Russian police detained around 25 gay rights activists who took part in an unsanctioned rally in St Petersburg on Saturday, according to Reuters witnesses. A few dozen activists gathered at Palace Square on Saturday afternoon, defying a ban to hold the rally. Organisers had said they would stage one-man protests to demand freedom of association […]
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Creators of fake accounts and news pages on Facebook are learning from their past mistakes and making themselves harder to track and identify, posing new challenges in preventing the platform from being used for political misinformation, cyber security experts say. This was apparent as Facebook tried to determine who created pages it said were aimed […]
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Romanian police were investigating vandalism at the childhood home of Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, which was painted with anti-Semitic graffiti. Wiesel, an activist and writer, was born in the northwestern Romanian town of Sighetu Marmatiei. His family was deported to Auschwitz, where his mother and one of his sisters died. Wiesel and […]
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Israel’s new “nation-state” law has provoked anger among members of its most integrated minority, the Druze, prompting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to seek corrective legislation. Netanyahu has defended the law, which declares that only Jews have the right of self-determination in the country, from fierce criticism at home and abroad. But his conservative government appears […]
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Some 20,000 people turned out on Thursday for Jerusalem’s annual Gay Pride parade, flanked by police officers after threats by some Jewish activists to disrupt the celebration. They waved rainbow flags and a few Israeli ones with rainbow motifs as they processed through the Jewish part of Jerusalem on a march that went off largely […]
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The Roman Catholic Church formally changed its teaching on Thursday to declare the death penalty inadmissible whatever the circumstance, a move likely to be criticised in countries where capital punishment is legal. The 1.2 billion-member Catholic Church had for centuries allowed the death penalty in extreme cases, but the position began to change under Pope […]
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France voted to outlaw sexual harassment on the streets, leaving cat-callers and aggressively lecherous individuals facing potential on-the-spot fines of up to 750 euros as part of tougher legislation to fight sexual violence. Lawmakers approved the law in a second reading late on Wednesday, days after outrage erupted in France after a man attacked a […]
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Every few weeks, Susan Bro walks down 4th Street in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, until she gets to a brick wall covered in chalked messages like “Love over hate” and “Gone but not forgotten.” “I come just to absorb the energy of the place,” Bro, 61, said on Tuesday as she stood on the block now […]
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Around 1,300 Danes marched through Copenhagen on Wednesday in protest at a new ban on the wearing of face veils in public, accusing the government of infringing on women’s right to dress as they choose. Denmark’s parliament enacted the ban in May, joining France and some other European Union countries to uphold what some politicians […]
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Google plans to launch a version of its search engine in China that will block some websites and search terms, two sources said, in a move that could mark its return to a market it abandoned eight years ago on censorship concerns. The plan comes even as China has stepped up scrutiny into business dealings […]
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