Jul 06, 2007   | COMMENTS     

LONDON (AP) — Thousands of revelers wearing feather boas and draped in pink and red Union Jack flags turned out for London’s Gay Pride parade last weekend but the flamboyant celebrations were muted by three suspected terror plots. Yellow police vests dotted a sea of rainbow flags. Security was high after the discovery early June 29 of two gas-laden Mercedes parked just meters from the parade’s finishing point at Trafalgar Square. A third incident came the next day when two men crashed a burning vehicle into the main Glasgow Airport terminal. The two men were arrested, one of whom was injured. London Mayor Ken Livingstone told the crowd that terrorists will not intimidate Britain. “They planned to cause destruction and fear, and they failed,” Livingstone said. “No one stayed home in fear.”

Madrid celebrates gay rights
advances at Euro Pride

MADRID, Spain (AP) — Hundreds of thousands of people from across Europe packed into Madrid last week and joined in a Gay Pride parade that saluted Spain’s socialist government for introducing legislation that has turned this once deeply conservative nation into a bastion of gender equality. The parade, which filled the capital’s vast Alcala and Gran Via boulevards from Puerta de Alcala square in the east to Plaza de Espana square in the west, took place in a festive and peaceful atmosphere. For days, buses and airplanes had arrived in Madrid loaded with people set on taking advantage of a four-day annual gay festival, which started June 27 in the Spanish capital’s colorful Chueca neighborhood as a prelude to Saturday’s bigger, continent-wide Euro Pride events. Around 200 cultural, festive and sporting events were organized around Madrid, where organizers estimated as many as 2.5 million people were taking part. The parade, with at least 45 festive floats, crisscrossed Madrid under the banner “Now Europe, equality is possible.”

Rights watchdog criticizes
Polish leaders’ rhetoric on gays

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — The top European human rights watchdog criticized Polish leaders for anti-gay rhetoric and said the country had a homophobia problem. “I think we should remember that one of the groups that were targeted by the Nazis were homosexuals, and we should really avoid to fall into that trap now,” said Council of Europe human rights commissioner Thomas Hammarberg. Hammarberg was in the Polish capital last week to present a report on Poland’s human rights performance to Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, and to encourage Warsaw to do more on a number of issues, including overcrowded prisons and slow legal procedures. “We feel that there is a problem of homophobia in several countries of Europe, including Poland, that one has to avoid statements, in particular from leading politicians, that may be interpreted as justifying homophobic actions or opinions,” Hammarberg said.

Moscow police detain
gay rights activists

MOSCOW (AP) — Police blocked gay rights activists from holding a demonstration in the capital last week and detained two of them despite the protest being authorized by city authorities. The approximately two-dozen activists aimed to hold the rally outside the European Union’s representative office in Moscow to demand that the EU impose a visa ban on Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who has banned gay rights parades and called homosexuality satanic. Although the planned demonstration had been sanctioned, police said they decided to block it because it would interfere with construction taking place nearby. “Authorities in Moscow have broken the law again by not allowing our picket,” said activist Alexey Davydov. Demonstrators tried to unfurl a banner, but police dispersed them, grabbing Davydov and another demonstrator and forcing them into a police bus. A group of gay rights opponents stood nearby, but did not interfere.

Group of public health experts
calls for boost in HIV prevention

SEATTLE (AP) — Sixty million more people around the world could be infected with HIV by 2015 if prevention programs aren’t scaled up and spread out, according to a group of public health experts convened by the Gates and Kaiser foundations. “We should be wining in HIV prevention,” Jennifer Kates, vice president and director of HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, said last week. But the reality, according to a new report from Global HIV Prevention Working Group, is that organizations trying to prevent HIV infection have found the tools, but not the money to make enough of a difference. The working group, which is made up of more than 50 public health experts, clinicians, researchers and people living with HIV, previewed its fifth report two weeks ago at an international conference in Rwanda and released it to a wider audience last week.