Latest news with #Rosenblum
Los Angeles Times
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Transgender Americans say they're traveling less out of fear since the election, research shows
Michelle Rosenblum of Ventura is planning a family vacation to Hawaii. She is excited — but worried. Rosenblum is transgender. After President Trump's election in November to a second term, she said, she rushed to get her identity documents in order as a matter of safety. Rosenblum updated her California birth certificate to show she had transitioned. And she renewed her passport. She applied as a female but was stunned to receive a letter from the U.S. Department of State saying her application had to be changed 'to correct your information to show your biological sex at birth.' As she prepares to fly, Rosenblum fears the discrepancy between her California Real ID — which says female — and her passport will create problems with the Transportation Security Administration. In an email to The Times, Lorie Dankers, a TSA spokesperson, said the agency 'accepts documents for identity verification with an 'X' marker. There is no change to this policy.' In California, residents have had the option to choose 'X' for nonbinary since 2019. But not all states allow this. And for transgender people who have transitioned from one gender to the other and do not fall under the 'X' category, discrepancies can remain. Rosenblum is debating bringing a stack of documents to the airport that she would rather keep safe at home, such as her birth certificate, Social Security card, and a court order showing her change in gender. 'In the 10 years that I've been transitioned, I have never felt like, 'Whoa, I need to get all my papers together,'' said Rosenblum, who works in marketing. 'I was never concerned about traveling.' In a newly released survey of transgender Americans by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, nearly a third of respondents said they were traveling less frequently as a result of the 2024 election. Nearly 70% said they were less likely to go on vacation to states they viewed as more hostile to transgender people, particularly politically conservative states in the South and Midwest. The survey, published this month, also showed that 48% of respondents were considering moving or had already moved to places in the U.S. they viewed as safer— notably, blue states such as California, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York and Washington. Forty-five percent of respondents said they wanted to move out of the country because of the current political climate. 'When you feel that you need to consider moving, you've been pushed to a certain point,' said Abbie Goldberg, the lead author of the survey and an affiliated scholar at the Williams Institute, which researches public policy surrounding sexual orientation and gender identity. 'If you're a trans person living in the U.S., particularly in a state with not a lot of protections and some explicitly anti-trans legislation, you're thinking about your physical safety, your children's safety at school, the possibility you could be fired from your job and no way to push back.' However, most respondents who wanted to move said they face barriers, including the high cost of living, in places such as California. The survey of 302 transgender, nonbinary and gender-diverse adults was conducted in December, before Trump's inauguration. Goldberg said the percentages of trans people wanting to move and declining to travel are probably higher now. In his first 100 days, Trump issued executive orders banning trans women from women's sports and barring the federal government from recognizing genders other than male or female. Trump also is pushing to ban transgender Americans from the U.S. military, writing in an executive order that transgender identity is a 'falsehood' inconsistent with the 'humility and selflessness required of a service member.' The Supreme Court cleared the way this month for that ban to take effect. In California, Democrats are divided on some LGBTQ+ issues, such as trans athletes competing in women's sports. But progressive leaders have cast the state as a bulwark against Trump's opposition to transgender rights, which will probably be a big issue in the state's 2026 campaign for governor. Rosenblum said she is grateful to live in California, where she feels protected by the state's antidiscrimination laws. But as she gets ready for vacation, she said, 'it feels like people are trying to shove me back into the closet.' Email us at essentialcalifornia@ and your response might appear in the newsletter this week. Today's great photo is from contributor Gioncarlo Valentine in the studio of artist Diego Cardoso, who is painting L.A. as it really moves, one street at a time. Kevinisha Walker, multiplatform editorAndrew Campa, Sunday writerKarim Doumar, head of newsletters How can we make this newsletter more useful? Send comments to essentialcalifornia@ Check our top stories, topics and the latest articles on
CBS News
21-04-2025
- CBS News
Video shows suspect vandalizing Israeli hostage display in Baltimore, police search underway
Baltimore County Police are searching for a man seen on video appearing to vandalize an Israeli hostage display in Northwest Baltimore. The video appears to show the man yanking stakes from the ground and pulling an Israeli flag off the home. "To step up on somebody's lawn and destroy their property in such a vicious way, when ultimately…what are we displaying here? Victims," said property owner Azi Rosenblum. Rosenblum explains the photos on those stakes show some of the 59 Israelis still held hostage in Gaza. He says this memorial is his way of showing support for them in a way he says is meant to be non-political. "It doesn't address any of the larger conflict in any way, shape, or form. And for someone to feel so strongly opposed to people coming home and being safe and not being starved and not being abused, to come up on the lawn and tear apart something that represents simply that is pretty awful," said Rosenblum. The vandal also allegedly tried to break this window in the back of the house. Rosenblum says this is the fourth time since the display was put up 563 days ago that it has been vandalized. While he understands the conflict is controversial, he also hopes his display can serve as a learning opportunity, which is why each time, he rebuilds it. "I don't need everyone to necessarily appreciate the message or agree with it, I'm totally cool with people having other views and other opinions. What I would hope is that anyone who is driving by and is the least bit curious, that they would investigate. Look up the facts. Do some research," said Rosenblum. He says he will continue to rebuild it as many times as he has to until the hostages are brought home. "It's very personal and we're one big family, and when it's your family and you care about something and it's the right thing to do, then you're willing to pay the price and this is the right thing to do," said Rosenblum. The Baltimore County Police Department says they are currently investigating who is responsible for the vandalism, and they have increased patrols in the area. Anyone with information is asked to contact police at 410-887-4636 (INFO).
New York Times
07-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Craving More of ‘The White Lotus'? Read These Books Next
Smart, funny and compulsively watchable, HBO's 'The White Lotus' is the rare TV satire that strikes a perfect balance between vicious and empathetic, skewering the superrich while also humanizing their often outlandish foibles. The series, which just wrapped up its third season, follows a formula that's as familiar as it is addictive: A flock of wealthy, ill-mannered tourists descends on a far-flung luxury resort for one week, dreaming of escape — only to find that the very problems they hoped to flee are swiftly and mercilessly closing in on them, with deadly consequences. Part of the pleasure of the show is how it manages to make these doomed holidays seem so appealing. Lives implode, relationships crumble and people wind up dead, but you still want to be there regardless. If you're not quite ready to check out of the White Lotus, we've got 10 novels that channel the spirit of the show, from ruthless depictions of moneyed vacationers to murder mysteries set at high-end resorts. If you want to open on a dead body Kismet Much like the White Lotus in Thailand, Sedona, Ariz., has a reputation for spirituality that attracts all manner of gurus, yogis and so-called wellness aficionados. Their pretensions are witheringly lampooned in this comic thriller about Ronnie, a Pakistani American who tags along to the desert enclave with her friend turned life coach, Marley. It isn't long before the dark side of paradise reveals itself, in the form of a dead body — the first of many that soon turn up in various states of dismemberment. Akhtar has a keen eye for the hypocrisy of the namaste-espousing elite, and no vampire facial, jar of manuka honey or hot yoga session is spared from her mordantly funny wit. The Hunting Party Flitting between the past and present, this mystery novel is more than a mere whodunit: Although the story begins with a murder, Foley conceals the identity of the victim, describing the body in vague terms before rewinding to the start of the week. The cast of this locked-room drama comprises nine 30-something friends from Oxford University who have assembled at a remote hunting lodge in the Scottish Highlands for their annual New Year's Eve party. When a raging blizzard traps the group inside, secrets, lies and betrayals all bubble to the surface, and the question of who will die — and who will do the killing — becomes more and more intriguing. Bad Summer People In Rosenblum's Salcombe, a fictional summer getaway for the rich in the heart of Fire Island, the tennis pros steal, the loving wives lie, and everybody bad mouths, screws over and sleeps with everyone else — sometimes all at the same time. Rosenblum charts the intricate rivalries and obsessions ping-ponging around this cloistered idyll with an anthropologist's rigor, tracing in sharp detail how this complex web of relationships could escalate from affairs to larceny and all the way to murder. If you like the rich behaving badly Long Island Compromise Carl Fletcher, a second-generation immigrant and the owner of a polystyrene factory, is kidnapped one morning, in broad daylight, outside his Long Island home. He's eventually returned in one piece, but the trauma — which he steadfastly refuses to acknowledge — has repercussions that last decades, looming over the lives of his three children as they clumsily transition into adulthood. Like 'The White Lotus,' this novel by Brodesser-Akner, a writer for The New York Times Magazine, is in part about how money doesn't solve your problems, just reconfigures them — and about how even the most dogged efforts to preserve a veneer of normality and stave off a breakdown are doomed to fail. I Eat Men Like Air Alex Sable is the kind of 20-something patrician in the making who is attuned to the subtlest gradations of class — a billionaire's scion who knows in an instant whose blazer is from J. Crew, and who'd rather be caught dead than in something other than Brunello Cucinelli. As the novel opens, Alex is himself caught dead, found in the bathtub of a New Hampshire mansion with his wrists slashed and his Patek Philippe watch broken. Berman flashes back through the lavish bacchanalia of Alex's last months, through the eyes of a podcaster trying to unravel the mystery of his death, to reveal the knotty story behind the apparent suicide. Memento Mori Few writers were as capable of scalpel-sharp dissection of the rich as the Scottish novelist Muriel Spark, whose magisterial social satires remain relevant even half a century later. 'Memento Mori,' one of her most assiduous, tells the story of a group of well-to-do Britons who are thrown into an existential crisis by a series of threatening phone calls, which could be a criminal conspiracy, a prank or the literal embodiment of death. (In typical Spark fashion, it's probably a combination of all three.) The characters are petty, duplicitous, conniving — and also, somehow, strangely sympathetic. It's an acidly funny book that's as smart as they come. If you want a far-flung locale Tangerine It's 1956 in Tangier, Morocco, and Alice Shipley, a housewife struggling to find herself, is sucked into a twisted whirlwind when Lucy Mason, her enigmatic college roommate, unexpectedly shows up at her door. The book's sun-kissed setting and atmosphere of diaphanous unease are reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith, and there's a trace of 'The Golden Notebook' in Mangan's canny rendering of incipient feminism in the aftermath of World War II. But as the novel gains violent momentum, the tension that takes hold is pure 'White Lotus.' Havoc The premise seems charming: Maggie Burkhardt, an 81-year-old widow taking up semi-permanent residence at a palatial hotel in Luxor, Egypt, passes her time during the tail end of the Covid lockdowns by attempting to 'liberate' unhappy couples with a bit of meddling. Her mischief takes a dark turn, however, when she makes an unlikely nemesis: an 8-year-old boy named Otto, whom she engages in a cat-and-mouse game too irresistibly diabolical to spoil. Bollen's storytelling more than matches 'The White Lotus' for I-can't-believe-they-just-went-there nerve, and when it's not outright shocking, it's outrageously, scandalously delightful. Death on the Nile Long before Mike White set his murderers loose among the superrich, Agatha Christie made a career of it — staging one locked-room mystery after another in exotic locales around the globe and rounding out their ensembles with tycoons, socialites and other members of the upper crust. One of her best-known and most beloved novels in this mode, and probably the closest cousin to 'The White Lotus,' is 'Death on the Nile,' which finds the famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot sussing out clues among vacationers on a luxury river cruise that turns deadly. If you want to stay with the Thai theme The Resort Scuba divers, influencers and hard-partying tourists converge on the glamorous Koh Sang Resort in this sleek holiday thriller. There's an unspoken rule among Koh Sang's community of expats, known as the Permanents, not to pry into anybody's past. But when dead bodies start turning up on the Thai island, it becomes clear that some of the residents' pasts aren't done with them. Ochs draws out the lush details of the idyllic environment, and even as the body count steadily rises, the island remains strangely appealing.
Yahoo
29-01-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
‘We saw this coming': State attorneys general are ready for Trump 2.0
Less than 24 hours after President Donald Trump signed an executive order to significantly restrict birthright citizenship last week, nearly two dozen state attorneys general filed lawsuits seeking to block the order. Two days after that, a federal judge in Seattle issued a two-week pause on the measure as the court considers a more extensive hold on the policy. This week, another federal judge temporarily blocked the administration's attempt to freeze federal assistance and loans. This came after another joint lawsuit with 22 state attorneys general and the District of Columbia challenged the move. This swift legal action from some of the country's top law enforcement officials was months in the making, former Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum told The 19th. 'We saw this coming, even though we hoped it wouldn't. We started preparing as the Democratic AGs almost two years ago for the potential eventuality,' Rosenblum said in an interview days after Trump's inauguration. 'I believe that there's no group better prepared to push back where appropriate.' Rosenblum entered office as Oregon's first woman attorney general in 2012 and served during three presidential administrations before stepping away in December 2024. In her position, she oversaw an office of more than 350 lawyers who challenged the first Trump administration hundreds of times on things from executive orders to federal rule changes. She was part of a group of Democratic attorneys general who sued the administration over its travel ban on several majority-Muslim countries and its attempt to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that protects certain undocumented people brought to the United States as children. Rosenblum explained that before suing, a state attorney general's office staff must evaluate whether a specific policy will be harmful to people in her state, assemble a legal team that consults with other state attorney general offices to decide what cases to sign onto and divide responsibilities as well as determine which courts would be the most appropriate to file a legal complaint. As the team builds its case, it also gathers personal testimony from people who have been directly affected by the policies. Rosenblum noted that last week's challenges to Trump's birthright citizenship order — brought by her successor in Oregon and more than 20 other state attorneys general — were filed in two states, Massachusetts and Washington state. 'Sometimes it makes sense to have multiple actions sort of paralleling each other,' Rosenblum said. 'What you do as lawyers is you take a look at what potential claims can be brought, and then you decide which ones are going to be most likely to be successful. You don't necessarily want to throw all the mud on the ball. You want to pick and choose.' A lot has changed since Trump first sat in the Oval Office eight years ago, she added. 'We didn't know what he was going to do, and we didn't really know a whole lot about how to push back,' Rosenblum said of Trump's first term. At the time, Trump lost a number of legal challenges because of executive actions that were rushed, 'frivolous' and 'over the top,' according to Rosenblum. A federal district court judge said in 2018 that the Trump team's reason for seeking to end the DACA program was 'virtually unexplained' in its legal arguments. Ahead of Trump's inauguration, legal advocates indicated that Trump's staffers have likely learned lessons and will sharpen their executive orders and directives with fewer mistakes this time around. 'We knew that they had better lawyers. We knew that they learned some lessons. I think now they're smarter about it, they're going to be more careful,' Rosenblum said. Still, there will inevitably be some mistakes, she continued, pointing to Trump's first round of executive orders. Some 'look like they've just been thrown together on a napkin,' Rosenblum said, while others 'they've been working on for a long time.' The landscape of federal courts is also different today from 2017. Trump's judicial appointments not only led to the most conservative Supreme Court in decades, but he also shifted key appellate courts like the 9th Circuit to the right. Rosenblum is concerned about what this means for the future of cases that center on issues affecting historically marginalized groups like women, people of color and transgender people. Well before Trump even won the 2024 presidential election, Democratic attorney general offices were planning. They did not know exactly what the wording of potential executive orders and other directives from Trump would say, but the attorneys did what they could to be more nimble on key areas like immigration. Their offices drafted memos, sample legal complaints and legal documents that could be used as templates when the time came to file a lawsuit, Rosenblum said. After Trump won the election and reality set in, Democratic state attorneys general met in Philadelphia a few weeks later. There was extreme disappointment and reflection over the results, Rosenblum said, but the group was also determined to take on the work ahead. Some of Trump's toughest legal critics issued statements about the results of the election, expressing their intention to fight for the rights of people in their states. Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell wrote at the time that she is 'clear-eyed that President-elect Trump has told us exactly what he intends to do as president, and that we need to believe him and to be ready for the challenges ahead.' New York Attorney General Letitia James echoed those sentiments in November. 'My office has been preparing for a potential second Trump Administration, and I am ready to do everything in my power to ensure our state and nation do not go backwards,' she wrote. 'During his first term, we stood up for the rule of law and defended against abuses of power and federal efforts to harm New Yorkers.' Since James took office in 2019, she and Trump have publicly clashed, particularly after her office sued Trump and the Trump Organization for financial fraud. Last year Trump said James has a 'big, nasty, and ugly mouth' and called her 'low IQ.' To legal advocates, both state attorneys general and beyond, Rosenblum advised that it will be important to stay resilient, to partner up where appropriate, and to not let internal conflict get in the way of the larger mission of the work. 'I would not be surprised to see more actions being brought by attorneys general within the next few days, certainly weeks. And again, it's a work in progress. It's very fluid,' she said. 'But the bottom line is, I know that the Democratic attorneys general are ready. The post 'We saw this coming': State attorneys general are ready for Trump 2.0 appeared first on The 19th. News that represents you, in your inbox every weekday. Subscribe to our free, daily newsletter.
