Rowdy protesters did their best to interrupt a gay pride parade through central Budapest on Saturday, but were prevented by a massive coordinated operation by riot police.
However, there were sporadic outbreaks of unrest around the event, with some of the several hundred demonstrators pelting police with stones and burning the rainbow-flag used by the parade organizers.
Riot police were able to quickly disperse the several hundred demonstrators through sheer force of numbers and the occasional volley of tear gas.
During one fracas, an English man was punched after getting into a row with a group of some 20 anti-gay protesters, police told local news agency MTI.
Riot police broke up the altercation, and the man was taken away for medical attention.
A 60-year-old man among the anti-gay demonstrators was knocked down as the crowd was pushed back by riot police, and had to be taken by stretcher to an ambulance.
About 2,000 participants, an international mix of activists and sympathizers, including former Hungarian prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsany and his wife, gathered in the early afternoon on Budapest’s landmark Heroes’ Square before marching along a broad avenue into central Budapest.
Two-meter-high metal fences lined the entire 4km parade route.
All side streets onto Andrassy Road, the Hungarian capital’s answer to the Champs Elysees in Paris, were blocked by barriers manned by riot police.
Anti-gay protesters were unable to get anywhere near the parade.
Tourists, including Swedish soccer fans in town for the evening’s World Cup qualifier against Hungary, found themselves wandering around in bewilderment as they were prevented from reaching many of the Hungarian capital’s attractions.
A similar parade last year was disrupted by violent gangs who screamed abuse and pelted the participants with eggs and bottles before starting pitched battles with riot police, who responded to petrol bombs and stones with tear gas.
Among those who expressed solidarity with the participants in this year’s 14th gay and lesbian parade was the American actress Whoopi Goldberg, who sent a videotaped message of support earlier in the week.
The embassies of Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US earlier issued a joint letter of support for the Budapest Pride Festival, of which Saturday’s parade was the finale.
The British embassy has been particularly vocal recently in its condemnation of racist and homophobic extremist groups in Hungary.
British Ambassador to Hungary Greg Dorey hosted a tea party on Wednesday, attended by staff from the supporting embassies, organizers, organizations such as Amnesty International and Hungarian public figures.
“Sometimes it is those who make the most fuss about the perceived treatment of Hungarians abroad who are most vocal, and sometimes physical, in abusing the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people here — without even seeing the inconsistency and hypocrisy of this position,” Dorey told his guests.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack