Minnesota Governor Tim Walz criticized President Donald Trump during an interview with MSNBC host Jen Psaki, stressing just why the people who elected Trump to run the country “like a business” were completely misguided.
Walz particularly lamented the impacts of Trump’s ongoing trade war with Canada and Mexico, noting that Trump has a history of scuttling deals and “a proven track record of being an absolute failure.”
U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth speaks at the Al Udeid Air Base, Thursday, May 15, 2025, in Doha, Qatar. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Military commanders will be told to identify troops in their units who are transgender or have gender dysphoria, then send them to get medical checks in order to force them out of the service, officials said Thursday.
A senior defense official laid out what could be a complicated and lengthy new process aimed at fulfilling President Donald Trump’s directive to remove transgender service members from the U.S. military.
The new order to commanders relies on routine annual health checks that service members are required to undergo. Another defense official said the Defense Department has scrapped — for now — plans to go through troops’ health records to identify those with gender dysphoria.
Far Right Federal Judge Rules Gay And Trans People Can Be Discriminated Against In Workplaces
Judge Kacsmaryk, a federal judge in the Northern District of Texas, ruled on the EEOC’s treatment of Title VII employment discrimination claims on gay and trans people.
On Thursday, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk—a far-right federal judge in the Northern District of Texas with a record of aligning with the GOP’s most extreme legal positions—issued a ruling declaring that Title VII no longer protects LGBTQ+ people from workplace discrimination. The decision directly contradicts the Supreme Court’s landmark 2020 ruling inBostock v. Clayton County, which held that discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity is, by definition, sex discrimination. Kacsmaryk’s ruling marks one of the most alarming judicial rollbacks of LGBTQ+ rights in recent memory—and sets up a direct legal challenge to one of the foundational civil rights protections for queer and trans people in the United States.
Montana Court Issues Final Blow to Anti-Trans Health Care Law
A judge found that the law’s premise is not scientific, but “political and ideological.”
A state judge in Montana has permanently struck down SB 99, a law which sought to ban gender-affirming care for Montana youth under age 18.
The court decision is a welcome reprieve for young trans Montanans, who have had the threat of forced detransition hanging over their heads since 2023. The bill would have threatened the licensure of physicians who provided trans-affirming care to this age group and prevented state funds from being used for gender-affirming surgeries, hormones, puberty blockers, and “social transitioning” measures for trans youth. It also would have allowed parents of trans kids to sue medical professionals for providing their children with the proper care.
But these kinds of laws, which are being passed around the country, are highly unscientific. They try to erase the biological reality of gender and sexual diversity to further a far-right gender ideology. As the court ruling declared, “the State’s interest is actually a political and ideological one: ensuring minors in Montana are never provided treatment to address” their gender dysphoria.
“In other words, the State’s interest is actually blocking transgender expression.”
1) The court found overwhelming evidence backing the benefits of gender-affirming care for trans people.
Israeli ministers said the settler outpost at Homesh will be retrospectively legalised (file photo from May 2023)
Israeli ministers say 22 new Jewish settlements have been approved in the occupied West Bank – the biggest expansion in decades.
Several already exist as outposts, built without government authorisation, but will now be made legal under Israeli law. Others are completely new, according to Defence Minister Israel Katz and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
Settlements – which are widely seen as illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this – are one of the most contentious issues between Israel and the Palestinians.
Katz said the move “prevents the establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger Israel”, while the Palestinian presidency called it a “dangerous escalation”.
The Israeli anti-settlement watchdog Peace Now called it “the most extensive move of its kind” in more than 30 years and warned that it would “dramatically reshape the West Bank and entrench the occupation even further”.
BBC team’s tense encounter with sanctioned Israeli settler while filming in West Bank
Israeli settlers are seizing Palestinian land under cover of war – they hope permanently
Israel has built about 160 settlements housing some 700,000 Jews since it occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem – land Palestinians want, along with Gaza, for their hoped-for future state – in the 1967 Middle East war. An estimated 3.3 million Palestinians live alongside them.
Successive Israeli governments have allowed settlements to grow. However, expansion has risen sharply since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power in late 2022 at the head of a right-wing, pro-settler coalition, as well as the start of the Gaza war, triggered by Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel.
On Thursday, Israel Katz and Bezalel Smotrich – an ultranationalist leader and settler who has control over planning in the West Bank – officially confirmed a decision that is believed to have been taken by the government two weeks ago.
A statement said they had approved 22 new settlements, the “renewal of settlement in northern Samaria [northern West Bank], and reinforcement of the eastern axis of the State of Israel”.
It did not include information about the exact location of the new settlements, but maps being circulated suggest they will be across the length and width of the West Bank.
Katz and Smotrich did highlight what they described as the “historic return” to Homesh and Sa-Nur, two settlements deep in the northern West Bank which were evacuated at the same time as Israel withdrew its troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005.
Nine of the settlements would be completely new, according to the watchdog. They include Mount Ebal, just to the south of Homesh and near the city of Nablus, and Beit Horon North, west of Ramallah, where it said construction had already begun in recent days.
The last of the settlements, Nofei Prat, was currently officially considered a “neighbourhood” of another settlement near East Jerusalem, Kfar Adumim, and would now be recognised as independent, Peace Now added.
Katz said the decision was a “strategic move that prevents the establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger Israel, and serves as a buffer against our enemies.”
“This is a Zionist, security, and national response – and a clear decision on the future of the country,” he added.
Smotrich called it a “once-in-a-generation decision” and declared: “Next step sovereignty!”
But a spokesperson for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas – who governs parts of the West Bank not under full Israeli control – called it a “dangerous escalation” and accused Israel of continuing to drag the region into a “cycle of violence and instability”.
“This extremist Israeli government is trying by all means to prevent the establishment of an independent Palestinian state,” Nabil Abu Rudeineh told Reuters news agency.
Lior Amihai, director of Peace Now, said: “The Israeli government no longer pretends otherwise: the annexation of the occupied territories and expansion of settlements is its central goal.”
Elisha Ben Kimon, an Israeli journalist with the popular Ynet news site who covers the West Bank and settlements, told the BBC’s Newshour programme that 70% to 80% of ministers wanted to declare the formal annexation of the West Bank.
“I think that Israel is a few steps from declaring this area as Israeli territory. They believe that this period will never be coming back, this is one opportunity that they don’t want to slip from their hands – that’s why they’re doing this now,” Mr Ben Kimon told the BBC’s Newshour programme.
Israel effectively annexed East Jerusalem in 1980, in a move not recognised by the vast majority of the international community.
AFP
Israeli soldiers accompanied settlers establishing the Homesh outpost in May 2023
This latest step is a blow to renewed efforts to revive momentum on a two-state solution to the decades-old Israel-Palestinian conflict – the internationally approved formula for peace that would see the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel – with a French-Saudi summit planned at the UN’s headquarters in New York next month.
Jordan’s foreign ministry condemned what it called a “flagrant violation of international law” that “undermines prospects for peace by entrenching the occupation”.
UK Foreign Office Minister Hamish Falconer said the move was “a deliberate obstacle to Palestinian statehood”.
Since taking office, the current Israeli government has decided to establish a total of 49 new settlements and begun the legalisation process for seven unauthorised outposts which will be recognised as “neighbourhoods” of existing settlements, according to Peace Now.
Last year, the UN’s top court issued an advisory opinion that said “Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful”. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) also said Israeli settlements “have been established and are being maintained in violation of international law”, and that Israel should “evacuate all settlers”.
Netanyahu said at the time that the court had made a “decision of lies” and insisted that “the Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land”.
Anti-abortion and abortion rights protesters confront each other outside a Planned Parenthood office in Missouri in 2022.Robert Cohen/St. Louis Post-Dispatch vía AP
One might have thought that last November, when Missourians voted to enshrine “reproductive freedom,” including abortion, in the state constitution, that would be the end of the conversation. In overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, the US Supreme Court professed that the question of whether abortion should be legal was now up to states. And the people of Missouri made it very clear: They wanted abortion rights (at least until fetal viability).
Alas, the Missouri Supreme Court doesn’t seem to be inclined to listen.
Thanks to the passage of Amendment 3, Missouri’s criminal abortion ban is gone. But local Planned Parenthood affiliates are still fighting in court to overturn the web of restrictions, known as TRAP laws, that made providing abortions virtually impossible in the state even when Roe was the law of the land. These include a 72-hour waiting period, hallway width requirements for abortion clinics, and a rule that providers must have admitting privileges at a hospital 15 minutes away, to name just a few. In a pair of decisions in December and February, Jackson County Judge Jerri Zhang agreed to temporarily suspend enough of those old laws to allow abortions to resume in Missouri while the court case heads to a January 2026 trial.
But on Tuesday, the state supreme court overturned Zhang’s rulings, ordering her to reconsider the temporary block on the TRAP laws using a different legal standard. As a result, abortion providers have once again been forced to halt their work, rendering the constitutional right to abortion effectively moot, for now. For the second time since 2022, abortion clinics had to call pregnant people this week to let them know their scheduled abortions had been canceled, the Associated Pressreported.
“This decision puts our state back under a de facto abortion ban and is devastating for Missourians and the providers they trust with their personal health care decisions,” Emily Wales and Margot Riphagen, leaders of the two Planned Parenthood affiliates that operate in Missouri, said in a joint statement. “We will continue to fight for their freedom to the constitutionally protected health care they voted for.”
Planned Parenthood lawyers have already filed a brief asking Zhang to re-issue her preliminary injunction under the new standard and block the TRAP laws again. But even if Zhang agrees, and abortions do resume again in Missouri in a few weeks—or after a January 2026 trial—abortion rights in the state will remain far from settled.
That’s because, two weeks ago, Missouri lawmakers voted to put yet another constitutional amendment on the ballot—this one repealing the reproductive freedom amendment and banning virtually all abortions. Voters will see that question on their November 2026 ballots—or sooner, if Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe decides to call a special election.
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I watched videos of this protest and the complete violence of the police going full out assault against the gay protestors who were just standing there. The Christian group in anger at what the mayor said about them, so the next day blocked access to the town hall not letting reporters, workers, or people in the community into the town hall. The Christian group did not have a permit and violated sound level ordnances but the police did not try to remove them or force them to let people through to the town hall. But the police did again violently attack the counter protestors from the neighborhoods. It seems clear the police are pro the Christian haters who want conversion therapy done on LGBTQ+ kids to wipe out anyone not straight and cis. The police chaplain is on the fly for the hate group as you can see below. The Christian hate group wants to force everyone to live as their church doctrines demand. They are extremely hateful towards the LGBTQ+ community. They demand that people respect and accommodate their views but refuse to accept the rights of the LGBTQ+ community, not accept the rights that the LGBTQ+ communities are due. I will post the rest of the post by Joe. My. God. but at the end I will post a video that streamer Vaush made on this subject also. As Vaush says the prosecutors refused to press charges on many the police arrested. Maybe because they were innocent protestors viciously attacked by bigoted police. Hugs
In the days after a chaotic confrontation between police and protesters at a conservative Christian rally on Capitol Hill, several groups have questioned why the demonstration was held at Cal Anderson Park and how the city could have better prepared.
The rally, advocating “freedom from same sex attraction” and ”the sacrality of biological gender,” was permitted in the heart of the state’s most LGBTQ+-friendly neighborhood, in a park named for the state’s first openly gay elected official.It attracted scores of protesters who scrapped with police. Twenty-three people were arrested.
Local LGBTQ+ advocates and at least one City Hall politician expressed anger the permit was granted for Cal Anderson, alleging the location was intended to rile the neighborhood’s residents.
The Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced via a social media post on Tuesday evening the FBI will investigate allegations of targeted violence against religious groups regarding last weekend’s chaotic Cal Anderson Park rally.
Dan Bogino posted the announcement on X at 5:15 p.m., writing, “We have asked our team to fully investigate allegations of targeted violence against religious groups at the Seattle concert. Freedom of religion isn’t a suggestion.”
MayDay USA, which describes itself as a Christian Pro-Life organization, held the rally at Cal Anderson Park in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. It was met by LGBTQ+ protesters in a competing rally. At some point, police were called in, and there were multiple scuffles between the group and officers.
One of the prominent supporters of Mayday USA is former Spokane Valley state representative Matt Shea, of the “On Fire Ministries,” according to the Radical Women Seattle. Mayday USA organizers have set up a tour of five cities in the country, with Saturday’s event being held in what is considered the heart of the LGBTQ+ community in Seattle on Capitol Hill.
Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell said the far-right rally was specifically held at the park in Seattle’s known LGBTQ+ neighborhood “to provoke a reaction by promoting beliefs that are inherently opposed to our city’s values.”
In a statement, Mayor Harrell called Seattle “a welcoming, inclusive city for LGBTQ+ communities, and we stand with our trans neighbors when they face bigotry and injustice.” Harrell said anarchists joined the counterprotesters, which resulted in violence and arrests. He said the event organizes shut down the event early after being asked to do so.
Matt Shea, the far-right extremist cited above, has appeared here multiple times, most recently in February 2023 when a church then-affiliated with Shea was ordered to pay Planned Parenthood nearly $1 million in legal fees and a fine related to protests that “interfered with patient care.”
He first earned national headlines in 2019 when leaked chats showed his violent fantasies about executing non-Christians and when it was learned that he had participated in militia drills to train young men for “biblical warfare.”
Shea advocates for the creation of a 51st US state based on “biblical law.” He has also said that all American men who fail to avow allegiance to Jesus should be executed.
He was expelled by the Washington state Republican caucus but refused to resign even after the feds found that he had “participated in an act of domestic terrorism against the United States” by helping plan the armed takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016.
Shea did not seek reelection in 2020 and is now the pastor of Covenant Christian Church in Spokane.
I have very few photos of me as a child. I only have these few. I wish I had more. I did have a small book given to me by someone who knew my adopting adults but hurricane Ian took them from me and I did not have them saved digitally. Notice that until I was 17 and in the church boarding school was I allowed to have long hair. Hair was used as a way to set me apart from other kids, to reenforce the idea that I was less than the others, I was the one to be hurt and used. As I have mentioned while the other kids could have their hair the current style I was required to have my hair as short as possible. When I was young my adopting father cut it himself and would often leave bald spots and make it as ugly as possible. Hugs
Me at 7 months
These two pictures below I do not know how old I am, but again notice the hair. In the top picture we are at the large farm my grandparents owned. It was a place the entire family gathered at holidays. I was happy to be outside because inside the big farm house with a dozen bedrooms I was constantly being raped or made to please “my” siblings, cousins, and uncles. Even at that age of 4 or 5 I was no stranger to the emotional, physical, and sexual abuse that started at age 3. The clothing was always decent when we were there, to be taken from me once we left. At the farm house I had food to eat when hungry, and grandmother was always talking to me, hugging me, and just letting me stay near her. No one yelled at me even though I was scared of some of the adult men. But when we left the good times stopped and the abuse began.
The lower one I think was taken after we have had moved to the small cow town to evade the abuse charges against the adults. I think this might have been my second grade school photo. By now the light was going from my eyes and I learned not to talk. I simply looked at everyone as possibly the next one I would have to “make happy” or perform for. It was now happening at school, by the one of the town police officers, and of course at home. My siblings would drug me and take me to parties or simply have them at the house we lived in and I would be a party favor.
In this picture below I am about 11 or 12. I am about to go to be taken somewhere to some event to be displayed. I think it might have been to church where for a while the adopting adult female and her daughters were going to hopefully to buy their way past their guilts. The pastor there was regularly abusing me, I have talked about that before. I was grateful he only wanted to play with my nude body or have me suck him, never put something in my butt as normally I would have been raped at least once before getting ready for church. By now I had no fight left in me. Notice the always long sleeves to cover the marks and bruises and the long pants to cover the welts and marks. Again notice the short hair at a time when longer flowing hair was being worn by boys my age in school. This would have been in the early 1970s. By now at this age I had accepted I was a toy to be used or displayed, moved and directed by them. I had no agency, no authority, no say in my life. My retreat was in my head, the place I lived, the dreams and stories I told myself that no one else could hear.
Below is me at 18 at the church boarding school. This is the first time in my life I was allowed to grow my hair out. The adopting adults hated it. The adopting adult female constantly bitching and insulting me over. At this point the adopting male refused to speak to me or be in any room I was in if I had to be at their home during the school year. I tried to remain at the school as much as possible.
Below is me at age 23 or early 24 when I had just gotten out of the military. I had already started to let my hair grow over my ears. This was the way I kept my hair most of my life just longer on the sides and back. Parted on the left and swept to the right. Hugs
This is me at age 23 or early 24 when I had just gotten out of the military. I had already started to let my hair grow over my ears. This was the way I kept my hair most of my life just longer on the sides and back. Parted on the left and swept to the right. Hugs
Snippet: In the book The Great Open Dance: A Progressive Christian Theology, theologian Jon Paul Sydnor argues that even the apostle Paul calls for an allegorical reading of Genesis by citing his letter to the church in Galatia. In Galatians 4:21-31, Paul explains the significance of Sarah and Hagar. In verse 24, he tells his audience, “These things are being taken figuratively: the women represent two covenants.” If Paul didn’t read Genesis literally, then I think that permits Christians to interpret Genesis from a more open perspective when it comes to gender and sexuality.
I hold out hope that the Bible can be interpreted in such a way as to make room for me and other trans people. I grasp on to the idea that there is a Christianity out there that is safe and committed to fighting anti-trans legislation. Perhaps to my own harm, I even sometimes find myself hoping that fundamentalists and the Far Right can be persuaded. Persuaded to care, persuaded to see the shared humanity between themselves and transgender people, persuaded by their own good book to protect my community and change their ways. Though I know this is unlikely, I continue to cling to hope. As I am literally fed and cared for by a Christian community, I gain a better understanding of what faith looks like. Today, I am choosing to have faith in my identity as something beautiful and chosen, and good.
In Transgender, Intersex, and Biblical Interpretation, theologians Terese J. Hornsby and Deryn Guest write, “The trans body is not a minority exception to a two-gendered system; it is not an anomaly or a body that exists in the margins. The reality is that there are no margins.” This limitlessness, this abundance, is not only good theology, it is safety, it is belonging.
May 23, 2025, 3:13 PM EDT; Updated: May 23, 2025, 3:35 PM EDT
Allie Reed
Correspondent
A large transgender flag with signatures and messages during a protest.
Photographer: Manaure Quintero/Bloomberg
The Trump administration must republish two Harvard Medical School professors’ papers it censored because they contained words related to gender ideology, a federal judge ruled Friday.
“The plaintiffs are likely to succeed in proving that the removal of their articles was a textbook example of viewpoint discrimination by the defendants in violation of the First Amendment,” Judge Leo Sorokin wrote for the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
The US Department of Health and Human Services took down peer-reviewed articles by doctors Gordon Schiff and Celeste Royce from the now-inactive Patient Safety Network website, run by the HHS’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
PSNet said the articles were taken down in accordance with President Donald Trump’s executive order directing agencies to remove content that promotes “gender ideology.” Schiff’s article, on suicide risk assessment, and Royce’s, on endometriosis, both referenced transgender people.
“This is a flagrant violation of the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights as private speakers on a limited public forum,” Sorokin wrote.
The government can only restrict speech on a limited public forum like PSNet in a way that is reasonable and viewpoint neutral, the order said, and the administration’s restrictions were not.
Sorokin said it is not within his discretion “to evaluate the wisdom of restricting access to peer-reviewed scientific information that enhances patient safety by fostering more informed and timely diagnostic care—or of eliminating entirely a free, online repository of patient-safety resources accessed each year by thousands of medical professionals seeking to provide better, safer care to their patients in the United States. Those are matters for the political branches of government to decide.”
The preliminary injunction applies to Schiff and Royce’s articles, as well as other content removed from PSNet in a similar manner.
The Trump administration is asking a federal judge to reject a challenge from two Harvard University Medical School physicians seeking to block the government’s removal of research papers because they included terms related to the LGBTQ communities. https://t.co/Bj8Wuuu8c7
Photo: Acting NASA Administrator Janet Petro, who also serves as Kennedy Space Center director, a post she assumed in 2021. Trump elevated Petro to lead NASA after he ousted former Sen. Bill Nelson for believing in climate change.
Newly-released data shows that Oklahoma ranks 46th in per-pupil spending, but Walters, who is eyeing a run for governor, has called for cuts to his state’s “wasteful” education spending, including $250,000 to provide school districts with emergency inhalers.
In his KFOR interview, Walters did boast about getting new teachers a signing bonus, but as was widely reported the time, $290,000 of that money had to be clawed back because it had gone to teachers who did not qualify. Some of those teachers had already spent the money.
New: CBP seized a shipment of t-shirts from @cola.baby featuring a swarm of bees attacking a cop. The company also sells "ELIMINATE ICE" t-shirt and previously was threatened by LAPD for "FUCK THE LAPD" shirts and hats. Shirts to be "destroyed under CBP supervision"www.404media.co/cbp-seizes-s…
Rep. Beth Lear first appeared here in January 2024 when she defended her anti-trans bathroom bill by citing the “millstones” bible verse which calls for drowning anyone who hurts children.
She later blamed “depraved monster” Alfred Kinsey, liberals, and the ACLU for transgender people even existing.
Rep. Josh Williams first appeared here in July 2024 for his bill that would criminalize drag shows in the presence of children. Williams reintroduced his bill last week.
Scottie's Playtime 