UnderpantsWeevil

South Western’s elected school board is making some strange decisions.

For the last two years, they’ve fixated on which bathrooms LGBTQ+ kids use. In 2023, officials in this Hanover-area district played musical chairs with school bathrooms in a misguided attempt to appease the loudest bigots among them — ending up with five different types of bathrooms.

After a low-turnout school board election in which several far-right members joined their ranks, they hired a Christian law firm, decided to begin banning books and reopened the bathroom issue. Board President Matthew Gelazela, who was elevated to his post after previously serving as the board’s most vocal bomb-thrower, pointed to Red Lion’s discriminatory policies as something to aspire to.

Now, upon the advice of that law firm — the Harrisburg-based Independence Law Center — the board approved spending $8,700 to cut windows so passersby can look into the so-called “gender-identity” student bathrooms.

Donald Trump is escalating his threats to increase tariffs on imports if he wins a second term in the White House, reviving fears of renewed trade wars that hit the global economy during his presidency.

The Republican candidate, seeking to win blue-collar votes in swing states pivotal to November’s presidential election, has doubled down on his protectionist rhetoric, delivering blunt warnings of tariffs to US trading partners including the EU.

On Saturday, Trump went further, promising tariffs of 100 per cent on imports from countries that were moving away from using the dollar — a threat that could engulf many developing economies too.

“I’ll say, ‘you leave the dollar, you’re not doing business with the United States. Because we’re going to put a 100 per cent tariff on your goods,’” he said at a rally in Wisconsin.

“If we lost the dollar as the world currency, I think that would be the equivalent of losing a war,” he told the Economic Club of New York on Thursday.

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“Right now, I’m thinking more about how to save my people,” says Mykhailo Temper. “It’s quite hard to imagine we will be able to move the enemy back to the borders of 1991,” he adds, referring to his country’s aim of restoring its full territorial integrity.

Once buoyed by hopes of liberating their lands, even soldiers at the front now voice a desire for negotiations with Russia to end the war. Yuriy, another commander on the eastern front who gave only his first name, says he fears the prospect of a “forever war”.

“I am for negotiations now,” he adds, expressing his concern that his son — also a soldier — could spend much of his life fighting and that his grandson might one day inherit an endless conflict. “If the US turns off the spigot, we’re finished,” says another officer, a member of the 72nd Mechanised Brigade, in nearby Kurakhove.

Ukraine is heading into what may be its darkest moment of the war so far. It is losing on the battlefield in the east of the country, with Russian forces advancing relentlessly — albeit at immense cost in men and equipment.

There has been a shift towards minimizing visible harm to civilian populations since the sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s, which resulted in widespread malnutrition and epidemics. “There’s a strategy of trying to offload the enforcement to the private sector,” she said. “U.S. policy has created conditions that make it commercially compelling for the private sector to withdraw from whole markets, resulting in severe and widespread economic harm, but in a form that is not directly attributable to US policymakers.”

The Helms-Burton Act is a good example. In 2019, Trump implemented Title III of the law, which allows Americans to sue companies doing business with Cuba, which every previous president had waived. Cruise liners that took American tourists to Havana during the Obama years have since been sued for hundreds of millions of dollars in a Florida federal court for docking at Havana’s main port. The effect has been to deter multinationals from investing in the island.

But perhaps the best example of an almost invisible but insidious sanction is designating Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism”. Presented as a benign policy tool to make the world a safer place rather than an arm of economic warfare, it has contaminated the word “Cuba” more than ever in the global economy. Almost overnight the label provoked both global banks and vital exporters to pull out of the Cuban market, according to diplomats and businesspeople on the island.

Senior White House figures privately told Israel that the U.S. would support its decision to ramp up military pressure against Hezbollah — even as the Biden administration publicly urged the Israeli government in recent weeks to curtail its strikes, according to American and Israeli officials.

Presidential adviser Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk, the White House coordinator for the Middle East, told top Israeli officials in recent weeks that the U.S. agreed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s broad strategy to shift Israel’s military focus to the north against Hezbollah in order to convince the group to engage in diplomatic talks to end the conflict, the officials told POLITICO.

The complaint says he sped past the traffic point, disobeyed commands by officers to stop and, when he finally stopped after being chased by police, “removed bags of fertilizer from his vehicle and threw them on the ground to make it appear that they were explosives.”

Nauta told law enforcement, the complaint says, that “he intended to make officers, and others, believe that he had explosives.”

More than 200 trade unions and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Spain have initiated a 24-hour general strike titled "Against the genocide and occupation in Palestine."

As part of the nationwide strike on Friday, demonstrations took place in the capital Madrid and other major cities such as Barcelona and Bilbao, with university students suspending classes in solidarity.

The unions and NGOs expressed that Israel's attacks on Gaza have become "intolerable," urging the Spanish government to "immediately cut diplomatic, commercial, and military relations with Israel" to prevent its participation in "Israel's ethnic cleansing."

Vice President Kamala Harris plans to announce Friday that not only would she keep in place President Joe Biden’s sweeping asylum crackdown if she wins the White House, but that she would take it even further.

During her border visit in Douglas, Arizona, the vice president will propose toughening the president’s policy that suspends asylum claims in between ports of entry when border crossings reach a certain threshold, per a senior campaign official, who was granted anonymity to not get ahead of the vice president’s speech. The senior campaign official did not provide further details of Harris’ proposal.

It’s a striking and aggressive move from Harris in the final stretch of the campaign, as she doubles down on her efforts to cut into former President Donald Trump’s advantage with voters on immigration. The new proposal comes as the vice president makes her first trip to the southern border as the Democratic nominee, when she also plans to emphasize her opponent’s role in killing the bipartisan border deal.

Leaked documents obtained by the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS), a Washington-based think-tank, show that in 2017 a Sudanese company controlled by Prigozhin made purchases of industrial equipment from China that passed through large western banks.

Wagner, which the US Treasury has accused of “mass executions, rape, child abductions and other brutalities against innocents” in Africa, became infamous for providing mercenary services to repressive dictators and for fighting in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The leaked documents show how Prigozhin, whose plane crashed last year after attempting a mutiny against Russian President Vladimir Putin, was able to establish a transnational criminal empire in natural resources in part by secretly hijacking the payments systems of western financial institutions.

One invoice shows that in August 2017, Meroe Gold, a Sudanese mining company that was a front for Wagner, sent a payment from a local bank account via JPMorgan Chase as an intermediate bank in New York to a seller in China.

Another invoice from the same year shows that Meroe Gold sent payment for diesel generators and spare parts to a Chinese company via Hang Seng Bank, which is part of the HSBC Group.