Latest news with #andField
New York Post
6 days ago
- Politics
- New York Post
California board of education president opens up on defying Newsom to keep trans athletes out of girls sports
The Kern County Board of Education in California on Tuesday became the latest blue state board of education to pass a local resolution to keep biological males out of girls sports while its state law does the opposite. The state has been a hotbed of controversy involving trans athletes competing in women's high school and college sports over the last year and a top target by President Donald Trump's administration for defying his mandate to enforce Title IX. Kern County Board of Education President Mary Little told Fox News Digital her board's unanimous 6-0 resolution was in response to Newsom's 'illegal' defiance of federal law. 'We've talked about it on and off, especially since there's been a problem with how Gov. Newsom has been responding to the federal law,' Little said. 'He's not following the original intent of Title IX … so those laws are supposed to trump California laws, and we're supposed to obey those before we follow an illegal California law.' Little said her school board has not received any pushback from the state government in regard to the new resolution. 6 Kern County Board of Education President Mary Little revealed her board's unanimous 6-0 resolution was in response to Newsom's 'illegal' defiance of federal law. Fox News Kern County Board of Education Trustee Lori Cisneros initially proposed the resolution to the board. Cisneros has been a teacher 28 years and works as an independent teacher who provides her services to charter schools. 'I believe it's necessary to do our duty to protect girls in sports, and I'm looking out for their safety and fairness,' Cisneros told Fox News Digital. 'I am not happy with the governor. He is not complying with federal law … and he is intentionally pushing to go against what Title IX is all about. 'I see it affecting families with girl athletes who are frustrated about having to compete against a biological male. And they're frustrated because biological males, naturally, are stronger, bigger and just different than how girls are designed.' 6 California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks during a rally in Los Angeles on Aug. 14, 2025. REUTERS 6 Female spectators wear 'Protect Girls Sports' shirts during the CIF Southern Section D3 Track and Field meet at Nathan Shapell Memorial Stadium in Yorba Linda, Calif. on May 10, 2025. Getty Images 6 Transgender student athlete AB Hernandez from Jurupa Valley High School leaves the stadium after competing in the triple jump at the California high school championships in Clovis, Calif. on May 30, 2025. AP The US Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against the California Department of Education (CDE) and California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) for its policies that continue to allow males to compete in girls sports across the state. '(Newsom) is costing the taxpayers a lot of money by illegally thwarting the law,' Little said. Kern said if she could send a message directly to Newsom, she would tell him, 'Follow the federal law and Title IX.' Fox News Digital has reached out to Newsom's office for a response. US Education Secretary Linda McMahon praised Kern's recent resolution in a post on X Thursday. 'California's Kern County Board of Education made a courageous decision to defy their reckless Governor and take a stand for women and girls. I commend the Board members and hope other counties follow suit and protect women's sports,' McMahon wrote. Multiple California schools and families were affected by incidents involving males competing in girls sports in the past school year alone. One incident that caught Little's eye in particular was a situation at Martin Luther King High School in Riverside, California, where a transgender student took a varsity spot from a female athlete on the girls cross-country team in the fall. The female athlete who lost her spot, Taylor Starling, then filed a lawsuit against the Riverside Unified School District. 'That was unfortunate, in my opinion,' Little said. 'He's a biological male. He's not a female. He's running against girls and that's equitably unfair.' 6 A plane tows a protest banner over the California high school track and field championship meet on May 30, 2025. Image of Sports/Newscom via ZUMA Little said she believes parents have a 'constitutional right' to prevent their daughters from competing against males in girls sports and suggested that putting trans athletes in girls sports and locker rooms is a 'discriminatory practice.' 'It's just a fundamental constitutional right for parents to have children in sports without their students being subjected to discriminatory practices,' Little said. 'Males are males, and females are females. 'There's biological differences. A man is able to do more, faster and stronger.' Little said eight speakers attended Tuesday's meeting to oppose the resolution and support trans inclusion in girls sports. Little said those speakers argued that the resolution was 'unfair.' 'That's their opinion. I welcome everybody's opinion, and I want to listen to it and make sure that I understand it,' Little said. 'And if we disagree, we disagree.' Little is also urging other school boards to pass their own resolutions to comply with Title IX. 'Absolutely, why not?' she said when asked if she would urge other California school boards to follow her lead. 'Take a stand and protect the students, especially the girls in sports and other vulnerable areas like locker rooms.' Newsom has previously said the CDE and CIF are following laws the state enacted in 2013 but has repeatedly said he believes males competing in girls sports is 'unfair.' 'I struggled with the issue of fairness when it came to sports,' Newsom said in response to the lawsuit at a July event. 'And we tried to figure that out a couple of years ago, and we were unsuccessful. And we struggled with that recently. 6 Parents protest transgender athletes during the CIF State Track and Field Championships. Getty Images 'And my position is that I don't think it's fair, but I also think it's demeaning to talk down to people and to belittle the trans community. And I don't like the way the right wing talks about the trans community. These people just want to survive.' A bipartisan survey by the Public Policy Institute of California found the majority of California residents oppose biological male trans athletes competing in women's sports. That figure included more than 70% of the state's school parents. 'Most Californians support requiring transgender athletes to compete on teams matching the sex they were assigned at birth,' the poll stated. 'Solid majorities of adults (65%) and likely voters (64%) support requiring that transgender athletes compete on teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with. An overwhelming majority of public school parents (71%) support such a requirement.'
Campaign ME
13-06-2025
- Business
- Campaign ME
The tug-of-war between brand and performance in an AI-driven world
There's a perennial tension that underpins many marketing leadership debates: The tug-of-war between long-term brand building and short-term performance marketing. We've all been there … watching passionate chief marketing officers (CMOs), performance directors and agency leaders fiercely defend their positions on conference panels, each armed with data, frameworks and conviction. I've always leaned toward the Binet and Field school of thought. That neat 'steps' chart showing how brand drives performance? It's been a mainstay in my stakeholder conversations, quietly tucked in my back pocket for years. But recently, I felt that familiar framework beginning to fray. HSBC recently hosted the first Financial Services Marketers Leaders Conference in Dubai. At the event, a London-based video and content agency, Casey Wishart, presented a provocative idea that large language models (LLMs) are not just tools or enablers. They're now a channel. More radically, they are also an audience. That took me a minute to fully register. We're all adapting to a media landscape where younger audiences increasingly bypass traditional discovery channels. They don't browse; they ask. Why scroll through pages of blue links when a single prompt to a chatbot can deliver context, options and a decision pathway? In that world, LLMs act as gatekeepers. They shape perceptions. They synthesise information. They may well decide which brand gets mentioned and which gets forgotten. So then, is the question we should be asking: What influences the influencer… when the influencer is an algorithm? This is where the debate about brand versus performance begins to get a bit knottier. Because if LLMs are to be understood as a new type of 'media', we have to play by a very different set of rules. You don't buy your way into their favour through paid impressions or carefully calibrated bidding strategies. Instead, you go old school. Editorial content, white papers, thought leadership – the unsexy stuff we scorned in the early 2000s because it didn't generate clicks fast enough – are now some of the most influential materials in an LLM's diet. Casey Wishart noted that Gartner predicts brands' organic search traffic will decrease by 50 per cent by 2028, which is right around the corner, as people embrace AI powered search. PR suddenly matters again. Authority matters. Citations, credibility, clarity of purpose are the signals LLMs are tuned to absorb. That means brand marketers might be better placed to influence LLMs than performance teams – at least in their current form. And here's the real kicker: while we can't yet track 'conversions' from an LLM response, we all know that change is coming fast. It's only a matter of time before those answers are embedded with shoppable actions and transactional pathways, or logged in first-party data ecosystems. There's a whole new 'Page 1' battle commencing, and I'm not sure that many marketers are fully armed. To be clear, this isn't an argument against performance marketing. But let's be honest: it's in the middle of an identity crisis. The obsession with click-through rates, attribution models and return on ad spend (ROAS) dashboards is starting to look a little brittle in the face of cookie deprecation, regulatory shifts and rising consumer cynicism. The way we operate has to evolve, bringing together performance with brand authority, speed with credibility. And as some of the big tech platforms lose relevance or battle credibility issues, performance teams are being forced to rethink what success really looks like. Increasingly, the answer is: trust. As marketers, we've always believed in the power of storytelling. Now we must learn to teach as well. These models learn by crawling, reading, indexing and summarising. So the question for every brand becomes: What are we teaching them about us? This is not a job for the data science team alone. It's not just a compliance issue. It's a brand issue. A trust issue. And that lies firmly within marketing's remit. We're entering a future where every brand interaction might be filtered through an AI lens – whether that's a customer asking ChatGPT about mortgage options, or a procurement team querying an enterprise LLM about environmental, social and governance (ESG) credentials. If your brand isn't represented clearly and credibly in the data, you may simply vanish from the shortlist. So yes, brand still matters. performance still matters. But the battleground is shifting. The LLM layer adds complexity, but it also offers a new frontier – one where core principles such as consistency, clarity, credibility and trust come roaring back into relevance. We must be ready to meet that challenge, to reframe how we think about influence and to ensure that when someone, or something asks who we are, the answer is accurate, powerful and aligned with everything we've worked so hard to build. By Aimee Peters, Regional Head of Brand, Partnerships and Wholesale Marketing, MENAT, HSBC
Yahoo
25-04-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Heart of Texas Special Olympics hosts annual Track and Field competition
WACO, Texas (FOX 44) – The Heart of Texas Special Olympics Track and Field competition took place at Rice Field on Friday! Students from across many school districts competed in this regional competition which takes place across Texas every April. Justin Kimbro, a sixth grade student from Tennyson Middle School, was one of many athletes competing this year. He says he was excited to put his training to good use in the competition – and here's what he looked forward to the most. 'Winning. But I'm trying to look to be brave, and that's it,' Kimbro said. Kimbro also says that it felt great to socialize with not only his teammates, but with athletes from other districts. Many athletes from the Waco Independent School District team have been competing in the Track and Field competition for about two years now – many say the event gets better each year. Students will be advancing to the state competition in May. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
