Author: Reporter

With just two days to spare, President Joe Biden signed legislation on Jnue 3 that lifts the nation’s debt ceiling, averting an unprecedented default on the federal government’s debt. President Biden celebrated a “crisis averted” in his first speech to the nation from the Oval Office on June 2. Treasury Department had warned the U.S. would not be able to meet its obligations. The budget agreement eliminated the potential for an unprecedented government default that would have been catastrophic for the domestic and global economies. “Passing this budget agreement was critical. The stakes could not have been higher,” Biden...

YouTube will stop removing content that falsely claims the 2020 election or other past U.S. presidential elections were marred by “widespread fraud, errors or glitches,” the platform announced on June 2. The change is a reversal for the Google-owned video service, which said a month after the 2020 election that it would start removing new posts that falsely claimed widespread voter fraud or errors changed the outcome. YouTube said in a blog post that the updated policy was an attempt to protect the ability to “openly debate political ideas, even those that are controversial or based on disproven assumptions.”...

The start of June marks the beginning of Pride month around the U.S. and some parts of the world, a season intended to celebrate the lives and experiences of LGBTQ+ communities and to protest against attacks on hard-won civil rights gains. This year’s Pride takes place in a contentious political climate in which some state legislators have sought to ban drag shows, prohibit gender-affirming care and limit how teachers can talk about sexuality and gender in the classroom. Events have been disrupted. Performers have been harassed. And in Colorado in November, five people were killed and several injured when...

Dozens of transgender people in Florida have turned to crowdfunding appeals to help them leave the state after the passage of new legislation that targets the LGBTQ+ community, including a law that curtails access to gender-affirming care for adults and bans it for minors. For Sage Chelf, the decision to leave hardly felt like a choice, but she didn’t have the funds to cover a move. The 30-year-old trans woman, who lives in the Orlando area, was nearly out of one medication when she found out the clinic that had been prescribing her hormone therapy was ending all treatment...

Target once distinguished itself as being boldly supportive of the LGBTQ+ community. Now that status is tarnished after it removed some products aimed at LGBTQ+ and relocated Pride Month displays to the back of stores in certain Southern locations in response to online complaints and in-store confrontations that it says threatened employees’ well-being. Target faces a second backlash from customers upset by the discount retailer’s reaction to aggressive, anti-LGBTQ+ activism, which has also been sweeping through Republican state legislatures. Civil rights groups chided the company for caving to anti-LGBTQ+ customers who tipped over displays and expressed outrage over gender-fluid...

Aaron and Lacey Jennen’s roots in Arkansas run deep. They have spent their entire lives there, attended the flagship state university, and are raising a family. So they are heartbroken at the prospect of perhaps having to move to one of an ever-dwindling number of states where gender-affirming health care for their transgender teenage daughter, Sabrina, is not threatened. “We were like, ‘OK, if we can just get Sabrina to 18 … we can put all this horrible stuff behind us,'” Aaron Jennen said, “and unfortunately that’s not been the case, as you’ve seen a proliferation of anti-trans legislation...