The Trump administration decided that support for transgender people belonged in the nation’s counterterrorism apparatus. Months later, it commissioned a study that appears designed to tell the government it was right.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday released a 24-page report claiming that people who support transgender identities, chosen names, pronouns, and parental acceptance are more likely to hold “left-wing authoritarian” beliefs and consider certain acts of political violence justified.

HHS promoted the findings under a headline declaring that people associated with “radical gender ideology” are more likely to justify political violence. Assistant Secretary for Health Adm. Brian Christine said the study raises questions about “what happens when ideology is given the authority of medicine.”

The report does not establish that affirming transgender people causes violent attitudes. It does not measure whether anyone committed, planned, or intended to commit violence. It does not compare left- and right-wing violence. It does not demonstrate that transgender people are disproportionately violent. Only 13 of its 1,208 respondents identified as transgender or gender-nonconforming.

And its authors acknowledge that the correlations they found cannot establish causation. A person’s politics could influence both sets of answers, authoritarian tendencies could influence their views about transgender people, or some unmeasured factor could affect both.

In other words, the study cannot answer the inflammatory question its title poses: “Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology?”

Researchers affiliated with Rutgers University, the conservative Manhattan Institute, and the Network Contagion Research Institute created their own five-question “Clinical Gender Affirmation Scale."

The questions asked respondents whether failing to affirm a transgender person could cause psychological distress, whether transgender people should be supported in expressing their identities, whether using a person’s chosen name and pronouns is necessary support, and whether parents should support children exploring their gender.

None of the questions asked about puberty blockers, hormones, surgery, or any other medical intervention. The supposedly radical clinical positions largely amounted to treating transgender people respectfully and supporting families as they navigate a child’s questions about gender.

Those positions are also supported by research. A peer-reviewed Journal of Adolescent Health study found that transgender youth who could use their chosen names in more settings reported lower levels of depression, suicidal ideation, and suicidal behavior. Research has likewise linked parental support with greater life satisfaction, fewer depressive symptoms, and a lower perceived burden among transgender adolescents.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has said discrimination based on gender identity or expression harms children’s social and emotional health. Its policy supporting comprehensive care for transgender and gender-diverse young people was reaffirmed in 2023.

“These are not scales that have ever been validated. They just made them up on their own,” Andrew Flores, an American University political scientist and distinguished visiting scholar at the Williams Institute, told Erin in the Morning. Flores said the design was “stacking the deck in favor of trying to find these correlations.”

The report was not published in an academic journal or subjected to conventional peer review before HHS released it. It identifies no institutional review board approval and provides no conflict-of-interest statement. It says only that HHS commissioned the work.

The report’s six violence scenarios asked respondents about killing Donald Trump, killing conservative activist Charlie Kirk, killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, setting fire to Immigration and Customs Enforcement buildings, damaging wealthy people’s property and committing violence against police.

There were no parallel questions about right-wing violence: attacking the Capitol to overturn an election, bombing an abortion clinic, assaulting immigrants, targeting Black or Jewish Americans, or attacking LGBTQ+ people and Pride events.

The broader concept of “left-wing authoritarianism” is itself disputed. A 2024 review in Political Psychology warned that some research conflates authoritarianism with the much broader category of antidemocratic attitudes, obscuring meaningful differences between political movements.

Survey findings about political violence also require particular caution. A 2022 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, based on four survey experiments involving 4,904 respondents, found that ambiguous questions and disengaged participants can substantially inflate apparent support for violence.

Left-wing violence exists, and credible researchers say its recent increase deserves attention. But the longer record does not resemble the threat picture HHS presented.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies found that left-wing attacks and plots rose from a very low baseline and, through July 4, 2025, outnumbered far-right incidents for the first time in more than 30 years. That amounted to five left-wing attacks or plots in the first half of 2025, amid a sharp decline in far-right activity.

The same CSIS analysis found that left-wing attacks remained far less lethal. From 2016 through mid-2025, left-wing terrorist attacks killed 13 people. Right-wing attacks killed 112, while jihadist attacks killed 82.

The Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism separately found that all 13 extremist-related murders identified in 2024 were connected to right-wing extremism. Over the decade covered by its report, far-right extremists committed 328 of 429 extremist-related killings, or 76 percent.

The violence surrounding transgender people also runs predominantly in the other direction.

As The Advocate reported in January, GLAAD documented 1,042 anti-LGBTQ+ incidents in 2025, including 76 assaults, 22 threats of mass violence and 15 arson attempts. More than half — 532 — targeted transgender and gender-nonconforming people.

FBI data for 2024 recorded 2,278 single-bias hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation and 527 motivated by gender identity. Nearly three-quarters of the gender-identity offenses were specifically anti-transgender.

The administration has repeatedly tried to reverse the victim-and-perpetrator reality. In September 2025, White House counterterrorism official Sebastian Gorka falsely suggested transgender people were disproportionately responsible for mass shootings. Among more than 4,600 mass shootings documented from 2014 through 2024, at most six involved transgender suspects, or about 0.13 percent.

After Kirk’s killing in September 2025, the Heritage Foundation urged the FBI to create a category called “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism,” The Advocate reported.

By December, Attorney General Pam Bondi had directed the FBI to explore cash rewards for information leading to leaders of organizations the Justice Department labeled domestic terrorist groups. The department’s list of suspect beliefs included “radical gender ideology."

In April, Trump requested an additional $166 million for FBI counterterrorism programs targeting what his administration called extremism involving migration, race and gender. The proposal also sought a new federal center focused partly on left-wing political violence.

In May, the White House explicitly placed “radically pro-transgender” organizations within its counterterrorism strategy, citing Kirk’s assassination even though the defendants and shooters it named did not appear to belong to a transgender political organization.

HHS has also used government reports to attack transgender health care. A previous department document promoted a rebranded form of conversion therapy and rejected mainstream clinical guidance. Experts told The Advocate in December that the earlier report was “a political document pretending to be science.”

The new survey supplies the same campaign with a scientific-looking bridge between accepting transgender people and treating their supporters as security threats.

“This so-called study, sponsored by an extreme right-wing advocacy organization, is another example of the outcome leading the research - MAGA Republicans want to sow hatred against our fellow Americans in a desperate attempt to distract from their failures ahead of the midterms,” Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson said in a statement.

In which the authors claim that obsession with reuse and recycling has far outstripped the evidence and we might be better off literally using more landfills and more single-use materials.

Despite a recent block on new proposed rules for mail in voting, a whistleblower report, published through Senator Blumenthal’s office, alleges that the postal service is continuing to implement a system to comply with the executive order.

The report indicates that the implementation of the new system has been rushed by postal service leadership, and that the system design choices, particularly a zero fail policy when inspecting ballots, made by USPS will likely result in significant delays in accepting and counting mail in ballots.

‘The Whistleblower is aware of three critical aspects that USPS fails to mention in its Final Rule, which make the second barcode scanning verification another potential point of failure for ballot mail:

a. that the USPS is adopting a zero-percent failure policy;

b. that a zero-percent failure policy means that if a barcode scanner fails to correctly read one barcode in a batch, the entire batch is rejected and returned to the state;

c. that even in the week before the new system is meant to be ready, USPS
does not have a clear policy as to how many ballots will be sampled in ballot mail batches.

1. Given states often deliver ballots to the USPS in large ballot batches, a zero percent
   failure rate during verification can derail vast numbers of ballots. The new scanning
   verification process is designed so that after a single failed bar code verification, USPS will stop the sample scanning and refuse to accept the entire batch of ballots.

2. Instead, as best as the Whistleblower understands, when a scanned ballot IMb is
   not found in the statewide list, USPS expects the state to take back the entire batch
   to cure the issue with the single ballot that failed verification. Only after a state
   cures the problem ballot, are they permitted to restart the process by uploading a
   new batch manifest to start the automated barcode verification over again. As
   designed, the process is entirely unforgiving. It could delay ballots by the thousands
   in repeated verification cycles - and thus prevent states from mailing enormous numbers of ballots. These issues would only be compounded if potential IT failures identified herein were added to the mix.

3. USPS has not adopted such strict verification regimes with other large mailing
   contexts.

4. Even under ordinary circumstances, a zero percent failure rate when spot checking
   in a batch of thousands or tens of thousands of mailings would be problematic. Based on information provided by the Whistleblower it is unclear whether other errors that occur during the barcode scanning verification could result in the
   verification to fail and the batch to be rejected.

5. Of course such technical issues are predictable - and likely. In 2017 the USPS Office of Inspector General (“OIG”) audited mail scanning problems finding that for package tracking specifically, scanner problems were caused by GPS signal
   obstruction. Another scanner issue, redacted from the report, contributed to errors in 5% of the audited scans. Information made available to the Whistleblower also seems to allude to apparent concerns about potential limitations of scanners used to validate samples of ballots, such that not all sampling can occur in real time due
   to connectivity and cradling needs for certain scanners at mail acceptance facilities.’

Obligated by bot to post.

American Rheinmetall delivered the first Lynx XM30 prototype to the Army this week, the company said in a Tuesday statement, the latest move in the service’s yearslong effort to replace the M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle.

The vehicle is slated to start testing, while seven additional prototypes are scheduled for delivery later this year. The evaluation is part of a roughly $764 million Engineering and Manufacturing Development contract intended to take the vehicle from digital design through validation.

The Lynx XM30 was created for a battlefield increasingly shaped by drones and electronic warfare, according to the company, and its design features modular, open architecture to enable the quick integration of new technology while it is in service. Rheinmetall said the prototype has a first-of-its-kind hybrid-electric powertrain that combines a traditional engine with electric power.

Once the prototypes clear safety checks, soldiers will put them through exercises that simulate combat. The Army plans to do technical testing while troops simultaneously train with additional prototypes in what Matt Warnick, American Rheinmetall’s CEO, called a “parallel evaluation timeline.”

In 2023, the Army selected American Rheinmetall and General Dynamics Land Systems for the XM30 design phase. The prototypes are meant to supersede the Bradley, which entered service in the 1980s.

The XM30 model is built off of Rheinmetall’s Lynx KF41.

In which the SNP insists on a stupid policy by making it even dumber and more destructive. Empty shelves by legislative fiat.

Government bond yields jumped across major markets Tuesday, with borrowing costs in Japan and the U.K. touching multi-decade highs, and U.S. Treasury yields surging, as renewed Middle East hostilities reignite inflation concerns.

The key U.S. 10-year Treasury note yield moved to a 20-month high, rising 3 basis points to trade at 4.7880%.

Japan’s benchmark 10-year bond yield jumped more than 6 basis points, moving to 3% for the first time since 1996. Japan’s short-term 2-year government bond yield also touched a 31-year high of 1.81%.

Elsewhere, yields on U.K. 10-year government bonds, known as Gilts, rose more than 9 basis points to 5.2341%, their highest level since June 2008 in the midst of the Global Financial Crisis. The U.K. 30-year Gilt yield, meanwhile, soared 9 basis points to 5.8856%, its highest level since March 1998.

German government bonds — typically seen as a barometer for euro zone borrowing costs — also rose. The 10-year bund yield was up more than 3 basis points at 3.3546%, a new 52-week high, as the 2-year bund yield reached 2.9496%, its highest level since July 2024. France’s 2-year government bond yield rose to its highest level since April 2024.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent shrugged off concerns over rising U.S. yields in an interview with CNBC on Monday.

Speaking on the sidelines of the G20 finance ministers’ meeting in Asheville, North Carolina, Bessent said the U.S. bond market remains “the best performing market” in the world, noting that Fitch Ratings last month reaffirmed its AA+ rating on government debt.

The jump in borrowing costs came after the U.S. and Iran launched retaliatory strikes around the Strait of Hormuz in recent days, driving energy prices higher and putting inflation pressures back on investors’ radars.

Brent crude, the global price benchmark, was last seen about 2.2% higher at $92.38 per barrel, while West Texas Intermediate futures were up 2.61% at $88.05.

Steve Englander, head of global G10 FX research and North America macro strategy at Standard Chartered, said the six-month conflict, combined with a Supreme Court tariff ruling that he said removed roughly 40% of additional tariff revenue, had added to pressure on bonds.

Englander told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” Tuesday that yields across the curve will remain under upward pressure, adding that the U.S. is not alone in facing a deficit problem.

“I think ‘best performing’, as Bessent said, isn’t the same as well performing,” Englander said. “Everybody has a deficit problem — I don’t think there’s any reason to cheer.”

The rise in the cost of British government debt comes as U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham is reportedly set to tell lawmakers later that greater public control is the only way to boost the country’s growth.

Burnham, who in July became the U.K.’s seventh prime minister in 10 years, is said to be mulling legislation which would make it easier to take struggling utilities into public ownership, The Guardian reported Tuesday. U.K. bond yields are also playing catch-up with global peers after a public holiday on Monday.

According to media reports, a key installation near the Jänschwalde coal plant in Brandenburg was repeatedly targeted with rockets, which emergency crews later found and defused.

Several improvised explosive devices were found at a substation near a coal-fired power plant in Germany on Tuesday and several power lines were damaged, police and a grid operator said.

Operator 50Hertz said there was a "brief interruption of service" but all lines are now back in operation at the Preilack substation, which distributes power from the nearby Jänschwalde power plant.

Police said no one was hurt.

The apparent aim was to trigger a large-scale power outage in the area around the nearby coal-fired power plant. According to initial findings, however, this did not happen.

The Cottbus police directorate stated that the police headquarters in Potsdam had taken over communications regarding the incident. The Brandenburg Interior Ministry also referred enquiries there.

There was initially no official statement from the police or from the grid operator 50Hertz, which runs the substation.

The Turnow/Preilack substation is located in the municipality of Turnow-Preilack in the Spree-Neiße district of Brandenburg. The facility is an important hub in the Lausitz power grid and is connected to the nearby Jänschwalde coal-fired power plant.

SINGAPORE, Sept 1 (Reuters) - Two supertankers carrying Saudi ​oil were struck by unknown projectiles within minutes of each other while ‌transiting outbound through the Strait of Hormuz late on Monday, according to shipping intelligence and tracking firms Marisks and Kpler.

"The near-simultaneous incidents represent a further escalation in the threat environment within ​the Omani corridor," Marisks said.

The Reuters Power Up newsletter by columnist Ron Bousso provides everything you need to know about the global energy industry. Sign up here.

The tankers each loaded 2 million barrels of ​Saudi crude at the Juaymah terminal last week, Kpler data showed. Saudi ⁠Aramco resumed oil loadings and sales from inside the strait in August.

Iranian and ​U.S. blockades of the Strait of Hormuz have sharply curbed energy exports from the ​Gulf as both sides tried to assert their authority over the waterway.

Efforts by mediators including Qatar and Oman to broker a deal to reopen the strait, which carried about a fifth of ​global oil supplies before the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran more than ​six months ago, have so far proven inconclusive.

Oil prices gained on Tuesday after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened further ‌strikes ⁠against Iran, following the first exchanges of fire since late July.

In the latest attacks on shipping, the Saudi Arabian-flagged very large crude carrier Sidr was struck by unknown projectiles about 16.6 nautical miles northeast of Khasab, Oman at about 1952 UTC (GMT), Marisks ​said.

Minutes later, the ​Liberian-flagged VLCC Senegal ⁠Prosperity was reportedly struck by three unknown projectiles approximately 17 nautical miles east of Khasab, Marisks said. All crew aboard were ​reported safe, it added.

The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations agency reported ​three projectiles ⁠striking a tanker in the same location as it sailed out of the Strait of Hormuz, in what appeared to be the same incident.

Bahri, operator of Sidr, and Sinokor, ⁠operator ​of Senegal Prosperity, did not immediately respond to ​requests for comment.

Earlier on Tuesday, Iranian media reported that a Saudi oil tanker was stopped while transiting through the ​southern corridor of the Strait of Hormuz.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/09/mamdani-pied-a-terre-tax/688482/

New York City’s new pied-à-terre tax provokes strong opinions. Supporters argue that the nation’s first tax on luxury second homes will help balance the city’s budget and improve “a fundamentally unfair system” that “hurts working New Yorkers,” as Mayor Zohran Mamdani has put it. Opponents warn that the tax will alienate the rich people who power the city’s economy. Some homeowners fear that the new tax treats them as “guilty until proven resident.”

But Mamdani’s backers and detractors alike are missing the bigger picture. The new tax was created because the city has been spending more than it takes in. That problem has not gone away. Neither has the dysfunctional property-tax system that made the tax so enticing in the first place. New York’s political class would do well to focus on solving these long-term financial challenges before they metastasize into a crisis. By spending political capital on a controversial but largely symbolic policy change, Mamdani has made that task even more difficult.

For more than a decade, New York lawmakers had noodled around with creating a tax on pieds-à-terre, high-end residential units that don’t serve as year-round homes. A pied-à-terre tax, already used in London and Vancouver, was tossed around to fund city government and, later, to shore up the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s perennially strained finances. The idea gained new attention earlier this year as Mamdani stared down a significant budget gap. State lawmakers authorized the tax, which will apply to about 10,000 properties, to help city hall balance this year’s budget. Nonresident owners of condos and co-ops worth at least $1 million or houses worth at least $5 million will owe an extra tax in the neighborhood of 1 percent of their property’s market value.

The new policy has triggered some overheated reactions. (Mamdani Derangement Syndrome is real.) One pundit described the mere act of listing the properties subject to the tax as “a call to violence,” even though local governments have let the public inspect the official list of property valuations and owners since colonial times. Other critics claim that the tax will cause wealthy New Yorkers to relocate. The revenue raised by the tax “is very little compared to to [sic] the TAXES PAID by the tens of thousands of people who are fleeing the City, never to return,” Donald Trump, a notable pied-à-terre owner, declared on Truth Social. “This dangerous political ‘experiment’ in New York will destroy what was once a great City and State.” In fact, the people subject to the tax can’t leave New York, because they are already, by definition, not residents.

Still, these histrionic critiques are responding to a real shift in New York City politics. Bill de Blasio, for example—nobody’s idea of a fiscal conservative—sought to raise income taxes on the city’s highest earners in order to finance universal prekindergarten. Mayor Mamdani, in contrast, seems to view certain tax increases as virtuous unto themselves. His campaign slogan, “Tax the rich,” was a policy goal, not a mechanism. He unveiled the pied-à-terre-tax proposal with a video singling out the hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin and his Central Park South condo.

Mamdani’s approach makes for good political theater. But the drama around the pied-à-terre tax, along with its turbulent implementation, has distracted from the underlying problem that made co-ops and condos so attractive in the first place: their inequitable tax treatment.

Under state law, the property tax on these units isn’t based on their market value, but rather on the city’s estimate of the rent that a similar unit would fetch if it were an apartment. The result is that many are wildly undertaxed. A Bloomberg analysis of pre-COVID data found that the median sales price of a New York City condo was more than five times the city’s property-tax valuation. The journalists found an example of a Bronx home with an effective tax rate more than 200 times higher than one in Brooklyn. One of the more compelling examples of the disconnect between property values and property taxes was the condo that Mamdani cited in his video: The city considers Griffin’s unit, which sold for $238 million in 2019, to have a market value of just $15.5 million (and a taxable value, a separate city calculation, of less than $7 million).

The gulf between assessed and market value is just one issue. New York City, with the state’s blessing, has since the 1980s used gimmicks to shield homeowners (otherwise known as voters) from property-tax increases. But the benefits have flowed more to some properties than to others. By law, the share of tax paid by each of four classes of properties (essentially: single-family homes, apartment buildings, utilities, and commercial or industrial sites) can change only by a certain amount in a year. This creates huge distortions. Over decades, the restriction has had the practical effect of preventing the property tax on homes in higher-demand neighborhoods from rising as quickly as their market value. That has left certain areas with significantly lower effective property-tax rates and smaller tax bills. One of the most regressive consequences of this system is the way it translates into higher gas and electric bills: The city has raised property taxes on utilities knowing they would pass the expense along to ratepayers.

The pied-à-terre tax does nothing to address these issues. State and city officials could have put a dent in the city’s property-tax inequities, and even produced a windfall for the city, by simplifying the city tax system in a way that makes all property-tax bills more reflective of property values. That would mean allowing the share of tax coming from different types of property to shift with market conditions, and ending the different tax treatment of residences. None of this can, or should, happen overnight—the system was highly dysfunctional before Mamdani was even born—but the mayor has missed an opportunity to make a down payment on a generations-overdue reform.

The pied-à-terre tax came into being only because the city faced a cash crunch and turned to onetime moves to deal with it (most notably postponing more than $2 billion a year in pension payments). Unfortunately, it still faces one: The tax is expected to cover less than one-half of 1 percent of the city’s budget. Even if it raises $500 million next year, as the Mamdani administration hopes, the city will still have a $6.4 billion gap in the 2028 fiscal-year budget, which the mayor must present this winter. Mamdani’s focus has generally been on the revenue side of the ledger, instead of looking critically at what the city already gets for its spending. That strategy is unsustainable. Both the city and, to an even greater extent, the state rely on volatile income-tax revenues that can drop suddenly in a recession or an emergency. New York City’s income-tax receipts plunged 21 percent from its 2009 fiscal year to its 2010 fiscal year, and didn’t recover until 2013. The city doesn’t have anywhere close to the level of reserves it would need to weather a similar downturn without deep and sudden spending cuts.

Putting New York City’s finances on a stable long-term footing is impossible without reining in spending. The city’s biggest expense by far is its public-school system. Enrollment has fallen 17 percent citywide since 2015, but officials bristle at the prospect of consolidation. Might the mayor perhaps shoot a TikTok video in front of the city’s half-empty schools? Beyond the education system, the city gives its workforce, including retirees, no-cost health-insurance coverage. (Even the state government requires employees to pay at least 12 percent toward their coverage.) Put another way, city taxpayers absorbed this century’s explosive growth in health-care costs in a way few other employers did. They did this even as unionized employees enjoyed automatic pay raises—which continue even after their next contract expires, regardless of the city’s financial condition.

Mamdani has tapped agency “savings officers,” but his failure to push for structural changes, either to the property-tax system or to the budget itself, has appropriately left people wondering how, not if, they’ll next be asked to pay the city more. If he doesn’t do more to stretch every dollar in the good times, he risks finding that the bad times will arrive sooner—and last longer.

In 2007 the IAF struck a site in Syria, which the Israeli government said was being set up by the Assad regime as a secret nuclear reactor.

The attack was widely condemned, especially by Arab states and members of the non-aligned movement, as a pretextous rogue action in violation of international law.

Now almost two decades later, the IAEA has been able to inspect the site following the fall of the Assad regime. Its preliminary findings indicate that the site was indeed a secret nuclear reactor under construction. A separate investigation following the new Syrian government's warning to the IAEA identified a separate site with tons of nuclear material; previously Israeli intelligence had claimed that the Assad regime had several tons of uranium and had managed to fabricate or procure several tons of nuclear fuel rods.

Notably, the reactor site had briefly falled into the hands of ISIS during the Syrian Civil War.