. Pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel protests have both taken place in Basel this week.
The clinic is housed in a medical office south of downtown Orlando. Inside, the mostly Latino staff is dressed in pineapple-print turquoise shirts, and Spanish, not English, is most commonly heard in appointment rooms and hallways.“At the core of it, if the organization is not led by and for people of color, then we’re just an afterthought,” said
, the community outreach director at Pineapple Healthcare who was diagnosed with HIV in 2013.“¿Te mudaste reciente, ya por fin?” nurse practitioner Eliza Otero asked Hermida. Did you finally move? She started treating Hermida while he still lived in Charlotte. “Hace un mes que no nos vemos.” It’s been a month since we last saw each other.They still need to work on lowering his cholesterol and blood pressure, she told him. Though his viral load remains high, Otero said it should improve with regular, consistent care.
Pineapple Healthcare, which doesn’t receive initiative money, offers full-scope primary care to mostly Latino males. Hermida gets his HIV medication at no cost there because the clinic is part of a federal drug discount program.The clinic is in many ways an oasis. The new diagnosis rate for Latinos in Orange County, Florida, which includes Orlando, rose by about a third from 2012 through 2022, while dropping by a third for others. Florida has the third-largest Latino population in the U.S., and had the seventh-highest rate of new overall HIV diagnoses among Latinos in the nation in 2022.
Hermida, whose asylum case is pending, never imagined getting medication would be so difficult, he said during the 500-mile drive from North Carolina to Florida. After hotel rooms, jobs lost and family goodbyes, he is hopeful his search for consistent HIV treatment — which has come to define his life the past two years — can finally come to an end.
“Soy un nómada a la fuerza, pero bueno, como me comenta mi prometido y mis familiares, yo tengo que estar donde me den buenos servicios médicos,” he said. I’m forced to be a nomad, but like my family and my fiancé say, I have to be where I can get good medical services.The challenge was rejected by a court in 2022, but the group was granted permission last year to take its case to the Supreme Court.
Aidan O’Neill, a lawyer for FWS, told the Supreme Court judges — three men and two women — that under the Equality Act “sex” should refer to biological sex as understood “in ordinary, everyday language.”“Our position is your sex, whether you are a man or a woman or a girl or a boy, is determined from conception in utero, even before one’s birth, by one’s body,” he said. “It is an expression of one’s bodily reality. It is an immutable biological state.”
Women’s rights activists celebrate outside the Supreme Court to challenge gender recognition laws, in London, Wednesday, April 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)Women’s rights activists celebrate outside the Supreme Court to challenge gender recognition laws, in London, Wednesday, April 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)