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.

Change is afoot in corporate America. For the past two months, everyone from Chevron to Comcast and Hershey’s to Harvard Business School has put out statements containing the phrase “We stand in solidarity with the Black community,” or some very close variant. The sudden outpourings of corporate sentiment were widely dismissed as meaningless, hypocritical, opportunistic, or all three. But there’s reason to believe that such vocal calls for change from corporations could actually be worse than meaningless—and in fact damage the chances that corporations will follow through on meaningful change in the months and years ahead.

Why? Less than a year ago, nearly 200 CEOs signed a solemn pledge, issued by the Business Roundtable, to stop caring primarily about their shareholders and to serve the needs of their workers, communities, and country too. The Wharton management professor Tyler Wry has been compiling data on the signatories’ behavior since. “We were interested in whether these statements were worth the paper they were printed on, or just symbolic,” he told me recently. “When COVID hit, it was a natural experiment and a chance to see if companies were living up to their word.”

The results have startled him. As COVID-19 spread in March and April, did signers give less of their capital to shareholders (via dividends and stock buybacks)? No. On average, signers actually paid out 20 percent more of their capital than similar companies that did not sign the statement. Then, as the coronavirus swept the country, did they lay off fewer workers? On the contrary, in the first four weeks of the crisis, Wry found, signers were almost 20 percent more prone to announce layoffs or furloughs. Signers were less likely to donate to relief efforts, less likely to offer customer discounts, and less likely to shift production to pandemic-related goods. “Signing this statement had zero positive effect,” said Wry. Why, though, would it produce a negative effect?

We are in the middle of a mass extinction, the first caused by a single species. There are 7.8 billion of us, on a planet that scientists estimate can support 1.5 billion humans living as the average US citizen does today. And we know that the biggest contribution any individual living in affluent nations can make is to not have children. According to one study, having one fewer child prevents 58.6 tonnes of carbon emissions every year; compare that with living car-free (2.4 tonnes), avoiding a transatlantic return flight (1.6), or eating a plant-based diet (0.82). Another study said it was almost 20 times more important than any other choice an environmentally minded individual could make. Such claims have been questioned. After all, does a parent really bear the burden of their child’s emissions? Won’t our individual emissions fall as technologies and lifestyles change? Isn’t measuring our individual carbon footprint – a concept popularised by oil and gas multinational BP – giving a free pass to the handful of corporate powers responsible for almost all carbon emissions? The only thing that isn’t up for debate is that we all know that we are living in ways that can’t continue.

Coronavirus isn’t likely to give us coronababies – but a pandemic isn’t the reason that having children has shifted from an inevitability to a choice, and now, a moral question. A long time ago, “Do we have children?” became “Should we?”

“If she didn’t say that I wouldn’t have hit her.” “If he didn’t cut me off I would never have chased after him!” “My father is to blame for my problems with anger.”

These are just a few examples of comments I’ve heard over the years, made by individuals who blamed others in order to justify their anger and how they expressed it. In the first, a 32-year-old husband, married for just two years, assaulted his wife while under the influence of alcohol. He hit his wife after she threatened to divorce him and make sure that he would suffer financially. His aggression was a reaction to his anger—rage that masked his feelings of powerlessness, hurt, and anticipated loss. In spite of arguments that had escalated in the previous year, he was unable to honestly acknowledge that he and his wife were incompatible.

In each scenario, these individuals deny their responsibility for their behavior. They portray themselves as powerless in their actions and, often, incapable of change. The details of how they blamed others for their anger is different. However, in each situation, these individuals failed to recognize that their tendency to blame others only strengthened their perceived powerlessness and–in turn– their likelihood of blaming others.

It is one thing to suggest that an event contributed to triggering our anger. It is an entirely different issue to suggest that others are responsible for our feelings, their intensity and how we manage them.

Steps to Reduce Your Tendency to Blame Others

1. Recognize it when it occurs.

2. Reflect on the purpose it serves you. What feelings are you trying to avoid?

3. Cultivate increased self-compassion to recognize that being human involves making mistakes, having flaws and weaknesses.

4 Recognize how your tendency for global thinking contributes to blaming.

5. Look for your contribution to your suffering.

"As the women's movement went mainstream, I loved the options for women it created, but also felt there was a demonizing of men, an undervaluing of the family, and a blindness to how boys and men were being harmed that would have profound effects on families, boys, addiction, careers, male unemployment, the global economy and so on," he explained. "When I uncovered reasons that were not part of the public consciousness, I felt I had something to contribute."

Farrell soon discovered that there was little serious attention being paid to the space of boy's development, either in academia or anywhere else. The subject was, in Farrell's words, "a national afterthought."

What was not an afterthought to Farrell were the big disparities in outcomes of every kind between boys and girls in America. Disparities that crossed ethnic, racial and geographic boundaries.

"Before age 9, boys and girls commit suicide equally," Farrell told a Tedx audience. "By age 10 to 14, it is twice the amount for boys. Between 15 and 19, it is four times the amount, and by ages 18 to 24, it is six times the amount. That's staggering." Often, these tragedies seem to share one circumstance: the lack of a father in the home.

Two Disney World fanatics who live-streamed their trip to the Orlando theme park's reopening over the weekend are receiving intense backlash for vacationing amid a pandemic and continuing to explore the park after one fell ill.

YouTuber Tonya Blakey, known as That Crazy Disney Lady to her 9,500 subscribers, streamed over 10 hours of footage of her trip to the Magic Kingdom on Friday and Saturday. In the videos, she and her friend, Robin, wandered the grounds, rode Splash Mountain, and experienced a brief health scare.

It's a sad day for Slurpee lovers everywhere.

The convenience retailer has celebrated July 11 (7/11) every summer since 2002 as 7-Eleven Day, with free Slurpees for all who visited one of the stores. But it's been canceled this year. And, yes, you can blame it on the pandemic.

Instead, 7-Eleven said it would celebrate its birthday by donating one million meals to Feeding America, a national nonprofit.

The governor of Texas has warned that he could reimpose a lockdown on the state if coronavirus prevention measures were not heeded, as states across the U.S. battled to get the pandemic under control.

Friday brought 63,900 new cases nationwide - a new record, according to data from Johns Hopkins University analyzed by CNN.

Bioethicist Dr Zeke Emanuel said up to 250,000 Americans could die directly from the coronavirus by the end of the year.