A chance encounter reminded me: there are two ways to look at what’s happened in Minneapolis

One of the few advantages of being as conspicuous as I am is that many people come up to me whom I don’t know, to talk about what’s happening in America. It’s like a free-floating focus group.

On Monday morning, I was at a restaurant counter finishing my breakfast when a middle-aged man sat down next to me and said he didn’t want to intrude. (He just had, so I put down my knife and fork, wiped my mouth with my napkin, and turned toward him.) He wanted me to know that although he’d been a life-long Republican, the events of the past weeks had caused him to leave the Republican party.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now

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My pup Romeo and daughter Harper share names with the Beckham offspring. Could VB not just have laid claim to ‘Posh’ instead?

As a sidebar to the civil war in the House of Beckham, it emerged at the weekend that Victoria has trademarked all her children’s names. A lot of people think this is a peculiar parenting move, and a lot of other people think this a perfectly natural thing to do, for someone who has built a global brand from just their name and raw talent – but I thought, wait a second: my daughter is also called Harper and my dog is called Romeo, and even though neither of them has imminent plans to launch a perfume, I still should have been consulted on this.

My Harper was born two years before the Beckhams’, and therefore by any reasonable metric, Posh copied me. But – see brand-building, above – by the time my Harper was four, even her own father couldn’t remember which one had come first. No such excuse for Romeo the dog, who started out 14 years younger than Romeo Beckham^TM, but is now 46 years older, thanks to dog years. The name clash couldn’t be helped: he came from a themed litter (featuring Rogue, Rebel, Ricky, Ross and Raoul) and he was the most loving. You can’t mess with that kind of nominative determinism.

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The terrifying animal at the centre of Burke Doeren’s thriller is convincingly ferocious but the supporting humans don’t match its power

Despite its lurid poster art, as an ursine rampage film this falls closer to the serious Grizzly Man/Timothy Treadwell end of the scale, rather than the Cocaine Bear one. Based on a freak August 1967 tragedy in which two women were separately mauled to death by grizzlies in Montana’s Glacier National Park (described here as a “trillion to one” occurrence), Burke Doeren’s debut grips in tooth’n’claw terms, but is considerably less sure-footed when it comes to people.

Down at the park, fire season is all the rangers think they have on their plate, but they’re not reckoning with wayward teenagers and rogue bears. At the giftshop, Michele (Ali Skovbye) leans on Paul (Jacob Buster) to join her posse and help her shoo off an unwanted suitor at Trout Lake. So he leaves colleague Julie (Brec Bassinger) to a sexy bivouac with boyfriend Roy (Matt Lintz) in a separate location. Meanwhile, with smoke plumes occupying the rangers, rookie Joan (Lauren Call) is commandeered to lead a tour group heading out to a remote lodge.

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A wave of violence has left transgender people afraid to go out, as experts say the global rise of far-right ideology is fuelling transphobia

It was past midnight but Zehrish Khanzadi and Bindiya Rana were still up, drinking tea, when the doorbell rang. Within seconds of Rana unlocking the door remotely from the kitchen, three shots rang out. “The men fled and she narrowly escaped all three bullets,” Khanzadi says of her colleague and housemate.

Both trans women work for the Gender Alliance Interactive (GIA), an organisation that advocates for transgender rights, Rapa as its head and Khanzadi as a rights activist.

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peaceful-jp-scenery posted a photo:

Kamikochi, Nakanose
上高地・中ノ瀬

No one else was walking this route, and since the snowshoeing only caused me to sink about 10cm, I decided to go this way.

このルート、誰も歩いていなかった。スノーシューで沈みは10cm程度だったので、ここを行く事にしました。

Matsumoto city, Nagano pref, Japan

peaceful-jp-scenery has added a photo to the pool:

Kamikochi, Nakanose
上高地・中ノ瀬

No one else was walking this route, and since the snowshoeing only caused me to sink about 10cm, I decided to go this way.

このルート、誰も歩いていなかった。スノーシューで沈みは10cm程度だったので、ここを行く事にしました。

Matsumoto city, Nagano pref, Japan

Voor ras-Rotterdammers Gerda en Frans zijn het spannende tijden. Ze zijn binnenkort weer op tv, in het tweede seizoen van '010: De Mensen Die Rotterdam Kleur Geven', en het stel wordt weer opa en oma. "Me schoondochter loop op alle dag."

We krijgen vaak suggesties van lezers. Gisteren ontvingen we deze van dhr. Peter B., vandaar de B. achter onze RGvT-initialen. Ik heb hem speciaal op papier getekend, zodat we het origineel naar de inzender kunnen opsturen. Dank!

Bastiaan Geleijnse is van plan om op het Instagram-account er wekelijks een VRIJDAG, NU-JIJDAG van te maken. Daar plaatst hij dan het plaatje van de cartoon van na het weekend en kun je als lezer je eigen tekstbijdrage toevoegen. Die cartoons maak ik echter niet op papier, die teken ik gewoon op mijn oude, vertrouwde iPad.

Zie hier voor VRIJDAG, NU-JIJdag op INSTA: https://www.instagram.com/fokke__sukke/

In space, no one can hear you bork

NASA has confirmed that its planet hunter, TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), entered safe mode due to a command error that inadvertently left the spacecraft's solar arrays angled away from the Sun.…