EDGE San Francisco

Australian police have been accused of brutality after a video surfaced that shows officers roughly handling a man during the city’s gay and lesbian Mardi Gras festival.

Duval Street was the place to be on Mardi Gras in the U.S.’s southernmost and wildest town. EDGE’s paparazzo were on hand to capture these photos of the celebration!

A new generation of parades is hitting the streets of New Orleans for Mardi Gras, and they’re throwing away old traditions of big, glitzy floats and celebrity kings and queens for smaller, greener and sometimes naughtier floats with a hipster sensibility.

As millions watched the sequin-clad samba dancers at Rio de Janeiro’s iconic Carnival parade Sunday, at least a few eyes turned toward the stars, or at least toward the VIP boxes hosting celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez and Fergie.

Mardi Gras has long been celebrated in U.S. coastal towns from Texas to Florida. And it means big business. "It is more of a regional thing, Mardi Gras is," said Stephen Toomey, whose family started a chain of Alabama-based Mardi Gras stores.

"Brazil is not for beginners," the late, great Brazilian composer Tom Jobim once quipped. Nowhere does the remark hold more true than for the country’s pulsing, chaotic oceanfront metropolis, Rio de Janeiro.

Australia’s political leaders were lampooned for their opposition to gay marriage as hundreds of thousands of revelers crammed inner Sydney streets Saturday for one of the world’s premier gay and lesbian parades.