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A federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that a transgender high school student in Wisconsin has both a constitutional and statutory right to use the bathroom that aligns with his gender identity.

The ruling, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for 7th Circuit in Chicago, is the first of its kind and could open the door for other courts — and eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court — to find that both the Constitution and federal law protect trans students from school-based discrimination.

The court described the ordeal of Ashton “Ash” Whitaker, the teen at the center of the case, as that of “a 17-year‐old high school senior who has what would seem like a simple request: to use the boys’ restroom while at school.”

With his mother’s support, Whitaker had sued his school district, the Kenosha Unified School District, after he was barred from using the facilities other boys used and was relegated instead to the girls’ restroom or a gender-neutral bathroom in the main office.

This singling out, Whitaker’s lawsuit maintained, violated both the constitutional guarantee of equality and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which forbids sex discrimination by school entities receiving federal funding. The 7th Circuit agreed with both claims and upheld an injunction that directed the school to accommodate the student.

“Here, the School District’s policy cannot be stated without referencing sex, as the School District decides which bathroom a student may use based upon the sex listed on the student’s birth certificate,” wrote U.S. Circuit Judge Ann Claire Williams for a three-judge panel. “This policy is inherently based upon a sex‐classification and heightened review applies.”

That language matters, because it could prove persuasive to other appeals courts considering whether existing law treats gender identity as a protected category in the school context, said Joe Wardenski, a member of the legal team representing Whitaker.

The ruling “is the first federal appeals court to decisively hold that that both Title IX and the 14th Amendment provide protections to transgender students,” Wardenski said.

As timing would have it, the 7th Circuit — which covers the states of Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana — heard oral arguments in the dispute only weeks after the Supreme Court punted on the case of Gavin Grimm, a Virginia teen who was hoping to convince the justices that federal law as interpreted by the Obama administration already covers transgender students.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

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Americans give President Donald Trump generally positive marks for his first official trip abroad, according to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll, although most still say he doesn’t have the respect of other world leaders.

Forty-six percent of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of his international trip, the survey finds, and 35 percent disapprove. Another 19 percent aren’t sure.

Ninety-three percent of voters who supported Trump in last year’s election approve of how he handled the trip, compared to 14 percent of those who supported Hillary Clinton and 39 percent of those who supported a third-party candidate or didn’t vote.

Trump declared himself pleased with the trip, announcing Saturday that “I think we hit a home run no matter where we are.”

He was met with largely warm welcomes in Saudi Arabia and Israel, but received a chillier reception during his later stops. HuffPost’s S.V. Date reported:

At the unveiling of a memorial at NATO headquarters to the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, Trump used the occasion to scorch America’s military allies for failing to spend as much on defense in recent years as Trump would have wanted. In his view, their failure to do so unfairly burdened U.S. taxpayers ― an opinion other NATO members do not share, a sentiment made clear by their facial expressions as he spoke.

(Trump then generated unflattering headlines for himself by shoving aside the leader of Montenegro, NATO’s newest member, so he could take his assigned spot for a group photo, and, later, by reportedly calling Germany “bad” for selling so many cars in the United States.)

Finally, at the G-7 meeting of the world’s largest democratically run economies, Trump would not commit to honor the United States’ participation in the 2015 agreement to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to slow climate change, which the other six nations badly wanted the world’s largest economy to remain part of. Even as Trump deferred a decision on that point, he continued complaints that the United States is running trade deficits with European nations.

The poll was conducted last Wednesday through Friday, partially before the NATO and G-7 meetings.

Perhaps more relevantly to Trump’s image domestically, the trip briefly pivoted the news cycle from questions about his campaign’s relationship with Russia, as well as the GOP’s unpopular efforts to repeal Obamacare. The trip also ushered in a relatively fallow period for Trump’s usually frenetic Twitter account.

That may have helped to stanch Trump’s falling approval ratings after they hit a new low earlier this month. After a string of mid-March surveys found him with less than 40 percent approval, the latest round of surveys puts him largely back in the low 40s.

Few Americans, however, indicated that they think Trump is well-respected abroad. Fifty percent say they don’t think leaders of other countries around the world have much respect for Trump, while just 29 percent believe he is internationally respected.

In a March HuffPost/YouGov poll, 55 percent of Americans said that they did not believe Trump was respected abroad, with just 24 percent saying he held international leaders’ respect. That survey was taken just after Trump held a tense meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and claimed that British intelligence had helped to wiretap him.

Three-quarters of Americans now say it’s somewhat or very important that other leaders respect Trump, with only 12 percent viewing it as mostly unimportant.

Use the widget below to further explore the results of the HuffPost/YouGov survey, using the menu at the top to select survey questions and the buttons at the bottom to filter the data by subgroups:

The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted May 24-26 among U.S. adults, using a sample selected from YouGov’s opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population.

HuffPost has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls.You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov’s nationally representative opinion polling. Data from all HuffPost/YouGov polls can be found here. More details on the polls’ methodology are available here.

Most surveys report a margin of error that represents some, but not all, potential survey errors. YouGov’s reports include a model-based margin of error, which rests on a specific set of statistical assumptions about the selected sample, rather than the standard methodology for random probability sampling. If these assumptions are wrong, the model-based margin of error may also be inaccurate. Click here for a more detailed explanation of the model-based margin of error.

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WASHINGTON ― Officials at the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President Barack Obama wanted to take a more lenient stance on marijuana, with one former official telling HuffPost that staff pushed to ease federal prohibitions against the drug. But they never made that case directly to the public.

“ONDCP was in favor of decriminalizing but not legalizing,” explained former deputy director A. Thomas McLellan, who worked in the White House office during Obama’s first term.

Such a policy shift could have given a shot of momentum to efforts to relax marijuana laws across the country. But it never happened, in large part because officials were worried it would consume the office at a time when they needed to focus on the more pressing issue of the opioid epidemic.

The Office of National Drug Control Policy, which is more commonly known as the drug czar’s office, also determined that it couldn’t publicly support decriminalizing marijuana because of a provision in the legislation that authorized its existence.

The bipartisan 1988 law that created the drug czar’s office declared that “the legalization of illegal drugs is an unconscionable surrender in the war on drugs.” A later measure reauthorizing the office stipulated that no federal funds be used to study the legalization of marijuana or other Schedule I drugs and that the office had to “oppose any attempt to legalize” cannabis. As long as that language existed, Obama era staffers felt limited in their ability to speak out, let alone to signal real support for decriminalization.

“It forced the office to take a policy position that it may or may not agree to,” Michael Botticelli, the former director of the drug czar’s office, told HuffPost. “[It] hamstrings you into a policy position that might be the policy of the day but that might change.”

The anti-marijuana language in the statute not only hamstrung the office in taking new policy positions; it encouraged pro-marijuana advocates to question the office’s credibility on the issue.

“The existence of that statute, that prohibition, has been something that our movement has held up to criticize ONDCP,” said Tom Angell, the founder of Marijuana Majority. “Taking that off the table would be good for us and it would also be good for them. … It makes them look political in ways that their scientists probably don’t want to be.”

Officials within the drug czar’s office during the Obama administration agreed with Angell. Many suggested privately that the statute undermined their authority. “It makes it look like the office’s primary purpose is to oppose marijuana,” said another former employee.

The statute also made answering questions about marijuana policy complicated. When Botticelli was a deputy within the office, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) introduced legislation to remove the by-then-controversial language on marijuana. The bill went nowhere. Botticelli struggled even to answer questions on the subject. 

Operating within these political and legal constraints, Botticelli and others adopted more nuanced approaches to their work. The office pushed to obtain more federal funding for treatment. It supported states that sought to route those addicted to illegal substances like opioids away from the criminal justice system and into treatment. Botticelli supported the Justice Department’s efforts to shed the more onerous drug war era initiatives such as requiring mandatory minimum sentences for even low-level drug possession.

In a December 2015 interview on “60 Minutes,” Botticelli declared the war on drugs a failure. “We can’t arrest and incarcerate addiction out of people,” he said. “Not only do I think it’s really inhumane, but it’s ineffective and it cost us billions upon billions of dollars to keep doing this.”

Later in that interview, Botticelli was asked about legalizing marijuana, not just decriminalizing penalties for its use. He said he was against states’ commercializing the drug. “It becomes an addiction to, unfortunately, a tax revenue that’s often based on bad public health policy,” he said. His predecessor had had similar reservations about outright legalizing marijuana. 

The closest Botticelli came to addressing the decriminalization issue directly occurred when District of Columbia residents voted to ease restrictions on marijuana use. “I might not agree about legalization, but I do agree with our own ability to spend our own money the way that we want to,” he said.

Neither Botticelli nor his office would go much further than that during the eight years of the Obama presidency. Had they done so, they would have incurred blowback from both parties in Congress and alienated drug prevention advocates who oppose marijuana use. More importantly, the controversy would likely have distracted from the more critical opioid epidemic. That crisis ended up driving home the argument for a public health approach to drug addiction.

“You have to figure out if the juice is worth the squeeze,” said the former drug czar employee.

Of course, taking a stand in favor of marijuana decriminalization might also have given advocates a major boost in their efforts to change the conversation around marijuana policy.

Now, under the Trump administration, any internal angst over marijuana is likely moot. Soon after taking over the Justice Department, Attorney General Jeff Sessions began reversing the previous administration’s reforms. Sessions has instructed his prosecutors to vigorously enforce mandatory minimum sentences.

Those changes are “very alarming,” Botticelli told HuffPost.

“It seems like we are moving backwards instead of forward,” he said. “And to a position that I think doesn’t have a lot of science and evidence. We’ve tried that approach for a very long time, and it doesn’t seem to really have made a significant difference.”

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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Uber Technologies Inc said on Tuesday it fired the technology whiz it had hired to lead its self-driving unit, Anthony Levandowski, after he failed to comply with a court order to hand over documents at the center of a legal dispute between Uber and Alphabet Inc’s <GOOGL.O> Waymo unit.

Uber had hoped Levandowski, one the most respected self-driving engineers in Silicon Valley, would help the ride services company catch up to rivals including Waymo, in the race for self-driving technology. Instead the hiring led to a court fight and the threat of criminal charges. Uber replaced him as the head of its self-driving car unit in April before finally making the decision to fire him.

Levandowski formerly worked for Alphabet’s Waymo self-driving division, which says he stole trade secrets by downloading more than 14,000 documents before he left. Levandowski is not a defendant, but his actions are at the heart of Alphabet’s lawsuit against Uber.

Uber said in a letter to Levandowski filed in federal court on Tuesday that it was firing him because he had not complied with a court order to hand over the documents. 

He has declined to cooperate, citing his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. Levandowski’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Uber and Alphabet are battling over technology expected to revolutionize the way people use cars. Waymo claims its trade secrets made their way into Uber’s Lidar technology, which bounces light pulses off objects so self-driving cars can “see” the road. Uber denies these claims.

Levandowski has 20 days to comply with the court orders, according to the Uber letter.

Last month, Uber named Eric Meyhofer to replace Levandowski as head of its Advanced Technologies Group. Meyhofer will continue to lead the team, an Uber spokeswoman said via email.

The New York Times reported Levandowski’s exit earlier on Tuesday, citing an internal email sent to employees. 

“Over the last few months Uber has provided significant evidence to the court to demonstrate that our self-driving technology has been built independently,” Angela Padilla, Uber’s associate general counsel for employment and litigation, wrote in an email to employees, cited by the Times.

An Uber spokeswoman confirmed the letter’s authenticity and said the company has urged Levandowski to “fully cooperate.”

Waymo has said Levandowski received stock worth more than $250 million for joining Uber, along with his portion of the $680 million that Uber paid last year for Otto, the self-driving truck company he formed after leaving Google. That amount assumes certain targets would be met, and it was not clear how his firing would affect those payments.

A source familiar with the matter said Levandowski had not yet vested his Uber shares.

LEVANDOWSKI REFUSAL

Levandowski, a top engineer on self-driving technology, has turned into a liability for Uber in court. The company has acknowledged that his refusal to testify has hurt its defense efforts. Uber has never denied that he took the Waymo documents.

Asked last month why Uber did not threaten to fire Levandowski to pressure him into turning over the documents, Uber attorney Arturo Gonzalez told Reuters, “We can fire him but we still don’t get the documents.”

Uber had argued that it was acceptable to sideline Levandowski by preventing him from working on Lidar technology, but not firing him. But U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup criticized the company, telling lawyers: “You keep on your payroll someone who took 14,000 documents and is liable to use them.”

The judge theorized that Levandowski could have used Waymo’s documents himself even if he did not turn them over to Uber.

“What prevented him from bringing a laptop to work every day and consulting the files?” Alsup asked Uber lawyers in April.

Uber has been hit by a string of departures of senior executives and other negative news. Earlier this year, Uber was caught using its technology to avoid government regulators. Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick was seen on video berating an Uber driver, and the company also faced accusations of sexual harassment that led to an internal probe led by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

The Holder report will be shown to the board this week, a source familiar with the matter said, adding that next week, Uber plans to speak with employees about it.

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Former national security adviser Michael Flynn allegedly plans to comply with a Senate Intelligence Committee subpoena of documents related to its investigation of the retired lieutenant general’s ties to Russia, The Associated Press reported Tuesday. 

Flynn plans to hand over documents from his businesses as well as some personal documents by next week, according to the report. The AP cited a source “close to Flynn.” 

Reuters also reported that Flynn’s representatives had informed the Senate committee that he plans to turn over some of the documents.

Spokespeople for the committee’s chairman, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), and vice chairman, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), didn’t immediately return requests for comment. Nor did Flynn’s attorney. 

The Senate probe is one of several investigations into whether President Donald Trump’s campaign team actively colluded with Russian officials to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. Flynn, who served as a national security adviser on the campaign, is also under FBI investigation due to his financial ties to Russia as well as his work lobbying on behalf of the Turkish government. 

Flynn was fired from his role in the Trump administration after it was revealed he lied about discussing sanctions against Russia with that country’s ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak.

In March, Flynn allegedly sought immunity in exchange for testifying before the groups investigating the potential collusion. Flynn’s lawyer, Robert Kelner, said at the time that his client “certainly has a story to tell, and he very much wants to tell it, should the circumstances permit,” but added that “no reasonable person, who has the benefit of advice from counsel, would submit to questioning in such a highly politicized, witch hunt environment without assurances against unfair prosecution.”

Burr and Warner announced on May 10 that they would subpoena Flynn for documents related to their investigation after he declined to comply with an earlier request. Flynn again declined to cooperate, instead invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. 

The heads of the Senate committee then took a different route: subpoenaing his businesses and documents, which they argued are not covered by the Fifth Amendment, and threatening to hold him in contempt if he did not comply.

The Senate committee then voted to give its leaders “blanket authority” to issue any subpoenas related to the Russian investigation, essentially giving them a fast-track to seek information without first getting approval from their fellow committee members.  

Amid all of this, Trump has stood by Flynn. He’s repeatedly praised the general and claimed Flynn did nothing wrong aside from lying about his communications with Kislyak. And in February, he allegedly asked then-FBI Director Robert Comey to end his agency’s investigation of Flynn, telling Comey that Flynn is a “good guy.” 

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