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When American Girl opted to discontinue two of its historical dolls last week, the brand chose Facebook as its medium of communication: “Soon, we’ll say farewell to Marie-Grace, Cécile, Ruthi and Ivy,” American Girl announced. “Complete your collection while supplies last—quantities are extremely limited.” It wasn’t so simple, though. What the brand failed to address in its statement, but which very quickly became evident in blog posts, was that Cécile, an African-American doll, and Ivy, an Asian-American doll, were two of the only dolls of color in American Girl’s standard collection.

Police said 25-year-old Farzana Iqbal was stoned to death by her family for marrying the man she loved .. and not her cousin. ... Around 1,000 Pakistani women are killed every year by their families in honour killings. The true figure is probably many times higher since the Aurat Foundation only compiles figures from newspaper reports.

The woman, a petite blonde dressed in a black pantsuit and purple blouse, appeared nervous when addressing the jurors, speaking quietly and quickly, often clenching her hands in her lap.The woman then walked the jurors through graphic details of the assault, when she says multiple men raped her repeatedly. After the incident, the woman told police she guessed there were 5 to 8 men, but she could not recall how many exactly assaulted her. "It all happened so fast," she recalled.

UPDATED: A family brawl among 10 people at Ellingsrud in northeast Oslo left a two-year-old girl dead, one critically injured and three others wounded on Friday night. Police arrested several people at the scene of what was described as a massive knife fight. The fight was reported shortly before 5pm, police told Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK). Details were sketchy in initial reports from the scene, with one person reported dead and three persons said to be critically injured. It wasn’t until later that police confirmed that the victim of the deadly brawl that shocked the Ellingsrud neighbourhood was the two-year-old daughter...

Ibrahim King, 36, was charged with assault just before 4 a.m. at the PATH 9th Street Station for allegedly slugging Elizabeth Meja. The woman’s friend, Steve Sala said, “He looks at her for a very short moment and then he pulls his right fist back and lunges across the railing and punches her in the face.” King tried to flee, but Sala chased him down and applied a choke hold on him. In the scuffle, Sala extracted one of King’s dreadlocks from his scalp.

In the interest of furthering cross-culturalism, Presidential Medal of Freedom award winner/multicultural advocate/poet Maya Angelou once said that “[it was] time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.” With that pluralistic thought in mind, why not begin that lesson with the story of an elderly Muslim immigrant from Pakistan living in Brooklyn, New York named Noor Hussein? According to prosecutors, 75-year-old Noor met his late wife, 66-year-old Nazar, in Pakistan, where they married before emigrating to Brooklyn. Clearly the honeymoon was over, because Noor, which means "light" in Farsi,...

The City plans to attack economic segregation in its affordable housing plan—placing the poor in middle-class neighborhoods and the more affluent in high-poverty spots. Housing Preservation and Development Commissioner Vicki Been said the plan to build 80,000 new affordable apartments and preserve 120,000 units would create a more diverse city. “We really have to make economic diversity a cornerstone of that plan,” she said at a City Council budget hearing Wednesday. …

Pakistani immigrant beat his wife to death with a stick after the doomed woman made the mistake of cooking him lentils for dinner instead of the hearty meal of goat meat that he craved, according to court papers. Noor Hussein, 75, was so outraged over the prospect of eating the vegetarian fare that he pummeled his wife, Nazar Hussein, 66, inside their Brooklyn apartment until she was a “bloody mess,” prosecutors said in opening statements of his murder trial Wednesday. .... in his home country, beating your wife is customary. “He comes from a culture where he thinks this is...

The National Air Traffic Controllers Association is suggesting the FAA rethink its new ATC hiring protocol after the first attempt netted only a fraction of the controller trainee candidates it expected. As we reported in February, the agency revised its recruitment policies in the hopes of attracting a more diverse pool of prospective controllers. More than 28,000 people applied but of those, only 2,200 passed a somewhat mysterious "biographical questionnaire" to advance to the next selection level. NATCA says the FAA was hoping for 30 percent to pass the questionnaire phase. Among those who failed the questionnaire were graduates of...

MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry joined her fellow MSNBC host Joy Reid on Friday to talk about the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s historic decision in Brown v. The Board of Education and modern racial dynamics in education. Harris-Perry, an educator herself, said that the metrics used to assess the quality of an education need to include diversity as well as factors like test scores and college attendance. Harris-Perry and Reid wrestled with the history of segregation in education and eventually moved on to discuss the rise of charter schooling which both noted are now attracting minority students as well as...

If left-leaning publications value diversity, why don't they have any?On the staff of The American Prospect, I’m the only member of an ethnic minority. That's not because I bring all the variety the magazine needs, or because the editors don't think diversity is valuable. Everyone on the masthead of this liberal publication is committed to being inclusive—not just of racial and ethnic minorities but of women; gays, lesbians, and transgender people; and the poor. Nearly 40 percent of the country is non-white and/or Hispanic, but the number of minorities at the outlets included in this article's tally—most of them self-identified...

Mike Rowe the star of “Dirty Jobs,” his long running series on Discovery Channel sought out and performed a huge variety of jobs that actually got his hands – and the rest of him – dirty. He showed what others do every day to keep the country running with plenty of food, fiber and mobility. Mike was seen on a dairy farm shoveling cow manure, inside an Air Force transport plane fuel tank; in factories and farms cleaning out sumps; slaughter houses dealing with offal; crawling into places that a claustrophobic (not homophobic) like me would panic in. I only...

Three enforcers hired by Mexico’s biggest drug cartel flew from Los Angeles to Minnesota last month, kidnapped two local teenagers, and then tortured them for hours at a house in St. Paul in an effort to recover stolen drugs, according to court documents reviewed by the Star Tribune. Acting under orders from the Sinaloa cartel, the three kidnappers were trying to determine who had stolen 30 pounds of methamphetamine and $200,000 from a stash house on Palace Avenue in St. Paul. Before the episode was over, they had issued death threats against the Minnesota pair and their families, demanding that...

...Towson University won the 2014 Cross Examination Debate Association's national championship. Towson defeated the University of Oklahoma. What was Towson's strategy? Inexplicably using the N-word over and over again in an incomprehensible tirade. Here is an actual excerpt (with profanity redacted). See if you are able to tell what Towson is arguing in favor or against: They say the n*****s always already qu***, that's exactly the point! It means the impact is that the that the is the impact term, uh, to the afraid, uh, the, that it is a case term to the affirmative because, we, uh, we're saying...

U.S. teachers are nowhere near as diverse as their students. Almost half the students attending public schools are minorities, yet fewer than 1 in 5 of their teachers is nonwhite. New studies from the Center for American Progress and the National Education Association are calling attention to this “diversity gap” at elementary and secondary schools in the United States. The groups want more to be done to help teachers more accurately mirror the students in their classrooms. …

The St. Paul teachers’ contract may have an unwanted side effect: Limiting school spots for the city’s integration effort. The class-size lim­its her­ald­ed as a key fac­et of the new St. Paul public schools teachers contract are com­pli­cat­ing ef­forts to boost en­roll­ment and blunt­ing an in­itia­tive de­signed to in­te­grate some of the district’s most popu­lar schools. That initiative, Re­flect­ing St. Paul, was launched this school year and seeks to open seats in 11 schools to stu­dents from neighborhoods with low­er in­comes, high­er per­cent­ages of non-Eng­lish-speak­ing families and low­er test scores. Under the program, the stu­dents, many from mi­nor­i­ty groups, are...

The choice of comedian Stephen Colbert as the replacement for David Letterman ignited a battle of words online Thursday: While little doubt exists that Mr. Colbert is as funny, clever, charming, and goofy as Mr. Letterman, some media voices loudly complained that the decision by CBS now means that network late-night television will largely remain the domain of white male hosts. When Letterman announced last week that he will step down from the “Late Show” in 2015, television critics immediately started pooling names of possible replacements: comedians W. Kamau Bell, Ellen DeGeneres, Tina Fey, Chelsea Handler, Tig Notaro, Amy Poehler,...

A contestant named Julian from Indiana University must be feeling pretty stupid right about now. And Hoosiers can't be feeling too proud. Julian had the chance to win $1 million Friday night, had the puzzle fully solved, and then lost because he pronounced Achilles like “A-chill-us.” Because of that mistake, the show decided not to give him the victory and instead, one of the other contestants who know the “mythological hero” got the chance to steal and did. (To win the full $1 million he would have had to overcome some other hurdles as well.) But alas, poor Julian' disastrous...

A woman trashed a Flatiron diner — smashing glass ketchup bottles against a mirror and TV in a videotaped rampage — after a manager asked her to leave for screaming into her cellphone for 30 minutes, the NYPD said. Latima Brown, 22, was having a loud, profane phone conversation when she entered Malibu Diner at 163 W. 23rd St. with a friend about 5:10 a.m. April 2, police and owner Alex Grimpas said. “She was yelling and very upset and very verbal,” Grimpas, who wasn't present at the time, said about the incident caught on the restaurant's surveillance cameras. “We’re...

A 16-year-old was today arrested and charged over the murder of Nathan Trapuzzano, the newlywed who was shot dead as he took a morning walk. Simeon Adams, known by the nickname 'Red', is alleged to have confessed to a friend that he shot Nathan once in the stomach - after the newlywed, who was expecting his first child, reached down to his shoes as Adams made him strip during the robbery. Adams' friend Marvell Robinson told detectives he was woken up by the alleged shooter on the morning of April 1 at his home in Indianapolis. Adams told him: 'Man...