Tag: violence

WARSAW (Reuters) - Over 1,000 people gathered in Warsaw on Saturday in support of LGBT rights a week after the first pride march in the city of Bialystok was marred by violence. Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party has made LGBT rights a campaign issue ahead of parliamentary elections expected in October, with many politicians arguing pride marches promote unnecessary public displays of sexuality. “The tension is growing and is tied to the politics of the ruling party,...

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian activist for LGBT rights who was fatally stabbed in St Petersburg had regularly received death threats and reported them to police, who did nothing to protect her before she was murdered, a fellow campaigner said. Elena Grigoryeva, 41, was found dead with multiple knife wounds on Sunday evening, according to a statement from the Investigative Committee, the state body that investigates major crimes. “Recently she had been a victim of violence and was...

Yelena Grigoryeva, a Russian LGBT activist was recently found stabbed to death near her home. Image from The Moscow Times via Dinar Idrisov on Facebook Prominent LGBT activist Yelena Grigoryeva was found dead near her home in St. Petersburg, possibly because she was featured on a now-blocked website that encouraged people to hunt down non-heterosexual people by offering the killer prizes, according to The Moscow Times.  Grigoryeva was active in the pro-LGBT scene and fought for equality by tackling multiple issues,...

Research conducted by Rainbow Community Kampuchea (RoCK) has found that over 80% of queer women and trans men have faced violence in Cambodia. The research is one of the first of its kind in the country. The study met with 61 LBT people, 23 of them being lesbians, four of them being bisexual women and 34 being trans men. Over half the participants (51%) were under the age of 35. The researchers also met with parents of LBT children, UN...

Russia has blocked access to a website that was named after and inspired by the horror franchise Saw. The website was used by homophobes and encouraged violence against the LGBTQ community. The website charged people 200 rubles, equivalent to US $3, to access its database and track down people who were reportedly LGBTQ. If someone wanted their name removed from the website, they had to pay 1,500 rubles, equivalent to US $23. The website, which was launched last year, referred to...

A new report has revealed the levels of physical and sexual violence that soldiers serving in the South Korean military face. South Korea enforces national service, and while homosexuality is legal in the country, it is against the Military Service Act. People convicted of breaching Article 92-6 of the Act, which criminalises “anal intercourse”, face up to two years in prison. And now a new report from Amnesty, titled South Korea: Serving in Silence: LGBTI People in South Korea’s Military, criticised...

The Albert Kennedy Trust has commemorated its 30th anniversary with an event held at the Speaker’s House. During the event, attendees heard speeches from ambassadors for the charity, Robyn and Edmond, and another patron Simon Callow. Attendees were also treated to a rendition of Happy Birthday, played on the Speaker’s piano, by another patron of the charity, Dan Gillespie Sells. As part of their 30th anniversary, the Albert Kennedy Trust also worked on a small video with students and lecturers at...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The attorney general for the District of Columbia issued subpoenas on Friday to the National Rifle Association and its charitable foundation seeking financial records in an investigation into their nonprofit status. District of Colombia Attorney General Karl Racine said in a statement his office “has issued subpoenas to the National Rifle Association of America (NRA) and the NRA Foundation, Inc., as part of an investigation into whether these entities violated the District’s Nonprofit Act.” The announcement,...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Guatemalan asylum seeker left some members of a U.S. House panel visibly shaken on Wednesday with the story of her daughter’s death, saying the toddler had contracted a deadly lung infection during a 20-day detention near the U.S. border with Mexico. Yazmin Juarez told a House of Representatives subcommittee that it was “like they tore out a piece of my heart” when just weeks after they were released her daughter Mariee died at 19 months...

Pose star Indya Moore got into a heated altercation with a Trump supporter in New York City on Friday and things quickly turned violent. In a video uploaded to Facebook, Moore is seen stomping on a giant “Re-Elect Trump in 2020: Keep America Great!” sign outside of the studio where Pose is filmed while a woman off-camera says, “That’s personal property, sweetheart.” A man approaches and tries pulling the sign away from Moore, who tells him, “You’re not a fan of our...

The students at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey, were not having it when demonstrators showed up on their campus holding anti-LGBTQ, anti-women and anti-Muslim signs. According to the university’s online newspaper, The Whit, one of the signed held high read, “Warning: homos, whores, porno freaks…Muslims, drunks…obey Jesus or hellfire.” Charming. At the time, a social media post went out among students which claimed the demonstrators make their appearances on college campuses around the country in an attempt to make money. The social...

Members of the Men’s Therapeutic Cuddle Group of Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania (an area 30 minutes north of Philadelphia) try to heal each other’s trauma through clothed cuddling sessions. The group has been meeting for over two years and welcomes a range of sexual orientations, according to Philly.com. Scott Turner, the group’s 46-year-old co-founder, says that men are often taught to be stoic. “If you show any emotional weakness or vulnerability, that’s a failure to your title of a man,” Turner...

They were fatally shot Authorities found the bodies of three LGBTI activists shot dead in Mexico on Sunday (17 June). They found Rubén Estrada, Roberto Vega, and Carlos Uriel López in Taxco, a city within the Mexican state of Guerrero. The Washington Blade reports the men were at a nightclub in the early hours of Sunday when ‘a group of men tried to extort money from them’. They refused and the group of men returned, forcibly placing the three activists in a van...

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has issued a new order in his never ending quest to keep the U.S. as white and straight as possible. In a wide-reaching move, Sessions says that the government will no longer accept the threat of gang violence or domestic abuse as grounds for asylum in the U.S. “The mere fact that a country may have problems effectively policing certain crimes — such as domestic violence or gang violence — or that certain populations are more...