(TEXAS) — Texas legislators are heading into their third special session Monday with several controversial topics on the agenda, including transgender student participation in sports and gender-affirming health care for trans youth.
Lawmakers will consider banning transgender students from playing on interscholastic teams that align with their gender identity. Children in grades K through 12 would only be allowed to play sports that correspond with their sex assigned at birth or sex designated on their original birth certificate.
Texas lawmakers alone have introduced more than 40 anti-trans bills this year.
At least 30 states across the country have introduced similar bills on trans student-athletes. So far, eight states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Mississippi, Tennessee, South Dakota and West Virginia — have passed the bills into laws or signed them as executive orders.
The laws are being challenged in Arkansas, Florida, Tennessee and West Virginia.
Some groups in support of the bills, like the conservative Christian group Concerned Women for America, claim that trans girls have an unfair advantage.
“The issue is about the basic fairness and opportunities that women have fought for centuries to obtain,” the group said in a statement to ABC News. “The disparity comes when forcing women to compete against a biological male that has innate biological differences, giving them physical advantages that simply cannot be erased.”
There is no evidence that trans athletes disproportionately dominate sports when playing on teams that correspond with their gender identity. There is also no evidence that they have an advantage.
Other anti-trans bills on the special session docket include bans on gender-affirming therapy, counseling, surgery or health care. In some cases, allowing a child or teen under the age of 18 gender-affirming health care may be considered child abuse, if HB22 is signed into law.
LGBTQ+ advocates say these bills only serve to tarnish the mental health and safety of trans students.
“Like any other student, trans young people just want to stay healthy, go to school and spend time with their friends and loved ones,” Andy Marra, the executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund, told ABC News. “For transgender students living in states where their very lives are under attack, it can be near impossible to focus on much else but surviving.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that discrimination can lead to poor mental health, suicide, substance abuse, violence and other health risks for trans youth.
Young transgender students are also three times more likely to attempt suicide than their cisgender peers, the CDC reported.
(MOSCOW) — Russia’s ruling party, United Russia, which backs President Vladimir Putin, has kept its supermajority in the country’s parliament, sweeping elections that were marred with allegations of widespread ballot rigging and saw many of the Kremlin’s top opponents barred from running.
With virtually all ballots counted, Russia’s election’s commission said United Russia had taken nearly 50% of the vote and won nearly 90% of first-past-the-post districts, meaning the party will retain its two-thirds majority in the lower house of parliament, which allows it to change Russia’s constitution.
Russia’s elections are closely managed, and the pro-Kremlin party’s victory was seen as a foregone conclusion, but on Monday, opposition parties accused the Kremlin of using blatant fabrication to inflate the result and produce an overwhelming win even in Moscow, usually a center of dissent.
After polls closed Sunday night after three days of voting, early partial results showed several opposition parties and politicians making strong showings in the capital, with some seemingly in reach of victory with most votes counted.
But those results were all wiped out when, after many hours, authorities published results from online voting, which handed victories to pro-Kremlin candidates. Opposition parties, even those from the so-called “loyal opposition,” cried foul, accusing the Kremlin of using the online votes to conceal vote manipulation and steal victory for its candidates.
The Communist Party, which largely acts as a tame opposition in the parliament, said it would not recognize the results in Moscow, where six of its candidates lost out once the online votes were added.
Critics started raising suspicions about Moscow’s online count after it took far longer for it to be completed than the paper ballot count for most of the rest of the country — a sign, critics said, that officials were waiting to see how much they needed to alter the vote. The online voting was in effect a black box, with independent monitors unable to observe it or properly check how the results were signed off on by officials, independent monitors said. Workers at state companies and organizations have also reported being pressed by their managers to vote online en masse.
Several candidates called a protest at Moscow’s Pushkin Square on Monday. A few hundred people gathered under heavy rain to demonstrate, watched by a cordon of riot police.
“Such a giant difference between the results at the ‘live’ polling stations and the online vote can’t be true,” Mikhail Lobanov, a Communist candidate with wide support among liberal voters, told the crowd, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Lobanov said he had been on track to beat Yevgeny Popov, a pro-Kremlin TV personality, by a margin of 10,500 votes before the online votes suddenly gave Popov a lead of 20,000 votes at the last moment.
There were also allegations of widespread analogue ballot rigging around Russia. Throughout the weekend, there was a stream of videos seeming to show elections officials stuffing wads of ballots into voting urns or trying to block monitoring cameras while others did so.
Independent researchers also spotted that Russia’s central elections committee now encrypts the results data published on its website, a step reportedly intended to prevent researchers from crunching the data themselves, which in the past has allowed them to identify signs of rigging.
“Online voting represents right now represents an absolute evil — a black box that no one checks,” Sergey Shpilkin, a data scientist who in the past has used statistical analysis to demonstrate likely falsification in Russian elections, told Russian news website Meduza.
The head of Russia’s elections commission Ella Pamfilova in a video meeting with Putin said the elections had seen far fewer violations than usual and claimed Russia’s system was “one of the most transparent” in the world.
The United States and some European countries criticized the elections as unfair amid the Kremlin’s use of repressive laws to prevent opponents from participating. Ned Price, the U.S. State Department’s spokesperson, in a statement said the Russian government had conducted “widespread efforts to marginalize independent political figures” and had “severely restricted political pluralism and prevented the Russian people from exercising their civil and political rights.”
United Russia took nearly 50% of the vote despite polls suggesting its support was around 30%, as high food prices and unpopular pension reforms have eaten into its popularity. Ahead of the elections, the Kremlin launched a campaign of repression on a scale unprecedented under Putin’s 20 year-rule, barring dozens of opposition candidates from running, with many arrested and some forced abroad.
It dismantled the movement of its fiercest critic Alexey Navalny, who was jailed in January after surviving a nerve agent poisoning last year.
Navalny, from jail, had sought to exploit the Kremlin party’s unpopularity at the elections with a tactical voting campaign called “Smart Voting,” advising people to vote for any candidate with the best chance of beating United Russia.
On Monday, he claimed the campaign had worked, arguing the campaign’s recommended candidates had won 12 out of Moscow’s 15 districts before the online votes were added.
(NOTE LANGUAGE) In a chat with Marc Maron on his WTF with Marc Maron podcast, Sopranos creator David Chase revealed a bit about the iconic show’s finale — and how Journey ended up in it.
As you may remember, James Gandolfini‘s Tony Soprano and his family members sit down for dinner at a diner, and Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin'” cranks out of a jukebox.
While Chase wasn’t re-litigating what the vague ending means — spoiler alert, he apparently once accidentally called it Tony’s “death scene” — Chase did talk about what went into choosing that song.
In speaking with members of his crew at the time, Chase said he was left with three choices — one of which he couldn’t remember, and the other was Al Green‘s “Love and Happiness.”
When he mentioned “Don’t Stop Believin’,” Chase recalled, “[T]hey went, ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, no. Don’t do that! Ugh. F***.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s it. That’s the one.'”
Chase explained, “I wasn’t saying that just to throw it in their face. That was kind of my favorite, and it got a reaction of some kind. So I can make this song lovable, which it had been.”
The Emmy winner also detailed that other endings were shot to throw off potential spoilers — but wouldn’t reveal to Maron what those alternate takes were.
The Sopranos prequel, Chase’s The Many Saints of Newark, starring Gandolfini’s son Michael as a young Tony Soprano, hits theaters and HBO Max on October 1.
Scotty McCreery had most of his new album, Same Truck, completed before the COVID-19 pandemic altered life in 2020. But the forced downtime allowed him to see the project from a new vantage point.
In an interview with People, the American Idol winner shares that the album previously consisted of songs penned by other songwriters. But being at home allowed him to tap into his own well of songwriting, with 10 of the 12 songs co-written by him, including current single, “You Time.”
“I had a lot of outside cuts actually the first time around. But then the world shut down and I had nothing but time to sit there and pick up a guitar and strum ideas and write songs,” he explains. “Faith is something I lean on daily. I’ve definitely had to lean on it a lot in the last year and a half, with the craziness of the world.”
“You Time,” inspired by Scotty’s wife, Gabi,” is inching its way toward the #1 spot on the Billboard Country Airplay chart.
The Rolling Stones may have just lost their legendary drummer, Charlie Watts, but they’re moving forward. On Wednesday at 1 p.m. ET, they’re apparently releasing a video for “Living in the Heart of Love,” one of the previously unreleased tracks that will appear on the 40th Anniversary Edition of Tattoo You.
The band announced the video on social media, adding the tagline, “Charlie is my darling.” That’s the title of a 1966 documentary about the Stones that was never released, due to legal issues and the fact that all the prints of the film were stolen from their then-manager Andrew Loog Oldham‘s office. In 2012, a new film with restored footage called Charlie Is My Darling — Ireland 1965 was released.
The Stones posted a black-and-white clip of the video, which incorporates archival footage of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Watts in the Tattoo You era, along with new shots of young people dancing and making out, as well as a Stones record spinning on a turntable.
The video clip ends with the words “Charlie is my darling.”
The Stones’ tour kicks off September 26 in St. Louis, MO.
Ben Affleck heaped on the praise for his on-again squeeze Jennifer Lopez — but this was about her business acumen and her role as a role model for entrepreneurs of color.
Affleck told the trade Adweek that he’s “in awe” of Ms. From the Block, who was namedthe magazine’s 2021 Brand Visionary. The cover feature on Lopez features testimonials about her from colleagues and friends, including Affleck.
“I am in awe of what Jennifer’s effect on the world is,” Affleck enthused. “At most, as an artist, I can make movies that move people. Jennifer has inspired a massive group of people to feel they have a seat at the table in this country. That is an effect few people throughout history have had, one…I can only stand by and admire with respect,” Ben said.
The feature details not only Lopez’s cosmetics and fashion empire, but also her charity effort, Limitless Labs, which, along with Goldman Sachs, is boosting efforts of Latinx entrepreneurs.
“All I can tell you is that I have seen firsthand the difference representation makes because I have seen, over and over and over…women of color approach Jennifer and tell her what her example as a strong woman, and a woman succeeding and demanding her fair share in the business world means to them,” Affleck said.
Elsewhere in the feature, Lopez’s Hustlers co-producer and Nuyorican Productions partner Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas said, “Jennifer’s brand has always been about…not allowing anyone or anything to trivialize or marginalize or stop you.”
She added, “We try to pick projects with characters who are…empowered, and people are cast and our crews with as much diversity as possible, giving women and people of color an opportunity they did not have a few years ago.”
His hit collab with Dua Lipa, “Cold Heart (Pnau Remix),” rose from number 11 to number 10 on the chart this week, marking Elton’s first time in the chart’s top 10 since 2005.
“Cold Heart” extends his record for most top 10s on the Adult Contemporary radio airplay chart. He’s followed by Neil Diamond with 38 and Barbra Streisand, with 35.
Following the song’s release last month, it became Elton’s first entry on the Billboard Hot 100 since 2000 and his first entry on the Pop Airplay chart since 1998.
(NEW YORK) — More than a century ago, the globe was left devastated by a pandemic that has been described by experts as “the deadliest in human history.”
The 1918 influenza pandemic killed at least 50 million people worldwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, equivalent in proportion to 200 million in today’s global population. An estimated 675,000 of those deaths occurred in the United States.
Now, 18 months into the coronavirus pandemic, the virus has claimed more American lives than its counterpart a hundred years ago.
At this point, at least 675,446 Americans have been confirmed to have died since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University, with thousands of Americans lives still being lost each day.
Surpassing the 1918 death toll is a dismal milestone, but experts suggest there are key differences between both pandemics that must be taken into account, given modern day access to better medical treatments and vaccinations.
“These are two different viruses, two different times in history, at two different times of medical history, with what you have available to combat or treat it,” Howard Markel, professor of the history of medicine at the University of Michigan, told ABC News.
The influenza outbreak of 1918 began in the spring, with the novel H1N1 virus passing from birds to humans, and lasted for approximately two years. Approximately one-third of the world’s population at that time, or 500 million people, was ultimately estimated to have been infected, according to the CDC.
According to experts, it is important to recall, when comparing data from the two pandemics, that the numbers of deaths stemming from the 1918 pandemic are just estimates. In fact, according to Dr. Graham Mooney, assistant professor of the history of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, it is likely that these figures were significantly underestimated, because of non-registration, missing records, misdiagnosis or underreporting.
Likewise, experts believe that the current COVID-19 death count could already be greatly undercounted, due to inconsistent reporting by states and localities, and the exclusion of excess deaths.
In comparing the pandemics, Markel said, it is important to remember that we now have many more people living in the U.S. than in 1918, when the population stood at approximately 105 million, according to census data, compared to 328 million people in 2019.
The U.S. currently has a coronavirus case fatality rate of 1.6%, compared to the 2.5% fatality rate for influenza in 1918, noted Mooney. Normally, the flu’s fatality rate is less than 0.1%. And thus, the rate of death in the United States, due to COVID-19, remains significantly below the one attributed to the 1918 pandemic.
Ultimately, when compared on a per-capita basis, the pandemic of 1918 was far deadlier than this one, according to Christopher McKnight Nichols, associate professor of history at Oregon State University.
“The difference is that 1 in 500 Americans have died now, and about 1 in 152 died in 1918, although our number keeps going up,” Nichols told ABC News.
Vaccinations and traditional intervention methods key to protection
Although the two pandemics were at first comparable, the introduction of the coronavirus vaccine made the differences between the two “stark,” said Nichols.
“People were desperate for treatment measures in 1918. People were desperate for a vaccine,” Nichols said. “We have effective vaccines now, and so what strikes me in the comparison, if you think about this milestone, this tragedy of deaths, is that same number but we have a really effective treatment, the thing that they most wanted in 1918 and ’19, we’ve got. And for a lot of different reasons, we botched the response.”
Similar to the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, no vaccines or treatments were available to protect people against the 1918 influenza. Thus, protection through non-pharmaceutical interventions was critical, Mooney said.
“The same kinds of measures — the so-called non-pharmaceutical interventions that were put on in 1918 — were the same that we saw last year: lockdowns, social distancing, hygiene masks, limits on gathering places,” Nichols said.
In fact, social distancing was also one of the great historical lessons learned from 1918, according to Markel, demonstrating that if done early, and for a long time, such measures can work.
Millions of different communities and demographics affected
One fundamental contrast between the two pandemics, according to Markel, is that different age groups were most significantly impacted. A disproportionate number of those who succumbed to the disease in 1918 were in the 18- to 45-year-old age group. Young children and the elderly were also significantly impacted.
However, in the coronavirus pandemic, the age group that has been the most affected is over the age of 65, who make up 78.7% of virus-related deaths.
Historical evidence suggests that racial and ethnic disparities, which have affected communities of color throughout the coronavirus pandemic, were also present during the 1918 pandemic.
Black Americans had higher case fatality rates from influenza in 1918-19 than whites, according to a 2019 study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
Similarly, Black Americans account for nearly 14% of COVID-19 related deaths, despite the fact that Black Americans only account for 12.5% of the population.
Becoming endemic
Domestically and globally, experts said, it will be crucial for vaccine uptake to increase, in order to blunt the impact of the coronavirus death toll.
“I’m a little pessimistic going into winter, given the fact that there’s such a large unvaccinated population that it is a lot like 1918,” Nichols said, adding that it will ultimately be “some combination of getting more of the population immune, with vaccines and with infections.”
Ultimately, although “it’s not the worst of all time, it’s pretty darn close,” Markel said of the COVID-19 pandemic. “It’s the worst of our lifetimes, and it’s changed our lives in so many ways.”
(WASHINGTON) — A decorated group of more than 500 current and former American women Olympians and professional and collegiate athletes is warning the U.S. Supreme Court in a new legal filing that eroding access to abortion care in America will be “devastating” to women’s athletics at all levels.
“If the state compelled women athletes to carry pregnancies to term and give birth, it could derail women’s athletic careers, academic futures, and economic livelihoods at a large scale,” the women write. “Such a fundamental restriction on bodily integrity and human autonomy would never be imposed on a male athlete, though he would be equally responsible for a pregnancy.”
Among the named signatories are U.S. soccer star Megan Rapinoe; Olympic water polo player Ashleigh Johnson; WNBA star Diana Taurasi; U.S. women’s soccer national team captain Becky Sauerbrunn; and, Layshia Clarendon, a former WNBA all-star and current vice president of the Women’s National Basketball Players Association.
The filing — known as an amicus, or friend-of-the-court, brief — was made in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a blockbuster abortion rights showdown scheduled or oral argument at the Supreme Court on Dec. 1.
The state of Mississippi has explicitly asked the court to overturn nearly 50 years of abortion rights precedent since the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, allowing states to set stringent new restrictions on early-term abortions, if not outlaw them entirely.
“As women athletes and people in sports, we must have the power to make important decisions about our own bodies and exert control over our reproductive lives,” Rapinoe said in a statement. “I am honored to stand with the hundreds of athletes who have signed onto this Supreme Court brief to help champion not only our constitutional rights, but also those of future generations of athletes.”
The signatories are all women who “have exercised, relied on the availability of, or support the constitutional right to abortion care in order to meet the demands of their sports,” according to the brief.
Women’s rights advocates said it was the first time a large group of female American athletes publicly took a stand in support of abortion access.
Crissy Perham, a double gold medalist and captain of the 1992 U.S. Olympic swim team, offered one of several personal testimonies in the brief attesting to her experience obtaining an abortion.
“When I was in college, I was on birth control, but I accidentally became pregnant,” she wrote. “I decided to have an abortion. I wasn’t ready to be a mom, and having an abortion felt like I was given a second chance at life.”
“That choice ultimately led me to being an Olympian, a college graduate and a proud mother today,” Perham wrote.
Several athletes described the importance of the Supreme Court precedent in laying the groundwork for more women to participate in athletics and as a “safeguard” in case birth control failed.
“As a victim of rape during my junior year of college, I was comforted in the fact that if I were to fall pregnant and need an abortion, I would have access to that service,” a Division I field hockey player, who was not identified by name, wrote in the brief.
Ashleigh Johnson, the first Black woman on the U.S. Olympic water polo team and member of the gold-medal 2016 and 2021 Olympic teams, said she wants the justices to see abortion access a matter of racial justice.
“It is well-established that women of color experience real disparities in accessing health care services, including contraceptive, abortion and other reproductive care,” Johnson said in a statement. “I hope we can have a real conversation as a country about valuing Black women’s autonomy.”
The case will be argued in December and is expected to be decided by the end of June 2022.
