A pro-Kremlin lawmaker and former Olympic gold medalist faced a racism row on Saturday after she posted a photo-collage of US President Barack Obama juxtaposed with a banana on Twitter.
Irina Rodnina posted on Twitter a photomontage that purports to show Obama and his wife gazing at a hand in the foreground holding up a banana.
The image evoked the brandishing of bananas at black players by some soccer fans, a crude racist slur still seen at some matches in Russia.
Now a lawmaker in the Duma lower house of parliament for the ruling party, Rodnina, 64, won three Olympic gold medals in figure skating in the 1970s and 1980s.
The image she posted on Twitter went viral after Russia’s charismatic opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, reposted it on Friday evening.
Navalny, who himself has raised eyebrows by speaking at nationalist rallies, wrote that the lawmaker was “making a joke.”
Journalist Tikhon Zyadko responded on Twitter that: “Duma deputy Irina Rodnina doesn’t hide she is a racist.”
“Maybe this is everyday racism. Maybe it’s that she was badly brought up and has a warped sense of humor,” wrote the deputy editor of Moskovsky Komsomolets daily, Aider Muzhdabayev, in a blog. “The main thing is that Rodnina did this, and she doesn’t regret it a bit.”
After the post sparked a storm of disgust on Saturday, Rodnina deleted the message, but insisted she believed she had done nothing wrong.
“Freedom of speech is freedom of speech! Deal with your hangups yourself,” she wrote defiantly on Twitter, saying the post had boosted her rating.
A member of the lower house’s ethics committee, Yan Zelinsky concurred in comments to Russian News Service radio.
“She sees the president of the United States as liking bananas. What’s the big deal?” he asked.
Another prominent sportswoman, pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva, recently stirred international outrage by slamming Swedish athletes for backing gay rights at the Moscow World Athletics Championships last month.
She said in broken English that Russians are “normal standard people” and dislike gay rights events.
It began as a satirical online project. Now millions of young people in India are flocking to it as an outlet for their frustration. A parody political party called the Cockroach Janta Party, with the insect as its symbol, has exploded across India’s social media by turning absurdist humor into protest. Memes and short videos mocking corruption, joblessness and political dysfunction have flooded social media sites, where millions of users are embracing the cockroach — known for its ability to survive harsh conditions — as a tongue-in-cheek symbol of endurance. The online movement’s rise has been unusually rapid. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)
SPEAKING OUT: After Siranudh Scott’s allegations surfaced, celebrities and public figures took to social media to share their own experiences of sexual misconduct and abuse A high-profile alleged sexual abuse case within a wealthy Thai beer brewing family has prompted a wave of painful accounts from survivors of unconnected abuse in the conservative nation. Siranudh Scott, a member of the billionaire Thai family that founded the ubiquitous Singha beer brand, posted an emotional video this month accusing his elder brother Sunit of repeatedly abusing him when he was a teenager. Sunit, who is in his 30s, later denied the allegations in a video posted online, but Singha parent Boonrawd dismissed him from his executive role with the company on Tuesday last week. “I felt I needed to speak
A Hong Kong astronaut is to join a Chinese space mission for the first time as part of a three-person crew launching today, as Beijing edges closer to its goal of landing people on the moon. The Tiangong space station — crewed by teams of three astronauts that are typically rotated every six months — is the crown jewel of China’s space program, boosted by billions in state investment in a bid to catch up with the US and Russia. The Shenzhou-23 mission is to blast off at 11:08pm from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China, carrying three astronauts to
UPGRADED ALERT: The risk inside DR Congo is now considered ‘very high,’ while neighboring countries face a ‘high’ threat as the outbreak continues, the WHO said Ebola is spreading faster than responders can track it in eastern Congo, where health workers managed to follow up with barely one in five identified contacts in a single day. Authorities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) reported 83 confirmed infections, 746 suspected cases and 1,603 identified contacts as of Thursday, but health workers were able to follow up on only 342 contacts that day — about 21 percent of the total under monitoring — data released by the DR Congo Ministry of Public Health on Friday showed. The figures suggest the response is falling behind the outbreak itself,
RSS