing specific weather disasters such as hurricanes and floods, or slow but irreversible changes like sea level rise and desertification, to climate change remains a delicate issue given the potential sums involved.

Concerns about the cost of climate change are growing on all fronts. 

Trump cited financial demands on the United States as one of the reasons for quitting the Paris accord; European countries have hesitated to raise fuel prices for fear of sparking yellow vests-style protests like those seen in France; meanwhile, businesses are beginning to consider the price not just of reducing emissions but also of failing to do so.

Scientists say the time to act is now, if the world wants to meet the goal set in Paris of keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), ideally 1.5C by the end of the century. By some measures average temperatures have already increased by one degree Celsius since pre-industrial times, with the sharpest rise occurring in the last few decades.

Tipping points

“Global warming is going faster,” said Johan Rockstrom, co-director of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “Climate impacts are occurring earlier and we are approaching potentially irreversible thresholds earlier than we previously thought.”

Rockstrom and several colleagues recently warned that the world is heading for several “tipping points” that could sharply accelerate the pace of climate change. They include deforestation in the Amazon and the decline of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.

Ribera, whose formal title is interim minister for ecological transition, indicated that European Union leaders may try to send a strong signal during the meeting that the bloc is prepared to make sharper cuts to its emissions than previously pledged. A recent proposal to aim for “climate neutrality” by 2050 failed to win support from all of the EU’s 28 member states, including the host of last year’s talks, Poland.

A bill originally meant to help law enforcement investigate cold cases of murdered and missing indigenous women that has floundered in Congress for two years may have the missing ingredients to become law — money and muscle.

The money comes from an appropriations subcommittee chaired by Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who told The Associated Press that for the first time funds are being directed specifically to murdered and missing indigenous people. The muscle comes from the White House and specifically the Department of Justice, which last week unveiled a plan that would investigate issues raised in the bill like data collection practices and federal databases.

It adds up to a strong outlook for Savanna’s Act, which was originally introduced in 2017 by Murkowski, Democratic Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Mastro and former North Dakota Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp. Murkowski and Heitkamp, longtime allies on issues affecting indigenous people, also created the Commission on Native Children, which recently held its first meeting.

“The great thing about Lisa’s work has been her willingness to not just pass this law but make sure there’s an appropriation for it,” Heitkamp said Friday.

Savanna Greywind

The bill is named for Savanna Greywind, a Native American North Dakota woman who was killed in 2017 when her baby was cut from her womb. The Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, chaired by North Dakota Republican John Hoeven, earlier this month advanced another version of bill to the full Senate for consideration.

Gloria Allred, an attorney for Greywind’s family, said they are “encouraged by what appears to be the strong efforts of U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s commitment to gather support for this bill in order for it to be signed into law one day.”

Savanna’s Act passed the Senate in 2018 but was blocked in the House by former Virginia Rep. Bob Goodlatte because he said it would hurt some agencies that have no link to tribal communities. Heitkamp said a new companion piece to the bill, the Not Invisible Act, has helped broaden the scope of the initiative and address concerns raised by Goodlatte.

“We are making some headway,” Murkowski said. “Not fast enough, but I think we’re making the efforts that are going to make a difference in the long haul. The legislative initiatives that we have used have successfully raised the issue of awareness.”

Savanna’s Act was introduced in the House earlier this year. Three of its co-sponsors are Native American — Sharice Davids of Wisconsin and Tom Cole and Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma.

Southern Africa is having one of the worst droughts in years with more than 40 million people expected to face food insecurity because of livestock and crop losses. Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia and Zimbabwe have declared this year’s drought an emergency. As Mqondisi Dube reports from Botswana’s village of Gamodubu, drought is so frequent that the government plans to stop calling it an emergency and instead make drought a part of the national budget.
 

California rock climber Brad Gobright reportedly reached the top of a highly challenging rock face in northern Mexico and was rappelling down with a companion when he fell to his death.

Climber Aidan Jacobson of Phoenix, Arizona, told Outside magazine he was with Gobright, and said they had just performed an ascent of the Sendero Luminoso route in the El Potrero Chico area near the northern city of Monterrey. Jacobson also fell, but a shorter distance, after something went wrong in the “simul-rappelling” descent, the magazine said.

The technique involves two climbers balancing each other’s weight off an anchor point. In online forums, many climbers described the technique as difficult and potentially dangerous.

Civil defense officials in Nuevo Leon state said Gobright, 31, fell about 300 meters (328 yards) to his death on Wednesday. The magazine account described the fall as 600 feet (about 200 meters). Jacobson suffered minor injuries, officials said.

Gobright’s body was recovered Thursday. The publication Rock and Ice described Gobright as “one of the most accomplished free solo climbers in the world.”

Friends on Friday described him as a dedicated climber who would travel the West Coast, living out of his Honda Civic, following the weather on a diet of gas station food.

“In some ways, I think he was such a fixture of the climbing community and such a big character on the scene, I feel like I’ve always known him,” said his friend Alex Honnold, who was the first person to ascend Yosemite National Park’s granite wall known as El Capitan without ropes or safety gear.

“He spent almost every day of his life doing exactly what he wanted to be doing.”

Jacobson said the pair might not have evened out the length of the 80-meter (88-yard) rope between them, to ensure each had the same amount, because Gobright’s end was apparently tangled in some bushes near a ledge below them.

That might have caused Gobright to essentially run out of rope; without the balancing weight of the other climber, both would fall. Jacobson fell through some vegetation and onto a ledge they were aiming for, injuring his ankle.

The duo did not tie knots at the end of the rope that would have prevented Gobright from rappelling off the end of it, Jacobson told Outside magazine.

Honnold said he’d often climb with Gobright as they discussed weighty topics such as the rise of China and would trade books about the evolution of humankind.

“He was just interested in the world,” Honnold said.

Samuel Crossley, a climber and photographer, said he first met Gobright about three years ago while filming “Safety Third,” a film chronicling Gobright’s life as a free solo climber.

Crossley said Gobright took the photographer’s needs and perspective into his climbs, taking direction well so they could make good photographs during sunrise or sunset that would become some of Crossley’s favorites.

Despite being an elite climber, Crossley said Gobright enjoyed living out of his sedan, noting other elite climbers lived out of vans.

“Brad was Brad, that was the beauty of it,” Crossley said. When you’re hanging out with Brad, you’re typically climbing and having a good time.”

Black Friday enthusiasts woke up before dawn and traveled cross-state to their favorite malls in search of hot deals, kicking off a shortened shopping season that intensified the scramble between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

But the ever-growing popularity of online shopping and holiday discounts that started weeks earlier dampened the frenzy. This year, more people got a head start on gift-hunting, lured by deals from retailers trying to compensate for the shorter season.

The shopping season is the shortest since 2013 because Thanksgiving fell on the last Thursday in November — the latest possible date it could be.

Shoppers up since the wee hours slept in chairs at Nashville’s Opry Mills mall, known for its outlet stores. Outside, deal-seekers were still fighting for parking spots by midmorning.

Haley Wright left Alabama at 4 a.m. to arrive at the Tennessee mall by 7 a.m. She makes the annual trip because she says the stores offer better deals and a more fun environment than the shops back home.

“I let my husband do the online shopping; I do Black Friday,” she said.

The National Retail Federation, the nation’s largest retail trade group, baked the shorter season into its forecast, but it says the real drivers will be the job market. It forecasts that holiday sales will rise between 3.8% and 4.2%, an increase from the disappointing 2.1% growth in the November and December 2018 period that came well short of the group’s prediction.

NRF expects online and catalog sales, which are included in the total, to increase between 11% and 14% for the holiday period.

Last year’s holiday sales were hurt by turmoil over the White House trade policy with China and a delay of nearly a month in data collection because of a government shutdown.

Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at market research firm NPD Group Inc., says he doesn’t believe a shorter season will affect overall sales, but early discounts will likely diminish Black Friday’s impact. In terms of the busiest day of the year, it will be a toss-up between Black Friday and the last Saturday before Christmas.

“We still have the same amount of money to spend regardless of whether the season is longer or shorter,” he said.

More than half of consumers started their holiday shopping early this year, and nearly a quarter of purchases have already been made, according to the annual survey released by the NRF and Prosper Insights & Analytics.

Kara Lopez and Jeremy Samora arrived at Denver’s Cherry Creek Shopping Center as soon as it opened Friday to snag deals on candles and lotions at Bath & Body Works.

A half-hour later, they sat with their purchases sharing a thermos of hot chocolate, a tradition Lopez started years ago when she had to wait in line for the store to open and the first shoppers inside got gifts like stuffed animals. It’s more relaxed these days, but Lopez likes it that way.

“I like the mall but not when it’s full of people,” she said.

Adobe Analytics predicts a loss of $1 billion in online revenue from a shortened season. Still, it expects online sales will reach $143.7 billion, up 14.1% from last year’s holiday season.

Adobe Analytics said Thanksgiving Day set records for online shopping. Consumers spent $4.2 billion on Thanksgiving, a 14.5% increase from the holiday a year ago. Black Friday was on track to hit $7.4 billion.

As online sales surged, some retailers including Costco.com and H&M grappled with brief outages, according to technology company Catchpoint.

Target reported Friday that 1 million more customers used its app to shop Black Friday deals compared with last year. The discounter said customers bought big ticket items like TVs, Apple iPads and Apple Watches.

Walmart worked to ease long lines with technology allowing shoppers to check out with sales associates in the aisles. The retail giant said its most popular deals included TVs, Apple AirPods and “Frozen” toys.

In Europe, though, Black Friday drew a backlash from activists, politicians and even consumers who criticized the U.S. shopping phenomenon as capitalism run amok. Climate demonstrators blocked a shopping mall near Paris and gathered in front of Amazon’s headquarters. Workers at Amazon in Germany went on strike for better pay. Some French lawmakers called for banning Black Friday altogether.

In the U.S., attention Friday turned to malls, which are fighting for traffic as online shopping grows.

At Mall of America, the country’s largest shopping mall, crowds were expected to exceed the 240,000 count on Black Friday from a year ago, said Jill Renslow, senior vice president at the Bloomington, Minnesota-based mall.

Maria Mainville, a spokesman at Taubman Centers, which operates a little over 20 malls in the U.S., says that its centers reported strong customer traffic since earlier this week. That’s different from last year when Black Friday and Thanksgiving drew the majority of the crowds for the period.

At some malls, some shoppers were surprised at the relatively thin crowds.

Two Bath & Body Works saleswomen wearing reindeer antler headbands shouted about promotions at a trickle of shoppers walking through Newport Centre in Jersey City, New Jersey.

“It looks empty for Black Friday,” said Latoya Robinson, a student who lives in New York and planned to stop by Forever 21 and Macy’s to shop for herself.

In Kansas, Kassi Adams and her husband drove 50 miles (80 kilometers) to Town East Mall in Wichita, even though the couple were nearly done with their holiday shopping. They were surprised to see how few people were there and even boasted about getting a choice parking spot.

“There is really not much of a crowd to fight,” she said.

Forget Thanksgiving. In Africa, consumers are forgoing the turkey dinner and family drama. Instead, they are, in huge numbers, celebrating the bonanza that comes the day after: 

Marketing website Black Friday Global estimates that Black Friday sales are 1,331 percent higher than average-day sales in Nigeria and 1,952 percent higher in South Africa, the continent’s two largest economies. In Nigeria, the average Black Friday shopper spends about $60 U.S.; in South Africa, it’s just over twice that amount per shopper. 
 
South African economist Mike Schussler, who estimates that the adopted holiday has been observed in South Africa for about a decade, said he thought Black Friday “has become a little bit of a worldwide phenomenon — particularly, I think, in countries where consumers are very much needed by the retailers, where retailers have had to entice consumers from their tight spending into the shops. And in South Africa and a few other places, the end of November is normally the time period when people get what we call their Christmas bonus or their annual bonus.” 

On the rise
 
And the phenomenon is growing. First National Bank, one of South Africa’s largest financial institutions, reported this week that its cardholders made purchases worth more than 2.5 billion rand — that’s a cool $169 million U.S. — last Black Friday, and it expected to see a 16 percent increase this year. 
 
In the world of electronic commerce, Black Friday has been a game-changer, said Abdesslam Benzitouni, a spokesperson for Jumia, a Nigeria-based shopping site that operates in more than 10 African countries. Black Friday, which Jumia started promoting in 2014, is now so big that it has eclipsed a single day, he said. He declined to give sales figures. 

“Just last year, we had more than 120 million visits on our website,” he told VOA from Nairobi. “And this year we’re expecting to have more than 150 million visiting our website. It was one day — Black Friday was on Friday. Then we went to one week. And now it’s one month for us.” 

Good for African enterprises
 
So what are African consumers buying? More or less the same stuff shoppers are buying everywhere else, he said: electronics, phones, televisions, clothes. But although many of those items are not made in Africa, this consumption binge is, Benzitouni argued, a good thing for the continent. Many of Jumia’s vendors, he said, are small, local African enterprises. 
 
“Imagine tomorrow, if we have this African free trade market between African countries, we can have, like, a seller from Nairobi who can sell directly to Nigeria or Ghana.  … Black Friday is just an opportunity to promote this e-commerce. So we are creating an infrastructure and visibility for a new digital economy,” he said. 

Or maybe it’s just a good day to get a sweet deal. Whatever the reason, in Africa, it’s open season for Black Friday. 

Namibia’s President Hage Geingob on Friday looked set to secure a second term with partial results from this week’s general election showing him leading with 56 percent of the vote.

The southwestern African country held its sixth presidential and parliamentary elections on Wednesday amid economic woes and growing frustration against the regime.

Geingob’s South West Africa People’s (SWAPO) party has been in power since Namibia’s independence from South Africa in 1990, and is widely hailed for its role in the liberation struggle.

But the president – who was elected with a sweeping 87 percent majority in 2014 – is predicted to lose a share of votes to a breakaway SWAPO member running as an independent candidate, former dentist Panduleni Itula.

The breakaway candidate is particularly popular among youth frustrated by the lack of jobs and too young to remember the SWAPO-led war for independence.

Partial results published by the Electoral Commission of Namibia after around 65 percent of the votes were counted showed Geingob leading with 56.08 percent, followed by Itula with 28.49 percent.

PDM candidate and second-time runner McHenry Venaani was third with 5.71 percent.

SWAPO was also ahead in parliament with 65.34 percent of the vote.

The party’s long-standing opponent, the Popular Democratic Movement (PDM), was a distant second at 15.67 percent.

Corruption scandal

SWAPO looks likely to retain the two-thirds majority in the 76-member parliament it has enjoyed since 1994.

But Geingob’s popularity has slipped. His first term was overshadowed by a recession, and his credibility took a hit over a giant fishing scnadal that erupted just before the election.

A series of leaked documents alleged that senior government officials awarded horse mackerel quotas to Samherji, one of Iceland’s biggest fishing firms, in exchange for bribes.

Fishing is one of Namibia’s key economic sectors, second only to mineral mining.

Two ministers resigned but have denied any wrongdoing. They appeared in court Thursday over alleged bribes of $10 million.

The saga took another twist on Friday when two South African lawyers representing the former ministers were detained for operating without work permits.

Namibia’s chief immigration officer Nehemia Nghishekwa told AFP the lawyers would be brought to court and were likely to spend the night in custody.

‘Generally peaceful’

Around 1.4 million of Namibia’s 2.4 million population were registered to vote. Half were under 37 and around a third born after 1990.

The election was “generally peaceful, well organised and conducted in a professional manner,” the Southern African Development Community (SADC) regional bloc said Friday.

Commonwealth observers echoed that assessment and said the polls were “carried out in a largely peaceful and orderly manner”.

Namibia was the first country in Africa to introduce electronic voting machines in 2014.      

The machines – opposed by opposition parties fearing the lack of paper could facilitate fraud – were meant to accelerate the voting and counting process.

But the voting process was painfully sluggish and had people queueing for hours.

“We observed that the processing of voters remains slow, thereby resulting in an arduous polling experience for many voters,” said the head of the Commonwealth Observer Group.

SADC recommended better training and “voter education” around the use of these machines.

Home foreclosures hit low-income neighborhoods in the United States particularly hard during the 2008 financial crisis, which triggered a severe economic recession.  Local groups, government funding, and people determined to bring change now work to rebuild those communities.  As VOA’s Arash Arabasadi reports, a convicted killer is a big part of that effort in Chicago’s famed South Side

The DR Congo town of Oicha on Friday buried 27 victims of the latest massacre in the sprawling country’s volatile east, with hundreds paying homage to the dead.

Mourners gathered in silence around the morgue of Oicha, located near the Ugandan border and east of the DRC town of Beni, the scene of repeated deadly attacks, an AFP correspondent said.

Workers wore face masks as they wrapped the corpses in shrouds. Wooden crosses marked the graves and many wept as the bodies were lowered.  

During the mass funerals, gunfire broke out from the nearby bush but it was unclear who was firing.

The victims were hacked to death with machetes on Wednesday, taking to 107 the number of people killed in and around Beni since November 5.

The vast majority of the killings have been carried out by the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a militia that has plagued the Democratic Republic of Congo’s east since the 1990s.

The massacres have sparked protests against the local United Nations peacekeeping mission, known by its French acronym MONUSCO.

A general shutdown was meanwhile observed in Goma, the main city in DRC’s east, in solidarity with the beleaguered residents of Beni and Oicha.

The UN refugee agency meanwhile said there was an exodus of locals from Oicha to Beni, about 30 km (20 miles) away.

“Alarming reports from the region suggest people being trapped and under threat from the armed groups, with daily reports of loss of life,” the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said on Friday.

“Abductions and attacks on schools, health centers and indigenous communities are also on the rise,” it said.

“Information is difficult to verify, as the movement of humanitarian workers is restricted due to insecurity around the city and in the territory of Beni, as a result of violence.”

It was only after her partner’s death that He Meili realized the full meaning of marriage.

As a lesbian couple in China, He and Li Qin kept their ties largely unspoken, sometimes introducing themselves as cousins. This rarely bothered He until Li succumbed to complications from lupus in 2016, and Li’s parents demanded that He hand over the deed for their apartment and other property documents under Li’s name.

He, a 51-year-old nonprofit worker in southern China’s Guangzhou city, has joined LGBT activists and supporters in an appeal to lawmakers to allow same-sex marriage, using a state-sanctioned channel to skirt recent government moves to suppress collective action.

“I realized if LGBT people don’t have the right to marry, we have no legal protections,” she said. “Others will also experience what I did — and be left with nothing.”

Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, space for civil society and advocacy has shrunk. Human rights activists and their lawyers have been detained, while internet censorship has increased.

LGBT activists have turned to a novel tactic: submitting statements to the National People’s Congress, China’s legislature, which is soliciting opinions from the public on a draft of the Marriage and Family portion of the Civil Code through Friday.

“A lot of people told me that this is the first time they’ve participated in the legal process,” said Peng Yanzi, director of LGBT Rights Advocacy China, one of several groups running the campaign.

The Marriage and Family section is among six draft regulations for which the legislature began seeking comments at the end of October. As of Thursday afternoon, the website showed that more than 200,000 suggestions had been submitted either online or by mail, the greatest number of any of the outstanding drafts. It was not clear what proportion of the suggestions pertained to same-sex marriage.

In social media posts, campaign participants held up their Express Mail Service envelopes along with rainbow Pride flags. In their suggestions, they shared stories of coming out, the challenge of gaining family members’ acceptance and running into legal roadblocks when trying to share their lives with someone of the same sex.

A teacher wrote about experiencing discrimination at his workplace; others wrote about not being allowed to make medical decisions for their ailing partners.

“This is not just a symbolic gesture,” Peng said. “It really has an impact on our everyday lives.”

Peng’s organization has outlined a desired revision to the language in the Civil Code, changing the terms throughout from “husband and wife” to “spouses” and from “men and women” to “the two parties.” Rather than adding specific language about same-sex marriage, the revisions seek to eliminate gendered terms from the legislation.

‘Harder to ignore’

While activists and experts acknowledge that legalizing same-sex marriage is still a far-off reality in China, they said appeals through the official channel will push the government to take the demand more seriously.

“There’s a near-zero chance the suggested changes will be accepted and implemented, but this campaign makes China’s LGBT community’s demands for equality harder to ignore,” said Darius Longarino, a senior fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center who has worked on legal reform programs promoting LGBT rights in China.

“Calls for gay marriage often get dismissed as being too marginal and unimportant to get onto the political agenda, or as being inconsistent with Chinese traditional culture,” Longarino said.

Few legal protections are available for same-sex couples in China. One party can apply to be the other’s legal guardian, but those accompanying rights are a small fraction of those enjoyed by married couples, Longarino said. He gave the example of a lesbian woman who bears a child in China, with no way for her partner to become a second legally recognized parent of that baby.

At a briefing in August, a spokesman for the National People’s Congress Standing Committee’s Legislative Affairs Commission suggested that same-sex marriage does not suit Chinese society.

“China’s current marriage system is built on the basis of a man and a woman becoming husband and wife,” said Zang Tiewei, director of the commission’s research department, when asked whether same-sex marriage will be legalized.

“This regulation is in line with China’s national conditions and historical and cultural traditions,” Zang said. “As far as I know, at the moment most countries in the world don’t recognize the legality of same-sex marriage.”

Censorship, stigma

LGBT advocates have garnered growing support from the Chinese public, using social media to raise awareness even as they face frequent censorship. They won a victory over the censors in April 2018, when one of the country’s top social networking sites backtracked on a plan to restrict content related to LGBT issues. Users flooded Weibo with hashtags such as “#I’mGayNotaPervert” after the Twitter-like platform said “pornographic, violent or gay” subject matter would be reviewed.

But misconceptions and discrimination persist. A 2015 survey by the Beijing LGBT Center found that 35% of mental health professionals in a sample group of nearly 1,000 believed that being gay is a mental illness. Around the same percentage supported the use of conversion therapy. When “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the hit biopic about Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury, came to China, viewers were treated to a version without any references to Mercury’s sexuality or his struggle with AIDS.

Hua Zile, the chief editor of an LGBT-focused Weibo account with 1.69 million followers, said he hasn’t publicized the same-sex marriage campaign on his microblog because he worries about the dispiriting effect it will have on the LGBT community when it inevitably fails.

“We can’t reach the sky in a single leap,” Hua said. “We should try to make progress step-by-step, or else we’ll constantly be disappointed.”

After He’s partner passed away, it pained her to think about how they kept their status in the shadows.

Through their 12-year relationship, it was He who accompanied Li on doctor’s visits. She stayed with her at the hospital when lupus made her nauseous and delirious with fever, and she helped her reach their fourth-floor walk-up after her legs grew weak.

In He’s mind, they were married. But in reality, many people didn’t even know they were dating.

Friends told He that she could file a lawsuit to recover some of her and Li’s shared property. She hired a lawyer to start the process, which required painstaking documentation of their relationship and signed statements from their neighbors and friends attesting to their long-term bond.

“It was like tearing open a wound over and over again,” He said. “I had to keep coming out about my sexuality. If we were married, all of this would be understood.”

In the end, He gave up on the lawsuit. It was too exhausting, she said, to have to prove their love to everyone.

Gaza’s health authorities say a Palestinian teenager has been killed as Israeli troops opened fire at people near the Gaza-Israel frontier.      

The health ministry said Friday that 16-year-old Fahed al-Astal was shot in the stomach. It said four others were wounded.
       

Witnesses say dozens of people have gathered near the perimeter fence east of Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, though there was no official demonstration planned today.
       
For the third straight week, the territory’s Hamas rulers canceled the regular Friday protests for fear of instability. This followed two days of fighting between Israel and the smaller Islamic Jihad militant group earlier this month.
       
Earlier on Friday, an Islamic Jihad militant died of wounds he sustained during the fighting.

In a British election dominated by Brexit, young voters who had no say in the country’s decision to leave the European Union could hold the key to victory. That is, if they can be bothered to vote.

It has long been a truth in British politics that young people vote in lower numbers than older ones. In the last election in 2017, just more than half of under-35s voted, compared to more than 70% of those older than 60.

But that may be changing. According to official figures, 3.85 million people registered to vote between the day the election was called on Oct. 29 and Tuesday’s registration deadline _ two-thirds of them under 35. The number of new registrations is almost a third higher than in 2017.

Amy Heley of Vote for your Future, a group working to increase youth participation, says the figure is “really encouraging, and shows that politics has been so high profile recently that it is encouraging more young people to vote.”

New voters are unimpressed

That doesn’t mean, however, that young voters like what they see. Many appear unimpressed with the choice between Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservatives, the main opposition Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn and a handful of smaller parties.

“I think they’re all unlikeable,” said Callum Nelson, a 21-year-old law student attending a question session with local candidates at his London college. “I’m tempted to exercise my right to spoil my ballot.”

About 46 million people are eligible to vote in the Dec. 12 election to fill all 650 seats in the House of Commons, including hundreds of thousands who were too young to take part in the U.K.’s 2016 Brexit referendum. Britain’s voting age is 18, although Labour and other parties, including the centrist Liberal Democrats and environmentalist Greens, want it lowered to 16.

The current election campaign is a product of that 2016 vote, in which Britons decided by 52%-48% to leave the European Union after more than four decades of membership.

More than three years on, the country remains an EU member. Johnson pushed for the December election, which is taking place more than two years early, in hopes of winning a majority and breaking Britain’s political impasse over Brexit. He says that if the Conservatives win a majority, he will get Parliament to ratify his Brexit divorce deal and take the U.K. out of the EU by the current Jan. 31 deadline.

Labour says it will negotiate a new Brexit deal, then give voters a choice between leaving on those terms and remaining in the bloc. It also has a radical domestic agenda, promising to nationalize key industries and utilities, hike the minimum wage and give free internet access to all.

While most opinion polls give Johnson’s Conservatives a substantial lead overall, the surge in new young voters is good news for Labour, which is seeking to defy the odds and win a general election for the first time since 2005.

Young voters are more likely than their older compatriots to oppose Brexit, which will end Britons’ right to work and live in 27 other European nations and will have a major — though as yet unknown — economic impact.

Other issues

Matt Walsh, a senior lecturer in journalism at the University of Cardiff, said young voters also strongly back abolition of tuition fees and stronger action against climate change, both policies “at the center of the offer that the Labour Party is putting forward to young people.”

Labour’s strategy “is to try and grab those missing voters, get them registered and get them to vote and support Labour policies,” he said.

Labour is spending more than its main rival on social media ads, churning out a stream of memes and messages on Facebook and Instagram. It is also outspending the Conservatives on Snapchat, whose users tend to be younger than those on the other networks. Twitter has banned all political advertising.

Labour also pushed to get young people to register to vote before the Nov. 26 deadline, spreading the message through tweets from celebrity supporters, including grime artist Stormzy. Corbyn posted a link to the government’s voter registration website 26 times on Twitter and 31 times on Facebook in the month before the deadline. Johnson, in contrast, didn’t post the link or the word “register” at all on Twitter, and just once on Facebook.

While some analysts are forecasting an electoral “youthquake,” others are cautious. This is a rare winter election, and turnout could suffer if Dec. 12 is a wet, cold day. It’s also difficult to know how much the voters’ decision will be motivated by Brexit and how much by domestic issues.

“At this point, I’m kind of sick of Brexit,” said Susie Chilver, a first-year politics student at the University of Bristol, in southwest England. “So, the things that are swaying it for me are things like social housing, and things like health care, more about social issues than foreign policy.”

Konstantinos Matakos, senior lecturer in the department of political economy at King’s College London, said there is an assumption that young voters are “leaning more Labour.” But he says their geographical spread, and whether they show up on polling day, will ultimately determine their impact on the outcome.

“It’s not a straightforward assumption to say that this surge in the registration rates will undoubtedly benefit Labour in terms of gaining electoral seats,” he said.

Some young voters agree that Labour shouldn’t take their support for granted.

“People think that students will definitely vote for Labour,” said Molly Jones, a 19-year-old student at London’s Westminster Kingsway College. “But a lot of them who I’ve spoken to, it’s not like that. They will vote for the Liberal Democrats, or the Greens, or even the Conservatives.

“All the parties are just a mess at the moment, and all the leaders are terrible,” she said. “It makes it really hard to vote for someone — you just hold your nose and vote.”
 

Former Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, a giant of his country’s post-World War II politics who pushed for a more assertive Japan while strengthening military ties with the United States, has died. He was 101.

The office of his son, Hirofumi Nakasone, confirmed that Nakasone died Friday at a Tokyo hospital where he was recently treated.

As a World War II navy officer, Yasuhiro Nakasone witnessed the depths of his country’s utter defeat and devastation. Four decades later, he presided over Japan in the 1980s at the pinnacle of its economic success.

In recent years, he lobbied for revision of the war-renouncing U.S.-drafted constitution, a longtime cause that no postwar leader has achieved to date.

From US critic to ally

Nakasone began his political career as a fiery nationalist denouncing the U.S. occupation that lasted from 1945 to 1952, but by the 1980s he was a stalwart ally of America known for his warm relations with President Ronald Reagan.

He boosted defense spending, tried to revise Japan’s U.S.-drafted pacifist constitution and drew criticism for his unabashed appeals to patriotism.

In the 1950s, he was a driving force behind building nuclear reactors in resource-poor Japan, a move that helped propel Japan’s strong economic growth after World War II but drew renewed scrutiny in the aftermath of the meltdowns at a nuclear plant in Fukushima swamped by a tsunami in 2011.

Navy officer to parliament

The son of a lumber merchant, Nakasone was born May 27, 1918, the last year of World War I. He went to Tokyo Imperial University before entering the Interior Ministry and then the navy, where he rose to the rank of lieutenant commander during World War II.

In his last news conference as prime minister, he said his political ambitions were sparked after the war by “the conviction I felt as I gazed bewildered at the burned ruins of Tokyo.”

“How can this country be revived into a happy and flourishing state?” he said.

He established his nationalist credentials by campaigning for parliament riding a white bicycle bearing the “rising sun,” or the “Hinomaru” national flag, which Japan’s wartime military had used. He won a seat in 1947, becoming the youngest member of parliament at age 28.

Nakasone became a leading figure in the Liberal Democratic Party that has dominated postwar politics. During more than a half-century in parliament, he served as defense chief, the top of the powerful Ministry of International Trade and Industry, and secretary-general of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party before becoming prime minister.

Nakasone assailed the U.S.-drafted postwar constitution, demanding revision of the document’s war-renouncing Article 9 and urging a military buildup.

Nuclear power

He was a key figure behind crafting and ramming through government funding for nuclear research in 1954, less than a decade after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing 200,000 people in the last days of the war. In 1955, he helped pass legislation designed to promote nuclear power.

“Atomic power used to be a beast, but now it’s cattle,” he told a parliamentary session in 1954.

In a 2006 speech marking the 50th anniversary of Japan’s first nuclear institute in Tokaimura, Nakasone said he was intrigued by nuclear power as he tried to figure out why Japan lost the war.

“My conclusion was that one of the biggest reasons was (the lack of) science and technology,” he said. “I felt strongly that Japan would end up being a lowly farming nation forever unless we take a bold step to develop science and technology.”

After the Fukushima disaster in 2011, there was a public backlash against nuclear energy, but Nakasone said it remained indispensable to maintain Japan’s industrial growth.

New kind of leader

As prime minister from 1982 to 1987, Nakasone broke the mold of the Japanese politician. His outspokenness appealed to voters, and he was praised for putting a human face on Japanese politics.

His tongue sometimes got him in trouble. He sparked outrage in 1986 by suggesting Japan was an economic success because it didn’t have minorities with lower intellectual levels.

He was the first Japanese prime minister to visit South Korea, a country with bitter memories of its 1910-1945 colonization by Japan. That was his first trip abroad as leader, a break from his predecessors, who made Washington their first stop.

Despite that gesture, Nakasone was staunchly committed to Japan’s alliance with the U.S., and his warm friendship with Reagan was known as “Ron-Yasu” diplomacy.

His premiership coincided with a period of major trade disputes with the West. Responding to U.S. complaints that Japanese markets were closed, Nakasone initiated packages to reduce tariffs and other import barriers, including a long-term plan to shift Japan’s export-dependent economy to focus more on domestic growth.

He also privatized the sprawling Japan National Railways, today’s Japan Railways group, as well as the state telephone and tobacco companies.

Controversial moves

Nakasone’s nationalist legacy includes the first official visit in 1985 by a postwar prime minister to Yasukuni Shrine, which honors the war dead, including Japan’s convicted war criminals. His visit fueled disputes with China and South Korea over World War II history that persist to this day.

Nakasone overcame opposition from Japan’s strong pacifist forces to boost defense budgets, and excluded military technology cooperation with the U.S. from Japan’s ban on arms exports.

“Japanese cowered under the (postwar U.S.) occupation and occupation policies,” Nakasone said just before stepping down as prime minister in 1987. “It is important to revive from that cowered spirit — that is healthy nationalism.”

But Nakasone also said Japan should remain a war-renouncing nation.

“We must stick to our commitment as a pacifist nation. We have caused tremendous trouble to our neighboring countries in the past war,” Nakasone said in a 2011 interview with public broadcaster NHK. “Our commitment to peace must be the centerpiece of Japan’s domestic and diplomatic policies.”

Both nationalist and wrestling with the same issues — stronger military, constitutional revision and trade friction with the U.S. — Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been compared to Nakasone by some Japanese media and analysts. But the Japan that Abe leads today is no longer at its peak and China is now a rival to the U.S., and Abe is seen more hawkish toward Beijing’s aspirations.

Elder statesman

In later life, Nakasone became one of Japan’s leading elder statesmen. He promoted his longtime dream of revising the U.S.-drafted constitution and pronouncing his views on national and international affairs. He had attended an annual May rally campaigning for a constitutional revision until he skipped one just before turning 100, when he had a hand injury and couldn’t use his cane to rise from his wheelchair.

He retired from parliament in 2003, at age 85, when he was pushed to retire from parliament after then-Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi urged him to step aside in upcoming elections to make way for a younger lawmaker.

Nakasone complied, but he accused Koizumi of discrimination and lack of respect for his elders. He publicly read a haiku poem. In his 100th birthday message, Nakasone said that he was not done yet, and that same haiku still best described his spirit:

Even after dusk,
Cicada persists in song,
While it still has life.

Nakasone is survived by his son Hirofumi, a parliamentarian, two daughters, and three grandchildren.

Donald Trump faces a process that could end with his removal as President of the United States. Impeachment hearings underway now in the House of Representatives are just the start of what is prescribed by the U.S. Constitution. In today’s installment of American Impeachment, VOA’s Steve Redisch has an overview of what is taking place.
 

NATO leaders are preparing to gather in London for a two-day meeting Tuesday to mark the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the alliance, but growing tensions among members could overshadow the celebrations.

The war in Syria and the ongoing Russian threat will serve as the backdrop to the summit. Fellow NATO members the United States and Turkey came close to confrontation in northern Syria last month, rattling the alliance.

“The position of Turkey in the North Atlantic alliance is a difficult one,” said Jonathan Eyal of the Royal United Services Institute in London in an interview with VOA this week.

“Turkey’s decision to become involved in military operations in the Middle East against the wishes of most of its allies, including the United States, [and] Turkey’s decision to buy Russian military equipment … [are] riling with many countries in Europe.”

NATO members say it’s better to have Turkey inside than outside the alliance.

“NATO is about European security, it’s not about coordinating policies in the Middle East,” Eyal said.

Where American troops once kept the peace, Russian forces now patrol northern Syria. The U.S. withdrawal has fueled concerns over America’s commitment to NATO. French President Emmanuel Macron recently called the alliance “brain dead” and urged Europe to create its own security architecture. 

The comments elicited a sharp rebuke from NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg this week.

“European unity cannot replace transatlantic unity. We need both. And we have to also understand that, especially after Brexit, the EU cannot defend Europe,” Stoltenberg told reporters.

Europe still sees Russia as the biggest threat following its 2014 forceful annexation of Crimea and ongoing campaigns of espionage, cyberwarfare and disinformation.

European concerns over the U.S. commitment to Article 5 of the NATO treaty, on collective defense, are not borne out by facts on the ground, Eyal said.

“The reality is the Pentagon’s spending in Europe is increasing, the number of U.S. troops is increasing.”

The deployment of U.S. troops in Europe is seen differently in Moscow.

“Some of the Eastern European nations are trying to get American boots on the ground despite the fact that Article 5 should cover their security, which suggests that they trust the United States more than they trust NATO,” Andrey Kortunov of the Russian Council on International Affairs in Moscow told VOA in a recent interview.

U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly demanded that European NATO members “share the burden.” Germany on Wednesday pledged to meet the NATO defense spending target of 2% of GDP, but only by the 2030s.

“The U.S. president should be credited with actually banging the table hard enough for the United States to be heard,” Eya said, “This is, and it’s important sometimes to repeat the cliché, the most successful alliance in modern history.”

NATO will hope that is cause for celebration as leaders gather for its 70th anniversary.