Salamence

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/9044687

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/65003

Anti-fossil fuel campaigners on Wednesday emphasized that Michigan state regulators had issued key permits for the Enbridge Line 5 tunnel in the Straits of Mackinac on the same day that "wildfire smoke from climate change blotted out the Mackinac Bridge from view" and as the US and other countries faced extreme heatwaves.

Despite the mounting evidence that—as energy and climate experts have long warned—continued fossil fuel extraction is heating the planet and causing dangerous extreme weather, Michigan's Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy handed down a permit Wednesday to allow the Canadian company Enbridge to construct a tunnel that EGLE officials acknowledged will likely have "significant impacts" on threatened or endangered species and Indigenous burial ground in the Straits.

“The magnitude of impacts to recognized historic and cultural values of this proposed project exceeds that of any other that EGLE has reviewed,” said EGLE in its statement on the permits.

Enbridge has sought to build a tunnel around its Line 5 pipeline in the Straits for years, following a massive oil spill from its Line 6B pipeline in the Kalamazoo River. Line 5 has been struck by ships' anchors numerous times, heightening concerns.

EGLE said in its explanation that the oil spill risk was found to be "unacceptable" and that the need for the tunnel outweighed its risks.

But opponents who have argued that Line 5 should be permanently shut down, including the Bay Mills Indian Community, condemned the agency for "rewarding" Enbridge with new permits even after its fossil fuel infrastructure has caused hazardous oil spills.

“Enbridge has spilled oil, committed safety violations, trespassed on lands, shattered ecosystems, pierced aquifers, violated our laws, and repeatedly shown contempt for tribal sovereignty," said Whitney Gravelle, president of the Bay Mills Indian Community. "They have left devastation in their wake, and now they’re being rewarded with responsibility over one of the most precious and sacred resources in our state. The Great Lakes are not safe in their hands. This decision is a deep betrayal of our Great Lake State, and we will confront it immediately, fiercely, and without hesitation.”

The state Department of Natural Resources also issued a permit following EGLE's decision, granting permission for the tunnel despite its potential impact on rare plants and animal habitats.

According to Michigan Bridge, about 1.53 acres of wetlands in Mackinac County would be impacted by the tunnel project, as well as 0.17 acres of Lake Michigan bottomlands in Emmet County, where Enbridge is expected to build a water intake structure.

The environmental legal organization Earthjustice, which has helped represent the Bay Mills Indian Community in its legal challenges against Enbridge, said that with the permits, the company will "transform the Straits of Mackinac into an industrial construction zone for at least six years, destroying views, displacing wildlife, and interrupting tourism dollars."

“Our environmental laws, the looming climate crisis, and simple common sense tells us that an oil pipeline doesn’t belong in the Great Lakes,” said Earthjustice managing attorney Debbie Chizewer. “Today’s decision is a setback, but we’re not giving up. A future without oil in the Great Lakes is still possible.”

EGLE is also expected to rule by September 30 on an Enbridge request to discharge millions of gallons of treated wastewater per day into Lake Michigan while it is constructing the tunnel, and the Michigan Supreme Court is considering a lawsuit brought by four Tribal Nations, including Bay Mills, alleging that the Michigan Public Service Commission improperly issued a key tunnel permit in 2023.

The state is also fighting Enbridge over Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's 2020 order to shut down Line 5 over oil spill concerns. She had campaigned in 2018 on a promise to shut down the pipeline. A federal judge ruled last year that the state had no authority to terminate the use of the pipeline, and the state appealed that ruling.

Advocates expressed anger on Wednesday at Whitmer as her government issued the permits.

“It’s incredibly disappointing that a governor who ran on a commitment to the climate and protecting the Great Lakes has now decided to instead endorse a Canadian industrial tunnel project that still threatens the Great Lakes and will contribute fossil fuels to the climate,” David Holtz, coalition coordinator for the anti-Line 5 group Oil & Water Don’t Mix, told Bridge Michigan.

David Gover, managing attorney for the Native American Rights Fund, said that "the Straits of Mackinac are not a piece of Enbridge oil infrastructure; they are the heart of creation for Anishinaabe people and a vital source of life for all who depend on the Great Lakes."

“We will pursue every legal avenue," Gover said, "to defend treaty rights, protect drinking water, and preserve tribal lifeways from another Enbridge disaster.”

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/9041879

WASHINGTON—President Trump is leaning toward expanding U.S. military operations in Iran after days of briefings from top aides, U.S. officials said. Options include stepping up airstrikes, sending ground forces to seize Iranian islands near the Strait of Hormuz and bombing a fortified site that could be used for covert nuclear work.

Trump hosted a Situation Room meeting Tuesday evening to discuss the potential seizure of Kharg Island and other territory along the Strait of Hormuz using U.S. troops, as well as the potential bombing of a tunnel complex at Pickaxe Mountain, a nuclear-linked site the U.S. has yet to target. Expanding airstrikes against more targets in Iran, including energy sites, also remains a possibility.

The discussion was one of multiple formal and informal conversations Trump has held in recent days with senior officials including Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the officials said.

The U.S. military said it launched two waves of airstrikes against Iran on Wednesday, targeting Iran’s ability to threaten vessels transiting the strait. “We’ll find out whether or not we settle with them, or we just finish it off,” Trump said at an industry event shortly after the second wave of attacks began.

The military also has been enforcing a U.S. blockade of Iranian ports, turning away several ships from the coast on Wednesday. In one case, the military said it fired hellfire missiles at the smokestake of a Curacao-flagged ship that was trying to sail to Kharg Island. The military said the ship ignored its warnings to turn around, so it was disabled.

The president hasn’t made a final decision on next steps in the war, officials said, and he insists privately and publicly that he would prefer resolving his dispute with Iran diplomatically. But Iran hasn’t capitulated to Trump’s demands that it surrender its nuclear stockpile after weeks of military strikes and an interim deal that would have allowed Tehran to make billions of dollars selling oil on the open market. The diplomatic gridlock has prompted Trump to ask aides for new, escalatory options that could force Iran to surrender, or at least promise to stop attacking commercial vessels in the strait.

Some U.S. officials said Trump is reluctant to commit ground forces. He has repeatedly walked back his biggest public threats, including taking Kharg Island and Iran’s oil industry. But if Trump were to approve of the plans, it would usher in the most dangerous phase of the nearly five-month war and drag the U.S. deeper into a growing Middle East conflict, one that would likely lead to higher gas prices and complicate Republicans’ plans for the midterms.

Trump has made candid statements about the war in recent days, confirming that he is considering new military options. While officials say he is leaning toward expanded operations, he could change his mind. And his open discussion of options also could be used to try to scare Iran back to the negotiating table. “We’re going to take out Pickaxe Mountain,” Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt this week. On Tuesday, shortly before the Situation Room meeting, Trump told Fox News that seizing Kharg Island was unlikely but not ruled out. “If we degrade them far enough and deep enough back, I would do that,” he added. Axios reported earlier on the Situation Room discussions.

The strikes Wednesday marked the fifth-straight day of attacks on Iran, following the collapse of an interim peace agreement that had lifted the U.S. blockade on Iranian ports and paused sanctions on Tehran’s oil sales. But Trump declared the ceasefire over after Iran attacked ships in the strait, reimposing the blockade and authorizing fresh strikes.

In an interview that aired Wednesday, Vance told podcaster Joe Rogan the strikes were aimed at forcing Iran back to the negotiating table.

“We’re not just going to bomb and bomb and bomb. We’re going to try to use our military force as one of the many tools that we have to solve the problem,” Vance said.

A green light on either a Pickaxe Mountain or Kharg Island operation would be Trump’s riskiest bet of the conflict.

Pickaxe is a heavily fortified underground site consisting of tunnels built into granite some 300- to 475-feet beneath the surface of a mountain peak—far deeper than Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites at Natanz and Fordow, which the U.S. and Israel bombed last summer. The site is believed to be incomplete.

The depth of the Pickaxe tunnels means they might not be vulnerable to direct hits from the U.S. military’s bunker-buster bombs. Whereas U.S. attacks on Fordow in 2025 targeted ventilation shafts that went straight down to the halls of the site, publicly available satellite imagery hasn’t exposed the definite locations of any ventilation sites at Pickaxe.

That doesn’t mean Pickaxe has no vulnerabilities. Construction at the site means it depends upon power supplies, equipment deliveries and construction personnel that could be sabotaged.

“If they make any move” toward turning Pickaxe into a functioning nuclear site, “we immediately go and do whatever we have to do, but they haven’t,” Trump said Tuesday on Fox News. “Nobody knows if they even are doing anything at Pickaxe, it’s just something that comes up.” Trump added that U.S. bunker-buster bombs “can go deep.”

Attempting to seize Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil-export hub, would harm the country’s oil industry but it also would put American forces directly in harm’s way. Troops would be easy targets for Iranian missiles and drones, U.S. officials and analysts say.

Retired Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie said the U.S. should still consider a Kharg Island operation. “That’s something we should think about doing because possession of Iranian soil would be a significant factor in future negotiations with Iran,” he said Sunday on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.”

Trump is also discussing ideas to occupy other islands along the Strait to assist with shipping and to destroy heavily militarized territory, with analysts pointing to Abu Musa, Greater Tunb and Lesser Tunb as the likeliest targets. U.S. troops would also be vulnerable in those locations, according to the officials and analysts.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/9041879

WASHINGTON—President Trump is leaning toward expanding U.S. military operations in Iran after days of briefings from top aides, U.S. officials said. Options include stepping up airstrikes, sending ground forces to seize Iranian islands near the Strait of Hormuz and bombing a fortified site that could be used for covert nuclear work.

Trump hosted a Situation Room meeting Tuesday evening to discuss the potential seizure of Kharg Island and other territory along the Strait of Hormuz using U.S. troops, as well as the potential bombing of a tunnel complex at Pickaxe Mountain, a nuclear-linked site the U.S. has yet to target. Expanding airstrikes against more targets in Iran, including energy sites, also remains a possibility.

The discussion was one of multiple formal and informal conversations Trump has held in recent days with senior officials including Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the officials said.

The U.S. military said it launched two waves of airstrikes against Iran on Wednesday, targeting Iran’s ability to threaten vessels transiting the strait. “We’ll find out whether or not we settle with them, or we just finish it off,” Trump said at an industry event shortly after the second wave of attacks began.

The military also has been enforcing a U.S. blockade of Iranian ports, turning away several ships from the coast on Wednesday. In one case, the military said it fired hellfire missiles at the smokestake of a Curacao-flagged ship that was trying to sail to Kharg Island. The military said the ship ignored its warnings to turn around, so it was disabled.

The president hasn’t made a final decision on next steps in the war, officials said, and he insists privately and publicly that he would prefer resolving his dispute with Iran diplomatically. But Iran hasn’t capitulated to Trump’s demands that it surrender its nuclear stockpile after weeks of military strikes and an interim deal that would have allowed Tehran to make billions of dollars selling oil on the open market. The diplomatic gridlock has prompted Trump to ask aides for new, escalatory options that could force Iran to surrender, or at least promise to stop attacking commercial vessels in the strait.

Some U.S. officials said Trump is reluctant to commit ground forces. He has repeatedly walked back his biggest public threats, including taking Kharg Island and Iran’s oil industry. But if Trump were to approve of the plans, it would usher in the most dangerous phase of the nearly five-month war and drag the U.S. deeper into a growing Middle East conflict, one that would likely lead to higher gas prices and complicate Republicans’ plans for the midterms.

Trump has made candid statements about the war in recent days, confirming that he is considering new military options. While officials say he is leaning toward expanded operations, he could change his mind. And his open discussion of options also could be used to try to scare Iran back to the negotiating table. “We’re going to take out Pickaxe Mountain,” Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt this week. On Tuesday, shortly before the Situation Room meeting, Trump told Fox News that seizing Kharg Island was unlikely but not ruled out. “If we degrade them far enough and deep enough back, I would do that,” he added. Axios reported earlier on the Situation Room discussions.

The strikes Wednesday marked the fifth-straight day of attacks on Iran, following the collapse of an interim peace agreement that had lifted the U.S. blockade on Iranian ports and paused sanctions on Tehran’s oil sales. But Trump declared the ceasefire over after Iran attacked ships in the strait, reimposing the blockade and authorizing fresh strikes.

In an interview that aired Wednesday, Vance told podcaster Joe Rogan the strikes were aimed at forcing Iran back to the negotiating table.

“We’re not just going to bomb and bomb and bomb. We’re going to try to use our military force as one of the many tools that we have to solve the problem,” Vance said.

A green light on either a Pickaxe Mountain or Kharg Island operation would be Trump’s riskiest bet of the conflict.

Pickaxe is a heavily fortified underground site consisting of tunnels built into granite some 300- to 475-feet beneath the surface of a mountain peak—far deeper than Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites at Natanz and Fordow, which the U.S. and Israel bombed last summer. The site is believed to be incomplete.

The depth of the Pickaxe tunnels means they might not be vulnerable to direct hits from the U.S. military’s bunker-buster bombs. Whereas U.S. attacks on Fordow in 2025 targeted ventilation shafts that went straight down to the halls of the site, publicly available satellite imagery hasn’t exposed the definite locations of any ventilation sites at Pickaxe.

That doesn’t mean Pickaxe has no vulnerabilities. Construction at the site means it depends upon power supplies, equipment deliveries and construction personnel that could be sabotaged.

“If they make any move” toward turning Pickaxe into a functioning nuclear site, “we immediately go and do whatever we have to do, but they haven’t,” Trump said Tuesday on Fox News. “Nobody knows if they even are doing anything at Pickaxe, it’s just something that comes up.” Trump added that U.S. bunker-buster bombs “can go deep.”

Attempting to seize Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil-export hub, would harm the country’s oil industry but it also would put American forces directly in harm’s way. Troops would be easy targets for Iranian missiles and drones, U.S. officials and analysts say.

Retired Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie said the U.S. should still consider a Kharg Island operation. “That’s something we should think about doing because possession of Iranian soil would be a significant factor in future negotiations with Iran,” he said Sunday on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.”

Trump is also discussing ideas to occupy other islands along the Strait to assist with shipping and to destroy heavily militarized territory, with analysts pointing to Abu Musa, Greater Tunb and Lesser Tunb as the likeliest targets. U.S. troops would also be vulnerable in those locations, according to the officials and analysts.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/9044667

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/65072

Amy Acton For Governor Instagram Account

Erin In The Morning is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber.

A growing uproar is consuming the Democratic Party after Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton, locked in a dead heat with Vivek Ramaswamy, took her turn at anti-transgender politics. In the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling that Title IX does not protect transgender people—a sweeping victory for the conservatives who have spent years engineering it—Acton was asked for her thoughts by a local newspaper, the Toledo Blade. She could have offered boilerplate responses or defended transgender kids. Instead, Acton embraced the ban, casting it as a matter of safety and vowing to enforce Ohio's "settled law." The fallout was swift: Democratic equality groups posted, then quietly deleted, criticisms of their own nominee, an intra-party rupture that now threatens the race itself—a pointless own-goal by a Democrat who apparently bought the idea that attacking her own most vulnerable constituents is how you win an election.

“I do not support boys playing in girls sports. This is already settled law in Ohio, and as governor I will enforce and uphold the law,” Dr. Acton said in a response to the Toledo Blade after the Supreme Court decision. “As a doctor, public servant, and a mom, I will always stand up for fairness and protect kids’ health and safety… While my opponent tries to divide us, I’m laser-focused on issues that matter most to Ohioans: lowering costs, cracking down on corruption, and cutting taxes for working families.”

Acton's response was quickly seen for its anti-trans sentiment. Ohio is home to some of the most extreme anti-trans laws in the United States, pushed by the same organizations whose attorneys defended trans sports bans at the Supreme Court. In 2024, the Republican supermajority overrode Governor Mike DeWine's veto to enact House Bill 68, which simultaneously banned gender-affirming care for trans youth and barred trans kids from school sports from kindergarten through college. Months later, legislators slipped a bathroom ban into an unrelated college-credit bill. The resulting law forces trans students out of bathrooms matching their gender identity at every school in the state—including private colleges like Antioch, where more than 80 percent of students identify as LGBTQ+. Trans Ohioans now risk their education, their healthcare, and their safety simply by existing in public.

The statement drew swift condemnation from Democrats across the state. The Ohio Democrats Progressive Caucus, an official advisory arm of the state party, issued a blistering rebuke: "ZERO Ohioans have become better able to buy groceries by keeping child sport players away from their favorite sport. Our hearts break for those kids. Those who disagree with that will never vote—let alone doorknock—for Amy Acton." The caucus warned that its members were less willing to volunteer for her campaign "not out of malice, but out of the bad feeling in our chests.” The party's Pride Caucus answered Acton's framing directly: "There are no boys in girls' sports. Trans girls are girls." Maria Bruno, executive director of Ohioans Against Extremism, called it "frustrating to see an otherwise strong candidate take the bait by trying to triangulate a response rather than just being frank: can we please just leave trans kids alone and get back to talking about how we can make life more affordable for Ohioans?" And in The Buckeye Flame, writer NV Gay put it plainly: "On the last day of Pride month, the transgender community of Ohio was betrayed—all for the sake of winning an election." But the condemnation itself became a controversy. The Progressive Caucus’s post vanished from the group's Facebook page. The caucus has not responded to questions about why—leaving Ohio Democrats to wonder who, exactly, wanted the warning unsaid.

The candidate's statement is all the more puzzling given recent elections. In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger had every opportunity to throw transgender people under the bus with similar statements and never took the bait—even as Republicans poured millions into anti-trans attack ads, with more than half of all GOP ad spending in the race devoted to the issue. Spanberger won by more than 15 points and Democrats flipped 13 House of Delegates seats, transforming a razor-thin 51–49 majority into a commanding 64–36 majority. New Jersey told the same story: Mikie Sherrill faced a similar anti-trans barrage and won by nearly 14 points, outrunning Governor Phil Murphy's 2021 margin in all 21 counties. And in 2023, Andy Beshear vetoed both a trans sports ban and a sweeping ban on gender-affirming care in Kentucky—a state Trump carried by 26 points—then won reelection by 5. The evidence is not ambiguous. Democrats who refuse to abandon trans people have a good track record. Acton chose the one strategy with no record of success.

The law Acton has promised to enforce reaches far beyond the marquee sports conservatives fixate on. While bans like Ohio's are sold through images of swimming and volleyball, House Bill 68 prohibits athletic associations from making case-by-case judgments about competitive fairness and instead imposes a blanket ban on transgender participation from kindergarten through college—replacing the Ohio High School Athletic Association's individualized policy, which functioned without incident for eight years and saw a grand total of 19 transgender girls compete among roughly 400,000 student athletes. This sweeping approach means transgender Ohioans can be excluded from activities such as darts, billiards, dancing, disc golf, fishing, and other sports where claims of unfair advantage are tenuous at best. Even chess—recognized as a sport by multiple universities—could fall under the ban's scope, echoing a recent move by FIDE, the international chess organization, to bar transgender women from women's chess competitions. Notably, each of these sports has seen targeted attacks from Republicans in recent years. This is what "settled law" looks like in practice: a teenager barred from throwing darts with their classmates or from playing chess with other girls.

What Acton's statement will cost her is not yet measurable. What is measurable is the race: the polling average separates her from Ramaswamy by less than a single point. In an election that close, transgender people are not a rounding error. They are one to two percent of the population—more when nonbinary people are counted—and every one of them has partners, parents, siblings, and friends: a web of people who love them and vote like it. If Acton loses this one by a point, it will not be because she stood up for transgender kids. More likely, it will be because she didn't.

Erin In The Morning is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber.

From Erin In The Morning via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/9044667

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/65072

Amy Acton For Governor Instagram Account

Erin In The Morning is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber.

A growing uproar is consuming the Democratic Party after Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton, locked in a dead heat with Vivek Ramaswamy, took her turn at anti-transgender politics. In the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling that Title IX does not protect transgender people—a sweeping victory for the conservatives who have spent years engineering it—Acton was asked for her thoughts by a local newspaper, the Toledo Blade. She could have offered boilerplate responses or defended transgender kids. Instead, Acton embraced the ban, casting it as a matter of safety and vowing to enforce Ohio's "settled law." The fallout was swift: Democratic equality groups posted, then quietly deleted, criticisms of their own nominee, an intra-party rupture that now threatens the race itself—a pointless own-goal by a Democrat who apparently bought the idea that attacking her own most vulnerable constituents is how you win an election.

“I do not support boys playing in girls sports. This is already settled law in Ohio, and as governor I will enforce and uphold the law,” Dr. Acton said in a response to the Toledo Blade after the Supreme Court decision. “As a doctor, public servant, and a mom, I will always stand up for fairness and protect kids’ health and safety… While my opponent tries to divide us, I’m laser-focused on issues that matter most to Ohioans: lowering costs, cracking down on corruption, and cutting taxes for working families.”

Acton's response was quickly seen for its anti-trans sentiment. Ohio is home to some of the most extreme anti-trans laws in the United States, pushed by the same organizations whose attorneys defended trans sports bans at the Supreme Court. In 2024, the Republican supermajority overrode Governor Mike DeWine's veto to enact House Bill 68, which simultaneously banned gender-affirming care for trans youth and barred trans kids from school sports from kindergarten through college. Months later, legislators slipped a bathroom ban into an unrelated college-credit bill. The resulting law forces trans students out of bathrooms matching their gender identity at every school in the state—including private colleges like Antioch, where more than 80 percent of students identify as LGBTQ+. Trans Ohioans now risk their education, their healthcare, and their safety simply by existing in public.

The statement drew swift condemnation from Democrats across the state. The Ohio Democrats Progressive Caucus, an official advisory arm of the state party, issued a blistering rebuke: "ZERO Ohioans have become better able to buy groceries by keeping child sport players away from their favorite sport. Our hearts break for those kids. Those who disagree with that will never vote—let alone doorknock—for Amy Acton." The caucus warned that its members were less willing to volunteer for her campaign "not out of malice, but out of the bad feeling in our chests.” The party's Pride Caucus answered Acton's framing directly: "There are no boys in girls' sports. Trans girls are girls." Maria Bruno, executive director of Ohioans Against Extremism, called it "frustrating to see an otherwise strong candidate take the bait by trying to triangulate a response rather than just being frank: can we please just leave trans kids alone and get back to talking about how we can make life more affordable for Ohioans?" And in The Buckeye Flame, writer NV Gay put it plainly: "On the last day of Pride month, the transgender community of Ohio was betrayed—all for the sake of winning an election." But the condemnation itself became a controversy. The Progressive Caucus’s post vanished from the group's Facebook page. The caucus has not responded to questions about why—leaving Ohio Democrats to wonder who, exactly, wanted the warning unsaid.

The candidate's statement is all the more puzzling given recent elections. In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger had every opportunity to throw transgender people under the bus with similar statements and never took the bait—even as Republicans poured millions into anti-trans attack ads, with more than half of all GOP ad spending in the race devoted to the issue. Spanberger won by more than 15 points and Democrats flipped 13 House of Delegates seats, transforming a razor-thin 51–49 majority into a commanding 64–36 majority. New Jersey told the same story: Mikie Sherrill faced a similar anti-trans barrage and won by nearly 14 points, outrunning Governor Phil Murphy's 2021 margin in all 21 counties. And in 2023, Andy Beshear vetoed both a trans sports ban and a sweeping ban on gender-affirming care in Kentucky—a state Trump carried by 26 points—then won reelection by 5. The evidence is not ambiguous. Democrats who refuse to abandon trans people have a good track record. Acton chose the one strategy with no record of success.

The law Acton has promised to enforce reaches far beyond the marquee sports conservatives fixate on. While bans like Ohio's are sold through images of swimming and volleyball, House Bill 68 prohibits athletic associations from making case-by-case judgments about competitive fairness and instead imposes a blanket ban on transgender participation from kindergarten through college—replacing the Ohio High School Athletic Association's individualized policy, which functioned without incident for eight years and saw a grand total of 19 transgender girls compete among roughly 400,000 student athletes. This sweeping approach means transgender Ohioans can be excluded from activities such as darts, billiards, dancing, disc golf, fishing, and other sports where claims of unfair advantage are tenuous at best. Even chess—recognized as a sport by multiple universities—could fall under the ban's scope, echoing a recent move by FIDE, the international chess organization, to bar transgender women from women's chess competitions. Notably, each of these sports has seen targeted attacks from Republicans in recent years. This is what "settled law" looks like in practice: a teenager barred from throwing darts with their classmates or from playing chess with other girls.

What Acton's statement will cost her is not yet measurable. What is measurable is the race: the polling average separates her from Ramaswamy by less than a single point. In an election that close, transgender people are not a rounding error. They are one to two percent of the population—more when nonbinary people are counted—and every one of them has partners, parents, siblings, and friends: a web of people who love them and vote like it. If Acton loses this one by a point, it will not be because she stood up for transgender kids. More likely, it will be because she didn't.

Erin In The Morning is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber.

From Erin In The Morning via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/9041618

Iran’s top military command unit has warned that it will strike every remaining infrastructure in the region if its infrastructure attacked.

The Khatam al-Anbiya Central Military Headquarters issued a strongly worded statement on Thursday, after US President Donald Trump threatened to expand terrorist American attacks against Iran next week to target civilian infrastructure, including power plants and bridges.

"If the recent empty threats by the US president to have the American military target the infrastructure of the Islamic Republic are carried out, then everything that, due to Iran's restraint, has so far remained intact—that is, all infrastructure throughout the region—will be smashed under the iron blows of the powerful armed forces of the Islamic Republic, to such an extent that no trace of it will remain, as though it had never existed,” the military command’s spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Ebrahim Zolfaqari said.

He also slammed the criminal US regime for continuing its lawless actions and efforts to destabilize West Asia.

Zolfaqari further stressed that Iran will never allow the United States—as a foreign, extra-regional country—to interfere in the Strait of Hormuz, which is the Islamic Republic’s “inviolable red line."

"Let the ignorant enemy know: for us, the moment of epic action is not a moment for restraint. What is being carried out by Iran’s armed forces is not an equivalent strike; it is a superior strike. The strikes will be more intense, extensive, and destructive than ever before. The fury of a nation that has never surrendered will burn the aggressor,” he added.

In another development on Thursday, the IRGC’s Public Relations Department said that the force’s Navy had conducted a “devastating strike against the US base in Sheikh Isa, Bahrain.”

The operation completely destroyed the air surveillance and control radar system and the fuel pumping station supplying the enemy’s fighter aircraft, it noted.

The attack came in response to crimes of the child-killing US military in its aerial assaults on coastal bases and several civilian locations, including a children’s cancer hospital and a water production facility serving pilgrims traveling to Iraq’s holy city of Karbala in the border region of Iran’s Ilam Province.

In the past few days, tensions have increased in the Strait of Hormuz, caused by deadly US strikes on Iran in gross violation of last month’s war-ending deal between the two sides.

Iran has declared the strategic waterway closed “until further notice” and at least until “the end of US interference in the region.”

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/9041618

Iran’s top military command unit has warned that it will strike every remaining infrastructure in the region if its infrastructure attacked.

The Khatam al-Anbiya Central Military Headquarters issued a strongly worded statement on Thursday, after US President Donald Trump threatened to expand terrorist American attacks against Iran next week to target civilian infrastructure, including power plants and bridges.

"If the recent empty threats by the US president to have the American military target the infrastructure of the Islamic Republic are carried out, then everything that, due to Iran's restraint, has so far remained intact—that is, all infrastructure throughout the region—will be smashed under the iron blows of the powerful armed forces of the Islamic Republic, to such an extent that no trace of it will remain, as though it had never existed,” the military command’s spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Ebrahim Zolfaqari said.

He also slammed the criminal US regime for continuing its lawless actions and efforts to destabilize West Asia.

Zolfaqari further stressed that Iran will never allow the United States—as a foreign, extra-regional country—to interfere in the Strait of Hormuz, which is the Islamic Republic’s “inviolable red line."

"Let the ignorant enemy know: for us, the moment of epic action is not a moment for restraint. What is being carried out by Iran’s armed forces is not an equivalent strike; it is a superior strike. The strikes will be more intense, extensive, and destructive than ever before. The fury of a nation that has never surrendered will burn the aggressor,” he added.

In another development on Thursday, the IRGC’s Public Relations Department said that the force’s Navy had conducted a “devastating strike against the US base in Sheikh Isa, Bahrain.”

The operation completely destroyed the air surveillance and control radar system and the fuel pumping station supplying the enemy’s fighter aircraft, it noted.

The attack came in response to crimes of the child-killing US military in its aerial assaults on coastal bases and several civilian locations, including a children’s cancer hospital and a water production facility serving pilgrims traveling to Iraq’s holy city of Karbala in the border region of Iran’s Ilam Province.

In the past few days, tensions have increased in the Strait of Hormuz, caused by deadly US strikes on Iran in gross violation of last month’s war-ending deal between the two sides.

Iran has declared the strategic waterway closed “until further notice” and at least until “the end of US interference in the region.”

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/9042122

Last week, the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025, published a report titled "Title IX's Failed Experiment: Why Accommodating Sex Differences Beats Engineered Parity." As its title suggests, the report---which came only days after the Supreme Court upheld laws banning trans women from women's sports---takes aim at Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bars sex discrimination in schools receiving federal funds and was directly responsible for the creation of women's sports programs in K-12 schools.

Its author, Heritage Foundation senior research fellow and Boise State University political science professor Scott Yenor, chooses to introduce the topic in a familiar way: transphobia. Here, he opens with a nod to the right-wing conspiracy theories surrounding Imane Khelif, writing that "in 2024, a Tunisian man defeated a Chinese woman for the Olympic women's boxing gold medal." Already, he gets the facts wrong: Imane Khelif is Algerian, and she isn't transgender, but regardless, he presses on and uses Khelif to call for laws that "define and uphold the physical differences between men and women."

However, Yenor is merely using the topic of trans athletes---one that right-wing groups have manufactured as a way to get many Americans comfortable with discriminatory policies---as a springboard for his true target: women's sports, and more specifically, "the deeper feminist settlement that has governed athletics for decades." This feminism, he writes, aimed to make women "more independent and even dominant and less deferential and less oriented toward motherhood and traditional female graces," and as a result, "Title IX evolved from a seemingly modest anti-discrimination statute into a powerful engine of feminist social engineering, complete with proportionality mandates."

His central argument is simple: Title IX has created "a prejudice in favor of a male-normed competitive model for women's sports and a prejudice against men's non-revenue programs," and these prejudices "rest on [the] false premise that differences in competitiveness and interest between the sexes are stereotypes to be engineered away." As he clarifies later, he believes that women, when compared to men, are naturally less 'aggressive, assertive, and dominant' and less interested in sports, and therefore, giving men more sporting opportunities isn't discriminatory. Rather, according to Yenor, the discrimination lies in giving women equality, as Title IX's mandates of equal spending and parity in competitive opportunity meant "colleges learned that the safest (and often cheapest) path to compliance was cutting men's non-revenue programs rather than adding women's teams or controlling costs in football and men's basketball."

Interestingly, his entire argument essentially reverses the rhetoric that Republicans have employed when banning trans athletes. There, they argue that trans athletes should get fewer opportunities because they are more competitive and aggressive and that every trans woman who wants to compete is unfairly taking an opportunity away from a cis woman. But here, it's now cis women who should get fewer opportunities for being less competitive and aggressive and that every cis woman who wants to compete is unfairly taking an opportunity away from a man.

And the irony continues Yenor takes issue with the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Virginia, a 1996 landmark case that struck down policies barring women from US military schools, for 'furthering the war on stereotypes.' Meanwhile, that ruling---and its finding that there are "inherent differences between men and women"---has been used to support anti-trans laws going back to the very first line of the very first anti-trans sports law in the US, Idaho House Bill 500 (2020).

Nevertheless, to account for these purported differences between genders, Yenor proposes that Title IX should instead 'accommodate nature' by doing away with many competitive women's sporting programs and instead "supporting a wide range of non-competitive and lower-intensity activities." And in this final section, he writes the following:

"History and the nature-denying extremism of today's Title IX enforcement compel us to consider basic questions: What goods do women themselves get from sports and physical activity? What goods do men get? What goods does society derive from women's participation? From male participation? Podiums, scholarships, or the cultivation of a conquering spirit are hardly the main concerns for most female athletes. Much less of a concern is having a career in professional sports."

As for the 'goods' in question, Yenor is unequivocal: children. In fact, he spends two-thirds of his answer to these questions on fertility alone:

"Of course, many women enjoy the thrill of competition, as the joy on faces of victorious female athletes shows. Women also benefit from activities that build health, good habits, vigor, bodily toughness, grace, confidence, social connection of teamwork, and beauty. Moderate exercise supports fertility and mental well-being far more reliably than does the high-intensity, elite model of sports, which, as science shows, produces Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S) and elevated rates of menstrual disruption in many top-notch female athletes. Between 26 percent and nearly 50 percent of women who exercise intensely stopped having regular menstrual cycles according to several studies. As one recent review of the literature holds, "evidence demonstrates higher rates of menstrual disturbance in elite athletes." High-intensity exercise increases infertility; moderate exercise assists fertility more than any other approach to exercise assists it."

Through this paragraph, Yenor reveals his hand---as well as the fact that the rest of the reasoning he presents may very well be entirely ad hoc. After all, according to his bio on the Heritage Foundation's page, Yenor "writes primarily on the family." Quotes from other conservative figures about him that are listed on the page characterize him as "a student of the hostile forces of feminism and liberals that rip the family apart or prevent families from forming" and as "one of the leading pro-family intellectuals in the country."

Title IX and college sports policy should therefore sit comfortably outside of his area of expertise---unless, of course, he believes this issue concerns family policy. Viewing the report through this lens, his emphasis on replacing the 'high-intensity, elite model of sports' with opportunities that promote 'moderate exercise' (which he defines as including "group fitness classes, dance, yoga, recreational intramurals, hiking clubs, and the like") starts to make more sense, as do his repeated references to the idea that competitive sports make women "less oriented towards motherhood" that are present throughout the report.

As Yenor's report shows, right-wing attacks on women's participation in sports will not remain limited to trans women for much longer. That discourse, ostensibly about 'fairness' and 'safety,' has served to normalize the idea that laws can and should be passed that regulate who qualifies as a woman and what opportunities she has access to. Now, armed with a recent victory at the Supreme Court that upheld those laws, men like Scott Yenor are looking to cash in.

Will America's women let them?

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/9041498

Craig Mokhiber is an international human rights lawyer and former senior United Nations Official. He left the UN in October of 2023, penning a widely read letter that warned of genocide in Gaza, criticized the international response and called for a new approach to Palestine and Israel based on equality, human rights and international law.

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/9021184

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/64205

After Iran claimed to have killed three U.S. personnel in Kuwait over the weekend, the Pentagon’s official toll of injuries and deaths in the war quietly climbed on Monday.

The increase followed the collapse last week of the ceasefire with Iran amid tit-for-tat attacks between the countries.

As hostilities escalated, Iran called for revenge on the U.S. for killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at the outset of the war in February.

The numbers for both wounded and dead U.S. service members in the war increased on Monday, according to the Defense Department.

The numbers for both wounded and dead U.S. service members in the war increased on Monday.

Iran claimed Sunday that it “demolished the U.S. Army’s surface-to-surface missile base” in Kuwait, killing three American military personnel.

U.S. Central Command responded: “There are zero reports of U.S. service member deaths or injuries in the region.”

On Monday, however, the Pentagon’s Iran war death toll, which was last updated Friday, went up by one.

Pentagon statistics show a sailor died in what was provisionally deemed a “non-hostile” fatality with a “pending” caveat, meaning it could later be revised to a hostile death.

It marks the first U.S. fatality on the Pentagon rolls since March. It was not immediately clear whether the new death listed occurred in Kuwait.

The U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense, CENTCOM, and the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Ceasefire Collapse

Iran’s military said on Monday that it launched strikes aimed at American military targets in Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman. Hours before, U.S. forces attacked Iran in response to strikes on commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

President Donald Trump renewed his past protection-racket threats to seize the Strait and begin charging a 20 percent toll on all goods passing through it.

“We’re gonna keep the strait, and we’ll probably run it,” he said on Monday. “We’re gonna get paid for guarding it, a lot of money.”

[

Read Our Complete Coverage

Targeting Iran --------------](/collections/targeting-iran/)

Following a week of public funeral ceremonies for Khamenei, his son and successor Mojtaba Khamenei called for retribution for the late supreme leader’s assassination.

“We pledge that we will avenge your pure blood and the blood of all those martyred in these two wars from the criminal and disgraced killers,” he said. “This revenge is the demand of our nation, and it must certainly be carried out.”

In addition to killing Khamenei, Trump’s war on Iran has killed thousands of Iranian civilians, including more than 150 — most of them children — in an attack on an elementary school.

U.S. Death Toll

The official number of dead and wounded U.S. personnel stands at 428, a more than 11 percent increase since the first ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran was struck on April 8.

Reporting by The Intercept previously found that the Pentagon’s official count of dead and wounded personnel is a gross undercount, stemming from what one U.S. government official called a “casualty cover-up.” The Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the president, is missing hundreds of known casualties.

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Pentagon Erases Wounded U.S. Troops From Iran War Casualty List: “Definition of a Cover-up”](https://theintercept.com/2026/04/22/iran-war-military-casualties-wounded/)

The number of casualties in the DCAS system fluctuates from time to time. On Monday, the number of U.S. deaths during Operation Epic Fury, the military’s name for the campaign in Iran, increased by one, to 14 total.

For a short time in May, however, the count was already at 14 before dropping back to 13, without explanation. Following the drop, DCAS listed 13 hostile and non-hostile U.S. deaths.

The Pentagon list of the dead is missing Maj. Sorffly Davius, a signals and communication officer with the New York Army National Guard who reportedly died of a sudden illness in Kuwait on March 6.

Davius’s death was widely acknowledged even as it was excluded from the official count. Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., spoke about him during a memorial service and Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, publicly recognized Daviusas a fallen service member.

Wounded U.S. Personnel

On Monday, the number of U.S. wounded from the Iran war rose by one, to 414.

Like the official U.S. death toll, it has fluctuated, rising from 385 to 428 during a pause in hostilities in April. Later that month, the number suddenly declined by 15 without public comment from the Defense Department, leading to questions about manipulation of the figures or incompetence at the Pentagon.

While DCAS provides a running tally of “non-hostile” deaths — meaning those who died from accidents or by illness — it doesn’t include “non-hostile” injuries.

The DCAS figures show that 65 Navy personnel have been wounded in action. More than 200 sailors injured during a fire aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford in March are, however, missing from the tally.

The post Iran Claims to Kill 3 U.S. Service Members in Kuwait appeared first on The Intercept.

From The Intercept via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/9019888

Snip:

The Iranian Army has delivered another powerful blow to the US occupation forces in the region, turning American bases into infernos of their own making.

According to the latest statement from the Army’s Public Relations Department on Monday night, following repeated US mischief and aggression against the Iranian homeland, waves of Iranian kamikaze drones targeted and hit critical infrastructure at US terrorist bases in Kuwait just hours ago.

Communication systems, fuel storage tanks, Patriot air defense batteries, control towers, and ammunition depots of the occupying American forces were directly struck and severely damaged.

In a coordinated naval response, the Iranian Army Navy fired cruise missiles at a hostile American vessel after US missile attacks on Iranian military centers, successfully neutralizing the threat.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/9019888

Snip:

The Iranian Army has delivered another powerful blow to the US occupation forces in the region, turning American bases into infernos of their own making.

According to the latest statement from the Army’s Public Relations Department on Monday night, following repeated US mischief and aggression against the Iranian homeland, waves of Iranian kamikaze drones targeted and hit critical infrastructure at US terrorist bases in Kuwait just hours ago.

Communication systems, fuel storage tanks, Patriot air defense batteries, control towers, and ammunition depots of the occupying American forces were directly struck and severely damaged.

In a coordinated naval response, the Iranian Army Navy fired cruise missiles at a hostile American vessel after US missile attacks on Iranian military centers, successfully neutralizing the threat.