Author: Reporter

P01135809: One image, one face, and one American moment represented in Donald Trump’s mug shot

A camera clicks. In a fraction of a second, the shutter opens and then closes, freezing forever the image in front of it. When the camera shutter blinked inside a jail in downtown Atlanta on August 24, it both created and documented a tiny inflection point in American life. Captured for posterity, there was a former president of the United States, for the first time in history, under arrest and captured in the sort of frame more commonly associated with drug dealers or drunken drivers. The trappings of power gone, for that split second. Left behind: an enduring image...

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Ukraine replaces despised Soviet icon with trident on Kyiv monument in time for Independence Day

The towering Mother Ukraine statue in Kyiv, one of the nation’s most recognizable landmarks, lost its hammer-and-sickle symbol on August 6 as officials replaced the Soviet-era emblem with the country’s trident coat of arms. The move is part of a wider shift to reclaim Ukraine’s cultural identity from the Communist past amid Russia’s ongoing invasion. Erected in 1981 as part of a larger complex housing the national World War II museum, the 200-foot Mother Ukraine monument stands on the right bank of the Dnieper River in Kyiv, facing eastward toward Moscow. Created in the image of a fearless female...

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2024 election: Polls show Trump remains popular with Republicans as he faces 91 felony charges

After every new indictment, Donald Trump has boasted that his standing among Republicans only improves, and he has a point. Nearly two-thirds of Republicans, 63%, say they want the former president to run again, according to new polling from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. That is up slightly from the 55% who said the same in April when Trump began facing a series of criminal charges. Seven in 10 Republicans now have a favorable opinion of Trump, an uptick from the 60% who said so two months ago. But in a crucial warning sign for the...

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Half-century of Hip-Hop: The continued global influence of Black culture as a musical movement

It was born in the break, all those decades ago — that moment when a song’s vocals dropped, instruments quieted down and the beat took the stage. It was then that hip-hop came into the world, taking the moment and reinventing it. Something new, coming out of something familiar. At the hands of the DJs playing the albums, that break moment became something more: a composition in itself, repeated in an endless loop, back and forth between the turntables. The MCs got in on it, speaking their own clever rhymes and wordplay over it. So did the dancers, the...

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Price of Hate: How Anti-LGBTQ+ laws will impact millions of transgender and intersex Americans

New laws targeting LGBTQ+ people are proliferating in GOP-led states, but often absent from policy decisions is a clear understanding of how many people will be directly affected. There has been relatively scant data collected on the number of LGBTQ+ residents in the United States, particularly intersex people — those born with physical traits that do not fit typical definitions for male or female categories. That means lawmakers are often writing laws without the same kind of baseline information they might have for other demographic groups. “We can’t study the impact without knowing the population,” said Christy Mallory, legal...

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DeSantis-controlled oversight board abolishes Disney World’s diversity and equity initiatives

Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs were abolished on August 1 from Walt Disney World’s governing district, now controlled by appointees of Governor Ron DeSantis, in an echo of the Florida governor’s agenda which has championed curtailing such programs in higher education and elsewhere. The Central Florida Tourism Oversight District said in a statement that its diversity, equity and inclusion committee would be eliminated, as would any job duties connected to it. Also axed were initiatives left over from when the district was controlled by Disney supporters, which awarded contracts based on goals of achieving racial or gender parity. Glenton...

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