flamingos

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Seems to be a way of making Bluesky style feeds with Mastodon-style services, well that's what I gather from reading the FAQ. They don't actually explain what this is anywhere.

The current and sole mod is inactive and all the links in the sidebar are dead. I plan to mostly run the community as is, update with news, post the occasional piece of fan art, etc.

I opened an SJW account with @flamingos@sh.itjust.works. I don't know if you need me to comment/post in !rwby@sh.itjust.works with that account. I know lemmy-ui only shows those options on content, but other frontends don't irrc.

The UK government’s latest relationships, sex and health education (RSHE) guidance calls on schools to be “mindful” that there is “significant debate” about transgender identities, and staff “should be careful not to endorse any particular view or teach it as fact”.

The Department for Education (DfE) finally published its long-awaited, updated statutory guidance on RSHE on Tuesday (15 July), as well as its response to the consultation held on proposed changes to it.

A statutory review of RSHE guidance was announced by the former Conservative government under Rishi Sunak in March 2023, after the DfE said it had received “disturbing” reports of “inappropriate material” being taught in some schools. Education secretary Gillian Keegan, who supported outing trans pupils to parents, said the review was needed to “make sure all children are protected from inappropriate content”.

The revised guidelines will come into force from 1 September 2026, replacing the previous guidance, and sets out the legal duties schools must comply with when teaching RSHE.

Within the 42-page document, points 67 to 72 – equal to around a page in length – outline guidance in relation to “gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender content”.

The word “transgender” does not appear anywhere else in the document.
[…]
Pupils should be taught “the facts and the law about biological sex and gender reassignment”, the updated guidance says, and they should “recognise that people have legal rights by virtue of their biological sex which are different from the rights of those of the opposite sex with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment”.

They should also learn to recognise that people with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment, as with the other protected characteristics, have protection from discrimination and should be treated with respect and dignity.”

State schools should be “mindful” that “beyond the facts and the law about biological sex and gender reassignment there is significant debate” and “should be careful not to endorse any particular view or teach it as fact”. The guidance goes on to give a specific example that schools should not “teach as fact that all people have a gender identity”.

It is also important to be “mindful to avoid any suggestion that social transition is a simple solution to feelings of distress or discomfort”, the guidance goes on to warn, and materials that could “encourage pupils to question their gender” should be avoided.

Apparently this should be ad free as well, let me know if that actually works.

Skeet

Unite has announced it has suspended Angela Rayner from her membership of the union, in an escalating row over the long-running bin strikes in Birmingham.

The deputy prime minister has been urging striking bin workers to accept a deal to end the dispute tabled by the Labour-run city council.

In an emergency motion at its conference in Brighton, the union said it would also re-examine its relationship with Labour if the council makes any of its members redundant.
[…]
A spokesperson for Rayner said she is no longer a member of the union - although Unite is insisting that she is on its membership system.

Unite is affiliated to Labour, and is the party's biggest union funder.

It did not donate to the party's election campaign last year, but made donations worth £10,000 towards Rayner's campaign, according to her register of interests.

Members of the union walked out in January over plans to downgrade some roles as part of the city council's attempts to sort out its equal pay liabilities.

An all-out indefinite strike was announced in March, and a deal to end industrial action has not yet been reached.

They also suspended Birmingham Council leader John Cotton.

We conducted an extensive financial analysis of 32 of these anti-rights organisations. Here's what we uncovered:

• Anti-rights groups have dramatically increased their spending by over 33% between 2019 and 2023, reaching £106 million
• The largest spenders are UK branches of US organisations (£34 million), ultra-conservative Christian policy/advocacy groups (£31.5 million), and anti-abortion organisations (£28.5 million)
• Groups promoting so-called "conversion therapy" have increased their spending by an alarming 165%
• The growth in expenditure of ‘crisis pregnancy centres’ – which work to dissuade pregnant people from seeking an abortion – has risen 46% between 2019 and 2023

Big spenders from the US

The Alliance for Defending Freedom (ADF), a Christian group that was instrumental in decimating abortion rights in the USA through the reversal of Roe v Wade, set up a UK branch in 2015. The ADF works to advance laws and policies that oppose access to abortion and LGBTI rights. In the UK they have been defending individuals charged for breaching Safe Access Zones around abortion clinics.

The ADF is spending more and more in the UK and its expenditure increased by 187% between 2019 and 2023, for a total of 3.9 million.

Anti-abortion groups and crisis pregnancy centres

We identified 25 anti-abortion organisations, including 13 so-called "crisis pregnancy centres". These unregulated centres pretend to offer impartial advice, but actually actively discourage abortion by spreading misinformation and stigma. For 9 of these 13 centres their spending rose by 46% from £4.4 million to £6.4million between 2019 and 2023.

Alarmingly, some of these centres receive funding from the National Lottery and government grants.

So-called ‘Conversion Therapy’ – a violation of human rights

We mapped 12 groups promoting the harmful and abusive practice of so-called "conversion therapy," aiming to ‘change’ or suppress people’s sexual orientation or gender identity. The spending of 4 of these surged by nearly 165%, marking the fastest growth of all categories tracked.

Despite the UK government announcing plans ban on conversion therapy in July 2024, no legislation has yet materialised.

Archive

I am talking to Amina, an AI avatar that plays the role of a woman living in a refugee camp in Chad after she escaped violence in Sudan. “I’m hanging in there, yeah,” Amina tells me. “ It’s tough here in the camp, but we’re staying strong.” I ask her how she came to be in a refugee camp. “I fled my hometown of Al Junaynah in Sudan back in June 2023, due to the violence, yeah?” It says. “It was a terrifying journey to escape the conflict. Now I’m trying to keep my kids safe and find some stability here in the camp. It’s not easy but we have to keep going, right?”

Amina is an experiment, part of a pair of AI avatars created by the United Nations University Center for Policy Research (UNU-CPR), a research institution connected to the United Nations. It’s one that is sure to be controversial, considering that the UN itself says a major problem facing refugees is their dehumanization for political gain or convenience. The UNU-CPR project is using an inhuman technology in an attempt to help people learn more about what they are facing. The group also tested a soldier persona called “Abdalla,” which “simulates the behavior and decision-making patterns of an actual combatant, offering negotiators and mediators a possible tool to train for future high-stakes negotiations.”
[…]
Right now, anyone can test Amina or Abdalla and talk with them for three minutes at a time. “The first is designed to create an accurate digital representation of a refugee living in a camp in Chad. The second creates a digital replica of a combatant leader in the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a group active in the southeastern part of Sudan from which many refugees are fleeing,” a write up of the project says.

The RSF began as groups of loose-knit militias in the early 2000s before becoming a more formal military group. It’s been conducting ethnic cleansing in Darfur for years now. I asked Abadalla if the RSF is committing genocide, and it gave a generally correct, though vague answer, and not one that you would expect from the group doing the killing.

“The RSF has faced serious allegations of committing atrocities and acts of genocide, particularly in Darfur, including systematic killings, mass rapes, and forced displacement of specific ethnic groups,” Abdalla tells me about the group it’s meant to represent. “These acts reflect a pattern of violence aimed at terrorizing civilians, contributing to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the region.”

On Monday, I gave what might have been my first ever fist pump for a House of Lords debate. Lord Watson of Invergowrie asked a question in the chamber about an investigation I published with Index on Censorship, where 53% of the school librarians I surveyed said they had been asked to remove books from their shelves. Even more worryingly, 56% of those librarians then felt forced to actually remove the books in question.

An overwhelming number of the books ripped off school library shelves had LGBTQ+ themes or authors, and the bans were usually in reaction to a single parent complaint – or even school leaders acting in anticipation of causing offence among particular communities. I spoke to librarians who feared for their jobs, and others have been in touch since, telling me about the pressure they are under.

The debate in the House of Lords showed overwhelming support for the freedom to read, and it was heartening to see the Lords sit up and listen.

Fast-forward to Wednesday evening. Just as I was thinking about which picture book to read to my son (which may or may not have had LGBTQ+ themes), a Reform councillor was making plans to raid library collections across Kent.
[…]
Whether books have indeed been banned, or a councillor is simply claiming that books have been banned, this is a dark moment for the freedom to read in the UK. Libraries in Kent have this week been a battleground for culture wars, and I fear they won’t be the last to become so.

There have been rumours of book ban demands happening in other Reform-led councils, but when I’ve asked the library services in question, they’ve denied having received such instructions. This is the first time it’s happened out in the open.

This is the kind of move we’ve already seen in the USA. Book censorship there has spiralled, with right-wing groups like Moms for Liberty and Republican politicians often leading the charge and calling for bans. Librarians have even received death threats and been investigated for holding LGBTQ+ content, as is very well-evidenced in a new film, The Librarians.

Up until this week, I could confidently say that library censorship in the UK was happening behind closed doors (not that that’s any better), and that incidents, whilst concerning, were not necessarily widespread. I can no longer say that. When a councillor publicly seeks to ban children’s books from a children’s section, something has shifted, there is a certain audacity to it. And now, I worry that the UK floodgates have opened. Others will feel emboldened to take similar actions.