PHOTOS: The Boys In Hamburg Are Absolutely Wunder-ful

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Melania Trump Website Deleted After Charges She Lied About College Degree

Melania Trump’s personal website vanished from the internet yesterday after questions were raised about whether she really obtained a degree in architecture she said she had obtained from the University of Llubljana, the Huffington Post reports:

Her online biography claimed she had, but a book about her life published earlier this year says she left the university after one year so she could pursue a modeling career.

Embellishing Trump’s educational achievements in her online biography “was almost certainly done in consultation with Trump and his advisors, as they were desperate to give off the impression that the Slovenian model was not just beautiful, but also smart and well-educated,” according to Melania Trump: The Inside Story, an unauthorized biography of the potential first lady.

Questions about Trump’s educational background gained a new sense of urgency last week, after she delivered a keynote at the Republican National Convention that had been plagiarized from a speech current first lady Michelle Obama gave at the Democratic National Convention in 2008.

RELATED: Melania Trump Plagiarized Michelle Obama’s 2008 Convention Speech

Melania Trump also tweeted this:

pic.twitter.com/pDAe8w08ym

— MELANIA TRUMP (@MELANIATRUMP) July 28, 2016

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Hillary Clinton Wasn’t the Only One to Break Barriers at the Democratic National Convention

Khizr Khan, with his wife Ghazala Khan next to him, was one of the standout speakers leading up to Clinton’s groundbreaking address to accept the Democratic nomination for president.

Khan’s son, Capt. Humayun S.M. Khan, was 27 years old when he was killed while serving the US Army in Iraq in 2004. Humayun is credited for an act of heroism that saved his unit from a suicide bomber and was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart.

“Like many immigrants, we came to this country empty-handed,” Khizr Khan said. “We believed in American democracy; that with hard work and goodness of this county, we could share in and contribute to its blessings.”

“We are blessed to raise our three sons in a nation where they were free to be themselves and follow their dreams.” Humayun, he said, dreamed of being a military lawyer. “But he put those dreams aside the day he sacrificed his life to save the lives of fellow soldiers.”

“If it was up to Donald Trump, he never would have been in America.”

Khan was born in Pakistan and immigrated with his family to the US via the United Arab Emirates in 1980. He’s part of a growing contingent of Asian Americans and who are making their voices heard on the political scene.

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are the fastest growing minority group in the country; from 2000 to 2010, the population grew by 46 percent according the US Census. The fast-growing populations are mostly in Nevada, Arizona and North Carolina.

An April-May poll by APIAVote and Advancing Justice brings light to this often undercounted portion of the electorate. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have been adding an average of 600,000 voter to their ranks per election cycle since the mid ’90s. In the last midterm election, their vote split between Republicans and Democrats. Now, though, their vote skews heavily Democratic.

And it’s not just for Hillary Clinton. It’s Democratic all the way down the ticket. According to the poll, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim views are punished severely by this group.

On Wednesday at the Democratic National Convention, the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus took the stage led by chair US Rep. Judy Chu of California.

Chu said that there are a record number of Asian American in Congress today.

“We have gone from being marginalized to becoming the margin of victory in key swing states and districts all across our nation,” she said.

Chu also talked about the importance of immigration reform and clearing a visa backlog of people trying to bring their families to the US.

“Hillary will fight to clear that backlog so that millions of American families can finally be reunited with their loved ones,” Chu said.

There are more than 1 million people waiting for family-sponsored visas from Mexico, and there are just as many from the Philippines, India, Vietnam and China.

Clinton mentioned immigrants or immigration four times her speech. “Comprehensive immigration reform will grow our economy and keep families together and it’s the right thing to do,” she said.

Her platform, however, has thus far focused on undocumented immigrants, specifically creating a path to citizenship for many and continuing the Obama administration policy of focusing deportation efforts on violent offenders. Asian Americans have a stake in this issue as well, however. Like Latinos, they also often live in mixed immigration status households. Asian immigrants make up 15 percent of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US, according to the Migration Policy Institute, and are the fastest growing undocumented group.

Beyond immigration, members of the caucus mentioned Pacific security, the rights of gay, lesbian and transgender people and education as being important to them.

For Khan, preserving the fundamental rights of Americans is what is at stake.

“Have you even read the United States Constitution,” he asked Republican candidate Donald Trump. He then pulled his own copy from his jacket pocket. “I will gladly lend you my copy.”

“In this document, look for the words ‘liberty’ and ‘equal protection of law,’” he said. “You have sacrificed nothing and no one.”

This article first appeared on PRI’s The World.

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Peter Thiel Cancels Appearance at Fascist Conference

Peter Thiel, the gay tech billionaire, Facebook board member, and desperately thirsty speaker at the Republican National Convention, pulled out of his speech at a nightmarish neo-fascist conference in September after we highlighted his planned appearance there last week.

The yearly confab of the Property and Freedom Society, in Bodrum, Turkey, has long welcomed white supremacists. Speakers this year include one gentleman who will explain why Hitler wasn’t to blame for World War II, and another who’ll describe how dusky, “low-IQ immigrants” are destroying Europe. The Society’s founder and conference organizer, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, has called for the establishment of a libertarian order from which advocates of democracy and “parasitism” are physically expelled, along with all gay people.

RELATED: Peter Thiel: Billionaire RNC Speaker, Gay Man, and Guest of Neo-Fascist

Yet Thiel said he was “proud” to be gay when he spoke at the RNC. What he has in common with the men (and they’re all men) who’ll speak at the conference is a creepy disdain for democracy.

In 2009, Thiel wrote that women’s suffrage had rendered American democracy incompatible with capitalism, and that democracy, rather than capitalism, ought to go. (This sentiment made Thiel an incongruous presence at the convention of a party trying to win women’s votes in a democracy. The Guardian speculated that Thiel is sidling up to Trump in the hope of becoming the technological luminary of a Trumpian regime, or at least a beneficiary of the regime’s patronage. But it’s equally easy to suppose Thiel hopes Trump will damage the institution corrupted by the country’s enfranchisement of women in 1920.)

RELATED: Peter Thiel Tells RNC He’s ‘Proud to Be Gay’; GOP Platform Says That He Shouldn’t Be

Thiel planned to address the Property and Freedom Society, according to its program, on one of his characteristically brutal beliefs: the virtue of corporate monopoly.

After we wrote about his speaking slot last week, his name vanished from the group’s website. And his spokesperson told the Huffington Post on Tuesday that he wouldn’t be attending. But the spokesperson didn’t deign to tell the public – what Thiel has called “the unthinking demos” – how he ended up with a speaking slot at a neo-fascist gathering in the first place, or why he pulled out. (Is it possible that Thiel didn’t know the sort of men with whom he’d share the stage? Did Facebook ask him to cancel? Did Reince Priebus?)

It’s clear that Thiel wants the matter to go away quietly. As, apparently, does Facebook, in which Thiel was the first outside investor: the company did not respond to a request for comment, on either the conference or his stance on women and democracy. If Facebook ever replies, we’ll let you know. But it probably won’t. In the year of the first major-party female presidential candidate, it’s safe to assume that Facebook – whose COO is, of course, Sheryl Sandberg, the author of the feminist manifesto Lean In – would rather duck.

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PHOTOS: New York's Bears, Gone Wild

www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/2016/7/29/photos-new-yorks-bears-gone-wild

What Are LGBT Organizations Doing to Support Black Lives Matter?

Activists hope to utilize groups like the Human Rights Campaign to help end police violence against African-Americans.

www.advocate.com/politics/2016/7/29/what-are-lgbt-organizations-doing-support-black-lives-matter

To the Killers of Trans Women…

As this mama bear struggles to protect her trans daughter from the world, she crafts a message to those who may do her child harm.

www.advocate.com/commentary/2016/7/29/killers-trans-women

Categorizing Trans Identity Is No Easy Feat

Can the World Health Organization declassify transgender identity as a mental disorder without alienating anyone?

www.advocate.com/commentary/2016/7/29/categorizing-trans-identity-no-easy-feat