Linkage

In the American political landscape there is some very good news… and some lingering bad news for the transgender community. Yet another election cycle has proven that campaigning against the trans community is a loser for Republicans. While there is a ton of confusion and prejudice against transgender people, the public doesn’t consider this issue important enough to vote for Republicans (especially when Republicans are taking their rights away, as with abortion).

As in 2022, the elections in 2023 proved that anti-trans rhetoric didn’t help Republicans win anything. Transphobia was a loser in the campaign to unseat Governor Andy Beshear, it was a loser in the campaign for the Virginia state legislature, and it was a loser in many of the local school board races where it was front and center.

That’s the good news, and it is very good news. As a transgender man in Virginia, I would never downplay that because it impacted my life directly, making it very unlikely that new restrictions on my medication will come to Virginia.

The bad news, of course, is that nothing has changed yet in the states where legislation targeting trans people made the most headway. We’ve seen bans and restrictions on transition medicine (including for adults in some places), schools banning books with LGBTQ+ characters, and laws removing the ability of trans people to update their documents to reflect their transitions. In addition to these bad laws there are ongoing efforts to use lawsuits against providers of transgender healthcare to drive providers out of the field and make obtaining treatment more difficult for everyone, even in blue states.

Over the past two years, the Energy and Utilities Association (EUA) has paid a public affairs firm to generate hundreds of articles and interviews to lobby the UK government on energy policy.

The PR campaign subjects heat pumps to intense criticism. Powered by electricity, heat pumps are currently set to play a key role in decarbonising heating and replacing gas boilers, which heat around 85 percent of Britain’s homes and account for 15 percent of greenhouse gas emissions nationwide.

Negative stories about electric heat pumps have featured in outlets such as The Sun, Telegraph and The Express, in which damning headlines dub the technology “Soviet-style”, “financially irrational” as well as “costly and noisy”. Broadcast media has amplified similar messages on BBC 2’s Newsnight, LBC, TalkTV and GB News.

The company driving this coverage is the Birmingham-based WPR Agency, which was hired by the EUA to deliver an “integrated PR and social media campaign” to “help change the direction of government policy”.

On its website WPR said it aimed to “spark outrage” around heat pumps. This wording, along with other phrases, has since been altered to read “spark conversations” following a request for comment on this article from DeSmog.

Can you talk about the settlement-outpost movement and your role in that, especially with young people that you’ve served as somewhat of an inspiration for?

A post is a basis for a bigger community. That’s the name of the game.

And why is that controversial, even among some settlers?

I don’t know that it’s controversial. Some might not know the process. And people say to me, “I want you to build a new outpost that will be as nice as the older one that we see.” I say to them, “It was a place with one family and now hundreds of families.” So this is how it started.

In Israel, there’s a lot of support for settlements, and this is why there have been right-wing governments for so many years. The world, especially the United States, thinks there is an option for a Palestinian state, and, if we continue to build communities, then we block the option for a Palestinian state. We want to close the option for a Palestinian state, and the world wants to leave the option open. It’s a very simple thing to understand.

A Best Value Notice is a letter issued to a local authority by the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. It sets out concerns about the authority’s performance and ability to achieve its Best Value Duty. It may require them to take specific actions to improve their services and achieve better value for money, report on improvement plans or engage directly with the department.

Essentially, it’s a firm tap on the shoulder and being handed a note which says: “Things seem shaky there, friend. You need to get back on the right track.”

A council under fire from the Government for piloting a four-day working week on full pay has reported improvements in staff performance and wellbeing.

Liberal Democrat-run South Cambridgeshire District Council, which is looking to continue a planned extension of the pilot until March despite Government officials ordering it to end, found rates of staff turnover and vacancies had dropped.

A report on progress since the start of the trial in January presented to the council’s employment and staffing committee on Thursday showed the number of agency staff covering vacancies had reduced from 23 to nine, providing a projected saving of £776,000.

Staff turnover reduced by 36% and sickness rates fell by 33%, while significant improvements were reported in the mental and physical health of employees.

Complaints to the council reduced by 2.5% and there was no worsening in the performance of any council service, the report said.

Suella Braverman has been no stranger to controversy in her time as a minister, with the Home Secretary once again facing calls for her dismissal over comments about the police.

Opponents of Ms Braverman have consistently accused her of employing “far-right” rhetoric and lacking “compassion” in her comments about asylum seekers, immigrants and multiculturalism.

She was also effectively sacked by Liz Truss over security concerns, before being brought back into government a week later by Rishi Sunak.

Below, the PA news agency looks at some of the major controversies from Ms Braverman’s time in office.

In previous genocides, whether those accompanying the Great Wars or that of Rwanda in 1994, various justifications were offered to explain the lack of immediate action. In some cases, no Geneva Conventions existed, and, as in Rwanda, many pleaded ignorance.

But, in Gaza, no excuse is acceptable. Every international news company has correspondents or some presence in the Strip. Hundreds of journalists, reporters, bloggers, photographers and cameramen are documenting and counting every event, every massacre and every bomb dropped on civilian homes. It is important here to note that scores of journalists have already been killed in Israeli attacks.

Scientific approximations are telling us, for example, that nearly 25,000 tons of explosives have been dropped on Gaza by Israel in the first 27 days of war. It is equivalent to two atomic bombs, like those dropped by the U.S. on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Boris Johnson said he would rather “let the bodies pile high” than impose another lockdown, the Covid Inquiry has heard.

The former prime minister has previously denied ever making the statement, both on television and to the House of Commons, after an anonymous source told the Daily Mail in 2021 that Johnson said: “No more fucking lockdowns – let the bodies pile high in their thousands.”

Boris Johnson told senior advisers that the Covid virus was “just nature’s way of dealing with old people” and he was “no longer buying” the fact the NHS was overwhelmed during the pandemic, the pandemic inquiry has heard.

In a WhatsApp message sent to his top aides in October 2020, the former prime minister said he had been “slightly rocked” by Covid infection rates and suggested he was, as a result, unconvinced that hospitals were on the brink despite public warnings from NHS chiefs and frontline staff.

The former chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, in his diaries described a “bonkers set of exchanges” in a meeting from that August. He noted that Johnson appeared “obsessed with older people accepting their fate” and letting younger people get on with their lives during the pandemic.

Draft of the Chapter published in Fascism and Theatre: The Politics and Aesthetics of Performance in the Era of Fascism, ed. Günter Berghaus, Berg, Oxford (1994), pp. 11-29.