On Tuesday the Senate confirmed the first openly gay black man to become a high-level federal judge with an astounding 98-0 vote, Al-Jazeera reports. Darrin Gayles has been appointed to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida after serving three years as a judge in the Florida Circuit Court. The George Washington…

Jonathan Fleming, the Brooklyn, N.Y., man who recently walked free after spending almost 25 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, now wants $162 million from the city, the Associated Press reports. The 52-year-old has filed a notice of claim to inform the city of his intention to sue. “I think this is…

The battle over the Washington, D.C., football team’s name has been decided in one fell swoop, with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office canceling the federal trademark protection that the offensive name has enjoyed, calling it “disparaging to Native Americans,” the Washington Post reports. The particular groundbreaking case was filed on behalf of five Native…

Updated Wednesday, June 18, 1 p.m. EDT: The White House has issued a response to a letter signed by various women and girls of color, including famed activists Alice Walker and Angela Davis, pushing for the involvement of women and girls of color in the My Brother’s Keeper initiative. The White House response—issued by Senior Adviser…

 The city of El Paso, Texas, after being ordered by the Texas Attorney General’s Office to obey an open-records request made by the El Paso Times, has finally released video detailing how body builder Daniel Saenz died while in police custody, the El Paso Times reports. In the video, released Monday, a police officer attempts…

Like many of the tech-adept in the age of social media, Henrico County, Va., mom Ciara Logan is tuned in to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and has enjoyed sharing photos of her three children. However, all that came to an abrupt end after a complete stranger took photos of her children and captioned them for…

A recording—allegedly of Los Angeles Police Department Detective Frank Lyga expressing zero remorse for shooting an off-duty black officer during a 1997 confrontation—has surfaced. In it Lyga, who is white, reportedly says that he regretted that there was only one person in the vehicle when the gunfire erupted, LA Weekly reports. “I could have killed a…

It’s been seven weeks since the last execution in the U.S., a botched lethal injection in Oklahoma that left the inmate dead from a heart attack several excruciating minutes after the drugs were first administered. But now the procedure is back, with Florida, Georgia and Missouri all planning to administer three separate lethal injections to…

President Barack Obama cannot do much nationally about discrimination based on sexual orientation without the help of Congress. However, the president is set to help those he can, and he plans to sign an executive order extending protections against such discrimination to federal employees, the Associated Press reports.  According to the news wire, the decision…

Turkish immigrant Melih Kalyoncu was just doing his two good friends a solid, dropping them off at Kennedy Airport for their flight to San Francisco, DNAinfo New York reports. His good deed, however, definitely did not go unpunished: He was accused by Taxi & Limousine Commission agents of operating an illegal cab and was slapped…