All those people who say they love Trump because of his policies should really look at what he did when was president instead of listening to his lies. Take, for example, his bold proposal to eliminate taxes on tips. Guess what he did when he was president? From 2018: House Republicans passed a spending bill Thursday that includes an important amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act. It bars employers from keeping tips earned by workers. The text, written by Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), was added to the bill to block a proposed Trump administration rule that would have allowed employers to pocket the tips of millions of workers — a move that could cost service workers $5.8 billion a year in lost tips. The amendment would soften the blow of the new tipping rule the Department of Labor (DOL) is developing. The rule, which the agency proposed in December, would repeal an Obama-era regulation that made official what had been the common view for decades: that tips are the sole property of the workers who earn them.
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This is not a drill Some smarmy former Trump aide over the weekend asked if anyone had evidence of pregnant women actually bleeding out in a parking lot, as alleged since abortion bans took hold across red states. He got inundated with replies, including the TikTok by Carmen Broesder (above) from Idaho. Michelle Goldberg cites a report from ProPublica on a Georgia women who died (Gift article): It was inevitable, once Roe v. Wade was overturned and states started banning abortion, that women were going to die. Over the last two years, we’ve learned of countless close calls. In Oklahoma, 25-year-old Jaci Statton, sick and bleeding with a nonviable partial molar pregnancy, said medical staff told her to wait in a parking lot until she was “crashing” or on the verge of a heart attack. In Florida, Anya Cook was sent home from the hospital after her membranes ruptured at 16 weeks; she then nearly bled to death in the bathroom of a hair salon. Women in Texas and Louisiana have been denied treatment for life-threatening ectopic pregnancies.
Wales' new First Minister Eluned Morgan is a former health minister, and has come under fire for lengthy waiting lists
At least one thing is now obvious in the Middle East: the Biden administration has failed abjectly in its objectives there, leaving the region in dangerous disarray. Its primary stated foreign policy goal has been to rally its partners in the region to cooperate with the extremist Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu while upholding a “rules-based” international order and blocking Iran and its allies in their policies. Clearly, such goals have had all the coherence of a chimera and have failed for one obvious reason. President Biden’s Achilles heel has been his “bear hug” of Netanyahu, who allied himself with the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis, while launching a ruinous total war on the people of Gaza in the wake of... Read more
Source: The Sphinx and the Sultan appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
Can you say “sto-chas-tic”? Sure. I knew you could. Some may “find it harsh using the terms ‘infestation’ and ‘cockroaches’” to describe members of Tren De Aragua, a Venezuelan gang operating in Texas, Department of Public Safety Commander Steve McCraw said on Monday. McCraw made his remarks in Houston after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) designated the group a foreign terrorist organization: “Tren de Aragua gangsters are like cockroaches,” said DPS Director McCraw. “They multiply quickly; small intrusions into communities become infestations if not aggressively pursued. These Venezuelan thugs are highly combative, violent, and certainly adaptable. They’re always involved in situations that first start with human smuggling. Then they are involved in the extortion, kidnappings, rape, assaults, and sex trafficking of migrants. Governor Abbott has made it very clear: We will not allow any of these gangsters to gain a foothold in Texas.” Over the last week, Donald Trump and vice presidential candidate J.D.
Iain Overton finds that financial strain on the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office is a direct result of the UK's departure from the European Union
Look, this is not up for debate. We’re going to keep feeding the grizzly bear.
Sure, he may not protect us in any tangible sense. In fact, sometimes he hurts us. But that’s just how the cookie crumbles.
The thing is, the grizzly bear has always been there. We’ve always been feeding him, and there really is no good reason to stop doing that.
Oh, he’s getting increasingly violent? He keeps attacking strangers for no discernible reason? First of all, I don’t know about that. Second of all, that’s not our problem. What the bear does after we feed him has nothing to do with us. That’s his business.
“Feeding the grizzly bear is so expensive,” you say. “That money could be put toward all sorts of better causes.”
Listen, a budget is a budget, and it can’t be changed. Unless we want to devote more money to feeding the grizzly bear, in which case the budget must be changed.
A series of columnists have resigned from the paper over fabrications in articles by former IDF soldier Elon Perry. Now victims of the publication's false claims are speaking up
This summer, at the British Medical Association’s Annual Representative Meeting — the yearly opportunity for BMA members to make their opinions policy — a motion passed calling for the protection of doctors and medical students involved in activism. With one doctor being persecuted for climate activism and in the wake of the Tory government threatening […]
- by Jennifer Saltzstein
- by David C Krakauer & Chris Kempes
So, nice little chart here:
Seems… bad. At least for America and Europe.
Let’s lay this out:
- Most of what you want to buy you can buy from China, you don’t need to get it from the West, so why use dollars?
- China almost never uses sanctions or seizes foreign currency. The US often does. US dollars are risky, the right to use them can and is often taken away, and so often are the dollars themselves.
So why use the dollar, except that it’s still easier in some cases?
After John McCain got caught up in a corruption scheme, he went to war with his own party to try to make sure it never happened again.
Occupational entry regulations (OER) are legal requirements that people need to meet to enter certain professions. They are intended to protect consumers by ensuring providers are of sufficient quality – but they can also create costs by making it harder for new workers to enter a profession or for new firms to open and grow. In this paper we construct a database of OER stringency across three states and a number of occupations to better understand these potential costs. We find that for services provided to consumers (businesses), OER tend to be more (less) stringent in Australia compared with the average OECD country. In most occupations OER are more stringent in Australia compared to the least stringent OECD country. We find that more stringent OER are associated with lower business entry and exit rates, and a slower flow of workers from less to more productive firms, both of which may have negative implications for productivity. We also find some tentative evidence that OER tend to be associated with skill shortages. These results do not necessarily suggest that OER should be less stringent.
Pulling children out of rubble, witnessing ill-treatment of Palestinian civilians by Israeli soldiers, witnessing the displaced Gazan population work its way through destroyed streets. In Australia, the Senate debate on housing. These are the items we found on our five-minute scroll on X. Civil defence teams rescue children from rubble @swilkinsonbc Civil defense teams rescue Continue reading »
Bolts.com has done some deep research into the elections official positions in states where they themselves are on the ballot this year. Yikes: One needs only to skim recent headlines to be reminded of the power of state elections officials to shape access to voting. Nebraska’s secretary of state just unilaterally shut down voter registration for tens of thousands of people with past felony convictions just weeks before the election. The secretary of state in Ohio, who has spent years courting the Big Lie, this month proposed to make it harder to vote by mail by limiting drop boxes. In Arizona, the secretary of state is laying the groundwork to combat election deniers who might seek to reject election results in November. All these officials were elected by voters in the 2022 midterms, a busy cycle that saw a coordinated (and largely unsuccessful) effort by followers of Donald Trump to take over election administration. Two years later, a new round of states are selecting their chief election officials.
Trump earlier today: Later that day:
Join State of Play as lawyer Kristen Zornada unpacks Israel's lobbying of U.S. Congress to block South Africa's ICJ case. We explore pending ICC warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, and Israel’s growing isolation on the global stage.
The post Israel Targets International Law Amid ICC Warrant Fears – Featuring Kristen Zornada appeared first on MintPress News.