Tag: politics

Men who correct women over any disagreement could face disciplinary action under new Green party rules

Men who correct women over any disagreement could be hauled before disciplinarians under plans being weighed up by the Green Party.

Leaders are considering broadening the party’s definition of misogyny to the point that ‘any disagreement’ could lead to men facing sanction.

The proposals are set out in a leaked 53-page dossier on legal and reputational risk prepared by its own lawyers.

The report reveals deep internal concern about the Greens’ approach to misogyny, transgender policy and LGBT rights, warning that current guidance could expose the party to serious legal and financial risk. 

It says the Green Party Council was ‘very close’ to adopting a document titled Guidance on Identifying Misogyny and Sexism as part of its ethics framework. 

According to the report, seen by the Telegraph, the draft guidance listed ‘being corrected’ as an example of misogynistic behaviour experienced by women, a definition the lawyers warned was so expansive it could ‘justify any disagreement between a man and a woman as a sanctionable disciplinary offence’. 

The dossier also cautions that internal rules on identifying transphobia and ‘queerphobia’ risk unlawfully discriminating against members who question contested gender theory. 

The authors stress that the party cannot legally penalise members for holding gender-critical views, which are protected under the Equality Act 2010. 

The warning follows a costly legal defeat for the Greens last year, when the party paid £9,100 to former spokesman and deputy leader Dr Shahrar Ali after a court ruled he had been improperly dismissed over his belief that ‘biology is real and immutable’. 

The report says the process used to remove him was ‘procedurally unfair’.

Dr Ali is now suing the party for a second time, alleging ‘procedural abuse’ and continued discrimination over his views on biological sex. 

The Greens have since admitted to ‘procedural shortfalls’ in his dismissal.

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Resignation Of Bulgarian Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov Amidst Mounting Political And Social Crisis

Rosen Zhelyazkov’s resignation on December 11, 2025, just minutes before the Bulgarian parliament was due to vote on the sixth no-confidence motion against his cabinet, marks the abrupt end of yet another short-lived government in a country that has now been trapped in near-permanent political crisis for more than five years.

The immediate trigger was a wave of nationwide protests that began in late November over the government’s draft 2026 budget – the first to be presented in euros ahead of the country’s scheduled entry into the eurozone on January 1, 2026. What started as anger over proposed increases in dividend taxes and social-security contributions quickly morphed into a broader, visceral rejection of systemic corruption, oligarchic capture, and the perceived arrogance of the political class. Within days, tens of thousands of people – students, pensioners, ethnic Bulgarians and Turks alike – were filling the streets of Sofia, Plovdiv, Varna and smaller towns. The scale and diversity of the crowds were striking in a country of fewer than seven million inhabitants.

Zhelyazkov’s cabinet, formed in early 2025 after the October 2024 parliamentary election, was always fragile. It rested on a minority coalition dominated by GERB (the party of longtime strongman Boyko Borissov) and tolerated, rather than actively supported, by the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS) and figures close to the sanctioned media magnate Delyan Peevski. From the outset, the government was dogged by the same accusations that have haunted every administration since the great anti-corruption protests of summer 2020: that it served narrow elite interests while ordinary citizens continued to suffer from the EU’s highest poverty rate, lowest wages, and most entrenched corruption.

The current crisis is only the latest chapter in a grinding cycle. Since Borissov’s fall in 2020–2021, Bulgaria has held seven parliamentary elections and seen six prime ministers come and go, none of whom lasted a full term. Each collapse has followed the same pattern: a shaky coalition, mutual recriminations, a no-confidence vote or the withdrawal of informal support, and then fresh elections that reproduce the same fragmented parliament. Public trust in institutions has collapsed to the low teens, and the country’s chronic inability to form stable governments has repeatedly delayed or jeopardised key strategic goals – Schengen membership (finally achieved in 2024), euro adoption, and the disbursement of billions in EU recovery funds.

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Another Imported Disaster: Somali Refugee and Lewiston City Councilor Who Lied About Residency Just Indicted on Federal Gun Theft Charges

Lewiston Mayor Carl Sheline is calling for the resignation of newly elected City Councilor Iman Osman after an Androscoggin County grand jury handed down an indictment charging Osman with receiving stolen property and theft by unauthorized taking.

According to court documents obtained by WMTW, the alleged crimes involve weapons taken from two separate estates between November 15, 2023, and October 11, 2024.

The indictment accuses Osman of knowingly receiving, retaining, or disposing of firearms or explosive devices that he knew, or had reason to believe, were stolen.

A separate count alleges Osman unlawfully exercised control over firearms belonging to a second estate.

“While he is entitled to the presumption of innocence, the judicial process will be lengthy and this matter has become an unwelcome distraction from the essential business of governing. Stepping down would be the right thing to do,” Sheline told WMTW.

But the indictment is only part of the controversy surrounding Osman.

Osman, 36, currently serves on the Lewiston School Committee and was elected on November 4 to represent Ward 5 on the City Council, defeating incumbent Councilor Eryn M. Soule-Leclair by just 35 votes.

However, his residency has been under intense scrutiny.

In the indictment, Osman lists his address as 210 Blake Street in Lewiston, a property that has been condemned since October 2024 following a drug raid and the use of chemical agents described as “a deterrent for humans.”

In other words, the address used by the councilor-elect is legally uninhabitable.

Despite the seriousness of the allegations, the Lewiston School Committee declined to investigate Osman’s residency claims.

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The Far Right Is Powered by Left-Wing Illiberalism and Hypocrisy

The introduction of the “Groypers” into our national consciousness over the last six weeks has ignited curiosity about what is causing the evident moral and intellectual disintegration of American conservatism. As someone who has been covering this space for years, I do not believe it’s possible to grasp what’s happening on the right without accepting that the left has, for decades now, been on its own illiberal journey—because to a far greater extent than most observers would like to admit, the former phenomenon is a response to the latter. 

If there’s one thing that voters of President Donald Trump and reactionary online personalities alike have made clear, it’s that they’re frustrated by the eagerness of mainstream institutions to excuse left-wing overreach while treating every right-wing infraction as an existential menace to democracy. This has created a boy-who-cried-wolf problem where attempts to sound the alarm about serious threats to the rule of law during Trump’s second term often provoke eyerolls or yawns. 

We need to recognize that there’s a natural tendency to overlook violations of norms and legal procedures by our own side while hyperfixating on our rivals’ transgressions. Human beings are excellent at rationalizing breaches of etiquette and convincing ourselves that extraordinary measures are necessary when they benefit us. Departures from the rules of the game by allies are downplayed or dismissed, and in any individual case that may be defensible—but the cumulative effect is that those on the receiving end sooner or later conclude that playing by the rules is for suckers.

Republican claims of Democratic hypocrisy may sometimes be overblown, but they are decidedly not imagined. The activist left in particular is guilty of helping to create the conditions for our toxic political moment. Consider the following ways in which left-of-center politics have, over the last generation or two, effectively repudiated liberal values.

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The Bipartisan War on Prices Is Coming for Your Credit Card

In a scene that perfectly captures the strangeness of American politics today, President Donald Trump, a billionaire and self-styled champion of American business (at least the ones he likes) was all smiles during an Oval Office visit from Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist and mayor-elect of New York City.

For months, the two men traded the harshest of insults. Mamdani was a “communist” and “radical left lunatic”; Trump a “fascist” and “despot.” Yet with New York’s mayoral election over and cameras clicking, the insults were on hold. The men praised each other as “rational” and “productive.” Trump even joked that Mamdani might “surprise some conservative people.”

Give them points for collegiality, just don’t be surprised. Trump and Mamdani are only the latest example of the right and the left converging on economic issues. One likes price floors, the other likes rent control. They’re both waging the same “war on prices,” as the Cato Institute’s Ryan Bourne calls it. And this war enjoys rising bipartisan support.

Take legislation introduced earlier this year by what would have once been an unlikely duo: Sens. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) and Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.). Their “10 Percent Credit Card Interest Rate Cap Act“—also reflecting a Trump idea from the 2024 campaign—sounds compassionate. Who enjoys paying 25 percent interest?

In practice, price controls of all sorts are disastrous. Credit card interest rates are high because unsecured consumer lending is very risky. They’re the price for the lender taking a chance on a person. If the government artificially caps rates far below the market rate, banks will stop lending to riskier borrowers. That doesn’t just mean broke shopaholics. It includes the working single parent using a financial last resort before payday.

Just as rent controls can create a housing shortage by reducing the attractiveness of supplying those homes, interest-rate caps can create a credit shortage. They put millions of working-class Americans—the people proposals like these are supposed to protect—at risk of being “debanked.” Stripped of their credit cards, some will turn to payday lenders, loan sharks, and pawn shops, whose charges are far higher.

It gets worse. A cap this low wouldn’t merely shrink credit availability; it would invert it. At 10 percent, banks would only lend to the safest, highest-income borrowers. Credit cards would become a luxury product for the affluent—a financial advantage while everyone else is pushed into the financial shadows.

Then there’s the fact that millions of small businesses rely on credit cards. According to a Federal Reserve survey of small businesses, half of employer firms use them to fund operations. Cards function as unsecured working-capital lines for firms that lack collateral or a long credit history. A 10 percent cap would push them toward far costlier and riskier alternatives.

And forget about travel miles or cash back. Those programs are funded by interest charges, which a 10 percent cap would wipe out. When lenders cannot price risk through market rates, they shift the cost to higher fees, shorter grace periods, and more hidden charges. Consumers don’t necessarily pay less; they just pay differently and more opaquely.

Finally, because credit cards are the primary way tens of millions of Americans build credit histories, a cap would destroy a crucial ladder into the financial mainstream.

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Jasmine Crockett’s Finances Exposed – Subject to Personal Liens While She Spends $50k-100k of Taxpayer Cash on Limos, Luxury Hotels Just This Year

If the new congressional maps enacted by Texas Republicans stand until 2026, which it appears that they will, Rep. Jasmine Crockett would likely be out of a seat.

To everyone else, this is pretty much a win-win; I’m going to assume that this includes Democrats, who must be tiring of her antics by now, particularly given her lack of substantive support to the party’s caucus in the lower house. For Crockett, it’s a big lose — because not only will she be out of the corridors of power, but out of ways to spend the taxpayer’s money, as well.

And boy, does she spend it. That’s why her Senate run is so important to her, and soon to be loathed by the Democrats. Not only does it put the left’s one big potential upset of 2026 out of reach for them, most likely, but it also means that Crockett’s profligate spending — while she had a three-grand lien on her condo, no less — is going to be front-page news for a while.

So, in case you missed it (no shade; keeping up on all things Jasmine-related has shaved at least 5 IQ points off my poor, addled brain), Rep. Crockett announced Monday that she was running for GOP Sen. John Cornyn’s seat in the upper chamber.

“Trump, I know you’re watching, so let me tell you directly,” Crockett at her announcement event, according to CNN. “You’re not entitled to a damn thing in Texas. You better get to work because I’m coming for you.”

Dun dun DUN! Be scared, Donald. Be very scared.

Actually, the environment is probably one of celebration rather than anxious celerity on the part of state Republicans. Unlike the usual Democratic saber-rattling about turning Texas purple, this time they looked like they actually had a shot. A divided GOP is likely to mean that Cornyn doesn’t emerge from his own primary as the nominee, with state Attorney General Ken Paxton leading the way in polls.

Paxton is a little bit more MAGA but a lot more controversial than the other Republican challengers, and while he does well in a GOP primary he’s not necessarily the candidate you want to go into a general election with.

On the other hand, pretty much every character issue you can bring up about Paxton goes out the window the moment Crockett gets the Democratic nomination — which she instantly becomes the favorite for. Paxton could be accused of the most abhorrent thing you can think of — do it on live TV, even — and he’d still be considered a near-lock to win the general election.

To that end, too, Crockett has shoved the one candidate who’s remotely electable out of the running — former U.S. Rep. Colin Allred — leaving Crockett to duel it out with James Talarico, a progressive state representative who once said during a floor speech that “God is nonbinary” and somehow managed to dodge the ensuing lightning bolt from the empyrean.

But let’s not talk about the gift that is Crockett’s statewide unelectability. Let’s instead take a look at the gift that is Crockett’s finances for a moment.

According to Fox News, the Dallas County Clerk’s website shows that Crockett — who makes $174,000 a year in her position as a congresswoman — is currently behind on her payments to the Westside Condominium Association by $3,047.79.

The unpaid lien notice dates from over a year ago.

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Liberals want to control what you watch online

New regulations from the Liberal Government’s Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) are trying to apply ‘Canadian content’ (CanCon) requirements to online platforms like YouTube and Spotify.

What could this mean for your online experience?

Will content that the Government doesn’t designate as sufficiently ‘Canadian’ disappear from your streaming platforms? Could companies like Netflix decide to pull out of Canada altogether rather than try to comply with onerous requirements?

Host Kris Sims is joined by longtime journalist and former CRTC vice-chair Peter Menzies to discuss what it all means.

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Crockett’s Senate Run Was Engineered By Republicans

Rep. Jasmine Crockett. (D-Texas) officially launched her campaign for the U.S. Senate on Monday, and Republicans appear to have played a major role in that happening. 

According to a report from NOTUS, the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) was “actively worked behind the scenes to encourage Rep. Jasmine Crockett to jump into the Senate Democratic primary in Texas, believing she will be the easiest opponent to beat.”

With Sen. John Cornyn facing a tough three-way primary and Democrats fielding two strong candidates, Republican strategists reportedly were concerned the race would be tougher than expected. They feared a draining fight could leave the nominee wounded before the real battle against the Democrats even began.

Back in July, the NRSC commissioned a private poll that “by design” included Crockett’s name among the Democratic contenders. Her numbers surprised everyone: she topped the field. Instead of treating it as an internal curiosity, GOP operatives moved fast. 

“When we saw the results, we were like, ‘OK, we got to disseminate this far and wide,’” a source told NOTUS.

In June news broke that Texas Democrats Colin Allred, James Talarico, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and Rep. Joaquin Castro met to discuss the 2026 election.

Operatives at the NRSC realized that Crockett — whose political stock had been rising — wasn’t included in that meeting and also hadn’t been included in any credible poll. So they decided to change that.

Following the NRSC’s polls, other surveys began to include Crockett and showed similar results: She was surging in the primary.

The NRSC then worked to amplify those polls and is taking credit for helping “orchestrate the pile on of these polling numbers to really drive that news cycle and that narrative that Jasmine Crockett was surging in Texas,” the source said.

And Crockett took the bait.

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House Democrat Files Impeachment Articles Against Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Turning ‘His Back on Science’

Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), who is running for Senate, filed articles of impeachment on Wednesday against Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., saying he has turned “his back on science.”

“Today, I formally introduced articles of impeachment against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. RFK Jr. has turned his back on science and the safety of the American people. Michiganders cannot take another day of his chaos,” the Michigan Democrat wrote in a statement.

Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for HHS, dismissed the articles of impeachment as a political ploy.

“Secretary Kennedy remains focused on the work of improving Americans’ health and lowering costs, not on partisan political stunts,” Nixon said.

Stevens is the second Democrat to recently move to impeach a Trump cabinet official; Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-MI) just filed articles of impeachment against Department of War Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Thanedar has cited the Trump administration’s strikes against vessels that were allegedly taking part in drug trafficking.

“Pete Hegseth has been using the United States military to extrajudicially assassinate people without evidence of any crime,” said Thanedar.

He added, “Former military attorneys have come out and asserted that his conduct constitutes war crimes. We cannot allow his reprehensible conduct to continue, which is why I have filed these articles to impeach him.”

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Socialist Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani Appoints a Convicted Armed Robber to Lead His Criminal Justice Team in New York City

New York City’s incoming socialist mayor is already proving exactly why voters should be worried.

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has tapped a convicted armed robber to help shape the city’s public-safety and criminal-justice agenda, according to new reporting from Fox News.

Mamdani appointed Mysonne Linen, a 49-year-old rapper, activist, and former Def Jam signee who spent seven years in prison for two violent taxi-driver robberies, to serve on his City Hall transition team.

According to court records and reporting from Fox News, citing the New York Daily News, Linen was convicted in 1999 for two separate armed robberies of taxi drivers:

• In June 1997, Linen and accomplices robbed cab driver Joseph Exiri, smashing him in the head with a beer bottle during the attack.
• In March 1998, prosecutors said Linen held up another cabbie, Francisco Monsanto, at gunpoint, stealing cash and a ring before fleeing into the night.

Both victims took the stand and identified Linen as one of their assailants.

Linen faced up to 25 years for the violent crimes and ultimately served seven years. At the time, his defense argued he had no motive because he was writing songs for Lil’ Kim and Mase

The announcement wasn’t made in a City Hall press release, but instead through an Instagram post from the radical social-justice organization Until Freedom, where Linen serves as a leader.

“We are proud that Until Freedom leaders have been chosen to serve on Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani’s transition team on committees for public safety and criminal justice respectively.

This is a testament to our decades of work advocating on behalf of Black and Brown communities and our expertise in gun violence prevention, legislative advocacy and criminal justice reform.

We are building something different.”

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