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International News Highlights — September 9, 2022

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Photo courtesy of Keffals / Youtube
Photo courtesy of Keffals / Youtube

Trans streamer's campaign takes down harassment site
Two web-hosting providers have dropped the infamous stalking and harassment site Kiwi Farms from their online security services, after a campaign by Trans Twitch streamer Clara "Keffals" Sorrentis pressured Cloudflare to do so, and shined a light on what the self-proclaimed "lighthearted discussion forum" was often used for.

Sorrenti fled her Canada home in August after she was doxxed (her personal information revealed online) and swatted (SWAT teams were called to her residence as a prank), but was found again by cyberstalkers in Belfast, Ireland, where the harassment continued. Her campaign has persisted, however, and is beginning to pay off. Kiwi Farms is now inaccessible.

Cloudflare had previously planned to defend Kiwi Farms, but Sorrenti and the site's other targets said it wasn't just used for racist, homophobic, and transphobic rhetoric; it was actively endangering and pursuing people, and it had been designed to do so.

"They are trying to get people to lose their jobs. They're trying to get people to lose their housing, to be starving and homeless," said Liz Fong-Jones, a former Google engineer and cloud computing expert, who is Trans. "And then they go after people's families, and then they tell people that the only way out is to kill themselves."

Cloudflare dropped Kiwi Farms, citing an "immediate threat to human life" of a degree his company had never seen. Later, Russian online security provider DDoS-Guard dropped the .ru domain of the site after receiving "multiple" complaints.

Caribbean court rules Gay sex a right
Ruling that sexual orientation is protected by the right to privacy, the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court has struck down a colonial-era law against homosexual conduct in the twin-island nation of St. Kitts and Nevis.

LGBTQ activists celebrated the ruling, since many Gay people in the country tended to avoid medical care for fear of persecution.

Jamal Jeffers, a Gay man, had sued the country's attorney general over the right to liberty, which Jeffers argued allows people to choose an intimate partner and have consensual sex however they want. Jeffers was joined in the suit by the St. Kitts and Nevis Alliance for Equality.

Local governments supporting the anti-Gay law argued that freedom of expression does not apply to sexual orientation, and that Gay sex threatened the moral norms that were the bedrock of St. Kitts and Nevis — in short, a slippery slope argument, and a religious one.

The court rejected that argument and others. "Public morality," it wrote, "is not synonymous with religious dogma or public opinion."

Courts in Belize, Trinidad & Tobago, and Antigua & Barbuda have also found such laws unconstitutional.

The Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court has unlimited jurisdiction in six independent states and three British Overseas Territories.