Minister vows to close ‘loophole’ after court clears Colston statue topplers

Grant Shapps leads calls to change law limiting prosecution of people who damage memorials

Britain is not a country where “destroying public property can ever be acceptable”, a cabinet minister has said, as Conservative MPs vented their frustration at four people being cleared of tearing down a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston.

Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, said the law would be changed to close a “potential loophole” limiting the prosecution of people who damage memorials as part of the police, crime, sentencing and courts (PCSC) bill.

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More than half of UK’s black children live in poverty, analysis shows

Exclusive: Labour party research also finds black children at least twice as likely to grow up poor as white children

More than half of black children in the UK are now growing up in poverty, a new analysis of official data has revealed.

Black children are also now more than twice as likely to be growing up poor as white children, according to the Labour party research, which was based on government figures for households that have a “relative low income” – defined as being below 60% of the median, the standard definition for poverty.

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South Africa set for battle over legacy of ‘moral compass’ Desmond Tutu

Tutu did not spare those in power in the ‘rainbow nation’ – a phrase of his with unfulfilled aspirations

From the moment he resigned from his post as a schoolteacher rather than comply with the orders of the racist, repressive apartheid regime in South Africa in 1958, Desmond Tutu never deviated from his principles, fighting for tolerance, equality and justice at home and abroad. This brought him love, influence and a moral prestige equalled by few others on the African continent or beyond.

But Tutu, the cleric and activist who died on Sunday in Cape Town aged 90, was not just outspoken in support of the causes he felt to be right – such as LGBT rights – but a fierce and implacable opponent of what he felt to be wrong. Criticism was often tempered with humour. On occasion, it was delivered straight. This earned him enemies, and still does.

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How Ida B Wells became the last hope for 12 wrongly convicted Black men

After the 1919 Elaine race massacre, the men on death row looked to the investigative journalist to use the power of the pen to save them

Throughout the Red Summer of 1919 and beyond, no journalist did more to chronicle the lynchings and other forms of terror inflicted on Black people than Ida B Wells-Barnett. From East St Louis, Illinois, to Elaine, Arkansas, her pen was an instrument for justice.

The 12 Black men had been tortured, smothered with rags soaked in chemicals, strapped to electric chairs, beaten with whips by white mobs trying to wring “confessions” out of them. The men had been arrested after the Elaine Massacre, during the Red Summer of 1919, when white mobs “with blood in their eyes” descended on the cotton fields of Elaine, Arkansas, killing more than 800 Black people.

Dear Mrs. Wells-Barnett,” he wrote. “This is one of the 12 mens which is sentenced to death speaking to you on this day and thanking you for your grate speech you made throughout the country in the Chicago Defender paper. So I am thanking you to the very highest hope you will do all you can for your collord race. Because we are innercent men, we Negroes. So I thank God that thro you, our Negroes are looking into this truble, and thank the city of Chicago for what it did to start things and hopen to hear from you all soon.

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How white mobs firebombed homes and decimated a Black community in Illinois – video

This is the final episode of Red Summers, a 360 video series by artist Bayeté Ross Smith covering the untold American history of racial terrorism. 

After the first world war, Black laborers moved to northern towns like East St Louis, Illinois, trying to escape Jim Crow in the south. In 1917, members of the White American Federation of Labor went on strike – and the company responded by hiring Black workers. 

Angry white workers began attacking Black people in the city. Eventually this leads to white mobs firebombing houses with Black families inside, while others outside waited to shoot and kill them. Historians estimate between 39 and 150 Black people were killed in the East St Louis riots.

Just months later, another race riot in Houston broke out after member of the all-white Houston police department arrested a high-ranking soldier in an all-Black army regiment – a group that had recently returned from war. Only the Black soldiers were penalized

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Defense rests after Kim Potter describes ‘chaotic’ traffic stop that killed Wright

The police officer who said she mistook her gun for Taser is charged with manslaughter for fatally shooting Daunte Wright

The defense has rested in the trial of a Minnesota police officer charged in the fatal shooting of Black motorist Daunte Wright.

Kim Potter, 49, is charged with manslaughter in Wright’s death during a traffic stop on 11 April in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center.

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bell hooks’ writing told Black women and girls to trust themselves | Deborah Douglas

The feminist writer created a vocabulary that helped us to learn, grow, and forgive – and above all to understand

Having just the right words to explain what’s happening keeps you from feeling, well, crazy.

When the world learned of the passing of bell hooks, the renowned feminist, public intellectual, author, and professor on Wednesday, at her home in Berea, Kentucky, it was the value and accessibility of her words that resonated with Black women, whose understanding of themselves and their own work was transformed by hooks.

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bell hooks remembered: ‘She embodied everything I wanted to be’

The activist and acclaimed author of Ain’t I a Woman and All About Love has died. Here, leading contemporaries pay tribute to her

A life in quotes: bell hooks

bell hooks, author and activist, dies aged 69

British journalist and author of the bestselling Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race

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bell hooks, author and activist, dies aged 69

In acclaimed works Ain’t I a Woman and All About Love the writer shared her ideas about race, feminism and romance with flair and compassion

Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name bell hooks, has died aged 69.

Her niece Ebony Motley tweeted: “The family of @bellhooks is sad to announce the passing of our sister, aunt, great aunt and great great aunt.”

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Derek Chauvin pleads guilty to civil rights charges in killing of George Floyd

Ex-Minneapolis police officer has already been convicted of state murder and manslaughter charges and sentenced to 22 1/2 years

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has pleaded guilty to violating George Floyd’s civil rights during the arrest that killed Floyd in May 2020, sparking mass racial justice protests across the US and beyond.

Chauvin appeared in federal court in person on Wednesday morning to change his plea to guilty. It means he will not face a federal trial in January, though he could end up spending more years behind bars when a judge sentences him at a later date.

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‘We suffered for 66 years’: US ends latest Emmett Till murder investigation without charges

The inquiry was reopened after a 2017 book claimed the white woman at the center of the case lied about Till whistling at her

The US justice department is ending its latest investigation into the death of Emmett Till, a Black teenager who was brutally abducted, tortured and killed in 1955, without filing any charges after failing to prove that a key witness lied.

Till’s family said it was disappointed by the news that there will continue to be no accountability for the infamous lynching.

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Far-right French presidential candidate put in headlock by protester – video

The far-right French presidential candidate Éric Zemmour appeared to be put in a headlock by a protester at his first campaign, days after he formally declared his candidacy in a video highlighting his anti-migrant and anti-Islam views.

Videos online appeared to show Zemmour being grabbed by a man at the heated rally near Paris on Sunday, during which anti-racism activists were also reportedly attacked. He was later reported to have suffered slight injuries

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‘Historical accident’: how abortion came to focus white, evangelical anger

A short history of the Rose decision’s emergence as a signature cause for the right

Public opinion on abortion in the US has changed little since 1973, when the supreme court in effect legalized the procedure nationally in its ruling on the case Roe v Wade. According to Gallup, which has the longest-running poll on the issue, about four in five Americans believe abortion should be legal, at least in some circumstances.

Yet the politics of abortion have opened deep divisions in the last five decades, which have only grown more profound in recent years of polarization. In 2021, state legislators have passed dozens of restrictions to abortion access, making it the most hostile year to abortion rights on record.

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How an innocent Black man served time for the rape of author Alice Sebold

Anthony Broadwater spent 16 years in jail as victim of miscarriage of justice but has accepted author’s apology

On 4 November 1981, five Black men in matching light blue shirts filed into a narrow, well-lit room on the third floor of a police station in Syracuse, New York, and turned to face a one-way mirror. On the other side, a 19-year-old white student stepped towards the glass, and tried to identify which of them was her rapist.

The student, Alice Sebold, would go on to a storied literary career. She had been the subject of a horrific attack late one night in May of the same year, dragged into a tunnel from a path in a public park and forced to lie down among broken bottles.

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Jussie Smollett was ‘real victim’ of racist attack, lawyer says as trial begins

Ex-Empire actor is accused of hiring two men to fake an attack in Chicago but new evidence could support Smollett’s defense

Jussie Smollett “is a real victim” of a “real crime,” his attorney said in opening statements at the ex-Empire actor’s trial Monday, rejecting prosecutors’ allegation that he staged a homophobic and racist attack in Chicago.

Defense attorney Nenye Uche said two brothers attacked Smollett in January 2019 because they didn’t like him, and that a $3,500 check the actor paid the men was for training so he could prepare for an upcoming music video, not as payment for staging a hate crime, as prosecutors allege. Uche also suggested a third attacker was involved and told jurors there is not a “shred” of physical and forensic evidence linking Smollett to the crime prosecutors allege.

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Michael Vaughan ‘sorry’ for hurt Azeem Rafiq suffered, denies racism allegations

  • Vaughan tells BBC Rafiq’s treatment by Yorkshire ‘hurts deeply’
  • Former England captain denies having made racist comments

Michael Vaughan has said he was sorry for the pain his former Yorkshire teammate Azeem Rafiq endured arising from the racism he experienced at the club.

Yorkshire’s new chairman, Lord Patel, has apologised to Rafiq for what he had been through and the former player told MPs this month of the “inhuman” treatment he suffered during his time at the county, with Vaughan among a number of figures implicated in the case. In an interview with BBC Breakfast shown on Saturday morning, Vaughan denied making racist comments.

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Ilhan Omar: Boebert is a ‘buffoon’ and ‘bigot’ for ‘made up’ anti-Muslim story

‘Sad she thinks bigotry gets her clout,’ says Omar after Boebert claims to have joked about terrorism when sharing elevator

The Minnesota Democrat Ilhan Omar called the Colorado Republican Lauren Boebert a buffoon, a bigot and a liar, for claiming to have joked about terrorism when sharing an elevator in Congress.

“Fact,” Omar wrote on Twitter on Thursday. “This buffoon looks down when she sees me at the Capitol, this whole story is made up. Sad she thinks bigotry gets her clout.

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Let’s talk about sex: how Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s WAP sent the world into overdrive

A cultural ‘cancer’, soft porn … or the height of empowerment? A revealing documentary examines the debates around one of the raunchiest – and most talked about – rap records around

As winter forces many of us to ditch nights out with friends in favour of nights in on the sofa, Belcalis Alamanzar’s iconic words ring out across the digital ether: “A ho never gets cold!”. In a clip that went viral in 2014, the rapper better known as Cardi B parades up and down a hotel corridor, clad in a plunging, barely-there bralette and tight-fitting skirt. For women who wear little and care about it even less, Megan Thee Stallion has made a name for herself in the same vein. Together, Meg and Cardi would go on to birth a movement with their hit 2020 single, WAP, an ode to female sexuality and “wet ass pussy” which brought a slice of the club to the worlds’ living rooms at the peak of lockdown.

In three minutes and seven seconds of poetic dirty talk, the pair walk us through the spiciest of bedroom sessions, except – contrary to patriarchal norms – they are firmly in the driver’s seat. From fellatio to make-up sex, Cardi and Megan leave their targets weak. With the video quickly becoming a talking point around the world, their sexual desire (and that of women in general) became the subject of fierce debate. While many praised their cheeky candour, others were unimpressed, with Fox News’s Candace Owens going as far as to call Cardi a “cancer cell” who was destroying culture.

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Justice prevailed in the trial of Ahmaud Arbery’s killers. In America, that’s a shock

The jury reached the right verdict – even as the criminal justice system did everything it could to exonerate the three men

It’s shocking that Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael, and William Bryan were found guilty of murdering Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia. Yet the shock doesn’t stem out of any miscarriage of justice. On the contrary, the jury in Glynn county deliberated and reached the correct decision. Stalking an innocent Black man, chasing him, cornering him, and then killing him must come with criminal consequences in this country, and each of the three murderers now faces the possibility of a life sentence.

But the shock is that justice was served in a case where it seemed the criminal justice system and substantial portions of media coverage were doing all they could to exonerate these men. In fact, everything about this case illustrates how difficult it is to get justice for Black people in this country, starting with how often Fox News and other media outlets referred to the case as “the Arbery trial”, as if Ahmaud Arbery were the perpetrator here and not the victim.

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‘A long fight’: relief across the US as men convicted of murdering Ahmaud Arbery

‘I never thought this day would come,’ says Ahmaud Arbery’s mother as some say it’s ‘not true justice’

Relief, emotion and a sense of hope came flooding out in Brunswick, on social media, from the White House and across the US as the nation came to terms with the Ahmaud Arbery verdicts and their place in history.

Outside the Georgia courthouse, a joyous, flag-waving crowd repeatedly chanted: “Ahmaud Arbery! Say his name!” as the Arbery family, surrounded by their attorneys, emerged to address them.

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