Interesting Shares

Row over £1.05m amenities block comes amid growing concern over the cost of the event, which is taking place in Osaka in 2025

Scientists made the discovery using data gathered by NASA's now-retired SOFIA airborne observatory.

Seven of the world’s “most trusted” media companies produce and promote content touting the key talking points of oil and gas.

A new report from GLAAD asked LGBTQ+ gamers about representation, harassment, and attitudes in the gaming world.

The good news? More and more gamers identify as queer. The bad news? Less than 2% of video games feature LGBTQ+ content.

On February 13, the media advocacy organization GLAAD released its inaugural State of LGBTQ Inclusivity in Gaming Report, which was created “to educate the game industry on the current state of LGBTQ representation that exists, make a fact-based business case for LGBTQ inclusion, and provide a playbook for more authentic representation,” per an official press release.

Working with Nielsen Games, GLAAD surveyed a sample of 1,452 LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ gamers about representation, harassment, and overall attitudes within the gaming world.

The report found that nearly 1 in 5 (17%) of active gamers are LGBTQ+, which marks a 70% increase from the 10% of active LGBTQ+ gamers counted in Nielsen’s 2020 Games 360 Survey. This percentage is even higher among younger age groups: almost a third (28%) of 13-to-17-year-old gamers are LGBTQ+, compared to about a quarter (24%) of 18-to-24-year-olds and 23% of 25-to-35-year-olds.

For many LGBTQ+ players, the gaming community isn’t just a hobby, but a vital source of support at a time when a record amount of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation is being introduced across the United States. (According to the American Civil Liberties Union, 417 such bills are active in states across the country as of this writing.) According to GLAAD, half (50%) of LGBTQ+ gamers feel more accepted by the gaming community than they do where they live, a percentage that increases to 55% for residents of states that have proposed and/or passed anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. In these states, 65% of LGBTQ+ gamers said that they depend on video games to help them get through hard times, and 75% say that games allow them to express themselves in ways they don’t feel comfortable doing in real life.

Yet despite these important queer ties to gaming, LGBTQ+ representation in the gaming world is sorely lacking. GLAAD counted the number of games that were tagged as having LGBTQ+ content on Steam as well as in Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo stores. They found that as of November 2023, less than 2% include LGBTQ+ characters. The Nintendo Switch Store has the lowest percentage of available games with LGBTQ+ characters and storylines, despite GLAAD data showing that Nintendo Switch consoles are particularly popular among LGBTQ+ gamers (39% of LGBTQ gamers use the consoles compared to 32% of non-LGBTQ gamers). The report notes that one potential explanation for the popularity of the Nintendo Switch among queer gamers “might be the lower cost of entry, compared to other platforms, and the fact that LGBTQ gamers in our study have relatively lower incomes than non-LGBTQ gamers.”

read more: https://www.them.us/story/lgbtq-gamers-queer-video-games-glaad-report

This story was originally posted by Greenpeace Africa.

For several years now, my country Ghana has been dealing with a silent plague: second-hand clothes. Behind its booming cocoa industry, vibrant culture and delicious food, this plague is choking our water bodies and toxifying our land. Why do I call them a plague? Because of the huge volumes of Western exports of discarded fast fashion.

Ghana was once declared home to the world’s largest electronic waste dump, due to the tonnes of e-waste being dumped into the country. But many are not aware of the further burdens that wealthy countries, especially in Europe and North America, continue to place on us.

For those reading this and living in the West, have you ever considered what actually happens to your clothing when you donate them? And do you assume donations end up in your home town or city? Well to answer that question – a lot of it comes to cities in Africa like Accra, flooding our flea markets before choking our rivers and lagoons, polluting our beaches and destroying marine life in our ocean – places they really shouldn’t be.

Second-hand clothes have long been important to Ghana’s local economy. Kantamanto market in Accra, established in the 1970s, is one of the largest second-hand markets in the world, with over 30,000 workers who sell, clean, repair and upcycle the Global North’s textile waste. But the growth of fast fashion since the 2000’s has led to increasing quantities of poorer quality clothing, and overproduced fast fashion arriving in overwhelming volumes. Ghana now receives an annual total of about 152,600 tonnes of second-hand clothes, known as Oburoni Wawu, literally translated as “dead white man’s clothes”. Every week, around 100 forty foot long containers, filled with over 15 million fashion items, arrive in the port of Tema, Ghana’s largest port, east of Accra. About 70% of these clothes are sent to Kantamanto market.

In October 2023, Greenpeace Africa and I joined forces with our colleagues at Greenpeace Germany on a research trip to document the situation in Ghana. Our aim was simple – to find out from local communities how this impacts their lives, how they feel about the vast quantities of used clothes being imported and to intervene by bringing just a small proportion of these clothes back to Europe – where they belong.

Our journey began in Old Fadama, Accra’s biggest informal settlement in Accra with over 80,000 inhabitants and home to a large and growing dumpsite. The mountains of clothes were huge. The smell was potent. And climbing to the top of them felt like standing on the monuments of our overconsumption – a harsh reminder of the fashion industry’s contribution to climate colonialism.

read more: https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/65273/return-to-sender-why-africa-doesnt-need-any-more-of-your-clothes/

Dreams play a significant role in the lives of Indigenous people in Australia.

Many believe dreams are a vehicle to connect with their ancestors, enable them to get guidance and ideas for expressing their creative abilities through singing, dancing, and artwork and maintain a connection to the spiritual realm.

Because of this, and the fact that it’s a biological necessity for maintaining good physical and mental health, getting a decent night’s sleep is crucial to improving health in Indigenous communities.

However, the lack of sleep health resources and services that respond to cultural needs and align with Indigenous worldviews often results in undiagnosed or unmanaged sleep issues in Indigenous peoples.

As Roslyn Von Senden, a Kalkadoon woman from Mount Isa who is involved in a programme to improve sleep health in communities, said: “Sleep loss deprives us of opportunities to connect with our culture, our ancestors and who we are as traditional custodians of the world’s oldest surviving culture. That leads to poor emotional and mental health, affects our wellbeing and results in chronic conditions.”

First Nations sleep research is a burgeoning field, with the evidence to date consistently suggesting high rates of poor sleep in Indigenous people across the world.

Poor understanding of the impact of sleep loss, limited availability of specialist sleep services and trained staff, inadequate sleep environments, and other social determinants of health significantly contribute to poor sleep in Indigenous communities.

Globally, three in five of adults struggle with poor sleep, significantly impacting their health and wellbeing.

read more: https://thewire.in/world/sleep-isnt-just-a-health-issue-its-a-cultural-one-too

Loosely based on the 2005 film, the new Mr. & Mrs. Smith TV reboot uses the action-comedy genre to represent how impossible life is for so many people today, with two misfit unemployables turning to assassin work out of desperation.

The eight episodes of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the new Amazon Prime remake of the 2005 Brad Pitt–Angelina Jolie hit movie, play at such a slow tempo, it’s as if you’re watching an experimental attempt to serialize an already-overlong indie art film and foist it on an unwary public.

Whether you can endure what is essentially the injection of action and comedy into something like Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story (2019) might depend on how much you like the lead actors, Donald Glover and Maya Erskine (PEN15), both of whom are versatile, compelling performers. They play misfit unemployables who apply for jobs as assassins and find that the hardest part of their dangerous new lives as John and Jane Smith isn’t the body count — it’s having to pretend to be married. The astonishingly good supporting cast helps too — it’s an unexpected pleasure to see colorful appearances by Paul Dano, Parker Posey, John Turturro, Alexander Skarsgård, Sharon Horgan, Sarah Paulson, Ron Perlman, and other notable talents.

Created by actor-singer-writer-producer Glover and Francesca Sloane, his fellow writer-producer on Atlanta, Mr. & Mrs. Smith is using the action-comedy genre as a way to represent how impossible life is now for so many people, which is a pretty good idea. So we recognize the dehumanizing process of the entirely computerized job interviews our two lead characters go through separately — sitting in a dark booth typing in anxious answers to more and more intrusive questions and having to submit fingernail clippings in tiny plastic bags to a small slot that opens up before them.

read more: https://portside.org/2024-02-11/new-mr-mrs-smith-very-different-brangelina-film

After choking on polluted air for many years, the Polish spa town of Ladek-Zdroj turned to renewables to clean up its act and improve its air quality. It managed to slash electricity costs in the process.

Small radio station forced to go silent after ‘unbelievable’ theft of giant tower, which would cost over $100,000 to replace

PARIS — An Olympic medal inlaid with a piece of the Eiffel Tower. How's that for a monumental prize?

A hexagonal, polished chunk of iron taken from the iconic landmark is being embedded in each gold, silver and bronze medal that will be hung around athletes' necks at the July 26-Aug. 11 Paris Games and Paralympics that follow.

Richard Plaud, a Frenchman who has dreamed of building the world's tallest matchstick sculpture, made headlines this week when Guinness World Records rejected his huge model of the Eiffel Tower, saying Plaud broke the rules.

It’s up to 300 locals in the north Atlantic town of Cape Ray to recover a shipwreck that appeared last month

The five-time NBA champion and his daughter, Gianna, died in a helicopter crash in January 2020.

Even Though it’s Night, which chronicles the conditions of Europe’s largest shantytown, Cañada Real, in running for a Goya

McDonald’s will open roughly 1,000 new outlets in China this year — part of what Bloomberg called a “breakneck expansion” in lower-tier cities in the country, where demand for Western fast food remains high.

The American fast-food chain has stated its ambition to have 10,000 restaurants in China by 2028. However, McDonald’s faces stiff competition from rivals such as Yum China — which owns Pizza Hut and KFC in the country, and which is also targeting cities outside of the economic hubs of Beijing and Shanghai.

read more: https://www.semafor.com/article/02/07/2024/china-will-see-1000-new-mcdonalds-restaurants-open-this-year

Climber, identified by police as a 29-year-old French man, believed to have reached top of 163m-tall residential building about 7.30am

On the centenary of it hosting the first winter games, the French town has lost none of the allure felt by pioneering skiers, curlers and skaters

Nutrinsect defies Italian food purists with cricket flour that can be incorporated into range of foods

The police in Saxony, eastern Germany, have seized 50,000 Bitcoin from the former operator of the pirate site movie2k.to through a voluntary deposit to a state-controlled wallet.

This is a record figure for the country's law enforcement authorities, corresponding to over $2.1 billion at today's Bitcoin-USD exchange rate.

California scientist and film-maker spot apparent pup – never before seen in the wild – in drone pictures

Pirates, kings and kidnappers feature in songs on website showcasing origins of modern music industry

Inexpensive test can help diagnose even ‘inaccessible’ tumours earlier, speeding up treatment and improving outcomes

State-owned railway company RZhD apologises as conductor faces calls to be sacked and potentially prosecuted

National Museums Scotland restores soldier’s brass guard, only the third of its kind known to exist