Richard Blanco: Last News

Nancy Mace has fired back at Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, saying she lives "rent-free" in the New York representative's head, after she accused the South Carolina congresswoman of "endangering women" with her transgender bathroom ban measure.A row has erupted on Capitol Hill over a bill proposed by Mace seeking to ban House members and staffers from "using single-sex facilities other than those corresponding to their biological sex."The measure covers bathrooms in the Capitol and House offices, charging the House sergeant-at-arms with enforcing the prohibition. It comes after the United States elected its first every transgender member of Congress, Sarah McBride, who will represent Delaware's at-large congressional district in the U.S.

When Amichai Lau-Lavie was ordained a rabbi, in 2016, he joined a family tradition that had been going on uninterrupted since the 11th century. And yet this had been a fraught process for Lau-Lavie, an Israel-born gay man who just a few years before entering New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary had been a pillar of a “God-optional” community. How he went from the Radical Faeries’ joyous, transgressive vision of queerness — which led to creating his drag alter ego, Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross — to embracing Conservative Judaism is the subject of Sandi DuBowski’s fascinating look at the act of questioning yourself and your family, your surroundings and your decisions.

On Wednesday, November 20, a man was jailed after pleading guilty to arson, violent disorder and criminal damage in connection to the Dublin riots. Declan Donaghey, of Williams Place Upper, appeared before the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court, where he was jailed in connection to last year’s riots.

An estimated 18 million Americans are invested in cryptocurrency, according to the Federal Reserve. And the United States just elected a pro-crypto president.

YouGov shows that only one in five Americans regularly uses terms such as "safe space" and "white privilege".Words like "antiracism" were understood by the majority of respondents, the poll found, but only a minority used social justice-oriented language regularly.Republicans are less likely than Democrats to use these phrases, the survey showed.Of the 30 terms in the survey, "safe space" was the most widely used, with 26 percent of Democrats and 17 percent of Republicans saying it featured in their vocabulary. Safe Spaces are locations not seen as a threat or a challenge to minorities.Some 17 percent of Republican voters regularly use the term "woke", which became more widely used during the Black Lives Matter movement and means being alert to injustice.