HellsBelle

Sarah McBride, the first out transgender member of Congress who won her election just weeks ago, posted a statement on social media, several hours before Republican House speaker Mike Johnson announced that transgender women are not permitted to use women’s bathrooms in the Capitol building.

In the post, which features a photo of McBride in a bathroom, McBride says “Here, I am using a women’s restroom in North Carolina that I’m technically barred from being in.”

The statement continues:

They say I’m a pervert They say I’m a man dressed as a woman. They say I’m a threat to their children. They say I’m confused, They say l’m dangerous

We’re all just people trying to pee in peace.

After two years of Pierre Poilievre as their leader, many Conservative MPs say they are much less free now than they were before his arrival.

The man who promised during his leadership run to make Canada "the freest country in the world" maintains tight control over the actions of his caucus members.

Normally loquacious Conservatives close up like oysters and dare not speak without their leader's approval. MPs are watched by Conservative staffers both inside and outside Parliament. Elected representatives are publicly called to order for deviating from the party line.

"Everybody is being watched. What we say, what we do, who we talk to. We're told not to fraternize with MPs from the other parties. And that's not normal," a Conservative source said.

Former prime minister Stephen Harper has been appointed the new chairman of the board of AIMCo, the Alberta Investment Management Corporation, the Alberta government said Wednesday.

"We're incredibly fortunate that Mr. Harper has agreed to take on this leadership role with AIMCo," Premier Danielle Smith said in a news release.

"Our ambitious goal of building the Heritage Savings Trust Fund to more than $250 billion in the next 25 years requires strong governance oversight, which he will provide."

The Pentagon was publicly dismissive of Trump’s pledge to employ the military to conduct mass deportations. “The Department does not comment on hypotheticals or speculate on what may occur,” a Defense Department spokesperson told The Intercept.

Behind the scenes, officials were exasperated. “It’s absolutely insane,” said one Pentagon official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the press on the matter. “I never thought I’d see the day when this was a ‘serious’ — put that in scare quotes — policy.” He said that the legal and logistical hurdles would be immense, and the proposal was “unrealistic and unserious.”

Another Defense Department official in a different office, who was also not authorized to speak with the press, had almost exactly the same reaction. “It’s insanity,” he said of Trump’s announcement.

In the five and a half years since the Chicago Police Department agreed to extensive oversight from a federal judge, there have been bursts of activity to address the brutality and civil rights violations that led to the agreement.

Court hearings: more than a hundred. Meetings: hundreds. Money: hundreds of millions in Chicago taxpayer dollars allocated to making the court-ordered reforms, known as a consent decree, a reality.

Chicago police haven’t crafted a system for officers to work with residents to address threats to public safety.

They haven’t completed a mandatory study of where officers are assigned throughout the city and whether changes would help thwart crime.

And they have failed to move forward with a plan to alert police brass about which officers have been accused of misconduct more than once and might need counseling, retraining or discipline.

Apple will ask a federal judge on Wednesday to dismiss the U.S. Department of Justice's case accusing the iPhone maker of unlawfully dominating the smartphone market, in the latest Big Tech antitrust showdown.

U.S. District Judge Julien Neals in Newark, New Jersey, is scheduled to hear arguments from lawyers for Apple, and from prosecutors who say the company locks users in and keeps competition out by limiting interoperability between the iPhone and third-party apps and devices.

Apple has moved to dismiss the case, saying its limitations on developers' access to its technology were reasonable, and that forcing it to share technology with competitors would chill innovation.

The U.S. Department of Justice brought the case during Donald Trump's first four-year term, and won a landmark ruling in August that Google maintained an illegal monopoly in online search and related advertising.

Prosecutors have floated a range of potential remedies in the case, from ending exclusive agreements in which Google pays billions of dollars annually to Apple and other companies to remain the default search engine on tablets and smartphones, to divesting parts of its business, such as its Android operating system.

The DOJ is expected to press forward with several of those proposals on Wednesday, including one that could require Google to divest its Chrome browser, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.

The U.S. House Ethics Committee is expected to meet behind closed doors Wednesday as some Senate Republicans call for it to share the findings of its probe into allegations of sexual misconduct involving Donald Trump's attorney general pick Matt Gaetz.

Gaetz, 42, resigned his House of Representatives seat last week, hours after President-elect Trump tapped him to lead the Justice Department, a move that raised questions in Congress as to the future of the panel's investigation into allegations that Gaetz had sex with a 17-year-old girl.

The Justice Department that Trump wants Gaetz to lead conducted its own three-year investigation into allegations of sex trafficking by the then-lawmaker, which produced no criminal charges, and also brought two criminal cases against Trump after he left office in 2021, neither of which went to trial.

As he did in his first term, U.S President-elect Donald Trump is likely in January to invoke the so-called global gag rule, a policy that bars U.S. foreign aid from being used to perform abortions or provide abortion information. The policy cuts off American government funding for services that women around the world rely on to avoid pregnancy or to space out their children, as well as for heath care unrelated to abortion.

The gag rule has a 40-year history of being applied by Republican presidents and rescinded by Democratic presidents. Every GOP president since the mid-1980s has invoked the rule, which is known as the Mexico City Policy for the city where it was first announced.

As one of his first acts as president in 2017, Trump expanded the rule to the extent that foreign NGOs were cut off from about $600 million in U.S. family planning funds and more than $11 billion in U.S. global health aid between 2017 and 2018 alone, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

Russia’s upper house of parliament on Wednesday endorsed a bill banning adoption of Russian children by citizens of countries where gender transitioning is legal.

The Federation Council also approved bills that outlaw the spread of material that encourages people not to have children.

The bills, which have previously been approved by the lower house, will now go to President Vladimir Putin for signing into law. They follow a series of laws that have suppressed sexual minorities and bolstered longstanding conventional values.

A "bomb cyclone" that brought wind gusts of up to 160 km/h to parts of the B.C. South Coast led to highway closures and power outages affecting thousands of people Tuesday night, and forced a group of school children on Vancouver Island to shelter in a school for hours.

At around 8 p.m. PT, the weather station on Sartine Island — just off the coast of northern Vancouver Island — recorded wind gusts of 159 km/h.

The bomb cyclone, which formed in the Pacific Ocean 400 kilometres west of Tofino, B.C., could see a pressure drop of 60 millibars over a 24-hour stretch at the centre of the storm — which forecasters say is highly unusual for B.C.

Mahdavi says U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration measurements are showing waves taller than 10 metres on the open ocean west of Vancouver Island, and waves are expected to grow considerably into Tuesday night.

U.S. officials would allow increased logging on federal lands across the Pacific Northwest in the name of fighting wildfires and boosting rural economies under proposed changes to a sweeping forest management plan that’s been in place for three decades.

The U.S. Forest Service proposal, released Friday, would overhaul the Northwest Forest Plan that governs about 38,000 square miles (99,000 square kilometers) in Oregon, Washington and California.

The plan was adopted in 1994 under President Bill Clinton amid pressure to curb destructive logging practices that resulted in widespread clearcuts and destroyed habitat used by spotted owls. Timber harvests dropped dramatically in subsequent years, spurring political backlash.

But federal officials now say worsening wildfires due to climate change mean forests must be more actively managed to increase their resiliency. Increased logging also would provide a more predictable supply of trees for timber companies, officials said, helping rural economies that have suffered after lumber mills shut down and forestry jobs disappeared.