Republican lawmakers in the US are leaning into outdated definitions of obscenity to outlaw drag and ban books too

For five months this year, homosexuality was prohibited in a Tennessee college town.

In June, the city council of Murfreesboro enacted an ordinance outlawing “indecent exposure, public indecency, lewd behavior, nudity or sexual conduct”. The rule did not explicitly mention homosexuality, but LGBTQ+ people in the town quickly realized that the ordinance references 21-72 of the city code, which categorizes homosexuality as an act of indecent sexual conduct.

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Candidates pledge support for Israel, and Florida governor says he’s ‘sick of Republicans losing’ as ex-president holds rally nearby

War in Gaza and other foreign policy issues were dominant in Wednesday’s lively third debate of Republican presidential hopefuls in Miami. Candidates pledged wholehearted support for Israel’s military onslaught of the territory following last month’s Hamas attacks.

“I will be telling Bibi [Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu] to finish the job once and for all with these butchers Hamas. They’re terrorists. They’re massacring innocent people. They would wipe every Jew off the globe if they could,” Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, said.

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Florida governor’s constant attacks on the education system have led to an increasing backlash from a wide range of people

This summer, Iris Mogul – a junior at a Miami high school – found out that she wouldn’t be able to take an AP African American history course that she had planned for the coming semester because it had been blocked by the state’s department of education. “As presented, the content of this course is inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value,” the department said in a statement.

“It felt so far away when I first heard about all of this,” says Mogul, who only had a passing knowledge of book challenges and changes to school curriculum previously. “But that is really when it hit me – when it started to affect me directly.”

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Florida governor says Washington Post report about undisclosed trips on donors’ planes a case of ‘Trump-legacy media collusion’

A spokesperson for Ron DeSantis has responded to a Washington Post report about undisclosed trips on donors’ private jets and said the report is an example of “Trump-legacy media collusion.”

The DeSantis spokesperson, Andrew Romeo, directed the paper to a former aide to the Florida governor now a top adviser to Donald Trump.

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If state’s highest court upholds the 15-week ban, a separate, stricter law would take effect prohibiting abortion after six weeks

The Florida supreme court on Friday will hear arguments in a case that could drastically limit abortion access in the south-eastern United States.

Abortion providers in Florida filed a lawsuit to block the state’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

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Republican presidential candidates took to the stage this week to try to convince voters they should be the one to take on Joe Biden in 2024. There was one notable exception – but Donald Trump was still inescapable for his opponents.

Joan E Greve speaks to the former GOP communications director Tara Setmayer about everyone’s performance on the night, and whether these debates even matter when the missing frontrunner is so far ahead in the polls

Archive: Fox News, CNN, CBS News

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Even though he decided not to attend, the former president cast a long shadow over this week’s debate between his rivals

Donald Trump stayed away from Wednesday’s Republican candidates’ debate in Milwaukee. Yet he remained the evening’s dominant presence. The former president’s poll lead among Republican supporters for the 2024 US presidential contest is so strong that he could afford to do this. His absence deliberately belittled both the televised event, as he simultaneously gave an imperiously misleading social media interview to Tucker Carlson, and his eight challengers, who were left vying to impress in a fantasy “What if?” contest over the choice for a party not in fact dominated by Mr Trump.

Absence also allowed Mr Trump, on the eve of his latest court appearance in Atlanta and now facing 91 felony counts in four separate criminal cases, to avoid offering himself as a target to his eight rivals. Not that he need have worried about that. Most of them went out of their way all evening to pay him repeated homage. No one did this more shamelessly than the Ohio entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy , who told the audience both that Mr Trump was the best Republican president of the 21st century and that, if elected, Mr Ramaswamy would instantly pardon him for whatever he may have been convicted of in the meantime.

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While most candidates didn’t flat out deny the climate emergency – save Vivek Ramaswamy – they showed no urgency to address it

Unlike in recent election cycles, most Republican presidential hopefuls this time around didn’t flat out deny that the climate crisis is real. But on the Fox News debate stage, they made clear that they’re not interested in dwelling on the issues – or doing much about it.

On Tuesday night, the eight candidates were asked to raise their hands if they believed in the reality of human-caused global heating. They all punted.

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Bail bondsman in Atlanta was charged with crimes related to alleged involvement in Coffee County voting systems breach

Scott Hall, one of Donald Trump’s co-defendants in the Georgia case, has turned himself in to the Fulton county jail, according to the jail’s online database.

A Georgia bail bondsman and Trump supporter, Hall is charged with illegally seeking access to voting machines in Coffee county, Georgia, to search for evidence they were rigged.

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