The Commerce Department has issued a list of 28 state security bureaus and tech companies in China that it says are being used to suppress the country’s Uighur Muslims and other ethnic minorities – a move that blocks them from doing business with U.S. firms.

The revised Entity List that came out late Monday adds several security bureaus with jurisdiction in China’s western Xinjiang region, where the Uighurs are concentrated, as well as firms such as Hikvision and Dahua Technology, which are leading providers of video surveillance equipment.

The filing says the entities “have been determined by the U.S. Government to be acting contrary to the foreign policy interests of the United States,” and have been engaged in “China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-technology surveillance against Uighurs, Kazakhs and other members of Muslim minority groups in the [Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region].”

In a statement, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said the U.S. “will not tolerate the brutal suppression of ethnic minorities in China.”

The move comes as the U.S. and China are engaged in a heated trade war that continues to escalate despite more than a dozen rounds of negotiation since it started more than a year ago. China’s Vice Premier Liu He and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer are expected to meet on Thursday for the latest high-level talks aimed at resolving the dispute.

Hikvision and Dahua join other high-profile Chinese tech firms Huawei and ZTE, which were placed on the Entity List in August. Also added on Monday are artificial intelligence firms SenseTime and Megvii Technology, and iFlytek, a company that specializes in voice recognition.

Hikvision said in a statement that it “strongly opposes today’s decision by the U.S. Government,” claiming that the move “will hamper efforts by global companies to improve human rights around the world.”

“Hikvision, as the security industry’s global leader, respects human rights and takes our responsibility to protect people in the U.S. and the world seriously,” the company said. “Hikvision has been engaging with Administration officials over the past 12 months to clarify misunderstandings about the company and address their concerns.”

In Xinjiang, a vast territory in northwest China home to many minority ethnic groups, the population is subjected to intense surveillance by face recognition technology and other means. Up to 1.5 million Uighur Muslims and other ethnic minorities are believed to be detained in Xinjiang in massive prison-like education camps.

At the U.S. Supreme Court, the long-awaited showdown over the rights of LGBTQ employees is center stage. On Tuesday, the justices hear a set of cases testing whether the federal law that bars sex discrimination in employment applies to LGBTQ employees.

Specifically, the question is whether employers are free to fire employees because they are gay or transgender. Front and center in these cases is Gerald Bostock who, for 10 years, was the child-welfare coordinator for Clayton County, Ga. His primary responsibility was a program that provides advocates in court for abused and neglected children.

“It was the job I loved, and my employer loved me doing the job,” says Bostock, noting that under his leadership the child advocates program “reached the benchmark of serving 100% of the children in foster care,” an “unheard of milestone” for any such program in the greater metro Atlanta region.

“I was fired for being gay”

But in 2013, Bostock joined a gay recreational softball league. And “from that point on, my life changed, ” he says. “Within months, I was fired for being gay. I lost my livelihood. I lost my medical insurance, and at the time I was fighting prostate cancer. It was devastating.”

Also front and center on Tuesday will be Aimee Stephens. She worked for the Harris Funeral Home in Livonia, Mich., as a funeral director for six years, presenting as a man. But by 2012, at age 51, she was in despair over her gender identity, and contemplating suicide.

“I stood in the backyard for an hour with a gun to my chest, but I couldn’t do it,” she says.

Stephens decided she would come out at work as a transgender woman. For eight months, she worked on a letter to her boss and co-workers telling them of her gender identity.

“In truth … even I do not fully understand it myself”

“I have realized that some of you may have trouble understanding this,” she wrote, adding, “In truth, I have had to live with it every day of my life, and even I do not fully understand it myself.”

Two weeks after giving the letter to her boss, Stephens was fired.

Stephens and Bostock both took their former employers to court, charging that their dismissals were based on sex and thus violated Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination “because of sex,” or “on the basis of sex.”

The owner of Harris Funeral Homes, Tom Rost, explained in a videotaped interview with his lawyers why he fired Stephens, saying that he was concerned about how the families of the deceased would react to Stephens who was, in Rost’s words, “the face of the Harris Funeral Home.”

Neither Clayton County officials nor their lawyers would comment about Bostock’s firing.

A “common sense argument”

But in their briefs the lawyers in both cases argue that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act does not apply to sexual orientation or gender status at all. “Everyone understood in 1964 [when the Civil Rights Act passed] that sex meant biological sex,” says John Bursch who is arguing on behalf of Harris Funeral Homes in the Supreme Court. That means that neither women nor men can be treated unequally in the work place, he says, but that “just does not translate into other categories” such as sexual orientation or gender identity.

Supporting that argument are 15 states, including Texas, and its solicitor general, Kyle Hawkins. The “common sense” argument, he asserts, is that “sex is not the same as sexual orientation and not the same as gender identity.”

But lawyers representing the fired workers counter that the Supreme Court over the last half century has interpreted the law far more broadly than that. They note that the justices have applied the anti-discrimination statute to a variety of situations that Congress wasn’t thinking about in 1964.

Where and how to draw the line

For example, “in 1964 you wouldn’t find a single dictionary that defined the term ‘sexual harassment’ and yet the Supreme Court has held that Title VII [of the 1964 Civil Rights Act] prohibits sexual harassment of women” and “also sexual harassment of men,” observes Stanford Law Professor Pamela Karlan.

Indeed, more than two decades ago, the Supreme Court ruled that even same-sex sexual harassment was illegal under the statute. Writing for a unanimous court, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, said that while same-sex sexual harassment was “not the principal evil Congress was concerned with” in 1964, “statutory provisions often go beyond the principal evil to cover reasonably comparable evils.” And, he said, “it is ultimately the provisions of our laws, rather than the principal concerns of our legislators by which we are governed.”

Stanford’s Karlan, who is arguing for the gay employees on Tuesday, will remind the justices of the court’s very first sex discrimination case after enactment of the 1964 law: Phillips v. Martin Marietta Corporation. At issue was an employer’s policy barring the hiring of women with young children.

The court ruled unanimously that the policy was illegal sex discrimination. Karlan argues that just as women with children are a subset of women covered by the anti-discrimination law, so too are gay, lesbian and bisexual employees.

“If it’s sex discrimination to say you can’t work for us if you are a woman and you have children at home, it’s also sex discrimination to say you can’t work for us because you’re a woman and you have a wife at home,” says Karlan.

Similarly, she maintains, “If you wouldn’t fire a man for marrying a woman, but “you would fire a woman for marrying a woman, you’ve discriminated against the woman who works for you,” Karlan maintains.

The transgender argument: politically difficult but analytically stark

The argument for transgender employees may be more politically difficult to sell. But it is arguably more stark. It goes like this: If an employer hires a man and later fires the employee when the employee shows up as a woman, how is that not discrimination based on sex?

Lawyer Bursch will tell the justices that sexual orientation and gender status simply do not fit under the 1964 anti-discrimination formula. He warns that if the court were to rule against the employers in these cases, it would have ramifications beyond employment.

Could employment cases affect school sports?

“If we redefine the meaning of sex in federal law,” he predicts, it would allow “biological men to identify as women and take women’s places on sports teams.” Bursch argues that has already happened in some places, with cisgender women losing out in medals to transgender women.

Federal law does indeed bar sex discrimination in sports programs at schools that get federal money. And the NCAA has developed regulations for when trans student athletes may or may not participate. But as Stanford’s Karlan observes, Title IX, known best for its impact in advancing women’s sports, “is a different statute.” And the regulations for education funding under Title IX “are different than the rules in the workplace” under Title VII.

Lawyers for the employers respond that Congress in 1964 simply did not anticipate the questions raised in these cases about the scope of Title VII and that Congress, not the courts, should be addressing these issues.

The case has drawn even more attention than anticipated, with dozens of friend-of-the-court briefs on each side. Siding with the employers are business groups that, for the most part, have some religious affiliation. But weighing in on the other side, in favor of protection for gay and trans employees, are 206 major corporations who employ over 7 million workers.

The Trump administration, reversing the position of the Obama administration, will argue in the Supreme Court against the LGBTQ employees.

President Trump has won at least a temporary reprieve from a judge’s order to release his tax records as part of a criminal investigation into his business dealings. Those records could be released to investigators as litigation continues.

Tax experts say the documents could reveal a lot — or not much at all — about Trump’s financial history.

“Numbers tell stories,” said Kelly Richmond Pope, who teaches forensic accounting at DePaul University. “So following those numbers can help piece together a story.”

The returns could prompt further investigation by prosecutors in New York, who are digging into Trump’s business dealings around hush money that his organization allegedly paid to two women who say they had extramarital affairs with him. And whatever the returns contain, they’re a matter of public interest, given that Trump has bucked precedent by not releasing them. Here are a few things that tax experts say they’ll be watching for as litigation over Trump’s tax records continues:

How good is Trump, really, at business?

Trump’s wealth and success as a businessman are a central part of his brand. A New York Times investigation last year revealed that much of his wealth in his early years in business came from his father, Fred Trump. And his tax records could give some additional clues to his more recent business dealings.

But his reported income may be limited by the fact that wealthy people are good at finding ways to avoid taxes, said Jeff Hoopes, associate professor of business at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School.

“The whole point of tax planning is you try to look like you’re really bad at business on your tax return. [That] is the goal of, kind of, both legal tax planning and illegal tax evasion,” Hoopes said. “If your goal is pay as little in taxes as possible, what you try to do is show the IRS that you made as little income as possible.”

How does he make his money — and how much?

Trump has a lot of business dealings, and that likely means a lot of documents, Hoopes said.

“You and I file a tax return, and it might be a dozen, two dozen, three dozen pages,” he said. “There are over 500 entities in the … Trump Organization. So this is gonna be a big, messy thing if it ever comes out. Just what is a Donald Trump tax return is kind of an open question.”

The details of Trump’s income may be obscured by complex legal relationships between Trump’s companies and his business partnerships, said Annette Nellen, a professor of accounting and an expert in tax law at San Jose State University.

“You can’t always get a lot of detail. You’re getting more, what’s their type of income, what are the types of expenses that they had,” Nellen said. “Did they have losses? What are these losses from?”

It also may be difficult to tell whether a business loss is the result of poor management or a typical cost of doing business, such as real estate depreciation or maintenance expenses, she said.

But there could be clues about Trump’s overall financial situation, Nellen said. She tells her students to look at presidential candidates’ tax records and notice how both their income and their marginal rate of taxation compare with those of average Americans.

“Compared to the rest of the population, are they at the top?” Nellen said. “I think it’s helping you know where they fit among all taxpayers.”

Has Trump done anything illegal?

Maybe, but the tax records alone probably won’t show that, according to Hoopes.

“If your goal with Donald Trump’s tax return is to find something he did wrong with his taxes, it’s not gonna be easy — at all,” Hoopes said.

Hoopes said it’s likely that, as Trump has claimed, he has already been audited repeatedly by the IRS — a process that involves producing many more records than a typical tax return would include.

“So absent that ability to ask Donald Trump for more information, it’s not clear we’d learn a whole lot,” Hoopes said.

Trump’s tax records could point to some of the organizations and individuals he has done business with, “but you’re not going to find the name of every vendor or contractor that he’s written a check for,” said Deidre Liedel, an accounting professor at the University of Toledo.

She said the tax returns could point to potential legal problems, but they contain limited amounts of documentation.

“To think that they’re going to find a trail of information that supports an illegal activity simply by looking at the tax returns, I think, is an erroneous assumption,” Liedel said. “Realistically, they are looking for the ability to go deeper into his documentation.”

Prosecutors likely will be looking at information related to any dealings with foreign entities.

“He has made some pretty definitive statements about his relationship, for example, with Russia,” Hoopes said. “If it turns out … he has some kind of financial holdings or assets in a financial institution in Russia, that might contradict what he’s said about his relationship with Russia.”

How much money does he give away?

Many famously wealthy Americans are also known for their charitable giving, said Pope, of DePaul University. Think Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, for example. She’s curious about Trump’s history of philanthropy.

“We live in a time when we are very intrigued by wealthy individuals,” she said. “I think a lot of time when people tout their wealth, one of the things that you may be interested in is, how much are you giving?”

Kay Maresh, an accounting professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, notes that Trump also has a history of touting his generosity — though he has not always produced evidence of it.

“Because he talks a lot about being charitable — kind of looking at those, seeing if there were any made to his Trump Foundation,” Maresh said.

What precedent does this set?

Liedel said she’s also watching to see what kind of precedent the case might set about how much financial information elected officials can be forced to release.

“I think there absolutely is a question here of a political motive,” Liedel said. “And what does it mean for other people who may or may not want to get into politics.”

Jonathan Adler, a constitutional law expert at Case Western Reserve University, said the case ultimately is about presidential power and the rule of law.

“The underlying question is whether the president is like the rest of us — an individual who is subject to the laws of this nation — or whether the president has some sort of quasi-royal prerogative,” Adler said. “As a legal question, that really strikes at the heart of how we conceive of the office of the president of the United States.”

Pope said she’d like to know what’s in those returns — and why Trump is fighting so hard to withhold them.

“I’m just curious — why the hesitation? Because I think that the hesitation has created, probably, more news stories than there needs to be. Because if they were just public, no one would probably think anything about it,” she said. “It makes us curious because they’re not, but I don’t know if we’ll ever know truly what the full story is.”