Agence France-Presse

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Police In Moscow Raid Bars Over ‘LGBT Propaganda’

Police in Moscow raided multiple bars early Saturday and arrested the director of a gay travel agency under laws criminalising “LGBT propaganda”, state media reported.

The raids came on the one year anniversary of Russia’s Supreme Court outlawing the “international LGBT movement”, paving the way for arrests and prosecutions of the country’s already repressed LGBTQ community.

Russian security forces raided at least three bars and nightclubs overnight “as part of measures to combat LGBT propaganda”, the state TASS news agency reported.

Social media videos from the Arma nightclub, the former premises of the Mutabor, showed club-goers sitting on the dancefloor while riot police walked around shouting orders.

Another video showed people being walked out of the popular Mono gay club in central Moscow with their hands above their heads, with a police van parked outside.

The interior ministry said police had also raided an unnamed nightclub on Skladochnaya Street that had been “propagandising the ideology of the banned LGBT movement”.

The Interfax news agency named the club as “Inferno Night”.

Police in the capital also arrested the director of a travel agency for gay men on suspicion of “organising tours for members of the LGBT community”.

The 48-year-old director of “Men Travel” was suspected of “preparing a trip for supporters of non-traditional sexual values to go to Egypt for the New Year holidays”, the TASS news agency reported Saturday, citing law enforcement.

The Kremlin has ramped up conservative rhetoric since launching its military assault on Ukraine almost three years ago, casting the conflict as a battleground against the West and its values.

Rights groups say the country is waging an unprecedented crackdown on LGBTQ people that has seen the owners of gay bars arrested and anyone associated with promoting LGBTQ rights prosecuted.

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Nepal introduces third gender category in latest census

Nepal has introduced a third gender category in its census for the first time, a move the Himalayan nation’s LGBTQ community hopes will bring them greater rights.

Officials from the Central Bureau of Statistics have been visiting homes across the country of 30 million people since Saturday, giving respondents the option of choosing “others” as their gender, alongside male and female.

Nepal already has some of South Asia’s most progressive laws on homosexuality and transgender rights, with landmark reforms passed in 2007 prohibiting gender or sexual orientation discrimination.

A third gender category for citizenship documents was introduced in 2013 and Nepal began issuing passports with the “others” category two years later.

But gay and transgender Nepalis and rights activists say the LGTBQ community — estimated at 900,000-strong — still faces discrimination, particularly for jobs, health and education.

LGBTQ activists say a lack of data has hampered access to benefits they are entitled to.

“When there is data after the census, we can use it as evidence to lobby for our rights. We can make demands in proportion to our size of the population,” said Pinky Gurung, President of LGBTQ rights group Blue Diamond Society.

However, in more than 70 census questions there is only one linked to gender and critics say the results will still be limited.

Rukshana Kapali, a transgender woman and activist, who has filed a Supreme Court writ against the methodology, said the census was “problematic” and “cannot capture the real data of the LGBTQ community in Nepal”.

Rights groups say LGBTQ people have also been scared to identify themselves in the past but they are encouraging them to be more open this time.

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The Gay Whistleblower at Heart of Facebook Scandal

Instantly recognisable with his pink hair and nose ring, Christopher Wylie claims to have helped create data analysis company Cambridge Analytica before turning whistleblower and becoming “the face” of the crisis engulfing Facebook.

Carole Cadwalladr, the Guardian journalist who worked with Wylie for a year on the story, described him as “clever, funny, bitchy, profound, intellectually ravenous, compelling. A master storyteller. A politicker. A data science nerd.”

The bespectacled 28-year-old describes himself as “the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool,” referring to Trump’s former adviser, whom the report said had deep links with Cambridge Analytica (CA).

With Wylie’s help, Cadwalladr revealed how CA scooped up data from millions of Facebook users in the US.

They then used the information to build political and psychological profiles, in order to create targeted messages for voters.

Facebook insists it did not know the data taken from its site were being used, but the revelations have raised urgent questions over how data of 50 million users ended up in CA’s hands.

Shares of the tech giant have since tumbled, with $70 billion (56 billion euros) wiped off in 10 days.

Wylie studied law and then fashion, before entering the British political sphere when he landed a job working for the Liberal Democrats.

Former Lib Dem colleague Ben Rathe had a less complementary description of Wylie, tweeting that he “thinks he’s Edward Snowden, when he’s actually Walter Mitty” — a reference to a fictional character with a vivid fantasy life.

Wylie became a research director for Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), the parent company of CA, in 2014.

“I helped create that company,” he said of CA in an interview with several European newspapers.

“I got caught up in my own curiosity, in the work I was doing. It’s not an excuse, but I found myself doing the research work I wanted to do, with a budget of several million, it was really very tempting,” he told French daily Liberation.

Initially, he enjoyed the globetrotting lifestyle, meeting with ministers from around the world.

But the job took a dark turn when he discovered that his predecessor had died in a Kenyan hotel. He believes the victim paid the price when a “deal went sour”.

“People suspected poisoning,” he told a British parliamentary committee investigating “fake news” on Tuesday.

– ‘Repair Facebook!’ –

His appearance before MPs saw him swap his usual loud T-shirts for a sober suit and tie, producing hours of testimony against the firm that he left in 2014.

He said he eventually decided to speak out after US President Donald Trump’s shock election victory, which he partly attributed to the misuse of personal data for political purposes.

Cambridge Analytica vigorously denies the charges levelled against it, saying that Wylie was merely “a part-time employee who left his position in July 2014” and had no direct knowledge of how the firm had operated since.

Wylie urged British MPs to dig deeper into the story, insisting that his concern was not political and was focussed on abuses in the democratic process — including during the Brexit referendum campaign.

“I supported Leave, despite having pink hair and my nose ring,” he said.

He claimed that various pro-Brexit organisations worked together to get around campaign finance rules, using the services of Aggregate IQ, a Canadian company linked to the SCL group.

Wylie believes that it is “very reasonable” to say that CA’s activities may have swung the Brexit vote, although he stressed he was not anti-Facebook, anti-social media or anti-data.

“I don’t say ‘delete Facebook’, but ‘repair Facebook’,” he told the European newspapers.

However, he admitted to MPs that he had “become the face” of the scandal.