Transgender prisoners in South Africa won an unprecedented 2019 court victory for the right to express their gender identity. But they are likely to see higher barriers to the realization of this right because of the country's COVID-19 state of disaster.

As a child, Wendi Tamariska saw orangutans roaming the tropical rainforest trees that surrounded his village in West Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo. But when he returned after training to be a teacher, both the trees and orangutans were gone.

“There are many acts of violence against trans bodies—some are perpetrated by the state or allowed by its institutions,” he says. “Our bodies become the first level of resistance, and living our gender identities shows that LGBTI people are everywhere in Honduran society.”

Little was known about Simon, an emaciated and malnourished baby chimpanzee, when he was confiscated from an unknown man by police last June in Conakry, the capital of Guinea, West Africa. Ragged and with a dull tone to his fur, the 10-month-old was handed over to a local wildlife protection agency, which took him to the Chimpanzee Conservation Center, a sanctuary inside one of the region’s most important protected areas, the 1,200-square-kilometer Haut Niger National Park.

“We are not criminals. We are human beings who have rights like any person.” This is the postscript of a three-page letter written by 29 trans and gender nonconforming migrants being held at the Cibola County Correctional Center in Milan, New Mexico, about 80 miles west of Albuquerque.

Some scientists thought mountain gorillas would be extinct by now. Instead, at the end of last year, their official conservation status got a promotion—from critically endangered to endangered—for the first time, thanks to population survey results released earlier in 2018.