It’s not easy to visit the Palestinian territories. To witness Hebron’s ancient religious sites in the West Bank, you normally need an Israel-issued visa. Entering Gaza, still under a 12-year Israeli-Egyptian air, land and sea blockade, is even more difficult, with access usually restricted to journalists and NGO workers.
But an app launched on Oct. 30 wants to bring the occupied Palestinian Territories into homes around the world. Palestine VR offers an array of virtual reality tours of the West Bank and Gaza, with users spared immigration interviews, soldiers at checkpoints, or the risk of attention by Hamas, or potentially fraught encounters with settlers.
Highlights of the new appinclude a tour of the ancient city of Hebron, guided by a former Israel Defence Forces (IDF) soldier-turned activist; a walk through Ramallah with 13-year-old journalist Jana Jihad; and a visit to Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock in the company of Palestinian anthropologist Ali Qleibo.
“Those who visit Palestine and are exposed to the reality of oppression, discrimination and displacement are always moved by what they see,” said Salem Barahmeh, the executive director of the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy, the NGO behind the app. “With Palestine VR, we want to bring this reality to people directly all over the world.”
Israel has controlled access to Gaza and the West Bank since the Israeli-Arab war of 1967. Its continued occupation of the territories is among a range of issues that have caused friction between Israel’s right-wing government and liberal American Jews.Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in September threatened to legally annex almost one-third of the West Bank—a move widely seen as a death knell for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
President Donald Trump, meanwhile, and his administration have made little effort to stay neutral. He has moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, which Palestinians regard as the capital of their future state, and recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a rocky plateau Israel also captured during the war of 1967.
In August, Israel blocked Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar from a planned tour of the West Bank following a tweeted intervention from Trump, who claimed the two Democratic Congresswomen, both Muslims, “hate Israel and all Jewish people.” Israel subsequently said it would consider a “humanitarian request” for Tlaib — whose parents were Palestinian immigrants — to visit her relatives, on the condition she would not voice certain political views.
“It’s critically important that people see the reality with their own eyes and that’s exactly what my government is trying to prevent,” Avner Gvaryahu, a former soldier who leads the app’s virtual tour of Hebron, told TIME. “But with the help of this app, they can get the second-best thing. You can’t hide the occupation and I’m confident that this tool will encourage more people to learn about the reality on the ground.”
Hariri said he had “reached a dead end,” after protesters rejected a package of reforms he introduced last week. But his resignation looks unlikely to assuage protesters, who seek nothing less than the removal of the entire system, as the country’s economy teeters on the brink of collapse.
Here’s what to know about Hariri’s resignation and what it means for the protests in Lebanon.
What led to Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s resignation?
The protests started on Oct. 17 after the government announced new taxes, including a fee on calls on free messaging services like WhatsApp. Protesters flooded the streets, angry at a government that has pushed Lebanon to the edge of economic collapse.This quickly grew into the largest anti-government protests in Lebanon’s history.
Hariri, the son of assassinated former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, announced a package of reforms Oct. 21 that included a pledge to fight corruption, fix failing infrastructure, help for poor families and to cut politicians’ salaries in half.
That offer was met with chants of “revolution” and fresh calls for him to step down. Since then, the protests have only escalated, blocking major roads across the country. Banks and universities remain closed.
After Hariri resigned, some protesters chanted “We want the 16 million back,” in reference to the large sum Hariri is alleged to have given to a South African model. Hariri has not commented on the allegations, but the model claims she had an affair with Hariri before he took office, and there is no suggestion the cash gifts were illicit.
That amount is pocket change compared the tens, or even hundreds of billions of dollars the demonstrators say was stolen by their politicians, aided by bank secrecy laws. They say that want those laws lifted and the money back in the public coffers.
“We are going to stay in the street until the whole system falls down,” said Hanna Hajj, who is from the south of Lebanon but lives in Beirut. “It’s been 30 years of this. The system is corrupt.”
What’s the reaction in the streets?
Hariri’s resignation was greeted with cheers and pledges to continue the demonstrations. “This is goal one. We achieved it,” said Jad Rustom, 29, as he heard the news. “We are going to celebrate tonight and tomorrow we will see what is the next step.”
Protesters say they want an end to corruption, nepotism, government mismanagement and most of all, the sectarian political system that they say has allowed all these things to flourish. Lebanon’s current political system is based on a sectarian power-sharing agreement re-established at the end of the country’s civil war in 1990. It reserves certain offices for each religious sect; the President is always a Christian and the Prime Minister a Sunni Muslim.
“We want a Lebanon that is not sectarian,” says protester Karim Choueiri, 43, who works at a solar energy company. “We want the best person to be in power, not because he’s Christian, Muslim, Druze, or whatever.”
Within moments of Hariri’s announcement, protesters started repeating the popular chant “all of them means all of them”—a saying also scrawled on walls across the country. “All of them” means the demonstrators want each of the country’s sectarian party leaders to resign.
“I’m worried there is too much utopia and there is a long road ahead,” says Choueiri. “It’s like we opened Pandora’s box. What happens next is not clear.”
What happens next?
This is not the first time Hariri has resigned. In 2017, he stepped down in a televised address while on a trip to Saudi Arabia—most believe under the pressure of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
The Lebanese came together then demanding their “kidnapped” prime minister be released and demanding an end to foreign meddling in their country. Many saw the forced resignation as Saudi Arabia’s attempt to counter the influence of Iran, which backs the Shi’ite political and militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon.
At the time, Lebanese President Michel Aoun refused to accept Hariri’s resignation.“That time was different,” says Layal Sakr, a Lebanese lawyer and co-founder of Seeds for Legal Initiatives, a legal advocacy organization. “This time it was the pressure of the people.”
Could Hariri return as prime minister again?
Hariri remains caretaker prime minister until the parliament votes on a new leader. And technically, “there is nothing in the law that says they cannot just nominate Saad Hariri again,” says Sakr.That would surely spark more outrage here.
What the protesters want is a new government, but elections must be ordered by the parliament, which still filled with the members of the old sectarian political parties.
If they do succeed in that, it’s unclear who will take over. The protesters have no leader or official list of demands, but most call for a technocratic government made up of experts who can help the country avoid complete financial collapse.
Why is Lebanon’s economy in such poor shape?
The civil war in neighboring Syria has negatively affected Lebanon’s economy, according to the World Bank, slowing GDP growth. At the same time, debt has piled up as lawmakers borrowed billions to pay for reconstruction from Lebanon’s own civil war, which lasted a decade and a half and ended in 1990. Protesters say officials also used the money to line their own pockets. The ratio of debt to GDP is now over 150%, and political paralysis has prevented the government doing much to tackle it.
Decades of state mismanagement and corruption has left Lebanon deeply divided between rich and poor, according to economist Nasreen Salti. Around one-third of Lebanese live below the poverty line, while an estimated 1% of the population holds 25% of the country’s wealth.
The war has also sent 1.5 million Syrians into Lebanon—which had a population of about 4.6 million at the start of the conflict—giving it the highest number of refugees in the world, per capita. While this has further strained the country’s cash-starved public services, the impact on the wider economy is disputed.
What has been the reaction to the protests?
Security forces have scuffled with protesters, who blocked roads several times. But the biggest on-the-ground confrontation has been between anti-government protesters andsupporters of Hezbollah and Amal, Lebanon’s two main Shiite parties who both have ministers in the current government.
On Tuesday, these counter-protesters attacked anti-government demonstrators at a sit-in blocking a road in central Beirut.They carried no flags, but chanted in support of Amal leader Nabih Berri, shouting slogans like, “We are the children of the resistance.”
Hezbollah,which the U.S. government has designated a terrorist organization, is commonly referred to as “the resistance” in Lebanon because of the group’s role in ending the Israel’s occupation in south Lebanon. Hezbollah is also seen as less corrupt by many—but that image has been tarnished after Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah, who has no official position in the government, said it should not resign and implied the protesters were backed by unnamed foreign embassies.
“There is clear funding by certain parties,” said Nasrallah.Protesters made light of this claim, some posting photos of their mothers making sandwiches for the protesters with captions like “this is support from from the Embassy of the Mother.”
After the confrontation Tuesday, the Amal and Hezbollah supporters raided the main protest camp, burning down tents and smashing chairs. Many of the protesters ran, but by evening, thousands had returned.“I feel bad for these people,” says anti-government protester Hussein Hassan of the counter-protesters as he stood amid the charred remains. “These people are poor, these people are brainwashed. I’m sure that soon enough they will join us in the streets, because our battle is theirs.”
(ISTANBUL) — Turkey on Wednesday condemned two resolutions passed by the U.S. House of Representatives that symbolize deteriorating Turkish-American relations.
Addressing his ruling party, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he wouldn’t recognize the nonbinding House resolution to recognize the century-old mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide. The bill passed 405-11. Erdogan then said Turkey “strongly condemns” a bipartisan bill to sanction senior Turkish officials and its army for Turkey’s incursion into northeastern Syria, which passed 403-16.
Both bills, passed Tuesday, were a sign of further deterioration in Turkish-American relations, which have been strained over multiple issues, especially U.S. support for Syrian Kurdish fighters considered terrorists by Ankara.
Turkey’s foreign ministry said that it summoned U.S. Ambassador David Satterfield on Wednesday over the resolutions.
Turkey disputes the description of mass deportations and killings of Ottoman Armenians in 1915 as genocide and has lobbied against its recognition in the U.S. for years. It has instead called for a joint committee of historians to investigate. “We are saddened that a slander against our country is being accepted by a country’s parliament,” he said and added, “we would consider this accusation the biggest insult towards our nation.”
The step to consider the events as genocide “does not count for anything,” Erdogan argued, saying American lawmakers had acted “opportunistically” to pass the bill at a time when Turkey is being widely criticized for its incursion into Syria.
Turkey’s cross-border offensive against Syrian Kurdish fighters, which Ankara says is necessary for its national security, began on Oct. 9 after months of Turkish threats and a sudden decision by U.S. President Donald Trump to withdraw troops and abandon Kurdish allies against the Islamic State group. Trump’s move was widely criticized by both the Republicans and the Democrats.
The second bill sanctioning Turkey shows the bipartisan disapproval of Trump’s decision and condemns Turkey’s offensive. The measure would bar most U.S. weapons sales to Turkey and slap sanctions on foreigners attempting to send the Turks military equipment. It would also block high-ranking Turkish officials from their assets in the U.S. and restrict their travel here.
“We will never accept those who attack Turkey and myself for the sake of supporting the PKK, which is a terror organization that is the killer of tens of thousands of people,” Erdogan said.
He was referring to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which has waged a 35-year armed insurgency in Turkey’s southeast and eastern regions. The Syrian Kurdish forces are linked to the group and follow the same ideological leader, Abdullah Ocalan, who is imprisoned in Turkey.
Turkey halted its operation through two separate cease-fires brokered by the U.S. and Russia to allow the Kurdish fighters to withdraw 30 kilometers (19 miles) away from the Turkish border but Erdogan renewed threats to resume the operation if promises weren’t fulfilled.
Turkey and allied Syrian fighters now control a portion of the previously Kurdish-held border zone, as Russian and Syrian government troops move into the rest of the areas following a deal with the Kurdish force.
Turkey’s foreign ministry criticized American lawmakers in a statement, saying it would be wrong for them to take their “vengeance”for Turkey’s Syria offensive through the Armenian genocide bill. “Undoubtedly, this resolution will negatively affect the image of the U.S. before the public opinion of Turkey,” the ministry said.
Everyone has an opinion about where Felicia Anna works. For the last nine years, the 33-year-old Romanian sex worker has attracted clients by standing in the glowing windows of the world’s most famous red light district. Sipping coffee outside a cafe on one of Amsterdam’s cobbled, canal-side streets, she says the area’s reputation means it attracts far more controversy than legal prostitution does in other areas. “We’re always in the public eye, literally” she says, laughing. (TIME has used pseudonyms to protect the identities of sex workers interviewed for this piece.)
Named “De Wallen” (The Walls) in Dutch for its position inside the old city walls, the red light district’s medieval buildings have been a hub for sex workers since the 15th century—long before the Netherlands legalized brothels and began regulating and taxing prostitution in October 2000. Today, escort services and sex clubs make up a significant part of Amsterdam’s sex work sector. But De Wallen’s 330 window brothels—popularized in the 1960s as authorities grew more tolerant of women opening their curtains to attract clients—remain iconic: the literal manifestation of the clear-eyed Dutch approach to activities that other countries would rather sweep under the rug.
In the years since Felicia Anna arrived in this city of 850,000, though, a crisis has been building that leaves the fate of the red light district uncertain. Budget tourists have flooded the streets of De Wallen, often snapping photos of sex workers without permission and crowding out residents. The increasing numbers of migrant workers from Eastern Europe and further afield since the late 20th century—advocates estimate around 80% of those working in the windows are migrants—has fueled concerns among lawmakers over sex trafficking. And, onan international level, the Dutch model of legalized, visible sex work hasn’t gained as much traction as the Swedish decriminalization model—implemented in 1999 and recently copied by Canada, France, Ireland, and Israel—that criminalizes the buying, but not selling, of sex in a bid to drive down demand. In the U.S., full decriminalization bills introduced this year byNew York StateandWashington D.C. legislators face a long road and fierce criticism—including from some sex worker advocates.
Femke Halsema, Amsterdam’s first elected female mayor, says she is determined to see Dutch pragmatism prevail in her city, despite the red light district’s difficulties. “I don’t have to like sex work. It’s irrelevant. Because there’s a market,” she says. Halsema has ruled out a city-wide ban on sex work but says the red light district must fundamentally change: crime must go down, residents must have a quieter life, and sex workers must have safer working conditions. In July, she announced four possible options for reform—including the end of all prostitution in the red light district. That idea has angered sex workers and their unions, who say it would drive them into more vulnerable underground conditions and damage the livelihoods of tax-paying workers. “We are a part of Amsterdam. We were here first,” Felicia Anna says. “Do we always have to move away, just because some people don’t like it?” To solve the red light district’s crisis, Amsterdam will need to decide how the world’s oldest profession should look in the 21st century city.
Jasper Juinen—Bloomberg via Getty ImagesFemke Halsema, mayor of Amsterdam, poses for a photograph in her office in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on Nov. 30, 2018.
The mayor’s officesits just half a mile from De Wallen, in a sleek city hall of metal and glass. Halsema came to Amsterdam in her early thirties, attracted by the freedom of the big city after getting bored knowing “every face” in smaller Dutch towns. Gazing through large windows over a canal, the mayor contemplates the red light district’s role in her adopted city’s reputation.“ Amsterdam has a very long tradition of protecting freedom, and being a tolerant city. And I really want to protect that,” she says; as a lawmaker in parliament in 2000, she voted in favor of national legalization. “But we do not want to be famous because of sex and drugs. We want to be famous for our cultural heritage.”
But Amsterdam’s raucous reputation likely helped to draw many of the 18 million tourists who visited the city in 2018—four times the number of annual visitors a decade ago, before Europe’s budget air travel boom. On a Friday evening in the red light district this fall, they are out in force. British women on bachelorette parties stream out of karaoke bars and into brightly lit cafes that serve Nutella on everything. Clusters of French and Spanish teenagers wander over canal bridges, swigging wine bought from convenience stores, while Australian backpackers in coffee shops sample the legal weed. Middle-aged German couples shuffle past the window brothels and snap souvenir photos, ignoring signs that warn photography will violate sex workers’ privacy. And locals furiously grip their bike handles, chiming their bells to clear a path through the throng.
Since Halsema took office in July 2018, the city has hired extrasecurity workersto remind tourists to behave and announced a ban on organized tour groups in the area, starting in April 2020. Soon, Halsema plans to go further. To alleviate congestion in the area and combat sex trafficking, she has suggested four scenarios: the closure of window brothel curtains to discourage gawking tourists; a reduction in the number of windows; the addition of more windows to relieve sidewalk crowding or the end of prostitution in the red light district entirely. If she moved sex work out of De Wallen, Halsema says she would create a new work space somewhere else, either by relocating the windows or by creating a sex work hotel, where authorities could screen visitors.
Some argue that the city government itself is partly to blame for the red light district’s problems. Starting in 2007, a city-run gentrification project called 1012 (for the area’s postal code) bought up the leases of buildings used as brothels and cannabis coffee shops and, over the next decade, replaced them with upscale boutiques and restaurants. Around 125 brothel windows closed, increasing the concentration of tourists around the ones that remained. In the meantime, new mini-markets and other shops geared toward tourists opened up, counteracting the city’s aim of drawing Amsterdammers rather than tourists to the area. In 2018, the city’spublic audit officeruled the project had largely failed.
Sex workers say that 1012 shifted the atmosphere in the red light district, turning it into a more general tourist area and making it harder to run sex-related businesses. “At the moment, there are many tourists who just come to watch, and to take pictures, but don’t want to visit them as a sex worker and pay for their services,” says Rik Viergever, a board member at My Red Light, a non-profit brothel partly run by sex workers. Felicia Anna says the new demographic, which can’t afford her prices, has forced her to take several months off work.
It also did less tangible damage. Project 1012 “completely destroyed” trust between sex workers and the authorities, says Mariska Majoor, who worked in the windows in the 1980s and has since been a writer and one of the most prominent Dutch campaigners on sex worker rights. 1012 was done in the name of reducing human trafficking and crime in the red light district. “But it felt very obvious that it was a real estate thing, about buying up valuable land for rich people. It had nothing to do with making things better for sex workers,” Majoor says.
This time, though, Halsema says conditions for sex workers are central to her reforms. “I think most Dutch people have a sentimental image in their head of the red light district as a nice, intimate part of town, where sailors come, where strong Dutch women invite them in and who hit them if they’re being rude,” she says. “But the atmosphere there today is different.” Halsema claims that the surge in women from poorer Eastern European countries, such as Romania and Bulgaria, as well as other less economically developed regions like Latin America and Africa, increases the risk of exploitation. While not all of them were trafficked, she says, “you can question their free will, because there is a huge need for them to feed families elsewhere.”
Closing some windows or shifting everything to a contained, city-run workspace would, Halsema says, make it easier to monitor trafficking than in the porous borders of the red light district. In the long run, quashing Amsterdam’s reputation as a sex work hub could also send a signal to traffickers. “As a local governor I can’t end human trafficking any more than I can stop the international weapons’ trade,” she says. “But I do think there’s something to say about the relationship between being internationally known as a place of prostitution, and the attraction for traffickers.”
National figures show a striking increase in Dutch authorities’ counts of the number of victims in the Netherlands since the legalization of brothels, from 228 in 1998, to a peak of 1,711 in 2012, and 742 in 2018 ; the national rapporteur on trafficking estimates that the actual number of victims in the Netherlands is around five times the reported figures.72% of potential reported victims in 2018 were working in sex work, the rest in sectors like construction. But the government says the fluctuation in reporting rates may be explained by the changing resources allocated to policing and social services in a given year, and the awareness of the public. In recent years, the Internet has given traffickers new ways to do business outside the view of law enforcement, further complicating efforts to accurately count victims.
It is also hard to know if the problem is worse than in other countries, warns Brian Varma, manager at CoMensha, a Dutch non-profit that gathers data on trafficking. “In the E.U., every member state has its own methods for measuring victims,” he says.The Netherlands registers everyone presumed to be a victim by authorities, including some people who have declined to be formally or legally identified as trafficked. “Other countries, for example Germany or France, only register identified victims. That is why our numbers are higher,“ Varma says.
Though Halsema concedes that the figures on trafficking are unreliable, she says she feels obligated to do anything she can to reduce trafficking in her city. “Even if only [a small fraction] are trafficked, the stories you hear are so horrible.” The websites of Dutch anti-trafficking organizations brim with victimtestimonials. Many were tricked by traffickers posing as boyfriends, known as “loverboys,” and forced to work for months or years as sexual slaves. In one 2016 court case, the victim of an Albanian trafficking gang told a court she’d been held hostage with her children in a red light district brothel, suffering beatings, rapes and pressure to undergo a breast enlargement. “We cannot accept it,” Halsema says.
Despite concerns from authorities,some sex workerssay the window brothels are actually one of the places they feel most empowered to do their job. Thanks to a quirk in the prostitution licensing system, the windows are the only place they can work in Amsterdam without giving a cut of their money to a brothel owner or escort agency—a rule sex worker unions have long argued is unfair. In the windows, workers pay a fixed rent of roughly 90 euros for a nine-hour day shift and 170 for a nine-hour night shift and keep the rest of what they make. “If I go to work in a club, usually the club owner would take away 50% of my income,” Felicia Anna says. Last year she started a new pressure group, Red Light United, to represent workers who use the windows. She surveyed 170 window workers and says 93% are against plans to move the windows.
Jade, 29, who began using the windows three years ago after moving to Amsterdam from outside the E.U., says that working alone in the windows allows her greater control over her money, as well as the option to turn clients away if she doesn’t like the look of them or if they are rude to her. She bristles at the mayor’s concern for migrant women. “We’re all seen as vulnerable foreign women now because we’re migrants,” she says. “But I’m very much an agent of my own life, of my migration and of my business.”
Few deny that trafficking exists in Amsterdam. Many sex workers and advocates argue, though, that the red light district is one of the safest places in the city to do sex work. Jade points out that working in the red light district, she is surrounded by her colleagues. Heleen Driessen, a counselor at P&G292, a De Wallen-based health clinic for sex workers, says the number of police, local lawmakers and social workers who visit the area regularly make it difficult for traffickers to put women to work there. ”Of course, there are sometimes victims of human trafficking,” Driessen says. “But when you ask them, they are also happy that they worked in the red light area, because they could find us and ask us for help.”
Driessen says the transparency about prostitution encapsulated by the red light district is what makes Amsterdam—and the Netherlands more broadly—one of the world’s safest places to be a sex worker. She contrasts that visibility with the Swedish model, which allows women to carry out sex work but criminalizes clients and anyone who profits from another person’s sex work. Critics of the Swedish model argue it serves only to minimize the visibility of sex work, rather than to make it safer for the women who do it. Some argue it discourages sex workers from working in pairs or groups because they could be jailed for running brothels. And because the criminalization of buyers pushes people to carry out sex work in isolated spaces out of sight of the authorities, the Swedish model has been blamed for a surge in violent attacks on sex workers in France and Ireland.
A vocal but fairly small minority is pushing for the Netherlands to adopt the Swedish model to address exploitation; Christian feminist campaign group Exxpose has compiled a petition of 50,000 signatures—above the threshold at which parliament must hold a debate. Exxpose cite research that shows Swedish authorities saw numbers of women working in street prostitutionwas halved in the decaded following the 1999 legislation.
Though the Swedish model has taken off in seven other countries, Exxpose’s push for criminalization in the Netherlands is unlikely to succeed any time soon. In Amsterdam, the mayor is clear that she’s a supporter of legalized sex work. But some sex workers say Halsema’s proposed reforms reflect a wider pattern of allowing sex work in theory, but discouraging it in practice. “There’s so much discouragement hidden in the rules that it’s virtually impossible to be innovative in this sector,” says Velvet December, a coordinator at the sex worker union PROUD, citing an existing ban on Amsterdam’s sex workers working from home, and on window workers using the internet to find clients
December fears if the window brothels are closed, the city’s already-tight rules governing sex work will make it hard to find new space for the industry to thrive. Investors will be put off by the regulations, and people living in areas targeted for a sex workers’ hotel will protest,she says, pointing to the example of nearby Utrecht as a city that tried to overhaul its prostitution sector. In 2013, the cityclosedits historic red light area and around 100 prostitution windows on canal boats, promising to look for new sites for window work. Six years later theplans remain stalled because of the difficulty finding financial backers and resistance from the city council.
Relocating or replacing the red light district with a purpose-built prostitution hotel would also mean the end of an international landmark—even if it’s a controversial one. “To have the sex industry integrated with so called ‘normal life’, among churches and restaurants and a kindergarten and the Salvation Army shop – that’s pretty special,“ Majoor says, noting that the red light district developed over centuries. “You can’t just create that atmosphere somewhere else. If we get rid of the sex work, Amsterdam’s city center will be like any other old European capital.”
Halsema says she’s well aware of the danger of being too dogmatic, given the red light district’s historical roots and the concerns of sex workers, residents and anti-trafficking groups. She has held public meetings on the proposed reforms, inviting local residents and sex workers to weigh in—a step that sets her apart from previous city authorities, sex workers say. The city council will debate her ideas up, offering opinions on potential risks and benefits of each one. But Halsema will make the final choice and implement it, likely some time next year. “I want to create a process where a lot of people feel they are being heard—which is not the same as having it their way. We all have to compromise in the end.”
The shape of that compromise will likely determine what comes to mind when you hear the name Amsterdam, or even the term “sex work,” 10 years from now. For a few months though, the windows and their curtains remain open. The red lights continue to glow. And the debate rages on.
(COPENHAGEN, Denmark) — Teen climate activist Greta Thunberg, who has inspired millions across the world to stage protests urging leaders to better tackle global warming, has declined an environmental prize, saying “the climate movement does not need any more prizes.”
Two fellow climate activists spoke on Thunberg’s behalf at an award ceremony Tuesday in Stockholm for the regional inter-parliamentary Nordic Council’s prizes, reading a statement thanking the group for the honor. Thunberg, 16, is currently in California. But Sofia and Isabella Axelsson quoted Thunberg as saying that “what we need is for our rulers and politicians to listen to the research.”
The Nordic Council hands out annual prizes for literature, youth literature, film, music and the environment, each worth 350,000 Danish kroner ($52,000).
It was not the first prize that the climate activist has won or been nominated for.
Three Norwegian lawmakers nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize this year because they believe “the massive movement Greta has set in motion is a very important peace contribution.”
Last year, about three months into her school climate strike campaign, Thunberg declined another award — the Children’s Climate Prize, which is awarded by a Swedish electricity company — because many of the finalists had to fly to Stockholm for the ceremony.
“We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and yet all you can talk about is money. You are failing us,” she said.
Weeks later, Thunberg won the 2019 Right Livelihood Award — known as the “Alternative Nobel” — “for inspiring and amplifying political demands for urgent climate action reflecting scientific facts.”
KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP) — A Nepalese man shattered the previous mountaineering record for successfully climbing the world’s 14 highest peaks, completing the feat in 189 days.
Nirmal Purja scaled the 8,027-meter (26,340-foot) Mount Shishapangma in China on Tuesday, which was the last of the 14 peaks that are more than 8,000 meters (26,240 feet) in height.
The previous record for climbing the 14 peaks was seven years, 10 months and six days. It was set by South Korean climber Kim Chang-ho in 2013.
Mingma Sherpa of Seven Summit Treks in Kathmandu, which equipped the expedition, said the 36-year-old Purja was in good health and safely descending from the summit.
Climbing experts called the record a momentous achievement in mountaineering history.
“It is a great achievement for mountaineering and mountaineers and a milestone in the history of climbing,” said Ang Tshering, who previously headed the Nepal Mountaineering Association.
A former soldier in the British army, Purja began his mission on April 23 with a climb of Mount Annpurna in Nepal.
In Nepal, he climbed Mount Annapurna on April 23, Mount Dhaulagiri on May 12, Mount Kanchenjunga on May 15, Mount Everest on May 22, Mount Lhotse on May 22, Mount Makalu on May 24 and Mount Manaslu on Sept. 27.
In Pakistan, he climbed Mount Nanga Parbat on July 3, Mount Gasherbrum 1 on July 15, Mount Gasherbrum 2 on July 18, Mount K2 on July 24 and Mount Broad Peak on July 26.
In China, he scaled Mount Cho You on Sept. 23 and Mount Shishapangma on Oct. 29.
He struggled to get permission from the Chinese government for his last climb and was allowed only after getting help from the Nepalese government.
Purja’s photo of a long line of climbers just below the Mount Everest summit was widely circulated on social media in May. It raised concerns about overcrowding and the safety of climbers spending so much time on the highest point of the earth for hours stuck on a traffic jam.
Purja joined the British army in 2003 and quit earlier this year to begin his mission of climbing all the highest peaks in record time.
WASHINGTON — The House has voted overwhelmingly to recognize the century-old mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide. The move is a clear rebuke to NATO ally Turkey in the wake of its invasion of northern Syria.
Historians estimate that up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed around World War I, and many scholars see it as the 20th century’s first genocide. Turkey disputes the description, saying the toll has been inflated and considering those killed victims of a civil war.
The nonbinding resolution passed 405-11 Tuesday. American lawmakers have been critical of Ankara’s recent incursion against the Kurds along the Turkish-Syrian border.
