Hate Crime | featured news

A gay man sued a Kentucky jail and a fellow inmate Tuesday, saying the other prisoner bit off part of his nose after harassing him for days. The suit says that Brandon Milam, of Bowling Green, Ky., was sitting on his bed on July 2 when Timothy Schwartz, the other inmate, approached him, pinned him against the wall and began punching his face.

David Plouffe, senior advisor to President Obama’s reelection campaign, fired back in unusually harsh terms Sunday in response to former House speaker Newt Gingrich’s assertion that Obama’s comments on the killing of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin were “disgraceful.”

An alternate juror in the trial of a former Rutgers University student Dharun Ravi said he disagrees with the verdict.

Former Rutgers student Dharun Ravi could face more than 10 years in prison following his conviction Friday for hate crimes, invasion of privacy, tampering with evidence, and a host of other charges related to his spying on his gay college roommate, Tyler Clementi, whose subsequent suicide sparked a national debate on bullying of gay youth.

Opening statements could begin Wednesday in the trial of a former Rutgers University student accused of spying on his gay roommate, Tyler Clementi, who then committed suicide after learning he had been secretly filmed during an encounter with another man in his dorm room.

At a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden Wednesday afternoon, President Obama plans to sign a bill into law that was more than a decade in the making. It is an update to the federal hate crimes statute that Congress initially passed in 1968.

Physical attacks on people based on their sexual orientation will join the list of federal hate crimes in a major expansion of the civil rights-era law Congress approved today and sent to President Barack Obama.

A House vote today put Congress on the verge of significantly expanding hate crimes law to make it a federal crime to assault people because of their sexual orientation.