The iconic yellow and green of Brazil’s flag mixed with a sea of rainbow-colored tutus, hand fans and drag queen hairdos at Sunday’s LGBTQ+ Pride parade in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
The annual event along Sao Paulo’s main thoroughfare is among the biggest gay Pride celebrations in the world, attracting thousands of people to celebrate the sexual diversity in a nation synonymous with street partying, but where violence and discrimination against members of the LGBTQ+ community has surged.
While apparel is mostly optional, this year organizers made a special appeal for participants to wear green and yellow in a pointed rebuke to far-right followers of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who have appropriated Brazil’s national symbols for themselves.
Photo: Bloomberg
“We will march this afternoon to take back our flag and to show that Brazil will be better, it will be queer, butch, transvestite,” Erika Hilton, who in 2022 became one of two openly transgender people elected to the Brazilian Congress, told a cheering crowd of revelers.
Although Brazil has pioneered LGBTQ+ rights in Latin America — transphobia was made a crime in 2019 — the nation still has the largest number of transgender and queer people murdered in the world.
Brazil was responsible for 31 percent of the 321 murders of transgender and gender diverse people reported murdered worldwide last year, according to Transgender Europe, which collects data globally.
It was the 16th consecutive year that Brazil led the list.
Airlines in Australia, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia and Singapore yesterday canceled flights to and from the Indonesian island of Bali, after a nearby volcano catapulted an ash tower into the sky. Australia’s Jetstar, Qantas and Virgin Australia all grounded flights after Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki on Flores island spewed a 9km tower a day earlier. Malaysia Airlines, AirAsia, India’s IndiGo and Singapore’s Scoot also listed flights as canceled. “Volcanic ash poses a significant threat to safe operations of the aircraft in the vicinity of volcanic clouds,” AirAsia said as it announced several cancelations. Multiple eruptions from the 1,703m twin-peaked volcano in
China has built a land-based prototype nuclear reactor for a large surface warship, in the clearest sign yet Beijing is advancing toward producing the nation’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, according to a new analysis of satellite imagery and Chinese government documents provided to The Associated Press. There have long been rumors that China is planning to build a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, but the research by the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California is the first to confirm it is working on a nuclear-powered propulsion system for a carrier-sized surface warship. Why is China’s pursuit of nuclear-powered carriers significant? China’s navy is already
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) launched a week-long diplomatic blitz of South America on Thursday by inaugurating a massive deep-water port in Peru, a US$1.3 billion investment by Beijing as it seeks to expand trade and influence on the continent. With China’s demand for agricultural goods and metals from Latin America growing, Xi will participate in the APEC summit in Lima then head to the Group of 20 summit in Rio de Janeiro next week, where he will also make a state visit to Brazil. Xi and Peruvian President Dina Boluarte participated on Thursday by video link in the opening
IT’S A DEAL? Including the phrase ‘overlapping claims’ in a Chinese-Indonesian joint statement over the weekend puts Jakarta’s national interests at risk, critics say Indonesia yesterday said it does not recognize China’s claims over the South China Sea, despite signing a maritime development deal with Beijing, as some analysts warned the pact risked compromising its sovereign rights. Beijing has long clashed with Southeast Asian neighbors over the South China Sea, which it claims almost in its entirety, based on a “nine-dash line” on its maps that cuts into the exclusive economic zones (EEZ) of several countries. Joint agreements with China in the strategic waterway have been sensitive for years, with some nations wary of deals they fear could be interpreted as legitimizing Beijing’s vast claims. In 2016,
RSS