Scotland vows it will challenge decision by UK to veto gender law
LONDON — Scotland’s leader said Tuesday that she will take the British government to court over its decision to block a Scottish law that makes it easier for people to change their gender on official documents.
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said the Conservative U.K. government was making a “profound mistake” by vetoing the Gender Recognition Reform Bill passed by the Scottish parliament in December.
“It will inevitably end up in court,” Sturgeon told the BBC. “The Scottish government will vigorously defend this legislation.”
Hailed as a landmark by transgender rights activists, the bill would allow people age 16 or older in Scotland to change the gender designation on their identity documents by self-declaration, removing the need for a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria.
It would also cut the time trans people must live in a different expressed gender before the change is legally recognized, from two years to three months for adults and to six months for people ages 16 and 17.
The legislation sets Scotland apart from the rest of the United Kingdom, where a medical diagnosis is needed before individuals can transition for legal purposes.
Scotland is part of the U.K. but, like Wales and Northern Ireland, has its own semi-autonomous government with broad powers over areas including health care.
The British government used a rarely invoked power Monday to block the law on the grounds that it could undermine U.K.-wide equality legislation that guarantees women and girls access to single-sex spaces. Opponents of the bill have argued that gender self-recognition could allow predatory men to gain access to spaces intended for women, a claim dismissed as scaremongering by supporters of the legislation.
The move puts the Conservative government in conflict with Sturgeon’s Scottish National Partyled administration, which wants Scotland to break from the United Kingdom and become an independent country.
Nearly 250,000 migrants crossed the treacherous Darien Gap between Colombia and Panama in 2022 on their way north, a figure that was nearly double the number from a year earlier, the International Organization for Migration said Tuesday.
At least 36 migrants died during the journey, but the United Nations’ migration agency said the real number is likely higher because some of those who perish in the deep jungle are never recovered.
In 2021, at least 133,000 migrants — mostly Haitian — crossed the Darien, according to Panama’s data. Last year, Venezuelans dominated the flow with more than 150,000 crossings.
Immigration figures:
Brazil riot charges: The office of Brazil’s prosecutor-general presented its first charges against some of the thousands of people who authorities say stormed government buildings in an effort to overturn former President Jair Bolsonaro’s loss in the October election.
The prosecutors in the recently formed group to combat anti-democratic acts also have requested that the 39 defendants who ransacked Congress be imprisoned as a preventive measure, and that
$7.7 million of their assets be frozen to help cover damages.
The defendants have been charged with armed criminal association, violent attempt to subvert the democratic state of law, staging a coup and damage to public property, the prosecutor general’s office said in a statement Monday night.
Their identities have not yet been released.
More than 1,000 people were arrested on the day of the Jan. 8 riot, which bore similarities to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol by mobs who wanted to overturn former President Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.
Missouri school reopens:
A red carpet, welcome signs, cheers and high-fives welcomed students back Tuesday at Central Visual Arts and Performing Arts High School in St. Louis, nearly three months after a gunman killed two people and injured seven others in a rampage inside the school.
The Oct. 24 shooting was among the deadliest school shootings in the country last year.
Student Alexzandria Bell and physical education teacher Jean Kuczka died before police killed the gunman, former student Orlando Harris, in an exchange of gunfire.
Principal Kacy Shahid said the school now has armed security. Therapists and other support services are available.
The incident was among 51 school shootings in the U.S. last year that resulted in injuries or deaths, according to tracking by Education Week. The attacks included the killings of 19 children and two teachers in May at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
A shooter stood over a 16-yearold mother clutching her 10-month-old baby and pumped bullets into their heads in a brazen attack in a central California farming community that left six
Deadly Calif. shooting:
dead at a home linked to drugs and guns, a sheriff said Tuesday.
Tulare County Sheriff Mike Boudreaux said the teenager was fleeing violence early Monday when the killers caught up to her outside a home in Goshen, a community of 3,000 residents in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley, and shot the teen and her child “assassination-style.”
“None of this was by accident,” Boudreaux said. “It was deliberate, intentional and horrific.”
Boudreaux said that the home is linked to gangs and drugs but on Tuesday he walked back earlier comments to reporters that the violence was likely a cartel hit, saying that investigators are still looking into that possibility.
Mideast tensions: Israeli forces shot and killed a Palestinian militant in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, the latest in a bout of surging violence between Israelis and Palestinians.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said the man, identified as Hamdi Shaker Abdullah Abu Dayyah, 40, was shot and killed by Israeli forces in Halhul, north of the West Bank city of Hebron.
The Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade — an armed militia affiliated with Fatah, the secular political party that controls the Palestinian Authority — claimed the man as a fighter.
The Israeli military said in a statement that troops in the area were fired upon and returned fire.
Tensions have soared in the West Bank, where the Israeli military has been conducting near-nightly arrest raids since last spring, after a wave of Palestinian attacks against Israelis that killed 19 people. Another 10 Israelis were killed in a second string of attacks later last year.
Nearly 150 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire in the West Bank and east Jerusalem in 2022, according the Israeli rights group B’Tselem.