A week after enduring a sustained beating in front of a jeering crowd, Muhlaysia Booker spoke out about her ordeal in the hope of raising awareness about violence faced by transgender women. “This time I can stand before you whereas in other scenarios we are at a memorial,” she said. A month later, Booker is…

A shadowy “deep state” secretly runs the country. A smart immigration policy is “blacks go back”. Nazi Germany wasn’t all bad. None of these statements would be out of place in the darker corners of far-right blogs anywhere in the world. But in Estonia as of last month, they are among the views of government…

Alabama Public Television has refused to air a recent episode of a children’s program that featured a same-sex wedding. An episode of the popular animated series Arthur, titled Mr Ratburn and the Special Someone, was deemed inappropriate for the state’s young viewers by Mike McKenzie, the director of programming for the station, saying broadcasting it…

It is one of the nation’s favorite jokes – with an entire state as the punchline. And at its center stands Florida Man, the mythical yet mercurial figure whose bizarre real-world antics have come to personify the perceived craziness of life in the Sunshine State. Briefly, back in the spring, Florida Man became a global…

Austin Eubanks, a victim of the 1999 Columbine school massacre who became a prominent campaigner on the danger of opioids after he developed an addiction to painkillers, has died. He was 37. Eubanks was found in his home in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and his death confirmed by a coroner on Saturday. Though the cause of…

Back in the 90s, we had girl power. In 2019, according to Emma Bunton, we have “people power”. So she told The Sun earlier this year, when the Spice Girls announced their long-anticipated reunion tour: “We’re about equality and bringing everyone together.” In the same interview, Geri Horner heaped praise on Theresa May, insisting: “We…

On a lane in what was once considered eastern France’s grimmest town, a street artist is up a ladder finishing a mural, the independent bookshop has a queue at the till, the organic cooperative is full of customers and Séverine Liebold’s arty independent tea shop is doing a brisk trade. When Liebold opened Tilvist in…

William Barr, the attorney general, came face to face this week with Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, at the Capitol in Washington. Shaking her hand, Barr was said to have joked: “Madam Speaker, did you bring your handcuffs?” The remark, at a ceremony honouring fallen law enforcement officers, was a riposte to Pelosi’s…

‘Journeyman” is a term often used to describe Don Was. At 66, the Detroit-born bassist and producer charted in the 1980s with his funk-fusion duo Was (Not Was), DJ’d at the legendary New York disco club Paradise Garage, and produced for Bonnie Raitt’s Grammy-winning Nick of Time in 1989, Bob Dylan’s Under the Red Sky…

Pete Buttigieg jabbed at Donald Trump during a Fox News town hall on Sunday, saying he understands why people and the media are “mesmerized” by the president’s tweets because “it is the nature of grotesque things that you can’t look away”. Asked how he responds to Trump’s tweets and name-calling – including referring to Buttigieg…