Blockbuster film Barbie has been banned by Kuwait in a bid to “protect” its “ethics and social traditions,” state media reported Wednesday. Official news agency KUNA quoted a spokesperson for the Kuwaiti Ministry of Information as saying that the film “promulgates ideas and beliefs that are alien to Kuwaiti society and public order.” Elsewhere in the Gulf, dozens of MPs in Bahrain have called for a ban on the film, which starts Australian actress Margot Robbie as Stereotypical Barbie and Canadian actor Ryan Gosling as Ken. According to the Bahraini newspaper Al-Watan, 32 deputies issued a stat…

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Many of the most far-right House Republicans truly believe the propaganda and extremism that they promote – in stark contact to other for whom it's just an act to get votes, a former RNC researched said Thursday. In an interview on the Aaron Rupar Show, Justin Higgans argued the true far-right believers — who have lately been causing fractures and divisions among GOP power caucuses — often end up tanking their own careers with their own inability to compromise. “A lot of Tea Party members, a lot of House Freedom Caucus members — that includes Ron DeSantis, he was one of those folks — don't bel…

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By Daniel Wiessner (Reuters) -A conservative legal group on Wednesday urged a U.S. anti-discrimination agency to investigate Kellogg Co over workplace diversity policies that it says are unlawful, and accused the cereal maker of sexualizing its products. This is the second complaint filed this week against a company by America First Legal, a nonprofit run by Stephen Miller, who was an adviser to then-President Donald Trump. America First in a letter to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) said Kellogg's hiring, training and promotion practices are designed to achieve a balan…

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Five minutes into “Passages,” a scene from a marriage takes a casually fateful turn, and one of the year's best films is off and running to destinations unknown. Late at night, a noisy Paris bistro is hosting a party for a film crew's recent completion of a feature. The director, a live-wire German emigre named Tomas, wants to dance. His reticent English husband Martin, sitting somewhat wearily at the bar, declines; the woman sitting next to Martin, French schoolteacher Agathe, volunteers. Eighty minutes later, director and co-writer Ira Sachs' sexual triangle comes to a perfectly judged concl…

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GREENSBORO, N.C. — An avowed white nationalist who openly supports Russia is a member of the U.S. Army Reserves, recently served in the North Carolina Army National Guard and worked for a local sheriff's office as a detention officer, according to a Raw Story investigation. Christopher Woodall, 34, of Winston-Salem, N.C., has a long history of activism in the white power movement that coincided with his service in the U.S. military and government work. In an interview this week with Raw Story, Woodall acknowledged that he is the author of texts that promote a “white nationalist training group,…

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By Tony Owusu It might be a busy latter part of the year for the Bud Light boycotters. The momentum from the group's successful campaign against the Anheuser-Busch InBev (BUD) – Get Free Report beer brand after it supposedly “went woke” — even though Bud Light has had multiple pro-LGBTQ advertisements and initiatives in the past — is to carry their political activism to a new target. Best Buy (BBY) – Get Free Report, the national electronics retail chain, now has a target on its back after O'Keefe Media Group published pictures of an application for a minority management program. DON'T MISS:…

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Washington (AFP) – The American Red Cross on Monday announced it will now allow gay and bisexual men to donate blood without restrictions that specifically target them over their sexual orientation. “The Red Cross celebrates this historic move as significant progress and remains committed to achieving an inclusive blood donation process that treats all potential donors with equality and respect while maintaining the safety of the blood supply,” the humanitarian organization said in a statement. The policy change follows updated guidance announced by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in…

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The wife of a Republican state lawmaker in Arkansas has made herself the unofficial monitor of her neighbors' Little Free Libraries. Arkansas Times reports that Jennifer Meeks, the wife of Arkansas State Rep. Stephen Meeks, posted on Facebook recently about her efforts to remove “terrible books” from local Little Free Libraries and replace them with Bibles. “I have been swapping out books in little free libraries for awhile,” she wrote in a Facebook post earlier this month. “I have seen good books, terrible books… Recently I have been picking up free Bibles at flea markets and thrift stores….

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Bud Light received mixed reactions after partnering with transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney in April. But renowned podcaster and comedian Joe Rogan still enjoys the brew. In a recent episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, he cracked open a can of Bud Light with country music star Zach Bryan. “And we're drinking Bud Lights, ladies and gentlemen. Sorry. There's nothing wrong with it,” Rogan said. “People are so silly. We were just talking about silliness. One person made a really stupid decision, and now everybody's decided that Bud Light is the enemy. But that's like thi…

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Noah Schnapp says his family already knew he was gay by the time he came out. The 18-year-old actor publicly revealed his sexuality in January, after his ‘Stranger Things' character Will Byers did the same thing on the Netflix show. He told Variety magazine in an interview done before the actors' and writers' strike that has brought Hollywood to a standstill: “When I finally told my friends and family I was gay after being scared in the closet for 18 years and all they said was, ‘We know.'” When asked if he's thought about dating, Noah said: “I'm just enjoying life, and if someone comes by, th…

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Wayne Brady officially came out as pansexual on Monday. “I am pansexual,” Brady, who is currently the host of CBS's TV show Let's Make A Deal, told People magazine in an interview. He added, “Bisexual – with an open mind!”  Brady first shared his news with his ex-wife Mandie Taketa, who was glad for him. She told the magazine that his coming out would allow him to be happier.  In light of this news, Brady has said he is excited to see what he will do next in life and that he has done research about being pansexual, which means that he does not base his attraction to people on their sex or gend…

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Joe Locke has called on fans to respect his “boundaries” after one called his grandma. The ‘Heartstopper' actor – who plays Charlie Spring in the Netflix young adult drama – admitted he feels a “weird guilt” that his position in the public eye has led to his family members receiving unwanted attention, with his mum having to set up new social media accounts due to strangers trying to message her or track her location, and he wants to put firm lines in place. Reflecting on his mother's online hassle and the call to his grandma, he told Teen Vogue magazine: “It's a weird guilt I sometimes feel t…

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PHILADELPHIA — At the Met on Tuesday morning, as Vanessa Bell Armstrong’s “Nobody But Jesus” echoed through the former opera house, Onederful Ancrum danced in memory of her friend O’Shae Sibley. As she fought back tears, Ancrum glided gracefully across the floor, then darted forward powerfully, as if carried by gusts of wind in front of the indigo coffin that held the body of her friend. One moment she drifted upward. The next, she tumbled to the ground. Then she clasped her hands together as she stood side by side with a banner emblazoned with the image of Sibley, both dancers in arabesque. I…

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By Joseph Ax (Reuters) -Ohio voters on Tuesday rejected a Republican-backed measure that would have made it harder to amend the state constitution, an initiative aimed at helping defeat a November referendum that would protect abortion access in the state. The results in the special election were a crucial victory for abortion rights advocates, who would have faced the daunting prospect of securing a super-majority of voters this fall if the measure had passed. The proposal, known as Issue 1, would have lifted the threshold for passing future changes to the state constitution to 60% of voters,…

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Republican pundits' attempts to attack the “Barbie” movie have flopped, with the film not only smashing box office records, but data showing it's a particularly big hit in red states. Now, Fox News is changing course and, in a new article, is trying to cast “Barbie” as a conservative role model. The plot of the film shows Barbie, played by Margot Robbie, faced with a choice of whether to remain in Barbie Land, or set off into the real world and face the problems of being a real person. “Some conservative women defend the film, with one commenter calling it a ‘delightfully fresh critique of mod…

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The tomboy who climbed onto the roof of Queen’s Gate boarding school for girls in London’s tony South Kensington to smoke cigarettes with her friends in 1960 was never short of company. While her pals gossiped about boys and horses, young Camilla Rosemary Shand, known as Milla, had some much more scandalous stories to tell. Who else could boast that her great-grandmother, Alice Keppel, was the official mistress of Britain’s King Edward VII? And what irony it would prove to be that Alice met Edward VII at a dinner party in 1898, when he was still the Prince of Wales before being crowned King. S…

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A pair of Black bikers in Michigan say they were chased down and harassed by a woman who proclaimed she had “white privilege,” The Daily Beast reported on Friday. According to Muskegon residents Darius Bankhead Sr. and James Grisham, they were riding their motorcycles to Grand Haven for the Coast Guard Festival, when a woman in a Jeep started tailing them, honking aggressively and flipping them off. Then, when they pulled into a parking lot to try to get a picture of her license plate, she followed them, parked in a handicapped spot, then got in their faces and started yelling. Video footage o…

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By Daniel Kline Las Vegas welcomes everyone. Sin City offers pretty much every form of entertainment imaginable in an attempt to serve as many audiences as possible. On the Las Vegas Strip, for example, Caesars Entertainment (CZR) – Get Free Report hosts a topless revue set to country music at Harrah's while “Ru Paul's Drag Race” has a longstanding engagement next door at Flamingo. DON'T MISS: A Las Vegas Strip Tradition People Loved Moves Closer to Its End No matter what you like to do, whom you love, or how you choose to spend your time, Las Vegas has what you want. What the Strip has not ha…

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(Reuters) – A 17-year-old male has been charged with murder as a hate crime in the stabbing death in New York City of a man who was dancing at a gas station when confronted by a group hurling anti-gay and anti-Black slurs, a police official said on Saturday. The death on July 29 of O'Shae Sibley, a 28-year-old professional dancer who was dancing to a Beyonce song when confronted by the suspect, outraged the LGBT community and prompted Beyonce and film director Spike Lee to pay tribute to him. Sibley was dancing with friends while refueling their car when they were approached by a group of male…

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Country music fans are picking sides as two of the genre's biggest singers have released music videos that have radically different views on how the country music scene should be depicted. The controversy surrounding Jason Aldean's song ‘Try That in a Small Town' didn't make headlines until the release of the accompanying music video this past month. The video shows Aldean and his band in front of a brightly lit white courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee. The square where the video was filmed was later revealed to be the site of race riots back in 1946 and a 1927 lynching. While Aldean sings warn…

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Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) signed two bills banning conversion therapy for minors in the state. These measures make Michigan the 22nd state to forbid the practice. Conversion therapy is any attempt to change an individual's sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression to align with homosexual and cisgender norms. A ban on the use of federal and state funds for the practice was put in place by Whitmer in 2021. One of the bills passed prohibits mental health professionals from engaging in conversion therapy with minors. Any violation of this law will result in the professiona…

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Vice President Kamala Harris rejected Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' offer to debate his state's new controversial standards for teaching African American history in public schools. Last week, DeSantis signed a bill that requires educators to instruct students on “how slaved developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” After receiving pushback from Democratic and Republicans across the country, DeSantis wrote a letter to Harris asking her to meet him in Tallahassee to discuss on the new curriculum. “In Florida, we are unafraid to have an open and honest …

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Washington (AFP) – Former US president Donald Trump took a swipe at his own country's women's soccer team on Sunday evening after they crashed out of the World Cup on penalties to Sweden, declaring that “woke equals failure.” Despite sealing American glory at the previous two World Cups, the team have become a lightning rod for anger from the US political right, in part because of their advocacy for social justice. Many conservatives were particularly chagrined by players taking the knee during the national anthem, in protest at the country's record on racial equality. Their co-captain, Megan …

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By Philip Pullella ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE (Reuters) -Pope Francis said on Sunday that the Catholic Church is open to everyone, including the gay community, and that it has a duty to accompany them on a personal path of spirituality but within the framework of its rules. Francis, speaking to reporters on the plane returning to Rome from Portugal, also said his health was good following surgery for an abdominal hernia in June. He said his stitches had been removed but had to wear an abdominal band for another two or three months until his muscles strengthened. Flying back from the World Youth Da…

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A Lufthansa pilot drew a penis-shaped flight path in the sky last week after being diverted from Catania airport in Sicily. The 24-kilometre-long pattern was spotted by amused aviation fans on FlightRadar24. The aircraft left Frankfurt in Germany at 1.45 pm on 28 July and reportedly attempted to land at Catania twice before its course was diverted. It took just over 16 minutes to circle in the sky off the east coast of Sicily – a manoeuvre that created the penis shape – before returning to its original flight path and continuing to Malta. Local Italian media claimed that the disgruntled pilot…

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