Sir Ian McKellen has called on gay people to stand in support of the trans community. In a wide-ranging chat with It’s A Sin star Olly Alexander hosted by TikTok to mark LGBTQ+ History Month, Sir Ian compared the hardships faced by trans people today to those experienced by gay people when he was younger. But despite these similarities, the actor expressed disappointment that support is not universal among gay people.

The parliamentarian ruled that the provision, which would gradually increase the wage to $15 an hour, violated the strict budgetary rules that limit what can be included in the package.

But thanks to some of the more conspiratorial ideas circling around in the big tent of the Republican coalition, CPAC was unable to provide its attendees a space safe from censorship. On Monday, three days before the conference began, it canceled an appearance from a panelist who “has expressed reprehensible views that have no home with our conference or our organization.” Though CPAC did not initially state who they booted from their list of speakers, the decision came hours after Media Matters published a story about the panelist Young Pharaoh, an online commentator who has called Judaism a “complete lie” and claimed that “all the censorship & social media platforms are controlled by CCP & Israel through Jewish CEO & corrupt Democrats.” Soon after, Ben Jacobs reported that the rapper was removed from the program. Young Pharaoh later confirmed to The Hill that he had been cut from his Saturday appearance; in an interview he repeated several anti-Semitic claims, and added: “Basically, I’m being censored.”

The U.S. has enjoyed global military dominance for decades. But in the face of emerging threats, some say a new strategy is in order.

Pipeline companies can find leaks. But they often don't, even as small spills grow bigger over days.

Dolly Parton is having a moment. After 60 years in public life, the sassy songbird in indelible drag is a reigning queen among pop culture’s most elite celebrity tier: the “unproblematic fave.” Those are celebrities who have transcended whatever domain first made them famous, have not disappointed their core fanbase, and manage to avoid a casual audience’s wrath. Rare in its own right, Dolly’s ascension is even more noteworthy because of what she is selling. Mediatized to our collective eyeteeth and insolent in our aesthetic preferences, we usually denigrate Dolly’s type of earnest sentimentality in the discourse. Yet over the past five years, it has become verboten to dislike her, much less to critique her. By tacit consensus, Dolly Parton is the one good thing in our empire’s twilight. The Dolly Parton Moment owes a lot to nostalgia. She has simply lived long enough, performed at a high level for enough years that we can spare the warm fuzzies she inspires in us. Nostalgia blunts the politics that produces all art, especially middlebrow art of the kind Parton creates. Even if you remember that 9 to 5 was part of a mainstreaming of big-tent working-woman feminism, you cannot feel the urgency of the time. The shoulder pads and Equal Rights Amendment and raucous debates on the Phil Donahue Show are artifacts now. There is no petition to sign, no march to attend and fight to be had about whether women belong in the workplace. Nostalgic celebrity is a neutered artist. We like that.

Days after South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg fatally struck a man while driving in September, detectives told the Republican official they had found a pair of broken reading glasses inside his Ford Taurus. They belonged to the man he killed. That was a problem, detectives said, because Ravnsborg, 44, said he didn’t know he had hit a man until the following day, when he returned to the scene and found the body of Joseph Boever, 55, in a ditch. “They’re Joe’s glasses, so that means his face came through your windshield,” one of the detectives said in an interview released by the South Dakota Department of Public Safety on Tuesday.

Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama are voting on unionization and Amazon is doing everything it can to stop them. As part of its anti-union campaign, Amazon ran anti-union ads on Twitch, the games streaming giant that it owns. Now Twitch has broken with its parent company and told Motherboard it has removed the ads, and that they should never have run in the first place.

Sen. Dick Durbin, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s new Democratic leader, is retaining a Republican rule that allowed President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees to be confirmed to federal appeals courts over home-state senators’ objections. Under a longtime Judiciary Committee policy, senators from the home state of a president’s judicial nominees are given blue slips of paper that they can return to the committee if they approve of the nominee. Some committee chairs, including the most recent Democratic chairmen, have allowed senators to veto a nominee by withholding a blue slip, while others have allowed the nominations to proceed, sometimes requiring the president to consult with the home-state senators.

In a 1995 article in the Journal of Black Studies, Kenneth Christmon describes an interaction between the French ethnographer Marcel Griaule and a Dogon elder and priest named Ogotemmeli. Griaule, who was doing work in Mali, told Ogotemmeli that he was confused by the occasional ramblings he had heard from older, apparently drunk men who repeated what he believed to be a curious phrase: “The dead are dying of thirst.” Ogotemmeli explained the phenomenon thusly: Death, he said, requires certain rituals to be performed before the departed can join the ancestors in peace. These rituals included a costly amount of food and drink; to economize, a family might wait until they could be performed with other families. While they waited, the spirits, caught between two worlds and in search of something to quench their thirst, would gather at the vats of fermenting beer that the families traditionally prepared for religious and secular purposes. They imparted the beer with their energy, giving it its intoxicating qualities. When an older man consumed it, Ogotemmeli continued, his ensuing state of drunkenness was the struggle between his own life force and that of the departed. So what sounded like incoherent nonsense to Griaule — “the dead are dying of thirst” — was actually the drinker’s attempt to expel the foreign energy. It made people take notice. The spirits are getting restless; it’s time to give them peace.

A San Francisco police officer accused of fabricating a reason for arresting a man is back on patrol even after a federal judge tossed a case over his false testimony, the San Francisco Examiner has learned.

From outreach workers in Santa Clara County to doctors in West Oakland, community leaders are helping battle misinformation as well as address mistrust founded on histories of abuse.

Paul was later admonished by committee Democrats for being disrespectful to Dr. Rachel Levine, the first transgender person to be nominated for a Senate-confirmed position.

In 1963, a Black politician named Ben Lewis was shot to death in Chicago. Clues suggest the murder was a professional hit. Decades later, it remains no accident authorities never solved the crime.

Immigrant-rights and social-justice groups in Miami have already decried the decision.

This is bizarre—but it fits a pattern we’ve seen again and again in 2021.

In Pawlet, Vt., where a landowner opened a tactical weapons training site, a zoning dispute has escalated into something more dangerous.

Alt-right mayoral candidate’s campaign was funded largely by donors who live in Toronto’s wealthiest neighbourhoods.

Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a Democratic Senate candidate, has replaced the pro-weed and LGBTQ rights flags hanging from his office balcony with bigger ones after lawmakers moved to ban the display. "Since they passed a law that said I can’t fly my old [LGBT] + weed flags from my office balcony, I figured new, bigger better ones would be legal," Fetterman said on Twitter along with a photo of the new flags. Fetterman was referring to a measure that the GOP-controlled Pennsylvania state legislature included in its budget legislation in November that banned the display of any flag other than the American flag, Pennsylvania’s state flag or flag honoring missing American soldiers at the state Capitol or its grounds.

Federal agents seized $2.82 million worth of cocaine-coated corn flakes, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said in a news release on Friday.