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Binyavanga Wainaina is one of Kenya's best-known writers. Now he is one of the most prominent figures in Africa to announce that he's gay.

Wainaina did so on Saturday, his 43rd birthday, in a piece posted on several websites, called, "I Am A Homosexual, Mum."

The title comes from a conversation he imagined, but did not have, with his mother back in 2000, when she was dying in a Kenyan hospital from complications related to diabetes.

In reality, Wainaina was living in South Africa at the time and did not make it back to Kenya before his mother died. He never told her he was gay.

But in his piece, he writes, "I, Binyavanga Wainaina, quite honestly swear I have known I am a homosexual since I was five."

He followed that up with a series of YouTube videos, called "We Must Free Our Imaginations," posted on Tuesday.

His declaration comes at a time when a number of African countries are enacting strict anti-gay laws on a continent that has long discriminated against gays.

Homosexual acts are illegal in Kenya. Uganda and Nigeria recently passed legislation that has been widely criticized by human rights groups. In Nigeria, the president signed the measure into law. In Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni refused to sign the law, citing technical reasons, then went on to call homosexuality an "abnormality."

Speaking on NPR's Tell Me More on Thursday, Wainaina said he decided to come out because, "I wanted to generate a conversation among Africans."

"If you're ready to share, you are ready to share," he said. "So I was ready to share."

In 2011, Wainaina's father was dying. And as with his mother, Wainaina regretted not telling him about being gay.

"Sometimes I feel like your parents are hostage to you much more than you are hostage to them, and so, the fear of sort of, wounding them, for me, I think, was a big thing," he said. "But then, this is the opportunity to test their hearts the way I didn't give myself the opportunity to test their hearts."

Wainaina also said he contemplated coming out while working on a memoir called One Day I Will Write About This Place (published in the U.S. by Grey Wolf Press). He didn't do so, but with all the attention focused on the recent laws in Uganda and Nigeria, he felt the time was right.

"While finishing (the book), I'd really kind of contemplated talking about being gay, and then I thought, in that kind of, sort of, writerly way 'Oh my God, I don't think my language is ready or lyrical enough to start talking about' that sort of thing. So I was finding reasons and excuses for a long time, but I think sometimes you're just ready. So I feel like I kind of did this because there's a lot going on in Nigeria with the new laws and so on, but really, in a certain way, by the time I was hitting that 'send' button to my friends to put it up on platforms, I felt, this is one of the most successfully put together and honest pieces I've ever written."

And so I thought, "You know what? This is going to have to work on my terms, which [are]: I want to live alone, and I'll be true, I'll be faithful, I'll see you every day, we'll have dinner together every night, but I don't want to get married and I don't want to live together." It just made perfect sense. And I kept saying, "But relationships don't all have to go the same way." And I really believe that. Every relationship doesn't have to follow the same formula. ...

It was good, I loved it. It was genius. And there were times where Karl and I, in that 11 years, would have problems and I would think, "It's so much better to have a fight and say, 'I want to go home,' instead of have a fight and say, 'I don't want to live with you anymore.'" I mean it really gave us both a tremendous amount of space. Karl needed time to get over being divorced and I needed time because I had psychological problems and didn't want to live with anybody ever again, and it really gave us a very healthy, solid foundation for what is now our marriage.

On how things changed when, after 11 years, they finally got married and moved in together

It changed in two big ways. One was that after we got married, Karl loved me more and that was amazing. There was something about getting married that allowed Karl to say, "OK ... I've been holding out on you. There's like a secret storeroom of extra love, but because we weren't married I was always afraid that you were going to leave." And so that was a wonderful bonus. He was just relaxed because he always really wanted to get married.

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If you don't live in the Northeast, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey may sound like just another obscure government agency. But it's suddenly been in the spotlight because of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and the lane closures at the George Washington Bridge.

The agency's name is a bit of an understatement. The Port Authority manages the biggest port on the East Coast, along with three major airports, the key bridges and tunnels across the Hudson River, bus and rail lines, and even the World Trade Center site.

The Port Authority controls a pot of money for long-range construction projects that's bigger than the annual budget of many states. The name is a holdover from the way the Port Authority was created.

Birth Of Giant

Back in 1920, business at the port of New York was bustling, but there was a problem. The port is spread across two states: New Jersey on one side of the Hudson River, and New York on the other. And the two states could not agree on how to manage it.

"The Port Authority was to be truly a bi-state effort," says Jameson Doig, who wrote a book about the Port Authority called Empire on the Hudson.

Doig says it was designed so that the governors of each state would appoint half of the Port Authority's commissioners. That was supposed to prevent local politicians from putting their friends in charge, and to encourage interstate cooperation.

"That was the key element, to not have [a] tug of war between the two states," he says, "but rather ... to improve the transportation and the economic development of the New York-New Jersey region as a whole."

And for a while, Doig says, that's pretty much how it worked.

Crossing The Streams (Of Money)

The Port Authority built the George Washington Bridge — the one at the heart of the current scandal — on time and under budget when it opened to traffic in 1931. For most of the 20th century, Doig says, the agency was a model of government competence and cooperation, even as it got bigger and drifted further from its original mission.

But in the 1990s, Republican New York Gov. George Pataki began the tradition of appointing political allies to positions of power at the Port Authority.

"What it did clearly in hindsight was it started to create two separate agencies in one building," says Thomas Wright, executive director of the Regional Plan Association in New York.

Since the 1990s, Wright says Port Authority commissioners from both sides of the Hudson have gotten more calculating about how they steer billions of dollars in spending back to their own states.

"They took the budget [and] they split it down the middle, essentially," he says. "So for every dollar invested in one side of the river, a dollar has to be invested in the other side of the river. It's absurd."

That process has only accelerated since Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie took office. Since then, the agency has moved even further from its bi-state roots. Like spending billions of Port Authority dollars, for example, to rebuild the Pulaski Skyway, a road that never leaves New Jersey.

Doig says Christie appointed political allies to dozens of positions.

"When Chris Christie became governor, he added a new passion, you might say, to have patronage appointees at the agency," Doig says.

Doig is also critical of Cuomo for, he says, all but ignoring the Port Authority.

Two of Christie's top appointees — David Wildstein and Bill Baroni — have resigned over their roles in the plan to close toll lanes at the George Washington Bridge last year, apparently as retribution for a political enemy.

Whenever that scandal dies down, Wright hopes the conversation will turn to reform.

"You go back to the original intention of the Port Authority; it was fiscal accountability with political independence," he says. "And we've got the worst of both worlds right now."

But any changes will require dialogue across the Hudson River, and that is exactly what's been missing at the Port Authority for a quite a while.

The credit and debit card data breaches at Target and Neiman Marcus compromised at least 70 million American consumers, and analysts say even more of us are at risk. That's because the technology we use to swipe for our purchases — magnetic stripes on the backs of cards — isn't hard for a skilled fraudster to hack.

"It's totally unprotected and it's static, so it's the same data that's read every single time. It's just about the worst security that you can put into a payment system," says Avivah Litan, a security analyst for Gartner, a firm retailers hire to assess their cybersecurity gaps.

Sophisticated cyberthieves got consumer data during the holiday season breaches by injecting a virus into Target's card payment terminals. From there, the bad guys systematically captured the information found on every card swiped, from Thanksgiving through just before Christmas.

"We've seen hacks as big as this before, in fact we've seen bigger, but what we haven't seen before is something this sophisticated and well organized," Litan says. The data from the cards was turned around and sold on an underground market, where thieves can recreate credit cards using the stolen data and use them to make fraudulent purchases, she says.

Industry leaders know magnetic stripes are outdated and easily exploitable. The rest of the world moved onto a more secure, harder-to-hack payment system based on chip-enabled cards — chip and PIN. Chip-enabled cards are more secure because the data on the chip is hidden behind encryption. So even if criminals intercept what's on it, they can't re-use it.

"It's standardized all over the world and used all over the world, except in the U.S. and perhaps one country in Africa," Litan says.

It's a reality that NPR's new London correspondent, Ari Shapiro, learned quickly when he moved overseas a few weeks ago.

"Basically my American credit card is like a second-class citizen here," Shapiro says. "I can't use the self-checkout line at the supermarket, I can't use the automated machine in the subway system or the post office. Some merchants charge me an extra charge just because of my American credit card."

Shapiro's new British pal, Ben Thompson, explains how he pays for purchases without swiping — or signing.

"I put the card in the machine. The retailer, the cashier will hand me a little key pad, I type in my [PIN] number. And that verifies the transaction. It means I don't have to sign, I don't have to use a pen. I literally type in four little numbers," Thompson says.

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