In a group chat dated Wednesday, Dumont High School teachers appear to bash the sexual orientation and lifestyle of one of their co-workers.

“Why is that kid with the gay gym teacher?” asks one, according to a screenshot of the chat posted online.

Q. Catfishing: My daughters have been phone banking, calling Arizona and Michigan and so on to get out the vote. I didn’t want to do that but I felt guilty. Then I read an article in Slate about using the dating app Hinge to get out the vote. That sounded like fun to me, so I set up an account. I figured that there were few people my age (about 70) on Hinge, so I used a pic that was 40(!) years old and pretended to be young, single, and child-free. My state was also in the bag as far as electoral votes were concerned, so I decided to “live” in another state. Anyway, you could say I was catfishing, but I figured it was for a good cause—no one would get hurt, thus, no harm, no foul.

However. I found a match. Of course he is much younger than I am and lives in a different state. But we are politically similar. And we have the same (very niche!) hobby. (I can’t name the hobby, because all my friends who read this column would immediately identify me! But, as a false example, it is not that we both like to read biographies—it is more like we both like to make art with old encyclopedias. So we share this unusual passion.)

Now I want to tell him the truth and be friends. But I know that no one wants to be fooled. Is there any way to break the news—that I am decades older than he is and not interested in dating—that would not destroy this budding relationship?

My husband and I (as well as our daughter, “Chloe”) moved to a new state about a year and a half ago. We live in an extremely White suburb that is surrounded by a large, non-White city. We wanted to live in the city, but the crime rate caused us to look elsewhere. As a result, everyone in our neighborhood is White. There are eight other children that live in our neighborhood that are around my daughter’s age (she’s 7). The first few months were great, and she was constantly going over to other kids’ houses to play or inviting them here. She was a little socially behind in our last town, so I was happy she had made friends. But then I started to notice that her friends were terribly racist, and after inviting the kids’ parents over for dinner … the parents are racist too. Not just microaggressions or an off-color joke (which would be bad enough by itself), but just full-on, blatant racism. Even my husband, who is from a small town that still has Klan activity, was shocked and appalled.

I don’t want my daughter spending time with these children. When the pandemic happened, we didn’t have to worry about it too much because no one was seeing anyone. But the neighborhood kids have started spending time together again (at a distance), and my daughter has been asking to go outside and play. The kids have also come and knocked on the door a few times asking for my daughter, but I made up an excuse. On the one hand, I don’t want to deprive my daughter of friends (she goes to an extremely small magnet school and isn’t really fitting in there, not to mention her classmates live 30-plus minutes away). On the other hand, I don’t want her to befriend racists! My daughter recently told me she had been feeling left out. What do I do?

—Not Raising a Racist

A Colorado landlord allegedly sent the tenants of his trailer park a letter warning of big rent increases if Joe Biden is elected president.

“Please understand IF Joe Biden is elected as our next President, everything you do and have to pay for will change completely,” the landlord of the Fort Morgan trailer park allegedly wrote, according to a letter obtained by Denver NBC station KUSA. “Everything will be increased. Like paying ALOT more in taxes, utilities, gasoline, groceries, new permits, fees and regulations…everything! This also means YOUR RENT will be increased to cover these expenses. Most likely, rent would DOUBLE in price!”

Growing up as a black kid in England’s white West Country, a car trip east to the busier, more exciting parts of the country meant one thing: KFC on the way back.

No matter how thrilling the purpose of our trip, the promise of salty, greasy chicken on our return would be the highlight of our day. My brother and I would get excited in the back seat just as the colonel’s bright face was due to make an appearance on the horizon. We knew what was coming.

“Shall we?” Dad would ask, as if it were a question and not an inevitability. Mum would nod, and soon enough I’d be savouring my two pieces of chicken – leg, if I was lucky. I can still smell the sharpness of the lemon hand wipe that would clean me up afterwards.

Back then, I was not even conscious of the racist baggage fried chicken came with in the US. But it was seeping into my subconscious, and I felt it.

As with most things, what happens in the US winds its way over to the UK. Including, it turns out, racist tropes. In my day job as a writer on a national newspaper – my supper clubs then were still a hobby – I sat next to someone who would often crack the same joke when I stood up to go for lunch. “What you getting?” he’d grin. “Fried chicken?”

A new report estimates that 29 million women and girls are victims of modern slavery, exploited by practices including forced labour, forced marriage, debt-bondage and domestic servitude.

Grace Forrest, co-founder of the Walk Free anti-slavery organisation, said Friday that means one in every 130 women and girls is living in modern slavery today, more than the population of Australia.

"The reality is that there are more people living in slavery today than any other time in human history," she told a U.N. news conference.

Walk Free defines modern slavery "as the systematic removal of a person’s freedom, where one person is exploited by another for personal or financial gain," she said.

According to the report, titled "Stacked Odds," women account for 99% of all victims of forced sexual exploitation, 84% of all victims of forced marriage, and 58% of all victims of forced labour.

My family have known Alex since we were teenagers and point-blank refuse to accept her as a woman. Alex has kept her original first name, as it’s gender-neutral, so it’s not even as though my parents and sister have had to adjust to learning a new name. They just won’t consider it. They refer to her as my “boyfriend” and have made comments about how glad they are that I’ve “finally grown out of my lesbian phase.” This is starting to eat away at my sense of identity. I was never attracted to Alex before her transition or to men in general. But my sister has argued with me that, since I’ve known Alex “since she was a boy,” I’ve obviously been in denial about my feelings toward her and must have been attracted to a guy all this time. My parents have repeated similar theories, and it’s getting to me. I’ve already started cutting them off on the phone every time they refer to my “boyfriend” or are rude to Alex on Zoom, but their constant speculation about my sexuality is gnawing at me. I took a long time accepting my lesbian identity. Does my relationship with Alex undermine that, or is that just transphobic thinking getting to me? How do I shut my parents down permanently on these horrible comments?


—Harried and Harangued

Costco has reportedly removed Palmetto Cheese from store shelves after the owner of the pimento cheese brand called Black Lives Matter a "terror organization."

Brian Henry, the founder of Palmetto Cheese and mayor of Pawleys Island, South Carolina, made a public Facebook post on Aug. 25 saying he was “sickened by the senseless killings in Georgetown.”

According to The Sun News of Myrtle Beach, Henry apologized at a news conference and called his comments “hurtful and insensitive.” He also asked people calling for a boycott of Palmetto to reconsider.

“There is a concerted effort to boycott Palmetto cheese,” Henry said. “Please consider the hundreds of South Carolina jobs that depend on its success. We humbly ask for your support.”

The Trump administration will begin banning downloads and use of popular Chinese-owned apps TikTok and WeChat late Sunday, in a move U.S. officials said was driven by national-security concerns but which drew objections for impinging on free-speech rights.

The Commerce Department issued regulations Friday to bar U.S. companies from providing downloads or updates for the TikTok and WeChat apps after 11:59 p.m. Sunday. Companies will also be banned from providing data-hosting services for WeChat at that time.

“Each collects vast swaths of data from users, including network activity, location data, and browsing and search histories,” the Commerce Department said. “Each is an active participant in China’s civil-military fusion and is subject to mandatory cooperation with the intelligence services” of the Chinese Communist Party.

The Texas State Board of Education has given preliminary rejection to a plan to include lessons about sexual orientation and gender identity in the sex education curriculum, but LGBTQ+ advocates are fighting back.

The Republican-majority board last week voted down a proposal by member Ruben Cortez, a Democrat, to teach students in middle school and high school about the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity, ABC News reports. It also rejected a move to start lessons about consent in middle school, as some board members thought the topic inappropriate for students that age. A final vote will come in November.

Let’s imagine we were giving an award for the worst social problem in the world today. Do you have any nominations?

Did I hear someone say international conflict? Racial prejudice maybe? Environmental destruction anyone? Millions of homeless refugees? Exploitation of women? Turns out there’s one problem that connects all of those, and it’s one you hardly ever hear politicians talk about.

Overpopulation may not be root of all evil, but it is indeed at the root of many of the world’s other miseries.

Just do the math. As a minimum, every additional person needs a certain quantity of food to eat and clean water to drink. Extra people could, in theory, live without clothes on their backs or roofs over their heads, but most of us would not wish for a world with more people, if they had to live homeless and naked against the elements. Beyond basic needs for food, water, and shelter, more people need more energy -- to light their homes and cook their food, and if that level is reached, they’ll be in the market for still more -- to power their refrigerators and washing machines. At moderate levels of economic development, people start to desire cell phones, big screen televisions, and cars to drive. And at the highest levels, they want second homes and vacations in far-away destinations, which they reach by flying on gas-guzzling airplanes.

One solution is to simply open our borders, to allow more of the world’s desperate people to come to the United States, England, the Netherlands, and Germany. That is the case Samantha Power made in her painful stories of the desperate people she encountered as a journalist and later as U.N. ambassador, which triggered the earlier open letter. The statistics seem to indicate that most immigrants are not criminals or terrorists, but are, compared to those who grow up in first world countries, actually more eager to work long and hard hours. Cafaro acknowledges the obvious -- that the opportunities in a first world country are substantially greater than those in a third world country. And if you are rich or middle class American, there are benefits from immigrants – cheaper labor and better bottom-lines on stock dividends (as large corporations have used the availability of cheaper immigrant labor to break unions, and drastically cut salaries and benefits for their employees). But Cafaro notes that those economic benefits to middle and upper-class Americans translate into severe costs for the poorest Americans. Middle-class people are generally out of touch with how those economic benefits to them translate into the hefty costs associated with unemployment or underemployment among African-Americans, poor whites, and native Hispanics. Many of these less fortunate groups have lost the union jobs that permitted their parents to live reasonably comfortable lives. This in turn leads to loss of health care benefits, and many other unpleasant downstream consequences.

China could throw yet another wrench in TikTok’s attempts to secure its future in the US. Officials in the country are opposed to a sale and would rather see the app be banned than sold to an American company, Reuters reports.

The report, which cites “three people with direct knowledge of the matter,” says that “Chinese officials believe a forced sale would make both ByteDance and China appear weak in the face of pressure from Washington.”

For the first time since 2000, the official guidance on relationships and sex education (RSE) in England is changing. From this month, RSE is mandatory in every secondary school, regardless of whether they are state or private (though the Government has said it will make allowances for schools as yet unable to implement the change because of the coronavirus crisis).

Relationships education – which is now compulsory in every primary school – will mainly deal with families and friendships. It will cover the risks of online relationships, digital privacy, physical boundaries and recognising abusive behaviour.

But will the new guidance protect and empower young people for sex and relationships in a modern world?“The curriculum puts the physical health and emotional wellbeing of young people at its core,” Chiquita Henson, headteacher of Cirencester Deer Park School, a secondary school in Gloucestershire, tells i.

Dear Care and Feeding,

During the current political environment and COVID-19 pandemic, I feel the country is heavily divided. My husband, our 10-year old daughter, and I are all progressive liberals. However, one of the families we have hung out with since our daughter was 5 is our polar opposite.

They are Trump supporters, make racist comments, don’t believe in climate change, do not support public education, think the whole COVID situation is a political hoax, and don’t wear masks. We have not hung out with this family since before the pandemic.

When we used to hang out, they would drop racist comments toward me (I am Asian) and say it was just a joke, or do things we don’t approve of (steal, tread off trail), or now they find us ridiculous to be social distancing. We have had five years of hanging out and traveling together. But, this year, the divide has made me wonder. Is it wrong to not want to hang out with people who has opposite views and do things that I find lack morals? We’ve been social distancing anyway, and this may be an opportunity for us to part ways.

—Is Breaking Up Hard to Do?

A number of companies based in downtown Portland are set to vacate or sell their offices because on-going protests in the city against police brutality have led to 'unsafe' conditions in the area, reports suggest.

Activists have taken to the city streets for the last 82 consecutive nights to demonstrate under the banner of Black Lives Matter, but some of the rallies have descended into chaos, resulting in violent clashes with police or widespread acts of vandalism.

‘Our downtown properties have sustained significant vandalism and a number of employees and contractors have been assaulted in recent months,’ Standard Insurance's community relations senior director Bob Speltz told KGW.