By HANNAH SCHOENBAUM (Associated Press)

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Transgender activists have flooded a Utah tip line created to alert state officials to possible violations of a new bathroom law with thousands of hoax reports in an effort to shield trans residents and their allies from any legitimate complaints that could threaten their safety.

The onslaught has led the state official tasked by the law with managing the tip line, Utah Auditor John Dougall, to bemoan getting stuck with the cumbersome task of filtering through fake complaints while also facing backlash for enforcing a law he had no role in passing.

“No auditor goes into auditing so they can be the bathroom monitors,” Dougall said Tuesday. “I think there were much better ways for the Legislature to go about addressing their concerns, rather than this ham-handed approach.”

In the week since it launched, the online tip line already has received more than 10,000 submissions, none of which seem legitimate, he said. The form asks people to report public school employees who knowingly allow someone to use a gender-designated facility in the presence of the opposite sex.

Utah residents and visitors are required by law to use bathrooms and changing rooms in government-owned buildings that correspond with their birth sex. As of last Wednesday, schools and agencies found not enforcing the new restrictions can be fined up to $10,000 per day for each violation.

Although their advocacy efforts failed to stop Republican lawmakers in many states from passing restrictions for trans people, the community has found success in interfering with the often ill-conceived enforcement plans attached to those laws.

Within hours of its publication Wednesday night, trans activists and community members from across the U.S. already had spread the Utah tip line widely on social media. Many shared the spam they had submitted and encouraged others to follow suit.

Their efforts mark the latest attempt by advocates to shut down or render unusable a government tip line that they argue sows division by encouraging residents to snitch on each other. Similar portals in at least five other states also have been inundated with hoax reports, leading state officials to shut some down.

In Virginia, Indiana, Arizona and Louisiana, activists flooded tip lines created to field complaints about teachers, librarians and school administrators who may have spoken to students about race, LGBTQ+ identities or other topics lawmakers argued were inappropriate for children. The Virginia tip line was taken down within a year, as was a tip line introduced in Missouri to report gender-affirming health care clinics.

Erin Reed, a prominent trans activist and legislative researcher, said there is a collective understanding in the trans community that submitting these hoax reports is an effective way of protesting the law and protecting trans people who might be targeted.

“There will be people who are trans that go into bathrooms that are potentially reported by these sorts of forms, and so the community is taking on a protective role,” Reed said. “If there are 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 form responses that are entered in, it’s going to be much harder for the auditor’s office to sift through every one of them and find the one legitimate trans person who was caught using a bathroom.”

The auditor’s office has encountered many reports that Dougall described as “total nonsense,” and others that he said appear credible at first glance and take much longer to filter out. His staff has spent the last week sorting through thousands of well-crafted complaints citing fake names or locations.

Despite efforts to clog the enforcement tool they had outlined in the bill, the Republican sponsors, Rep. Kera Birkeland and Sen. Dan McCay, said they remain confident in the tip line and the auditor’s ability filter out fake complaints.

“It’s not surprising that activists are taking the time to send false reports,” Birkeland said. “But that isn’t a distraction from the importance of the legislation and the protection it provides women across Utah.”

The Morgan Republican had pitched the policy as a safety measure to protect the privacy of women and girls without citing evidence of threats or assaults by trans people against them.

McCay said he hadn’t realized activists were responsible for flooding the tip line. The Salt Lake City senator said he does not plan to change how the law is being enforced.

LGBTQ+ rights advocates also have warned the law and the accompanying tip line give people license to question anyone’s gender in community spaces, which they argue could even affect people who are not trans.

Their warnings were amplified earlier this year when a Utah school board member came under fire — and later lost her reelection bid — for publicly questioning the gender of a high school basketball player she wrongly assumed was transgender.

By ISABELLA O’MALLEY (Associated Press)

Billions of people are using different kinds of energy each day and 2023 was a record-breaking year for renewable energy sources — ones that don’t emit planet-warming pollutants like carbon dioxide and methane — according to a report published Wednesday by Ember, a think tank based in London.

For the first time, 30% of electricity produced worldwide was from clean energy sources as the number of solar and wind farms continued to grow fast.

Of the types of clean energy generated last year, hydroelectric dams produced the most. That’s the same as in most years. Yet droughts in India, China, North America and Mexico meant hydropower hit a five-year low. Research shows climate change is causing droughts to develop more quickly and be more severe.

People used more electricity than ever last year, about 2% more, an increase of about as much as Canada uses in a year. Some of this new demand was for heat pumps, which are an efficient way to both heat and cool buildings, and for electric vehicles. It was also for electrolyzers, special machines used to get hydrogen out of water, for energy. These are all technologies that provide solutions to climate change.

Other increased demand was for electricity to feed new data centers and for air conditioning as places around the world become hotter.

Solar made up the biggest share of new clean energy last year. More than twice as much solar power was added as coal power. It was the 19th year in a row that solar was the fastest-growing source of electricity generation. A surge in solar installations happened at the end of the year and the report predicts 2024 will see an even larger jump.

China added more renewable energy than any other country last year — 51% of the new solar power and 60% of the new wind power globally. China, the European Union, the United States and Brazil together accounted for 81% of new solar generation in 2023.

Yet China was also responsible for 55% of coal generation globally and 60% of China’s electricity generation came from coal. The International Energy Agency says coal is the most carbon-intensive of the fossil fuels.

Scientists say emissions from burning fuels like coal must ramp steeply down to protect Earth’s climate, yet there was an increase in electricity made from burning fossil fuels. China, India, Vietnam and Mexico were responsible for nearly all of the rise.

The report said some countries burned coal to make up for the loss of hydroelectric power they experienced when drought caused their reservoirs to dry up. This is an example of a vicious cycle — when climate change prompts the use of more of the substances that cause climate change in the first place.

Despite all the growth in clean energy, fossil fuels still made up the majority of global electricity generated last year, causing a 1% rise in global power sector emissions. Scientists say even if we slashed all greenhouse gas emissions today, the planet would continue to warm for years because of the amount of pollutants already added to the atmosphere.

Analysts expect the world to use even more electricity in 2024. But renewable energy generation is forecast to grow even faster. That could mean a 2% drop (333 terawatt-hours) in energy generated from fossil fuels.

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By SARA CLINE (Associated Press)

Despite pleas from Democrats and gut-wrenching testimony from doctors and rape survivors, a GOP-controlled legislative committee rejected a bill Tuesday that would have added cases of rape and incest as exceptions to Louisiana’s abortion ban.

In the reliably red state, which is firmly ensconced in the Bible Belt and where even some Democrats oppose abortions, adding exceptions to Louisiana’s strict law has been an ongoing battle for advocates — with a similar measure failing last year. Currently, of the 14 states with abortion bans at all stages of pregnancy, six have exceptions in cases of rape and five have exceptions for incest.

“I will beg (committee) members to come to common sense,” Democratic state Rep. Alonzo Knox said to fellow lawmakers ahead of the vote, urging them to give approval to the exceptions. “I’m begging now.”

Lawmakers voted against the bill along party lines, with the measure failing 4-7.

A nearly identical bill met the same fate last year, effectively dying in the same committee. In the hopes of advancing the legislation out of committee and to the House floor for full debate, bill sponsor Democratic state Rep. Delisha Boyd added an amendment to the measure so that the exceptions would only apply to those who are younger than 17. However, the change was still not enough to sway opponents.

“We have cases here in Louisiana with children being raped and then subjected to carrying a child to term,” Boyd, a Democrat who has told her own mother’s story in an effort to fight for passage of the bil l. “I hope we take a look at the fact that this is to protect the most vulnerable, our children.”

Boyd said she will continue to try to get the bill onto the floor, possibly asking the House chamber to vote to bypass the committee. However, the technique is rarely successful for Democrats in the Legislature where Republicans hold a supermajority.

While most of those who voted against the bill did not give a reason for their vote, GOP state Rep. Dodie Horton offered her thoughts, saying that while she believes convicted rapists should receive the maximum penalty possible, she can’t in good conscience allow for abortions. She described the fetuses as “innocent children.”

“I think we should punish the perpetrator to the nth degree, I’d love to hang them from the high street if it was in my power to do so. But I cannot condone killing the innocent,” Horton said.

As in multiple other Republican states, Louisiana’s abortion law went into effect in 2022 following the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, ending a half-century of the nationwide right to abortion. The only exceptions to the ban are if there is substantial risk of death or impairment to the mother if she continues the pregnancy or in the case of “medically futile” pregnancies — when the fetus has a fatal abnormality.

Democrats have repeatedly fought — and failed — to loosen the law by clarifying vague language, abolishing jail time for doctors who perform illegal abortions and adding exceptions.

“It’s disgusting to me that we have a society where we can’t make exceptions in a situation where a young girl’s innocence has been taken away in the most vile way… and now she’s impregnated and somebody, somewhere, wants to force a nine, 10, 11, 12, 13-year-old child to have a baby for the monster that took away her innocence?” Knox said.

The bill attracted dozens of people to testify, including rape survivors who shared their own stories and doctors who argued that their hands are tied by the current law.

OB-GYN Dr. Neelima Sukhavasi told lawmakers that since the abortion ban has gone into effect, she and other colleagues have delivered babies who are birthed by teenagers who have been raped.

“One of these teenagers delivered a baby while clutching a Teddy Bear — and that’s an image that once you see that, you can’t unsee it,” Sukhavasi said.

In 2021, there were 7,444 reported abortions in Louisiana, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of those, 27 were obtained by people younger than 15. Nationwide, 1,338 pregnant patients under 15 received abortions, according to the CDC.

A study released by the Journal of the American Medical Association found that between July 2022 and January 2024, there were more than 64,000 pregnancies resulting from rape in states where abortion has been banned in all or most cases.