Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
D.C.
Delaware
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Mass.
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
N.Carolina
N.Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
S.Carolina
S.Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
W.Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming
Law Firm Website Design Companies : The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly


China’s top leaders have pledged to loosen monetary policy and provide more support for the slowing economy, while Premier Li Qiang swiped at threats of higher tariffs on Chinese exports, saying they hinder global growth.

Shares in Hong Kong jumped Monday after state media released a report on the meeting by the ruling Communist Party’s Politburo that said leaders would “implement more active fiscal policies and moderately loose monetary policies.”

The shift to “moderately loose” from the “prudent” monetary policies of the past 14 years was taken as a significant shift by market players, unleashing a spate of buying that pushed the Hang Seng index up 2.8%.

“This marks a significant recalibration in their approach, aiming to cushion the anticipated economic shocks” (from higher tariffs), Stephen Innes of SPI Asset Management said in a commentary.

Several months ago, the Chinese central bank and other regulators began rolling out various policies aimed at encouraging businesses and households to spend more money. Overall, Monday’s statement mostly reiterated the same broad promises as usual.

“The readout leaves little doubt that the shift toward a more supportive policy stance that began in September is still alive and well,” Julian Evans-Pritchard said in a report. He noted that the last such shift was in late 2008, during the global financial crisis, and that it may be followed by faster interest rate cuts in the coming year.

Monday’s meeting has set the tone for an annual economic planning meeting later in the week that will reaffirm policies for the coming year.

China’s economy has growing a bit more slowly than the official target for a 5% expansion in annual terms this year, and the property market is still in the doldrums. Consumer spending remains subdued, having never fully recovered after the COVID-19 pandemic, and the statement from the Politburo meeting promised a “combination punch” of government spending and easier credit to help boost consumption.

Consumer inflation in November was a lower-than-expected 0.2%, the government reported Monday, down from 0.3% the month before mainly due to lower food prices. That leaves ample room for interest rate cuts, analysts said.

With youth unemployment still relatively high and many households feeling the pinch of lower housing prices and unstable jobs, the statement called for improving the “people’s sense of gain, happiness and security.”

“We must do a good job in people’s livelihood protection and security and stability the ensure the stability of the overall social situation,” it said.

Also Monday, Li, who as premier has the traditional role of overseeing the economy, met with heads of the World Bank and other big international financial organizations.

Li did not refer to the United States by name, but took aim at countries that restrict trade through higher tariffs and other measures, in a veiled slam at Washington at a time when the U.S. has been tightening controls on exports of advanced technology, while President-elect Donald Trump is threatening to sharply hike import duties on Chinese products.


They have seen him smiling on a hostel security camera, but don’t know his name. They found the backpack he discarded while fleeing, but don’t know where he’s gone.

As the search for UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s killer goes on, investigators are reckoning with a tantalizing dichotomy: They have troves of evidence, but the shooter remains an enigma.

Police don’t know who he is, where he is, or why he did it, though they are confident it was a targeted attack instead of a random act.

“The net is tightening,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams said Saturday.

Hours after he spoke, police divers were seen searching a pond in Central Park, where the killer fled after the shooting. Officers have been scouring the park for days for any possible clues and found his bag there Friday.

Late Saturday, police released two additional photos of the suspected shooter that appeared to be from a camera mounted inside a taxi. The first shows him outside the vehicle and the second shows him looking through the partition between the back seat and the front of the cab. In both, his face is partially obscured by a blue, medical-style mask.

Retracing the gunman’s steps using surveillance video, police say, it appears he left the city by bus soon after the shooting Wednesday morning outside the New York Hilton Midtown. He was seen on video at an uptown bus station about 45 minutes later, NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said.

With the high-profile search expanding across state lines, the FBI announced late Friday that it was offering a $50,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction, adding to a reward of up to $10,000 that the NYPD has offered. Police say they believe the suspect acted alone.

Police provided no updates on the hunt Saturday, but investigators are urging patience — even with a killer on the loose. Hundreds of detectives are combing through video recordings and social media, vetting tips from the public and interviewing people who might have information, including Thompson’s family and coworkers and the shooter’s randomly assigned roommates at the Manhattan hostel where he stayed.

“This isn’t ‘Blue Bloods.’ We’re not going to solve this in 60 minutes,” Kenny told reporters Friday. “We’re painstakingly going through every bit of evidence that we can come across.”

The shooter paid cash at the hostel, presented what police believe was a fake ID and is believed to have paid cash for taxi rides and other transactions. He didn’t speak to others at the hostel and almost always kept his face covered with a mask, only lowering it while eating.

But investigators caught a break when they came across security camera images of an unguarded moment in which he briefly showed his face soon after arriving in New York on Nov. 24.

Police distributed the images to news outlets and on social media but so far haven’t been able to ID him using facial recognition — possibly because of the angle of the images or limitations on how the NYPD is allowed to use that technology, Kenny said. On Friday evening, investigators found a backpack in Central Park that had been worn by the gunman, police said. They didn’t immediately reveal what, if anything, it contained but said it would be tested and analyzed.

Another potential clue, a fingerprint on an item he purchased at a Starbucks minutes before the shooting, has so far proven useless for identifying him, Kenny said.

Aided by surveillance cameras on nearly every building and block, police have been able to retrace the shooter’s movements.

They know he ambushed Thompson at 6:44 a.m. as the executive arrived at the Hilton for his company’s annual investor conference, using a 9 mm pistol that resembled the guns farmers use to put down animals without causing a loud noise. They know ammunition found near Thompson’s body bore the words “delay,” “deny” and “depose,” mimicking a phrase used by insurance industry critics.

Kenny said the fact that the shooter knew UnitedHealthcare group was holding a conference at the hotel and what route Thompson might take to get there suggested that he could possibly be a disgruntled employee or client.


A federal appeals court panel on Friday unanimously upheld a law that could lead to a ban on TikTok as soon as next month, handing a resounding defeat to the popular social media platform as it fights for its survival in the U.S.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied TikTok’s petition to overturn the law — which requires TikTok to break ties with its China-based parent company ByteDance or be banned by mid-January — and rebuffed the company’s challenge of the statute, which it argued had ran afoul of the First Amendment.

“The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” said the court’s opinion, which was written by Judge Douglas Ginsburg. “Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States.”

TikTok and ByteDance — another plaintiff in the lawsuit — are expected to appeal to the Supreme Court, though its unclear whether the court will take up the case.

“The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech, and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue,” TikTok spokesperson Michael Hughes said in a statement.

“Unfortunately, the TikTok ban was conceived and pushed through based upon inaccurate, flawed and hypothetical information, resulting in outright censorship of the American people,” Hughes said. Unless stopped, he argued the statute “will silence the voices of over 170 million Americans here in the US and around the world on January 19th, 2025.”

Though the case is squarely in the court system, it’s also possible the two companies might be thrown some sort of a lifeline by President-elect Donald Trump, who tried to ban TikTok during his first term but said during the presidential campaign that he is now against such action.

“He wants to save TikTok,” Rep. Michael Waltz, Trump’s pick for national security adviser, said Friday during an interview on Fox Business.

The law, signed by President Joe Biden in April, was the culmination of a yearslong saga in Washington over the short-form video-sharing app, which the government sees as a national security threat due to its connections to China.

The U.S. has said it’s concerned about TikTok collecting vast swaths of user data, including sensitive information on viewing habits, that could fall into the hands of the Chinese government through coercion. Officials have also warned the proprietary algorithm that fuels what users see on the app is vulnerable to manipulation by Chinese authorities, who can use it to shape content on the platform in a way that’s difficult to detect. The European Union on Friday expressed similar concerns as it investigates intelligence that suggests Russia possibly abused the platform to influence the elections in Romania.


A court in Vietnam on Tuesday upheld the death sentence for real estate tycoon Truong My Lan but said it could be commuted to life if she reimburses some $11 billion, or three-fourths of what she defrauded in the country’s biggest financial crime.

The scale of her fraud shocked the nation, with analysts raising questions about whether other banks or businesses had similarly erred. It has also dampened Vietnam’s economic outlook and made foreign investors jittery at a time when Vietnam has been trying to position itself as a home for businesses pivoting their supply chains away from China.

Lan, 67, was convicted in April of embezzlement and bribery amounting to $12.5 billion, equivalent to 3% of the country’s GDP. As chairperson of the Van Thinh Phat real estate firm, the court said she illegally controlled Saigon Joint Stock Commercial Bank between 2012 and 2022 and allowed 2,500 loans that cost the bank $27 billion in losses.

A higher court in Ho Chi Minh on Tuesday rejected her appeal of the conviction but said that her death sentence could be commuted to life if she reimburses three-fourth of the losses, working out to around $11 billion, state media reported.

Her lawyers argued that she had repaid the money but the court disagreed since there were legal issues with some of the seized properties and prosecuting agencies couldn’t assess their value, VN Express reported.

Lan’s lawyers also noted several mitigating circumstances — she had admitted guilt, showed remorse and had paid back part of the amount.

“I feel pained due to the waste of national resources,” she said last week, according to state media.

But the court said her violations had negatively impacted banking, caused public disorder and eroded people’s trust, VN Express said.

Under Vietnamese law, death sentences aren’t immediately carried out and there is an extended legal process, said Nguyen Khac Giang, a visiting fellow in the Vietnam Studies Program at Singapore’s ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute. He added that Lan would seek another review of the case or a presidential pardon to reduce her sentence.

“Moreover, if she repays at least three-quarters of the misappropriated funds, the court may consider commuting her sentence to life imprisonment,” he said.

Her arrest was among the most high-profile in an anti-corruption drive in Vietnam that intensified after 2022. The so-called Blazing Furnace campaign touched the highest echelons of Vietnamese politics.

Lan, 67, and her family had set up the Van Thing Phat company in 1992, after Vietnam shed its state-run economy in favor of a more market-oriented approach open to foreigners. The company grew into one of Vietnam’s richest real estate firms, with luxury residential buildings, offices, hotels and shopping centers.

This made her a key player in the country’s financial industry. She orchestrated the 2011 merger of the beleaguered SCB bank with two other lenders in coordination with Vietnam’s central bank. The court said that she used this to tap SCB for cash and, according to government documents, owned more than 90% of the bank while approving thousands of loans to “ghost companies.”

These loans, according to state media, found their way to her and she bribed officials to cover her tracks.

The scale of the crime meant the case was split into two trials, and Lan was sentenced to another life sentence in October. At that trial, she was accused of raising $1.2 billion from nearly 36,000 investors by issuing bonds illegally through four companies, state media reported.

She was also found guilty of siphoning off $18 billion obtained through fraud and for using companies controlled by her to illegally transfer more than $4.5 billion in and out of Vietnam between 2012 and 2022.

Vietnam has handed down more than 2,000 death sentences in the past decade and executed more than 400 prisoners. It is a possible sentence for 14 different crimes but is typically applied for cases of murder and drug trafficking.


The founder and former CEO of the failed cryptocurrency lending platform Celsius Network could face decades in prison after pleading guilty Tuesday to federal fraud charges, admitting that he misled customers about the business.

Alexander Mashinsky, 58, of Manhattan, entered the plea in New York federal court to commodities and securities fraud.

He admitted illegally manipulating the price of Celsius’s proprietary crypto token while secretly selling his own tokens at inflated prices to pocket about $48 million before Celsius collapsed into bankruptcy in 2022.

In court, he admitted that in 2021 he publicly suggested there was regulatory consent for the company’s moves because he knew that customers “would find false comfort” with that.

And he said that in 2019, he was selling the crypto tokens even though he told the public that he was not. He said he knew customers would draw false comfort from that too.

“I accept full responsibility for my actions,” Mashinsky said of crimes that stretched from 2018 to 2022 as the company pitched itself to customers as a modern-day bank where they could safely deposit crypto assets and earn interest.

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a release that Mashinsky “orchestrated one of the biggest frauds in the crypto industry” as his company’s assets purportedly grew to about $25 billion at its peak, making it one of the largest crypto platforms in the world.

He said Mashinsky used catchy slogans like “Unbank Yourself” to entice prospective customers with a pledge that their money would be as safe in crypto accounts as money would be in a bank. Meanwhile, prosecutors said, Mashinsky and co-conspirators used customer deposits to fund market purchases of the Celsius token to prop up its value.

Machinsky made tens of millions of dollars selling his own CEL tokens at artificially high prices, leaving his customers “holding the bag when the company went bankrupt,” Williams said.

An indictment alleged that Mashinsky promoted Celsius through media interviews, his social media accounts and Celsius’ website, along with a weekly “Ask Mashinsky Anything” session broadcast that was posted to Celsius’ website and a YouTube channel.

Celsius employees from multiple departments who noticed false and misleading statements in the sessions warned Mashinsky, but they were ignored, the indictment said.

A plea agreement Mashinsky made with prosecutors calls for him to be sentenced to up to 30 years in prison and to forfeit over $48 million, which is the amount of money he allegedly made by selling his company’s token.

Sentencing was scheduled for April 8.


U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement can continue using a Seattle airport for chartered deportation flights, a federal appeals court ruled in a decision that rejected a 2019 local order that sought to counter then-President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.

The agency has long used airports around the country to charter flights deporting hundreds of thousands of noncitizens considered lawfully removable from the U.S.

But in 2019, in keeping with efforts in liberal Seattle and Washington state to resist Trump’s priorities, King County Executive Dow Constantine issued an executive order expressing concern that the deportations could constitute human rights abuses. It announced that future leases at the county airport, also known as Boeing Field, would bar operators from servicing deportation flights.

The order prompted ICE to begin using an airport in Yakima — a much farther drive from ICE’s Northwest detention center in Tacoma — for the deportation flights.The U.S. sued King County in 2020, arguing that Constantine’s order discriminated against the federal government by singling it and its contractors out for unfavorable treatment, and that it violated the terms of a World War II-era contract that guarantees the federal government’s right to use the airport.

U.S. District Judge Robert J. Bryan agreed, and Constantine issued a new executive order superseding his old one early last year. The new order, which was not challenged, does not purport to block deportation flights but instead prevents King County resources from aiding in the deportations beyond what federal law requires.

The new order also calls for transparency around any deportation flights. The airport now offers a conference room where the public can observe deportation flights on a video feed, and the county posts a log of deportation flights from the airport on its website.

The deportation flights resumed by May 2023, following Bryan’s decision and Constantine’s second executive order. In a ruling Friday, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld Bryan’s ruling.

“The Executive Order effectively grants King County the ‘power to control’ ICE’s transportation and deportation operations, forcing ICE either to stop using Boeing Field or to use government-owned planes there” — impermissibly overriding the federal government’s discretion, 9th Circuit Judge Daniel A. Bress wrote for the panel.

King County said it would not further appeal the case.

“The Ninth Circuit’s decision allows a raw assertion of federal power to overcome an expression of local values even absent any actual impact,” Amy Enbysk, a spokeswoman for the King County Executive’s Office, said in an emailed statement. “Although King County disagrees with the court’s decision, it will of course follow the court’s dictates.”


South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol faced parliamentary moves to impeach him after he sent heavily armed forces into Seoul’s streets with his baffling and sudden declaration of martial law that harkened to the country’s past dictatorships.

Opposition parties submitted the impeachment motion just hours after parliament unanimously voted to cancel Yoon’s declaration, forcing him to lift martial law about six hours after it began. Impeaching Yoon requires the support of two-thirds of the National Assembly and at least six of the nine Constitutional Court justices. The liberal opposition Democratic Party holds a majority in the 300-seat parliament and has called for Yoon’s resignation.

A vote on the impeachment motion could be held as early as Friday, Democratic Party lawmaker Kim Yong-min said.

During the tense hours under martial law, heavily armed forces surrounded the parliament, backed by army helicopters and armored vehicles. Lawmakers climbed walls to get into the building and held off troops by activating fire extinguishers. Politician and former news anchor Ahn Gwi-ryeong tried to pull an assault rifle away from a soldier who had pointed it at her chest as she shouted: “Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?”

The lawmakers who managed to reenter the building rejected Yoon’s martial law declaration 190-0, including 18 lawmakers from Yoon’s party, forcing Yoon to rescind it at a hastily assembled Cabinet meeting.

Yoon ordered martial law without warning in a speech late Tuesday where he vowed to eliminate “anti-state” forces he said were plotting rebellion and accused the main opposition parties of supporting the country’s rival, North Korea.

Yoon gave no direct evidence when he raised the specter of North Korea as a destabilizing force. Yoon has long maintained that a hard line against the North is the only way to stop Pyongyang from following through on its nuclear threats against Seoul.

Until the late 1980s, South Korea had a series of strongmen who repeatedly invoked North Korea when struggling to control domestic dissidents and political opponents. South Korea’s constitution gives the president power to use the military to keep order in “wartime, war-like situations or other comparable national emergency states.” That can include suspending civil rights like the freedom of the press and assembly, and temporarily limiting the powers of the courts and government agencies.

But it also gives the National Assembly power to lift the declaration with a majority vote.

Some experts say the way Yoon imposed martial law went far beyond his legitimate powers. While it comes with far-reaching powers, the constitution doesn’t allow a president to use the military to suspend parliament. Many also question whether the country really faces a situation comparable to war.

The opposition lambasted Yoon’s actions as undemocratic. Opposition leader Lee Jae-myung, who narrowly lost to Yoon in the 2022 presidential election, called Yoon’s announcement “illegal and unconstitutional.”

The sudden declaration was also opposed by the leader of Yoon’s own conservative party, Han Dong-hoon, who called the decision wrong and vowed to “stop it with the people.”

“The people will block the president’s anti-constitutional step. The military must be on the side of the public in any case. Let’s resolutely oppose it,” Kim Dong Yeon, the opposition party governor of Gyeonggi province, which surrounds Seoul, wrote on X.

Average South Koreans were in shock. Social media was flooded with messages expressing surprise and worry over Yoon’s announcement. There were quick claims that the emergency declaration was linked to Yoon’s political struggles.

He has had little success in getting his policies adopted by a parliament that has been controlled by the opposition since he took over in 2022.

Conservatives have said the opposition moves are political revenge for investigations into Lee, who is seen as the favorite for the next presidential election in 2027.

Just this month, Yoon denied wrongdoing in an influence-peddling scandal involving him and his wife. The claims have battered his approval ratings and fueled attacks by his rivals.

The scandal centers on claims that Yoon and first lady Kim Keon Hee exerted inappropriate influence on the conservative ruling People Power Party to pick a certain candidate to run for a parliamentary by-election in 2022 at the request of Myung Tae-kyun, an election broker and founder of a polling agency who conducted free opinion surveys for Yoon before he became president.


Harvey Weinstein was hospitalized Monday following an “alarming blood test,” his attorney said, less than a week after the disgraced movie mogul filed a legal claim alleging substandard medical care at New York City’s notorious jail complex.

Weinstein, 72, was sent to Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan for an “emergent treatment due to an alarming blood test result that requires immediate medical attention,” his attorney, Imran Ansari, said in a statement.

“It is expected that he will remain there until his condition stabilizes,” the statement continues. “His deprivation of care is not only medical malpractice, but a violation of his constitutional rights.”

A spokesperson for New York City’s Department of Correction did not immediately respond to an email. The agency’s inmate database confirmed that Weinstein had been transferred from Rikers Island to the Bellevue Hospital Prison Ward in Manhattan.

Weinstein has been in city custody since earlier this year after the New York Court of Appeals overturned his 2020 rape conviction in the state. The case is set to be retried in 2025. Weinstein has denied any wrongdoing.

In a legal filing last week, Weinstein’s attorneys accused the city of providing him with substandard medical care for a litany of medical afflictions, which include chronic myeloid leukemia and diabetes.

“When I last visited him, I found him with blood spatter on his prison garb, possibly from IV’s, clothes that had not been washed for weeks, and he had not even been provided clean underwear — hardly sanitary conditions for someone with severe medical conditions,” Ansari said in a statement that likened Rikers Island to a “gulag.”

The troubled jail complex, located on an island in New York City’s East River, has faced growing scrutiny for its mistreatment of detainees and dangerous conditions. Last week, a federal judge cleared the way for a possible federal takeover of the jail system, finding the city had placed its incarcerated population in “unconstitutional danger.”

A publicist for Weinstein, Juda Engelmayer, echoed the allegation in a statement Monday.

“Mr. Weinstein, who is suffering from a number of illnesses, including leukemia, has been deprived the medical attention that someone in his medical state deserves, prisoner or not,” he said. “In many ways, this mistreatment constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.”


More than 3,000 fake Gibson electric guitars shipped from Asia were seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents at the Los Angeles-Long Beach Seaport, authorities said.

Had the guitars been authentic, they would have been worth $18 million, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement. The agency said Gibson confirmed the guitars that were intercepted were counterfeit.

Gibson, founded in 1894 and based in Nashville, Tennessee, has the top market share in premium electric guitars and all its guitars are handcrafted in Nashville and Bozeman, Montana.

“These fraudulent guitars may look and feel legitimate for unsuspecting consumers buying them from third party online sources, street markets, unauthorized retailers, and person-to-person transactions,” said Cheryl M. Davies, CBP director of field operations in Los Angeles. “As we approach the busy Holiday shopping season, consumers should pay attention on where they are buying these goods and how much they are paying, and if is too good to be true it probably is.”

Gibson guitars have been such a fixture in music history that rock-and-roll visionary Chuck Berry was laid to rest with his instrument, blues musician B.B. King affectionately named his “Lucille,” and rock guitarist Eric Clapton borrowed one from George Harrison to play the solo on the Beatles’ song “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”

“This is really emotional and personal for us not only because of the protection of our players, but because of our Gibson team at large, including the artisans at our craftories in Nashville, TN and Bozeman, MT, who are generations of American families that have dedicated their entire lives to handcrafting Gibson instruments,” Beth Heidt, chief marketing officer at Gibson, said in a statement.

Authorities announced the seizure Tuesday but didn’t say when the guitars were taken, which country they came from, or who made them.

The investigation involving the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Homeland Security and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is ongoing.


The Supreme Court won’t hear a challenge to a federal requirement that cigarette packages and advertising include graphic images demonstrating the effects of smoking.

The high court declined to hear the case in a brief written order handed down Monday.

Tobacco company R.J. Reynolds appealed to the high court after the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found the warnings do not violate the First Amendment.

They include pictures of smoke-damaged lungs, feet blackened by diminished blood flow and a picture of a woman with a large growth on her neck and the caption “WARNING: Smoking causes head and neck cancer.”

The company argued the final image, for example, was misleading because a patient would likely go to the doctor before a growth reached that size.

The Food and Drug Administration countered that all the pictures reflect undisputed risks of smoking.

Nearly 120 countries around the world have adopted larger, graphic warning labels. Studies from those countries suggest the image-based labels are more effective than text warnings at publicizing smoking risks and encouraging smokers to quit. The U.S. has not updated its labels since 1984.

It’s not clear when new labels might appear. Some legal claims remain and the FDA has said it doesn’t plan to enforce any new requirements until at least December 2025.


Advocates for transgender rights are turning to a conservative-dominated Supreme Court after a presidential election in which Donald Trump and his allies promised to roll back protections for transgender people.

The justices on Wednesday are taking up the issue of gender-affirming care for transgender minors, which has been banned by Tennessee and 25 other Republican-led states.

The fight over whether transgender adolescents can access puberty blockers and hormonal treatments is part of a broader effort to regulate the lives of transgender people, including which sports competitions they can join and which bathrooms they can use.

Trump backed a national ban on such care as part of his 2024 campaign in which he demeaned and mocked transgender people.

In its waning days, the Biden administration, along with families of transgender adolescents, will appeal to the justices to strike down the Tennessee ban as unlawful sex discrimination and protect the constitutional rights of vulnerable Americans.

“The stakes are high, of course, for transgender adolescents, but also for the parents who are watching their children suffer, who are just trying to do right by their kids,” Chase Strangio, who represents the families at the Supreme Court, said in an interview. Strangio, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, will be the first openly transgender person to argue before the high court.

A lawyer for Tennessee will argue that the “life-altering gender-transition procedures” are risky and unproven and that it’s the state’s role to protect children.

Trump nominated three justices in his first term who pushed the court in a more conservative direction that included the decision in 2022 overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, which had protected abortion rights for nearly 50 years.

Yet one of Trump’s appointees, Justice Neil Gorsuch, also authored a ruling in 2020 that protected LGBTQ people from discrimination in the workplace under federal civil rights law.

The administration and transgender families both rely on that decision to bolster their arguments.

After Trump takes office on Jan. 20, 2025, it’s possible the new administration could weigh in on the case, which is not expected to be decided until the spring.

There are about 300,000 people between age 13 and 17, and 1.3 million adults who identify as transgender in the United States, according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law. The Williams Institute is a think tank that researches sexual orientation and gender identity demographics to inform laws and public policy decisions.

Most Republican-controlled states have adopted a ban similar to the one in Tennessee, and those laws mostly are in effect, despite legal challenges. The Tennessee case is the first time the nation’s top court will consider the constitutionality of the bans.

Sivan Kotler-Berkowitz, a 20-year-old college student in Massachusetts who is transgender, said his life would have been very different if he were just a few years younger and living in one of the states.

“These bans are denying people the opportunity to live and excel,” he said in an interview. “There are thousands of transgender youth across the country that are thriving just like me because we’ve had the love and understanding of our families and because we’ve had access to proper care.”

The bans in Tennessee and elsewhere have put families in the position of deciding whether to travel for ongoing health care, go without or wait until their children turn 18.

Erin Friday, a leader of Our Duty, an international group that supports the bans on gender-affirming care for minors, said the case is going to be as important as Roe v. Wade. She said upholding the Tennessee law would bolster the cases for the laws restricting sports participation and bathroom use.



The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor asked judges on Wednesday to issue an arrest warrant for the head of Myanmar’s military regime for crimes committed against the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority.

Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, who seized power from elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi in 2021, is accused of crimes against humanity for the persecution of the Rohingya.

Nearly a million people were forced into neighboring Bangladesh to escape what has been called an ethnic cleansing campaign involving mass rapes, killings and the torching of homes.

From a refugee camp in Bangladesh, the court’s top prosecutor, Karim Khan, said in a statement that he intended to request more warrants for Myanmar’s leaders soon.

“In doing so, we will be demonstrating, together with all of our partners, that the Rohingya have not been forgotten. That they, like all people around the world, are entitled to the protection of the law,” the British barrister said.

The allegations stem from a counterinsurgency campaign that Myanmar’s military began in August 2017 in response to an insurgent attack. Min Aung Hlaing, who heads the Myanmar Defense Services, is said to have directed the armed forces of Myanmar, known as the Tatmadaw, as well as the national police to attack Rohingya civilians.

Khan was in Bangladesh where he met with members of the displaced Rohingya population. About 1 million of the predominately Muslim Rohingya live in Bangladesh as refugees from Myanmar, including about 740,000 who fled in 2017.

Rohingya face widespread discrimination in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, with most denied citizenship. Myanmar’s government refuses to recognize the Rohingya as one of the country’s 135 lawful ethnic minorities, instead calling them Bengalis, with the implication that their native land is in Bangladesh and they are illegally settled in Myanmar.

Human rights groups applauded the decision to seek a warrant. The dire situation of the Rohingya has received less attention as the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza have grabbed headlines. “The ICC prosecutor’s decision to seek a warrant against Sr. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing comes amid renewed atrocities against Rohingya civilians that echo those suffered seven years ago. The ICC’s action is an important step toward breaking the cycle of abuses and impunity,” said Maria Elena Vignoli, senior international justice counsel at Human Rights Watch.

Legal News | Breaking News | Terms & Conditions | Privacy

ⓒ Breaking Legal News. All Rights Reserved.

The content contained on the web site has been prepared by BLN as a service to the internet community and is not intended to constitute legal advice or a substitute for consultation with a licensed legal professional in a particular case. Affordable law firm web design company
   More Legal News
   Legal Spotlight
   Exclusive Commentaries
   Attorney & Blog - Blog Watch
   Law Firm News  1  2  3  4  5  6 
   More Law Firm Blogs
Car Accident Lawyers
Sunnyvale, CA Personal Injury Attorney
www.esrajunglaw.com
Family Law in East Greenwich, RI
Divorce Lawyer, Erica S. Janton
www.jantonfamilylaw.com
Lane County, OR DUI Law Attorney
Eugene DUI Lawyer. Criminal Defense Law
www.mjmlawoffice.com
New York Surrogacy Lawyers
New York Adoption Lawyers
Adoption Pre-Certification
www.lawrsm.com
Chicago, Naperville IL Workers' Compensation Lawyers
Chicago Workplace Injury Attorneys
www.krol-law.com
Raleigh, NC Business Lawyer
www.rothlawgroup.com
Lorain Elyria Divorce Lawyer
www.loraindivorceattorney.com
Connecticut Special Education Lawyer
www.fortelawgroup.com
Immigration Attorney in Los Angeles, California
Family Immigration Attorney
www.brianohlaw.com/english
   More Legal News  1  2  3  4  5  6
   Legal News Links
  Click The Law
  Daily Bar News
  The Legal Report
  Legal News Post
  Crisis Legal News
  Legal News Journal
  Korean Web Agency
  Law Firm Directory