culture

Robin Williams, the beloved actor and comedian, was found dead in his Northern California home Monday from a reported suicide. The Oscar-winning actor was 63 and had a history of battling depression and drug abuse. According to a statement released by the Marin County Sheriff’s Department and viewed by Fox News, Williams was found unconscious…

Lakeisha Jones is suing Georgia’s Savannah-Chatham school board over what she claims was an unfair firing, according to Savannah Now. Jones was employed as a business teacher at Myers Middle School in Savannah, Ga. Students found nude photos of her on her cellphone after she sent them off to find scissors during classroom time. Jones…

Jovanka Beckles, Richmond, Calif.’s first openly lesbian council member, has become the victim of vicious heckling. “I’m going to keep coming up here and tell you how gays have no morality. … You’re filth. You’re dirt. Because I have the constitutional right to say it,” Richmond resident Mark Wassberg said at a recent City Council…

Another unarmed black boy has been shot down by police. Absorbing the ongoing news of the investigation Monday morning, I listened to eyewitness interviews and looked on as the media flashed pictures of Michael Brown, the 18-year-old gunned down by a Ferguson, Mo., police officer over the weekend. The repeated refrain in so many of…

The US Virgin Islands are awash in green.  Gaze out from just about any of perch on these three Caribbean outposts and behold some of the richest imaginable hues of nature’s most abundant color.  The broccoli-colored valley of trees sweeping between Blue Mountain and Mount Eagle on St. Croix. The spearmint-toned wall of organ pipe…

He was called “poor white trash” and “white bitch,” tormented until he was eventually fired and stripped of his teaching credentials. That’s what former Prince George’s County, Md., teacher Jon Everhart claimed in his racial-discrimination lawsuit against the county school board, alleging that the black principal at Largo High School forced him out of his…

The family of Anna Short Harrington, the woman who was the inspiration for much of the Aunt Jemima imagery, has filed a lawsuit against Pepsi Co. and its subsidiary the Quaker Oats Co., along with the Pinnacle Foods Group and the Hillshire Brands Co. D.W. Hunter, Harrington’s great-grandson, filed the class action lawsuit on behalf…

Barneys New York is cutting its losses (and bad press) and will cough up $525,000 to settle the racial-profiling allegations that have been weighed against it by the New York State attorney general, the New York Daily News reports. In addition to the $525,000, which will be used for fines and legal fees, the high-end retailer…

While details continue to emerge in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man by police in Ferguson, Mo., protesters turned looters on Sunday night as several stores were ransacked, vehicles were vandalized and police in riot gear were taunted as tensions continued to mount over exactly what happened that cost Michael Brown his life.  …