William Brock, 81, who is white, was arrested after he fatally shot Lo-Letha Hall, 61, outside his home in South Charleston, Ohio

An Ohio man was charged with murder after shooting a Black ride-share driver in an unprovoked attack, following the most recent string of cases of Black Americans being shot while doing mundane things.

William Brock, 81, who is white, was arrested after he fatally shot Lo-Letha Hall, 61, outside his home in South Charleston, Ohio, about an hour outside of Dayton, NBC News reported .

I quit when it sank in that pushing back at my routine embassy job felt less like resistance than complicity

When I began working as a consular officer at the US embassy in Ankara, Turkey, I was at the beginning of what was supposed to be a 20-year diplomatic career. Maybe I didn’t love all of US foreign policy, but in my routine visa assignment I was deeply committed to treating everybody I interviewed fairly and playing my part in facilitating the American immigrant dream. Then, on 27 June 2017, Donald Trump issued orders to begin implementing the “Muslim ban” . My routine job had suddenly become deeply morally fraught and instead of blandly facilitating the American dream, I was denying it to people based on their faith.

My first instinct was to draft a resignation letter, but I didn’t immediately send it because it felt at the time like I was part of a nigh-unanimous institutional rejection of an illiberal policy. More than 1,000 US diplomats put their signatures on an internal dissent cable against the Muslim ban when it was proclaimed. My boss hated the ban, my boss’ boss hated the ban, and the dozens of US ambassadors summoned to the foreign ministries of Muslim-majority countries to explain the policy tried to disown it as much as they possibly could. When I pushed back as much as I could, I did so with the full support of my bosses and colleagues. But, and this is the most important part, we always did so within the regulations.

Josef Burton is a former US diplomat who served in Turkey, India and Washington DC

When Joy and Jo Banner founded the Descendants Project in 2020, they didn’t expect to be defending their hometown first

When twin sisters Joy and Jo Banner founded their non-profit, the Descendants Project, in 2020, their goal was to protect the Black-founded “freetowns” in Louisiana’s river parishes. Like the Banners’ hometown of Wallace, many of the Black communities that abut the lower Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans were founded after emancipation by people who’d once been enslaved.

Today, decades of disinvestment have left freetowns vulnerable to predatory development, land theft and industrialization. The Banners hoped to reverse those trends. Yet within weeks of creating their organization, their purpose shifted dramatically. Instead of supporting other Black communities, the twins found themselves fighting for their own hometown’s survival. Wallace, population 1,240, was facing an existential threat in the form of the proposed construction of a gargantuan grain-export terminal, the latest in an onslaught of industrial growth along the lower Mississippi River. The terminal would “drain us of all of our resources and all of our quality of life”, Joy said. “The overall goal is to run all of us out.”

In 1999, the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho was attacked in a campaign of violence by a self-confessed racist and homophobe. It completely changed the course of my life

On Saturday 17 April 1999, a bomb exploded in Brixton market in south London, injuring 48 people, including a 23-month-old child. Newspapers showed an X-ray of the toddler’s head with a nail embedded in the skull. Immediately, people knew that someone wanted to kill in an area that had a large Black community.

This was the first of three nailbombs that were planted in the capital targeting minorities. The following weekend, a second bomb exploded in the Bangladeshi area of Brick Lane. Thirteen people were injured ; it might have been more if a passerby hadn’t spotted a suspicious bag and put it in the boot of his car, dampening the blast.

A candid documentary tells how a generation of activists from Asian communities confronted prejudice

I can still remember the chill I felt on first hearing of the murders of Parveen Khan and her three young children, Aqsa, Kamran and Imran. It was July 1981. In the middle of the night, someone had poured petrol through the letter box of their house in Walthamstow, north-east London, and set it alight. The only person to escape the inferno was Parveen’s husband, Yunus, who had jumped from an upstairs window, his injuries leaving him hospitalised for several weeks.

The perpetrators were never caught. Don Gibson was one of the investigating officers. Now, as then, he insists the arsonist was most likely Yunus Khan himself. For this to be true, observes Pete Hope, a firefighter who attended the scene, Khan must have gone out of the house, poured petrol through the letter box, come inside, set the petrol ablaze, gone upstairs, waited until the fire made escape almost impossible and then thrown himself out of a window.

The reporter who covered the trial for the Observer recalls the twists and turns of the double murder trial – and how the jury reached its verdict with astonishing speed

When the jury sent word they would deliver their verdict in the OJ Simpson double murder trial, the rest of America was caught by surprise, myself included. It had taken four hours to rule on nine months of evidence as to whether one of the country’s most famous black men had killed his former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her young friend, Ronald Goldman.

It felt far too quick. The televised case in 1995 had been an astonishing spectacle, its twists and turns drawing vast numbers of viewers from the nation’s daytime soaps.

Thirty years after I covered the ‘trial of the century’, its themes of race, misogyny, policing and celebrity still affect and define the nation

It wasn’t the Kennedy assassination, but I remember exactly where I was on 3 October 1995 when a Los Angeles jury delivered its verdict in the OJ Simpson trial. A novice US correspondent for this newspaper, I was hunched over a primitive laptop, ready to press send on the piece that I had already drafted, confidently explaining to UK readers why the jurors had convicted an American sporting legend of double murder and the likely impact of their decision. The button I had to press was “delete”.

The adrenaline-fuelled hour as I scrambled to write an entirely new commentary on the “shock acquittal” was repeated in newsrooms across the US and around the world. As it turned out, the verdict was not a shock to everyone – but we’ll get to that.

The racist abuse directed at Francesca Amewudah-Rivers shows how casting decisions have been hijacked by the culture wars

It’s a young actor’s worst nightmare: to land the role of a lifetime and then find yourself thrown into a media frenzy of vitriol. Over the past two weeks, Francesca Amewudah-Rivers has been the target of an intense and hateful backlash after she was cast in an upcoming production of Romeo and Juliet, opposite Tom Holland’s Romeo. The critical comments made about her casting are unquestionably racist, colourist and misogynistic, and they have highlighted how difficult it can be to be a dark-skinned black woman in the public eye.

This past summer I played Rosalind in a production of As You Like It, a dream role. It came with huge responsibility, and I can’t imagine also being faced with what Francesca has had to go through recently. Nor have I, as a mixed race, light-skinned woman, suffered these same experiences. Casting has become a political act in film, theatre and TV, and the online discussions that follow casting announcements can become seedbeds of hate that primarily benefit social media companies, driving comments and clicks. Actors become the faces of these online controversies, and while they suffer the consequences, social media companies are never held responsible for the abhorrent comments fuelled by their sites.

A deadline for the White House to review a proposal to ban the extra-addictive cigarettes expired last month with no action

A 1963 ad for Kool cigarettes features a Black man and woman, both holding lit cigarettes. The man, smiling, gazes down at the woman, who looks into the distance as she blows a stream of smoke from her mouth. The accompanying text reads: “Only Kool gives you rich, mellow tobaccos … and extra coolness … a refreshing coolness you draw so smoothly through Kool’s pure white filter … from the very first cigarette in the morning, to your last cigarette at night.”

A 1971 ad from the cigarette brand L&M depicts a Black woman enjoying a luxurious bath. One arm dangles off the side of the tub, while the other holds a lit cigarette. “Everybody’s in bed and I’ll be soon, but not yet, because the bath is so soothing and I can relax” the ad reads. “This … is the L&M moment.”