A Southern Baptist pastor who gave an invocation at a celebration honoring the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan stepped down from his rural Alabama church in late July.
Will Dismukes, who is also a Republican state representative for the city of Prattville, 14 miles northwest of Montgomery, boasted on a Facebook page that he participated at an annual birthday party for Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, a prominent figure in southern history.
On July 20, a Russian court ordered Father Sergiy, an influential monk who has denied the existence of the new coronavirus and urged his followers to ignore government lockdown orders, to pay a fine for fomenting enmity through his sermons.
Kimberly Jackson remembers the disappointment and devastation that erupted after the execution of Troy Davis nearly ten years ago in Jackson, Georgia.
Years of canvassing and protesting ended with activists weeping and embracing outside the prison after Davis was put to death by lethal injection. Davis, a black man who maintained his innocence, was on death row for two decades after being convicted of murdering a Savannah police officer.
Last month, Muslim pilgrims arrived in Mecca for a drastically scaled-down hajj, as Saudi authorities balanced the kingdom’s oversight of one of Islam’s key pillars with the safety of visitors in the face of a global pandemic.
The hajj, which ran from July 29 to August 2, is normally one of the world’s largest global gatherings, drawing about 2.5 million people for five intense days of worship.
Observers noted that federal officers in Portland caused more trouble than they solved. That may have been the point.