Icelandic Prime Mininster to visit China with Gay partner
Should be interesting to see how China reacts, they are not exactly forward thinking in this matter.
Quote:
Outgoing Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir will be traveling to China next week on an official visit to sign a free trade agreement. While the trip is official government business, much press attention has been paid to how the Chinese media and government officials will address the world’s first openly gay political leader and her wife, Jónína Leósdóttir, who will make the trip with her.
Homosexuality is still very much taboo in China, with the New York Times pointing out that it was just decriminalized in 1997 and removed from a list of mental disorders in 2001.
“Proponents of gay marriage here plan to watch closely how the state broadcaster, CCTV, handles coverage of the Icelandic visit, since gay marriage is not legal in China but there is pressure from some parts of society to legalize it,” writes the Times.
Question for the Icelandic-descended people on this board:
With of the patronymic/matronymic system of naming that has traditionally been used, how is this likely to change with gay marriage? Rather than simply taking the father's name and adding 'son' or 'dottir' on the end, would a gay or lesbian couple who adopted a child need to pick one of the parents?
Like, let's say Johanna Sigurdardottir and Jonina Leosdottir adopted a girl. Would the girl's last name be Johannadottir, Joninadottir, or JoninaJohannadottir or something like that? Or would they opt to break with the patronymic/matronymic naming pattern at that point and give her an entirely different surname? In most western nations, it's easy enough for a gay couple to simply combine the parents' surnames in a new compound last name, but in Iceland I imagine it must be more complex.
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With Iceland basically saying that they are not going to pay back any of the money borrowed from other nations' banks, do you think a country will have less faith in any sort of agreement signed going forward?
With Iceland basically saying that they are not going to pay back any of the money borrowed from other nations' banks, do you think a country will have less faith in any sort of agreement signed going forward?
Where do you get this idea?
Quote:
Fréttablaðið now reports that the New Landsbanki has paid 73 billion ISK in euros, pounds and dollars to the management team resolving matters for the old bank just before the weekend. This money will very soon be transferred on to the UK and Holland, thereby covering half the money Landsbanki owes to the two countries, who had previously covered the deposits made into Icesave.
While there is no word yet on how much or when the payment after this will be, the plan is to have the Icesave debt fully paid off by October 2018.
That was a good read. It was nice to see something that wasn't written from the Iceland POV. It does seem that despite my initial impression Iceland was in the right not to pay out.
Icesave definitely looks pretty scuzzy throughout this with their attempt to make Iceland pay when they had the funds the whole time to pay themselves.
The takeaway for me though is that it is dangerous to have large sums of money in a foreign bank.
Yeah the idea of buyer beware was very rarely brought up in the aftermath of the crash of Icesave. I mean you find a new online bank, from Iceland open up offering very high interest rates, you dump lots of money into this account and then lose your collective poop when it goes out of business in a massive economic crash?
What was so frustrating is how the UK and Holland took this so personal and blamed the entire nation, not the private bank. I'm very very glad we won that EFTA court case, it was nice to see the logic we had been arguing from the start, the fact the average Icelandic citizen should not have to pay the bills for a failed private bank; won the day.
Question for the Icelandic-descended people on this board:
With of the patronymic/matronymic system of naming that has traditionally been used, how is this likely to change with gay marriage? Rather than simply taking the father's name and adding 'son' or 'dottir' on the end, would a gay or lesbian couple who adopted a child need to pick one of the parents?
Like, let's say Johanna Sigurdardottir and Jonina Leosdottir adopted a girl. Would the girl's last name be Johannadottir, Joninadottir, or JoninaJohannadottir or something like that? Or would they opt to break with the patronymic/matronymic naming pattern at that point and give her an entirely different surname? In most western nations, it's easy enough for a gay couple to simply combine the parents' surnames in a new compound last name, but in Iceland I imagine it must be more complex.
About 15 years ago you started to see some changes to this very long tradition, as children started to ask for their last names to be based on the mother and not the father, often because of divorces or what not.
A famous footballer in Iceland took his mothers name and it really started a trend, since then a lot of people have been playing with it, my sister took our mothers maiden name as her middle name in order to pay tribute to our mother who passed in 96.
I think what most gay couples and married gay couples are doing is just keeping their names as is, the idea of taking a family name is quite unheard of in Iceland, so having a family with lots of different last names is quite normal.
What really needs a serious overhaul is the approved names list, Iceland has laws on what you can name your child, so Shaquina you is out of luck here
__________________ Allskonar fyrir Aumingja!!
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I dunno, maybe its just me, but when I was in Beijing, I noticed a ton of openly gay women out in public, way more than I see here. That or they were just really girly looking dudes with hot girls, but I swear they were both women. And they always had the hottest girls too.
But then, I didn't see any openly gay men couples, so I have no idea if it's some sort of double standard there where it's ok for women to be gay, but not men.
Icelandic Prime Mininster to visit China with Gay partner
