Lemdro.id

transcription: transgender ambulance driver whose pronouns are we/you/we/you/we/you

transcription: i found this book today, its called "the trans agenda". theres only one page, weird. (pictured on page) "stop killing us"

https://xcancel.com/MagellanQuest/status/2113229210286231739

transcription: you cant spell yuri without u and i

Inspired by a comment thread between @ sanzky@lemmy.world and @ruuster13@lemmy.zip

VOY s7e24 "Endgame" and DS9 s5e6 "Trials and Tribble-ations"

Fun fact: There's so many fricking crows where I live, if I started feeding them cheap unsalted peanuts, I'd have a massive crow army at my disposal within two weeks tops.

Meme provided by Dalekcheese@lemmy.world

Three male escorts in a new documentary have alleged that late Republican Senator Lindsey Graham paid them for sexual encounters, including one who says he was 17 at the time.

The CLOSETocracy, produced by Swamp Watch Studios and Tystnaden Films and released by the left-wing Young Turks network, features testimony from men who say Graham paid them for sexual encounters in Arizona and Washington, D.C. The allegations have not been independently corroborated.

One of the men, identified in the documentary as Kelvin, alleges he met Graham at a property in Arizona in 2001, when he was 17. He claims Graham paid him $120 for the encounter.

“My name is Kelvin. I had sex with Lindsey Graham when I was 17,” he says in the documentary.

For every 1,000 women, aged 15-44, approximately 53 gave birth last year - down from 54 the previous year, according to new data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Birth rates decreased among those up to age 29 but increased for women aged 30-44, the CDC found.

The findings are indicative of a broader U.S. trend in recent decades and one that the Trump administration and its MAGA allies, including Elon Musk, have sought to reverse.

...

However, there are multiple factors complicating efforts to reverse the trend. Greater access to IUDs and birth control have helped reduce teen births, which has long been a goal for U.S. policymakers because of the complications young mothers with underdeveloped bodies face during pregnancy.

“People are able to avoid having kids at points in their life when they don’t feel it’s the right time,” Karen Benjamin Guzzo, director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told NBC News Wednesday.

A shift in women’s education has also had a major impact. Women now make up the majority of the college-educated workforce, according to the Pew Research Center.

Those with college degrees generally have fewer children, 2022 University of Pennsylvania research shows. That’s largely because of a focus on establishing careers, traveling or finding a romantic partner.

But many women who want to have children are facing major headwinds - economic ones. The average cost of raising a child in the U.S. has ballooned to more than $300,000, the financial marketplace LendingTree says, rising nearly 2 percent from a year ago. That’s increased from $230,000 in 2000, the bank SoFi says.

And while marriage could help distribute some of that financial burden between two, fewer women are heading to the altar. The marriage rate has fallen 60 percent over the last five decades, according to 2023 research.

“Examining age-specific fertility rates, marriage rates and trends in women’s educational attainment, it is clear many women are delaying fertility and ultimately having fewer children,” the university said.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) again called for the firing of top Trump administration officials as the retiring Republican continues to clash with his own party.

...

In late spring 2020, a source I knew to be reliable called me with a story. The Dutch government had hacked into Jared Kushner’s phone and monitored him as he accessed a Dubai-based bank account. What was odd, the source said, was that the money in the account—hundreds of millions of dollars—had come from a bank in Azerbaijan. Most importantly, Kushner appeared to have transferred significant amounts of money from the Dubai account to other individuals, including a warlord, a mercenary and a one-time hit man. The story sounded preposterous, I told my source. And yet.

Six months later, I found myself speaking with someone else about the UAE government and their use of mercenaries in conflicts around the Middle East and Africa when I asked, on a whim, whether they knew anything about Kushner and bank transfers from a UAE account. My acquaintance grew quiet. Then they replied, “Yes.”

Over the next four years, I came to learn that, sometime in late 2017, the Netherlands Defense Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) made a startling discovery. A General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU) operative, a dark web hacker specializing in stolen bank data, was traveling to the UK for an espionage mission. They reached out to the British government for permission to apprehend him when he arrived. The British agreed.

When the Russian national arrived in England, the Dutch informed him that he had two options: he could work for them against the GRU, or the British would arrest him. Once in UK government custody, the operative would be charged with espionage. If convicted, he would spend years in a British prison. The Russian chose to change his employer.

From https://infosec.exchange/@flyingpenguin/117485961581578272