Judge grants preliminary injunction to protect collective bargaining agreement for TSA workers
SEATTLE (AP) — A federal judge on Monday granted a preliminary injunction to stop Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem from killing a collective bargaining agreement for Transportation Safety Administration workers.
U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman of Seattle said in her order that an injunction is needed to preserve the rights and benefits that TSA workers have enjoyed for years while being represented by the American Federation of Government Employees.
In their lawsuit, Pechman said, the union has shown that Noem's directive to end the agreement 'constitutes impermissible retaliation against it for its unwillingness to acquiesce to the Trump Administration's assault on federal workers.' It also likely violated due process and AFGE is likely to succeed in showing that Noem's decision was 'arbitrary and capricious," she added.
'Today's court decision is a crucial victory for federal workers and the rule of law,' AFGE National President Everett Kelley said in a release. 'The preliminary injunction underscores the unconstitutional nature of DHS's attack on TSA officers' First Amendment rights. We remain committed to ensuring our members' rights and dignity are protected, and we will not back down from defending our members' rights against unlawful union busting.'
Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Kipnis declined to comment on the judge's ruling, according to Emily Langlie, spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's office.
AFGE had entered into a new, seven-year collective bargaining agreement with agency last May, but Noem issued a memo Feb. 27 rescinding that agreement. One week later, TSA informed the union about Noem's directive, saying the contract was terminated and all pending grievances would be deleted.
AFGE filed a lawsuit against Noem, claiming the move was retaliation against the union for pushing back against the Trump administration's attacks on federal workers. AFGE had filed a separate lawsuit Feb. 19 against the Office of Personnel Management to stop the firing of probationary workers. A judge issued a temporary restraining order Feb. 27 stopping the firings — the same day Noem issued her memo.
Abigail Carter, representing AFGE during oral arguments before Pechman on May 27, said Noem's move was retaliation and a violation of the union's First Amendment right to protected speech and its Fifth Amendment right to due process.
'The administration has made it clear that if you don't disagree with it politically, you and your members can keep your rights, but if you do disagree, you lose them,' Carter said. She also argued that the collective bargaining agreement was necessary because TSA workers are not covered under the federal labor-management code. The agreement protects them from dangerous working conditions and unreasonable hours.
Kipnis denied the retaliation claim and said it was simply a difference in management styles.
Pechman questioned that contention. Not all unions are banned by the administration, Pechman said, only the ones oppose the administration.
'Isn't this a pattern that you see?' Pechman asked Kipnis. 'Attorneys who take opposition stances get banned. Those who don't, don't have those restrictions. Isn't this the pattern that the White House has set up?"
Kipnis said tension between unions and management are common and this conflict doesn't signal a violation of the workers' First Amendment rights, but instead reflects a confrontational relationship.
But Pechman wasn't convinced.
Previous TSA managers have found unions to be beneficial and renewed their contracts for years, she said. They found they made a happier workforce, and 'they wanted their employees to feel that they were well-treated,' she said. What has changed is this administration's attitude, she said.
To that, Kipnis replied: 'Or you could characterize it as a different management style. The former administration apparently saw that as a better way to do business. ... But this administration sees a different way of doing business. And the same statute affords them the same amount of discretion.'
Pechman said she understood that the administration has the right to exercise that discretion, 'but to abruptly cancel doesn't seem well reasoned, so I'm having trouble with that." She also noted, "But why the United States gets to back out of contracts that it's made is harder to accept.'
In Monday's order, Pechman said TSA workers would suffer 'irreparable harm' without the injunction, noting that if they lose their collective bargaining agreement, they will lose the benefits it provides.
'While the loss of money alone does not show irreparable harm, the total harms here are more than monetary,' Pechman said. 'They include the loss of substantive employment protections, avenues of grievance and arbitration, and the right to have a workforce that can unite to demand benefits that might not be obtainable through individual negotiation.'
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4 minutes ago
Stephen King on 'The Life of Chuck,' the end of the world and, yes, joy
NEW YORK -- NEW YORK (AP) — Stephen King 's first editor, Bill Thompson, once said, 'Steve has a movie camera in his head.' So vividly drawn is King's fiction that it's offered the basis for some 50 feature films. For half a century, since Brian De Palma's 1976 film 'Carrie,' Hollywood has turned, and turned again, to King's books for their richness of character, nightmare and sheer entertainment. Open any of those books up at random, and there's a decent chance you'll encounter a movie reference, too. Rita Hayworth. 'The Wizard of Oz.' 'Singin' in the Rain.' Sometimes even movies based on King's books turn up in his novels. That King's books have been such fodder for the movies is owed, in part, to how much of a moviegoer their author is. 'I love anything from 'The 400 Blows' to something with that guy Jason Statham,' King says, speaking by phone from his home in Maine. 'The worst movie I ever saw was still a great way to spend an afternoon. The only movie I ever walked out on was 'Transformers.' At a certain point I said, 'This is just ridiculous.'' Over time, King has developed a personal policy in how he talks about the adaptations of his books. 'My idea is: If you can't say something nice, keep your mouth shut,' he says. The most notable exception was Stanley Kubrick's 'The Shining,' which King famously called 'a big beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside.' But every now and then, King is such a fan of an adaptation that he's excited to talk about it. That's very much the case with 'The Life of Chuck,' Mike Flanagan's new adaptation of King's novella of the same name published in the 2020 collection 'If It Bleeds.' In 'The Life of Chuck,' which Neon releases in theaters Friday (nationwide June 13), there are separate storylines but the tone-setting opening is apocalyptic. The internet, like a dazed prize fighter, wobbles on its last legs before going down. California is said to be peeling away from the mainland like 'like old wallpaper.' And yet in this doomsday tale, King is at his most sincere. 'The Life of Chuck,' the book and the movie, is about what matters in life when everything else is lost. There is dancing, Walt Whitman and joy. 'In 'The Life of Chuck,' we understand that this guy's life is cut short, but that doesn't mean he doesn't experience joy,' says King. 'Existential dread and grief and things are part of the human experience, but so is joy.' It's telling that when King, our preeminent purveyor of horror, writes about doom times, he ends up scaling it down to a single life. While darkness and doom have, and probably always will, mark his work, King — a more playful, instinctual, genre-skipping writer than he's often credited as — 'The Life of Chuck' is a prime example of King, the humanist. 'An awful lot of people assume, because he writes so much stuff that's so scary, they kind of forget the reason his horror works so well is he's always juxtaposing it with light and with love and with empathy,' says Flanagan, who has twice before adapted King ('Doctor Sleep,' 'Gerald's Game') and is in the midst of making a 'Carrie' series for Amazon. 'You forget that 'It' isn't about the clown, it's about the kids and their friendship," adds Flanagan. ''The Stand' isn't about the virus or the demon taking over the world, it's ordinary people who have to come together and stand against a force they cannot defeat.' King, 77, has now written somewhere around 80 books, including the just released 'Never Flinch.' The mystery thriller brings back King's recent favorite protagonist, the private investigator Holly Gibney, who made her stand-alone debut in 'If It Bleeds.' It's Gibney's insecurities, and her willingness to push against them, that has kept King returning to her. 'It gave me great pleasure to see Holly grow into a more confident person,' King says. 'She never outgrows all of her insecurities, though. None of us do.' 'Never Flinch' is a reminder that King has always been less of a genre-first writer than a character-first one. He tends to fall in love with a character and follow them through thick and thin. 'I'm always happy writing. That's why I do it so much,' King says, chuckling. 'I'm a very chipper guy because I get rid of all that dark stuff in the books.' Dark stuff, as King says, hasn't been hard to come by lately, he grants. The kind of climate change disaster found in 'The Life of Chuck,' King says, often dominates his anxieties. 'We're creeping up little by little on being the one country who does not acknowledge it's a real problem with carbon in the atmosphere,' King says. 'That's crazy. Certain right wing politicians can talk all they want about how we're saving the world for our grandchildren. They don't care about that. They care about money.' On social media, King has been a sometimes critic of President Donald Trump, whose second term has included battles with the arts, academia and public financing for PBS and NPR. Over the next four years, King predicts, 'Culture is going to go underground.' In 'Never Finch,' Holly Gibney is hired as a bodyguard by a women's rights activist whose lecture tour is being plagued by mysterious acts of violence. In the afterward of the book, King includes a tribute to 'supporters of women's right to choose who have been murdered for doing their duty.' 'I'm sure they're not going to like that,' King says of right-wing critics. The original germ for 'The Life of Chuck' had nothing to do with current events. One day in Boston, King noticed a drummer busking on Boylston Street. He had the vision of a businessman in a suit who, walking by, can't resist dancing with abandon to the drummer's beat. King, a self-acknowledged dancer (though only in private, he notes), latched onto a story that would turn on the unpredictable nature of people, tracing the inner life of that imagined passerby. In the film, he's played by Tom Hiddleston. Chuck first appears, oddly, on a billboard that haunts and confuses a local teacher (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who's struggling to get his students to care about literature or education with the possible end of the world encroaching. It's a funny but maybe not coincidental irony that many of the best King adaptations, like 'Stand By Me' and 'The Shawshank Redemption," have come from the author's more warm-hearted tales. 'The Life of Chuck,' which won the People's Choice Award last fall at the Toronto International Film Festival, is after a similar spirit. When King reached out about attending the TIFF world premiere, Flanagan was shocked. The last time King had done that for one of his own adaptations was 26 years ago, for 'The Green Mile.' That movie, like 'The Shawshank Redemption' were box-office disappointments, King recalls, a fate he's hoping 'The Life of Chuck' can avoid. 'He views this movie as something that's a bit precious,' says Flanagan. 'He's said a few things to me in the past about how earnest it is, how this is a story without an ounce of cynicism. As it was being released into a cynical world, I think he felt protective of it. I think this one really means something to him.' The Stephen King industrial complex, meanwhile, keeps rolling along. Coming just this year are series of 'Welcome to Derry' and 'The Institute' and a film of 'The Long Walk.' King, himself, just finished a draft of 'Talisman 3.' If 'The Life of Chuck' has particular meaning to King, it could be because it represents something intrinsic about his own life. Chuck's small, seemingly unremarkable existence has grace and meaning because, as Whitman is quoted, he "contains multitudes' that surprise and delight him. King's fiction is evidence — heaps of it — that he does, too. 'There are some days where I sit down and I think, 'This is going to be a really good day,' and it's not, at all,' says King. 'Then other days I sit down and think to myself, 'I'm really tired and don't feel like doing this,' and then it catches fire. You never know what you're going to get.'
19 minutes ago
Edmund White, a groundbreaking gay author, dies at 85
NEW YORK -- NEW YORK (AP) — Edmund White, the groundbreaking man of letters who documented and imagined the gay revolution through journalism, essays, plays and such novels as "A Boy's Own Story" and "The Beautiful Room is Empty," has died. He was 85. White's death was confirmed Wednesday by his agent, Bill Clegg, who did not immediately provide additional details. Along with Larry Kramer, Armistead Maupin and others, White was among a generation of gay writers who in the 1970s became bards for a community no longer afraid to declare its existence. He was present at the Stonewall raids of 1969, when arrests at a club in Greenwich Village led to the birth of the modern gay movement, and for decades was a participant and observer through the tragedy of AIDS, the advance of gay rights and culture and the backlash of recent years. A resident of New York and Paris for much of his adult life, he was a novelist, journalist, biographer, playwright, activist, teacher and memoirist. "A Boy's Own Story" was a bestseller and classic coming-of-age novel that demonstrated gay literature's commercial appeal. He wrote a prizewinning biography of playwright Jean Genet and books on Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. He was a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, where colleagues included Toni Morrison and his close friend, Joyce Carol Oates. He was an encyclopedic reader who absorbed literature worldwide while returning yearly to such favorites as Tolstoy's 'Anna Karenina' and Henry Green's 'Nothing.' "Among gay writers of his generation, Edmund White has emerged as the most versatile man of letters," cultural critic Morris Dickstein wrote in The New York Times in 1995. "A cosmopolitan writer with a deep sense of tradition, he has bridged the gap between gay subcultures and a broader literary audience." In early 1982, just as the public was learning about AIDS, White was among the founders of Gay Men's Health Crisis, which advocated AIDS prevention and education. The author himself would learn that he was HIV-positive in 1985, and would remember friends afraid to be kissed by him, even on the cheek, and parents who didn't want him to touch their babies. White survived, but watched countless peers and loved ones suffer agonizing deaths. Out of the seven gay men, including White, who formed the influential writing group the Violet Quill, four died of complications from AIDS. As White wrote in his elegiac novel "The Farewell Symphony," the story followed a shocking arc: "Oppressed in the fifties, freed in the sixties, exalted in the seventies and wiped out in the eighties." But in the 1990s and after he lived to see gay people granted the right to marry and serve in the military, to see gay-themed books taught in schools and to see gay writers so widely published that they no longer needed to write about gay lives. "We're in this post-gay period where you can announce to everybody that you yourself are gay, and you can write books in which there are gay characters, but you don't need to write exclusively about that," he said in a Salon interview in 2009. "Your characters don't need to inhabit a ghetto any more than you do. A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people." In 2019, White received a National Book Award medal for lifetime achievement, an honor previously given to Morrison and Philip Roth among others. 'To go from the most maligned to a highly lauded writer in a half-century is astonishing,' White said during his acceptance speech. White was born in Cincinnati in 1940, but age at 7 moved with his mother to the Chicago area after his parents divorced. His father was a civil engineer "who reigned in silence over dinner as he studied his paper." His mother a psychologist "given to rages or fits of weeping." Trapped in "the closed, sniveling, resentful world of childhood," at times suicidal, White was at the same time a 'fierce little autodidact' who sought escape through the stories of others, whether Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" or a biography of the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. "As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excite me or assure me I wasn't the only one, that might confirm my identity I was unhappily piecing together," he wrote in the essay "Out of the Closet, On to the Bookshelf," published in 1991. As he wrote in "A Boy's Own Story," he knew as a child that he was attracted to boys, but for years was convinced he must change — out of a desire to please his father (whom he otherwise despised) and a wish to be "normal." Even as he secretly wrote a 'coming out' novel while a teenager, he insisted on seeing a therapist and begged to be sent to boarding school. One of the funniest and saddest episodes from "A Boy's Own Story" told of a brief crush he had on a teenage girl, ended by a polite and devastating note of rejection. 'For the next few months I grieved,' White writes. 'I would stay up all night crying and playing records and writing sonnets to Helen. What was I crying for?' He had a whirling, airborne imagination and New York and Paris had been in his dreams well before he lived in either place. After graduating from the University of Michigan, where he majored in Chinese, he moved to New York in the early 1960s and worked for years as a writer for Time-Life Books and an editor for The Saturday Review. He would interview Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote among others, and, for some assignments, was joined by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Socially, he met Burroughs, Jasper Johns, Christopher Isherwood and John Ashbery. He remembered drinking espresso with an ambitious singer named Naomi Cohen, whom the world would soon know as "Mama Cass" of the Mamas and Papas. He feuded with Kramer, Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag, an early supporter who withdrew a blurb for "A Boy's Own Story" after he caricatured her in the novel "Caracole." "In all my years of therapy I never got to the bottom of my impulse toward treachery, especially toward people who'd helped me and befriended me," he later wrote. Through much of the 1960s, he was writing novels that were rejected or never finished. Late at night, he would "dress as a hippie, and head out for the bars." A favorite stop was the Stonewall, where he would down vodka tonics and try to find the nerve to ask a man he had crush on to dance. He was in the neighborhood on the night of June 28, 1969, when police raided the Stonewall and "all hell broke loose." "Up until that moment we had all thought homosexuality was a medical term," wrote White, who soon joined the protests. "Suddenly we saw that we could be a minority group — with rights, a culture, an agenda." Before the 1970s, few novels about openly gay characters existed beyond Vidal's 'The City and the Pillar' and James Baldwin's 'Giovanni's Room.' Classics such as William Burroughs' 'Naked Lunch' had 'rendered gay life as exotic, marginal, even monstrous,' according to White. But the world was changing, and publishing was catching up, releasing fiction by White, Kramer, Andrew Holleran and others. White's debut novel, the surreal and suggestive "Forgetting Elena," was published in 1973. He collaborated with Charles Silverstein on "The Joy of Gay Sex," a follow-up to the bestselling "The Joy of Sex" that was updated after the emergence of AIDS. In 1978, his first openly gay novel, "Nocturnes for the King of Naples," was released and he followed with the nonfiction "States of Desire," his attempt to show "the varieties of gay experience and also to suggest the enormous range of gay life to straight and gay people — to show that gays aren't just hairdressers, they're also petroleum engineers and ranchers and short-order cooks." With "A Boy's Own Story," published in 1982, he began an autobiographical trilogy that continued with "The Beautiful Room is Empty" and "The Farewell Symphony," some of the most sexually direct and explicit fiction to land on literary shelves. Heterosexuals, he wrote in "The Farewell Symphony," could "afford elusiveness." But gays, "easily spooked," could not "risk feigning rejection." His other works included "Skinned Alive: Stories" and the novel 'A Previous Life,' in which he turns himself into a fictional character and imagines himself long forgotten after his death. In 2009, he published "City Boy," a memoir of New York in the 1960s and '70s in which he told of his friendships and rivalries and gave the real names of fictional characters from his earlier novels. Other recent books included the novels "Jack Holmes & His Friend" and 'Our Young Man' and the memoir 'Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris.' "From an early age I had the idea that writing was truth-telling," he told The Guardian around the time 'Jack Holmes' was released. 'It's on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature — the holy book. There's nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious and it should be totally transparent.'
Newsweek
34 minutes ago
- Newsweek
Donald Trump Finds His Approval Rating Sinking Once More
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. President Donald Trump's approval rating on the economy is sinking, according to new polling. Pollster G. Elliott Morris' tracker shows that on the issue of the economy, Trump's approval rating is underwater by 15.75 points. That is down from -14.94 points on Monday. When Morris' tracker first launched in January, Trump's approval rating on the economy was well above water, at +8.24 points. On the issue of inflation, Trump's approval rating stands at -22.24 points. That is down from +1.99 points in January. Why It Matters While this downturn hasn't returned to the all-time low of -16.28 percent net approval recorded on May 8, the trend comes despite Trump's recent move to scale back the tariffs that saw his approval ratings plummet in April amid economic anxiety. That the numbers are falling again suggests voters remain unconvinced by the administration's course correction—and that concerns over rising prices, trade instability, and mixed signals from the White House continue to overshadow any efforts to reset the economic narrative. What To Know While Morris' tracker shows that Trump's approval rating on the economy is trending downward, pollster Nate Silver's tracker tells a different story. Silver's tracker shows that in the past few days, Trump has been trending upward on the economy, with his approval currently standing at -10 points, up from -11.3 points on June 1. However, similar to Morris' tracker, Silver's tracker shows that Trump's net approval rating on the economy has trended downwards dramatically since January, when it stood at +6 points. The same trend occurs for Trump's net approval rating on inflation, which has trended upward in the past few days, from 19.7 on May 1 to 17.1 as of June 3, but has dropped from -6 points in January. Individual polls show that Americans remain sharply divided over Trump's handling of the economy during his second term. While some surveys indicate modest approval, others reveal significant dissatisfaction—highlighting the ongoing polarization of public opinion on one of the administration's most critical issues. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters in the rain after arriving on Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, on May 30, 2025. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters in the rain after arriving on Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, on May 30, 2025. Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP According to polling conducted between May 21 and June 2, 2025, economic job approval ratings for Trump range from a low of 37 percent to a high of 47 percent, with disapproval rates consistently higher in most surveys. The latest poll by AtlasIntel (May 21-27) shows Trump with just 42 percent approval on the economy and 54 percent disapproval, resulting in a net -12 percent rating. Similarly, RMG Research (May 28-29) recorded 44 percent approval and 55 percent disapproval, also yielding a net -11 percent score. Other pollsters, like YouGov and John Zogby Strategies, reported a slightly narrower gap. Zogby's poll from May 28-29 showed a 46-50 percent split, or a net -4 percent, indicating a more divided sentiment among likely voters. Only Morning Consult recorded a relatively neutral economic approval rating for the president, with 47 percent approving and 47 percent disapproving in its most recent surveys conducted between May 30 and June 2. This suggests a degree of economic support stability, though not a clear advantage. At the bottom end, the American Research Group poll (May 17-20) gave Trump just 37 percent approval compared to 60 percent disapproval, marking a net -23 percent—the steepest negative margin in the group. Meanwhile, polls show that Trump continues to face strong headwinds on the issue of inflation, with net approval ratings on the topic deeply negative—despite attempts by his administration to scale back tariffs, having paused the majority of them. Across national surveys conducted between May 1 and June 2, 2025, Trump's approval rating on inflation remains persistently low, ranging from just 31 percent to 44 percent. Disapproval consistently outpaces approval by double digits, with net ratings ranging from -7 percent (Harris/Harvard CAPS) to -32 percent (Verasight and Marquette Law School). In the most recent YouGov poll (May 30-June 2), just 39 percent approved of Trump's handling of inflation, while 54 percent disapproved—netting a -15 percent margin. The latest data from Verasight and Marquette University underscore the depth of discontent: only 31 percent and 34 percent of respondents, respectively, approved of Trump's inflation policies, while roughly two-thirds disapproved. That puts Trump's net approval at -32 percent in both surveys, among the worst marks recorded in this cycle. It comes after the pace of inflation slowed in April, the month that Trump introduced his tariffs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) said last month. The annual inflation rate was 2.3 percent in April, down from an annual rate of 2.4 percent March. Meanwhile, consumer confidence saw a surprising increase in May. The Conference Board reported a rise to 98, much higher than both the expected 87.1 and April's 86 reading. It was the biggest one-month jump in more than a year. Nonetheless, polls still show that voters don't trust Trump on the economy. In the latest Fox News poll from April, 72 percent said they were "very" or "extremely" worried about the economy entering a recession this year. What Happens Next Trump's approval rating could fluctuate in the coming weeks, depending on the evolving tariff situation and concerns about a recession.
