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150,000 people march for LGBTQ rights in Berlin

Draped in rainbow flags and touting signs, around 150,000 people marched for LGBTQ rights Saturday at Berlin’s annual Christopher Street Day celebration, celebrating this year's parade theme “United in Love.”

Berlin police gave the crowd estimate Saturday afternoon but said the number may still grow into the evening.

Klaus Lederer, Berlin’s deputy mayor and a senator for culture and Europe, said in a speech opening the celebrations that Berlin must be a “safe haven” for LGBTQ individuals facing persecution in their home countries.

READ MORE: Damaging winds force cruise ship passengers to spend another night out at sea

“For all the countries where being queer is still a punishable offence … Berlin must be a city of freedom,” he said.

German political institutions showed their support for the LGBTQ community. In a historic first, both the German Bundestag and the chancellery flew rainbow flags to mark the occasion.

Saturday’s parade was the first time since before the coronavirus pandemic that the annual celebration had proceeded without major restrictions.

Last year, around 65,000 people attended the parade amid social distancing rules and a ban on alcohol. In 2020, the parade was cancelled entirely due to the pandemic.

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Man charged with alleged murder of missing Sydney mum

A body has been discovered and a man charged with murder following in the search for missing 43-year-old Sydney mother Shereen Kumar.

Kumar disappeared from her home at Taylor Road in Dural, north-west Sydney, at 9pm on Wednesday and was reported missing to authorities on Thursday morning.

Police located a body while searching through bushland in Dural overnight. While it has not yet been formally identified, it is believed to be the missing woman.

READ MORE: NSW teen in a serious condition after being run over by crane

Shereen Kumar's family and friends are growing more concerned about the mother as her disappearance is considered out of character.

A 37-year-old man was arrested late on Saturday night and has since been charged with murder. He was refused bail and will appear in court later on Sunday.

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Despair and poverty fuel drug use in Afghanistan

Hundreds of men using heroin, opium and meth were strewn over a hillside above Kabul in tents or lying in the dirt. Some of them overdose, and quietly slip across the line from despair to death.

"There's a dead man next to you," someone told me as I picked my way among them, taking pictures.

"We buried someone over there earlier," another said.

READ MORE: All travellers from Indonesia now 'compelled' to sanitise shoes to stop foot and mouth disease outbreak

One man was face down in the mud, not moving. I shook him by the shoulder and asked if he was alive. He turned his head a bit, just half out of the mud, and whispered that he was.

"You're dying," I told him. "Try to survive."

"It's fine," he said, his voice sounding exhausted. "It's OK to die."

He lifted his body a little. I gave him some water, and someone gave him a glass pipe of heroin. Smoking it gave him some energy. He said his name was Dawood. He had lost a leg to a mine about a decade ago during the war and couldn't work after that. His life fell apart and he turned to drugs to escape.

Drug addiction has long been a problem in Afghanistan, the world's biggest producer of opium and heroin and now a major source of meth. The drug use has been fuelled by persistent poverty and decades of war that left few families unscarred.

It appears to be getting worse since the country's economy collapsed following the seizure of power by the Taliban in August 2021 and the subsequent halt of international financing. Families once able to get by found their livelihoods cut off, leaving many barely able to afford food. Millions have joined the ranks of the impoverished.

Drug users can be found around Kabul, living in parks and sewage drains, under bridges and on open hillsides.

READ MORE: Couple arrested after man dies in pool sinkhole

A 2015 survey by the U.N. estimated that up to 2.3 million people had used drugs that year, which would have amounted to about 5 per cent of the population at the time. Seven years later, the number is not known, but it's believed to have only increased, according to Dr Zalmel, the head of the Drug Demand Reduction Department who like many Afghans uses only one name.

The Taliban have launched an aggressive campaign to eradicate poppy cultivation. At the same time, they inherited the ousted, internationally backed government's policy of forcing drug users into camps.

Earlier this summer, Taliban fighters stormed two areas frequented by drug users — the one on the hillside and another under a bridge. They collected about 1500 people, officials said. They were taken to the Avicenna Medical Hospital for Drug Treatment, a former U.S. military base.

It's the largest of several treatment camps around Kabul. There, the residents were shaved and kept in a barracks for 45 days. They receive no treatment or medication as they go through withdrawal. The camp barely has enough money to feed those who live there.

READ MORE: Accused man dies in custody after sister awakened from coma

Such camps do little to treat addiction.

A week after the raids, both locations were once again full of hundreds of people using drugs.

On the hillside, I saw a man who was wandering in the darkness with a feeble flashlight. He was searching for his brother, who fell into drug use years ago and left home. "I hope one day I can find him," he said.

Under the bridge, where the stench was overwhelming, one man in his 30s who identified himself as Nazer seemed to be a figure of respect, breaking up fights and mediating disputes.

He said he spends most of his days under the bridge but goes to his home every once in a while. Addiction has spread throughout his family, he said.

When I expressed surprise that the area under the bridge had filled up again, Nazir smiled.

"It's normal," he said. "Every day, they become more and more. … It never ends."

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'No, I'm not the captain's wife': Breaking the bias at sea

Captain Kate McCue has been mistaken for a captain's wife – or a cruise director's wife – countless times in the past seven years.

No one has ever correctly guessed that she is the one who runs the ship.

Even a fellow captain confused McCue for a captain's spouse when she went to takeover a ship, while many cruise passengers and members of the public have assumed the same thing.

READ MORE: Women tradies working to smash bias out of the construction industry

McCue has shared several videos on social media of instances when both men and women have been shocked when she corrected them about her role.

"Are you serious?" one woman responded to hearing McCue ran the ship.

"But you're so beautiful," the passenger continued, hanging her mouth open.

"Seven years into being a captain, I still get similar reactions when I tell someone what I do for a living," McCue told nine.com.au.

It's not completely shocking that people don't expect a woman would be running a ship considering less than two per cent of the 1.2 million seafarers around the world are female, as shown by the BIMCO/ICS 2021 Seafarer Workforce Report.

McCue herself has only ever met one other female captain during her 26-year career at sea.

McCue became the first American woman to captain a major cruise ship in 2015 when she became the commanding officer of Celebrity Cruises' Celebrity Summit ship.

She said the public's reaction to her taking this title was "mind-blowing".

"If you had asked me if I thought the world would even bat an eye at this achievement, I would have told you 'no', because I didn't think anyone else would care," she said.

READ MORE: Why 30 Aussies are sailing around the Whitsundays in their birthday suits

McCue says gender is not an obstacle at sea

McCue said she had not even thought about the fact that there weren't many female leaders in her industry for the first 11 years of career, until Sweden's Captain Karin Stahre-Janson became the world's first female cruise captain in 2007.

McCue had wanted to be a cruise ship captain since her parents took her on a cruise when she was 12-years-old.

Fortunately, she says she has not had to face any of the stereotypical challenges or battles that may be expected in being one of the few females in a male-dominated industry and rising to the position of captain.

"That's because I have been blessed to work for a company that values diversity and inclusion," she said.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Ca0YDbYsit6/?utm_source=ig_embed&amp

"Our crew come from 60 to 75 different nationalities. Everyone is a minority of some sort, be it race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, etc.

"Because of this, I've found that differences weren't an issue to be overcome.

"Being a female onboard wasn't what defined me and it's why I recommend people to surround themselves with diversity wherever they can."

Her employer, Celebrity Cruises, is working hard to increase female representation at sea, with 32 per cent of its officers on the bridge in 2022 being female.

The company has a female president and CEO, Lisa Lutoff-Perlo, who appointed McCue as captain, and who also hired the first female Ecuadorian captain, Captain Nathaly Alban, and the first African woman to work on a cruise ship bridge, Nicholine Tifuh Azirh.

McCue wants other women to be as undeterred as she was to rise in the ranks in her industry, knowing they do not have to be defined by their gender.

She works to normalise the idea of women as captains using social media platforms Instagram and TikTok.

"My motto is, 'If you can sea it, you can be it,' because representation matters," she said.

"Social media is a wonderful tool to get people interested in the endless opportunities that there are at sea and it's important for them to be able to see someone like themselves in roles that they may have never imagined possible before."

McCue believes anyone interested in the maritime industry should absolutely pursue the line of work.

"I would encourage anyone who wanted to pursue a life at sea to jump in wholeheartedly.

"You don't need to follow in anyone else's footsteps. Forge your own path."