Legal experts say employers must take AI-related religious objections seriously, as a 2023 ruling raised the bar for denying such accommodat
"The funniest possible outcome of the AI mandate era is about to be HR departments discovering that 'sincerely held religious belief' under Title VII has a much lower bar than they assumed, and Pope Leo handed every Catholic employee a written excuse," wrote Corey Quinn, a software-startup founder in San Francisco, on X.
Employers could wind up in court if they outright dismiss workers who request a faith-based exemption from using AI, said Ashley Herd, a former McKinsey counsel and head of North American HR who now advises managers and employers on workplace issues.
"Playing priest, and telling employees their request isn't legitimate, does not tend to bode well for companies," said Herd, also a cohost of the "HR Besties" podcast. "A jury doesn't like it when employees get made fun of by managers or HR."
The ruling stems from a federal three-judge panel’s order in May 2025 that determined Mississippi lawmakers did not give Black voters in thr
The U.S. Supreme Court, in a brief order on Monday, reversed a lower court’s ruling that determined Mississippi lawmakers unlawfully diluted Black voting strength when it redrew the state’s legislative districts.
Monday’s order from the high court sends the case back to the lower federal court for further arguments in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent Callais decision, which rolled back protections against racial discrimination in the redistricting process.
tl;dr: all "algorithmically" pushed stuff on a newsfeed is mostly ads. nothing that's really surprising form this vulture article, but it is dismal and makes me grateful for one website where you only see things from people you follow WITHOUT horrible short-form video content
tl;dr: all "algorithmically" pushed stuff on a newsfeed is mostly ads.
Ok but that's NOT the tldr!!
In fact they talk very little about "algorithms" here. The REAL tldr is that even content being seen, enjoyed, and shared by people you follow or know in real life might be advertisements, because the SOURCE of the posts are advertisers-in-disguise.
To date, the ICC has not charged Hamas with any crimes committed against its own civilians. This filing, therefore, is the first by a Palest
The lawyers of a Palestinian Gazan man have made a formal submission to the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor demanding that 14 Hamas leaders be investigated for crimes committed against the Palestinian people.
To date, the ICC has not charged even one Hamas leader with any crimes committed against their own civilians. This is despite the fact that the ICC has charged leaders of Hamas and Israel with crimes committed against each other’s populations during the Israel-Hamas War.
This submission, therefore, marks the first such filing by a Palestinian against Hamas.
One of the two American attorneys, Elliot Malin, revealed this exclusively to The Jerusalem Post on Friday. Malin was joined by Eli Rosenbaum, a former senior US Justice Department war crimes prosecutor, and French attorney Sarah Scialom.
The 40-page article demands that 14 named Hamas leaders be investigated for crimes committed against the Palestinian people, with an eye toward the issuance of warrants for their arrest.
The client is a Palestinian civilian from Gaza who lost his wife, children, and other family members in the war in Gaza.
The submission demonstrates that if Hamas had not committed these war crimes and other crimes against the Palestinian people, the client’s family and countless other Palestinians would be alive today.
The submission includes the following war crimes: utilizing the presence of civilians or other protected persons as human shields; attacking civilians; intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects; willfully causing great suffering; destruction and appropriation of property; excessive incidental death, injury, or damage; attacking protected objects; committing outrages upon personal dignity; using, conscripting, or enlisting children; sentencing or execution without due process.
The submission also includes the following crimes against humanity: murder, extermination, torture, and persecution.
The lengthy submission documents that the best known of Hamas’s premeditated crimes, the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields and indeed human sacrifices, was the war crime that was principally responsible for the high death toll and extensive destruction experienced in Gaza.
This crime is in direct violation of the 1949 Geneva Convention.
The Hamas leaders identified in the submission are Izz al-Din al-Haddad, Khaled Mashaal, Mahmoud al-Zahar, Mohammed Odeh, Muhannad Rajab, Khalil al-Hayya, Mousa Abu Marzook, Ghazi Hamad, Izzat al-Rishq, Fathi Hamad, Nizar Awadallah, Husam Badran, Zaher Jabarin, and Basem Naim.
'Palestinian people deserve justice'
“The Palestinian people, including our client, deserve justice for the atrocities committed against them by Hamas, with the full backing of Iran’s leaders,” said Malin.
“To this day, the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) has not investigated, let alone sought warrants for, crimes cynically committed by Hamas and its accomplices against Palestinians during the war.”
Malin continued that “pursuing such justice goes to the heart of the mission of the OTP and the International Criminal Court, which it serves. Failing this mission means failing to deliver equal access to justice for those whom the court has ruled fall under its jurisdiction.”
Malin said that, if the Prosecutor and International Criminal Court refuse to seek justice for Palestinians who have been victimized by Hamas, the court “must ask OTP why the Gazan victims of Hamas inhumanity are being denied full justice.”
“Had Hamas’s fighters instead fought in compliance with longstanding international law rather than by hiding behind and underneath Gazan civilian men, women, and children, the civilian death toll would undoubtedly have been only a fraction of what it was,” Rosenbaum said.
“The credibility of international criminal justice rests on its ability to deliver swift accountability for crimes of this magnitude,” said Scialom.
“OTP’s continuing failure to pursue justice on behalf of Hamas’s deceased and displaced Palestinian victims in Gaza helps incentivize the repeated commission of such crimes as an effective geopolitical strategy, and it keeps the victimized Gazan community in the dark about essential facts of their victimization.”
Scialom said she is honored to represent the Palestinian client, whose family “tragically suffered enormous losses during the Gaza war.”
A year ago, the Ukrainian government decided to take the fight directly to Russia. It hasn’t looked back since.
A year ago, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky articulated a strategy of “bringing the war back to Russia.” “The war was brought from Russia, and it is to Russia that the war must be pushed back. They must be the ones forced into peace. They are the ones who must be pressured to ensure security,” Zelensky said in March 2025.
Since then, and ever more intensely this year, Ukraine has been pursuing a “strategic neutralization” of assets in Russia. This means scaling back the hard-fought, casualty-intensive thrusts to claw back occupied territory that have cost Ukraine so much in terms of blood and treasure, and instead embracing long-range, asymmetric warfare to degrade Russia’s economy, rupture its military manufacturing, and deflate civilian morale. This spring, there’s every sign that this strategy is bearing fruit—and perhaps even shifting the battlefield calculus in the war’s fifth, grinding year.
Almost daily, Ukraine’s new weaponry capabilities, in particular its own long-range missiles and high-precision drones, are wreaking havoc where they hit energy infrastructure, arms and explosives factories, and military command and logistics centers. On the home front, Ukraine is playing defense, killing or wounding about 35,000 Russians a month, according to Ukrainian sources, bringing some estimates of the war’s total death toll to 352,000 Russian service members.
According to Ulf Brunnbauer, a historian at the University of Regensburg, Ukraine’s object is to show its Western supporters that “they have not only staying power but can really harm Russia, thus helping their case for continuous support. This puts Kyiv in a better position for eventual peace talks by increasing the incentives for Russia to settle for a compromise.”
The battered oil refineries smoldering across Russia underscore Ukraine’s success in choking Russia’s economic lifeline. In April and thus this month, the Ukrainian armed forces have hit 20 oil refineries and export terminals. The dramatic images of Ukrainian drone strikes on the Tuapse oil refinery on Russia’s Black Sea coast on April 28 displayed a Russia at war and reeling: For weeks, thick black smoke spewed out of the site and blanketed more than 300 kilometers of southern Russia, including three cities.
The strikes, some hitting as far as 1,750 km from Ukraine—that’s 2.5 times farther than the range possible four years ago—have rendered Russia unable to fully capitalize on the high petroleum prices caused by the Iran war.
According to Al Jazeera, Ukraine has deterred Russia from reaping the gigantic windfall profits that it was counting on from oil exports, some of which the United States made possible by lifting individual sanctions in the context of the Iran war and energy crisis. Ukraine’s long-range strike campaign against Russian port and energy infrastructure in “a calculated bid to prevent Russia from offloading oil onto tankers,” Al Jazeera reports. In other words: Ukraine found a way to check the effects of a U.S. policy that had originally looked devastating for Ukraine. In March, Russia’s seaborne oil shipments dropped by roughly 300,000 barrels per day, partly as a result of Ukrainian drone strikes on refineries. According to Bloomberg, average output at Russian oil refineries fell to 4.69 million barrels per day in April, a record low since December 2009.
And the strikes on military installations such as air defense systems, airfields, and armament plants appear to be thrwarting Russia’s ground war in Ukraine, too—Kyiv’s most immediate priority. Russia’s forward momentum on the battlefield in Ukraine has ground to a virtual halt. Its armed forces even suffered a net loss of territory in April, for the first time since August 2024, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a U.S.-based think tank. Russia’s anticipated spring offensive is thus far a washout.
Just this weekend, Ukraine’s long-range strike capabilities reached deep into the Russian heartland, hammering its military tech industry in locations previously considered untouchable due to their closeness to the capital. Long-range attack drones struck Angstrem Microelectronics in Zelenograd, a main cog in Russia’s semiconductor industry. And drones also damaged MKB Raduga, the nerve center for Russia’s cruise missile program, in Dubna, just 80 miles north of Moscow.
“This strategy is all about the battlefield in Ukraine. It’s about stopping Russia from taking the Donbas and forcing it into negotiations that Ukraine can control,” said ISW analyst George Barros. “That should be the basis for a settlement.”
Until now, Barros argued, Russian President Vladimir Putin has operated “as if it doesn’t matter how high costs run as long as Russia keeps making gains and the West’s will dwindles. The idea was that Russia will simply outlast them and win in long run.” But Russia is obviously now wavering in a way that it hasn’t before, Barros said.
There are signs everywhere that Russia is panicking but perhaps none greater than Putin’s call for a cease-fire on May 9, Russia’s Victory Day national holiday, when it commemorates the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, usually with plenty of pomp and bluster. Putin pleaded with Ukraine not to disrupt the celebrations, and the usually uber-martial parade burnished no military hardware at all this year—a stinging admission that Ukraine has the capability of striking a top-tier public event in the middle of Moscow in the middle of the day.
According to the Moscow Times, an independent Russian media outlet, the Kremlin is rethinking its war goals and the narrative that it tells Russians about the “special military operation,” as it calls the war, downplaying its significance. Russian officials are apparently preparing to frame a peace deal with Ukraine as a “victory.” The Kremlin wants to shift public messaging away from its previous goal of capturing all of Ukraine, and in particular Kyiv, and toward holding what Russia already has—occupied territories in eastern and southern Ukraine—firmly in its hand.
And there’s even evidence of discontent among Russian political strategists regarding the war’s high cost. High-ranking officials have begun to question aloud the war’s continuation, according to the Moscow Times. Reportedly, they believe that taking the entire Donbas requires a full-fledged wartime economy and countrywide mass mobilization. This, they warned, would dangerously exhaust Russia’s resources, break the economy, and accelerate already dire population decline.
These setbacks for Russia are increasingly reflected in public opinion, which has largely supported the war until now. Although Russian polling shows that 73 percent of Russians approve of Putin’s performance—a robust number, were this applied to Western politicos—it is the lowest figure recorded since February 2022, according to the Public Opinion Foundation.
Most Russia experts doubt that Ukraine pins any hope on Russians rising up to overthrow Putin. The authoritarian state’s controls are too muscular, and just to make sure that this occurs to no one, Putin has clamped down on social media, such as the widely used Telegram channels, which are a widely accessed media source for many Russians.
“Public opinion,” said Barros of ISW, “is important to the Kremlin today in a way it wasn’t during the Cold War. Our team has been astonished about the extent to which Putin has made militarily questionable decisions in order to maximize regime stability and minimize discontent at home.”
And the deep-strike capabilities aren’t the “only cards that Ukraine has now,” said Fedir Serdiuk, a Ukrainian Defense Ministry advisor, in reference to U.S. President Donald Trump’s contention that Ukraine “doesn’t have the cards” to win the war.
“Ukraine relies on state-of-the-art unmanned surface vehicles and sensors to navigate and control the Black Sea,” Serdiuk said. “Millions of first-person-view drones, surveillance platforms, and much improved intelligence tech has helped sustain defense on the ground.” Serdiuk also pointed to ever more effective special operations such as Operation Spiderweb, a covert drone attack deep inside Russia in June 2025 that took out a significant portion of Russia’s strategic aviation capabilities, including Tu-95 and Tu-22M bombers.
Brunnbauer, the historian, doubted that Ukraine believes that it can push the Russians back, at least in the short or medium term. “But what they are showing to the world, to themselves, and to the Russians who care to know” he said, “is that time is not necessarily on Russia’s side—and that they can survive without much American help.”
The fact that anti-abortion laws and anti-transgender laws are both being implemented en masse, at the *same* time, by the *same* people (who, it hardly needs to be remarked, are overwhelmingly neither women nor transgender) should be enough to convince any reasonable person that the narrative of conflict between and women's and transgender is, first and foremost, a divide-and-conquer strategy by the far right.
Your survival is our survival. Our survival is your survival. Anyone who says different is a fed.
Also, hey, let's walk with this totally bad faith argument for a second. What IS different about a teen girl choosing to get an abortion, and a teen girl choosing to get a tubal ligation and a mastectomy? Are you saying that teenage girls who know that they will never want children should be forced to preserve their fertility anyway? Are you saying that teenage girls with severe back pain or the BRCA gene need to preserve their feminine breasts and be aesthetically pleasing to others, even at the expense of their own health? I mean, they're just too young to be making medical decisions which might make them less fertile or sexual desirable, right? What if they regret it???
And hey, you know, the same worry that teen girls might regret these things is true for adult women, too. Maybe we should make them wait until they're married, in case their future husband disapproves. Maybe we should make them wait until they've had kids - what if she regrets it and wants children? what if she regrets it and wants to breast feed? what if her stupid little woman brain hasn't thought this through and correctly pinned her entire self-worth and value as a person on her ability to act as a sex object and baby incubator? what then???
Trans men aren't women, and infantilizing them as poor helpless girls is obviously transphobic. But in addition to that, even if we were to buy into the central transphobic premise here, the conclusions would still be sexist as hell. Let's say that there are no trans men. Let's pretend for the sake of argument that trans men simply don't exist. Infantilizing teen girls out of being able to make their own medical decisions isn't feminist either.
If you're categorically against teen girls being able to choose to get a tubal ligation and a mastectomy, I have an awful lot of trouble believing that you're actually pro-choice. Pro-choice doesn't mean "women should have bodily autonomy just as long as they do the things I want". Pro-choice means pro-fucking-choice. You can't sing female empowerment and bodily autonomy out of one side of your mouth, while sticking your tongue out to lick the boot of the patriarchy on the other.
Let’s also note here that by “teen girl” they mean “eighteen or nineteen years old”. Or in other words: legally adult, and therefore (supposedly) allowed to make their own choices about their own bodies.
Trans people are people and deserve human rights. But also this is the same fight! I am a cis woman who never intends to use my uterus. They want to define everyone by their body parts. I am not a breeding mare and I want other people to have the same choice about their bodies (and who they are) that I should have!
Coin with pomegranates from the Jewish War, 66-70 CE
Synagogue mosaic, 3rd-4th century
Synagogue menorah, 4th-5th century
Legal inscription from synagogue, 6th century
Aramaic inscription in Hebrew letters from Kursi, 6th century
Mosaic of the zodiac from Beth Alpha synagogue, 6th century
The Aleppo Codex, written in Tiberias, 10th century
The Rambam's writing on his journey to Israel, 1165/1166
The Mount of Olives, which has been used as a Jewish cemetery for over 3000 years. photo by Andrew Shiva.
First-hand account of the 1517 Hebron massacre
Torah Shields, 16th century
Synagogue of the Jews, Jerusalem, illustrated by John Carne, pub. 1836-1838
Jews at the Western Wall, 1880
Mazal-Saada, Yosef and Margalit Zinati, 1981. the Zinati family has lived in Peki'in for millennia. Margalit has been the synagogue's guardian for years, preserving the Jewish heritage of the town.
still fucks me up what a bad rap coyotes get in peoples eyes. like ive talked to people who see em as like. gross pests who should be culled. theyre literally just as cool as wolves just a lil smaller and less confident. i love them with all my heart to balance out all the coyote haters out there, coyotes rule theyre doing great
this post was so fucking funny I literally was just like “I like coyotes I think they’re cool” and so many people fucking hated it. Shut up I’m trying. To enjoy animal
Love coyotes. As a concept. However, as someone who lives in a coyote area, I can also hate them. They have a tendency to murder small-to-medium-sized pets. I know several people whose cats and dogs were murdered by coyotes who hopped the fence into their yard.
We have a portion of our yard fenced off on the sides and on top with like a chicken wire ceiling to protect pets so they can go out at night and do their business without worrying about predators, like coyotes.
So, yes. Coyotes: cute, important for ecosystem, cool little dudes, etc. but also…they kill your pets and that makes many people hate them.
However, as someone who lives in a coyote area, I can also hate them.
This u?
For real though, you (as in, human development. not just you as an individual) moved into a wild predator's territory, destroyed most of its natural habitat and food sources, then put left small docile prey animals outside unattended. And you're mad at the natural predator for *checks notes* eating the food you left out for it?
A plane filled with Iraqi Jewish refugees photographed on arrival at Lod Airport outside Tel Aviv in early 1951 (Teddy Brauner, GPO).
Today, November 30th, is Jewish Refugee day or Yom HaPlitim (יום הפליטים), and we remember their stories.
Their arrival came amid a mass exodus triggered by escalating persecution in Iraq, including violent pogroms such as the 1941 Farhud, during which Jewish homes and businesses were looted and many civilians including children were murdered and wounded. Jewish girls were publicly raped. The community also faced targeted assassinations, public executions such as the infamous Baghdad hangings, and a series of bombings in 1950–1951 aimed at Iraq's Jewish community. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Jews in Iraq were frequently arrested on fabricated charges, tortured in prison, and subjected to the banning of communal, religious and political activity. These pressures finally peaked in state-sanctioned expropriation, revocation of citizenship, and forced expatriation.
In 1951, 120,000 Iraqi Jews were issued passports for the sole purpose of emigration known as passports of No Return. A prerequisite was the waiving of all property and monetary belongings.
By the 1930s, Jews made up roughly a quarter of Baghdad’s total population, and by 1945 around 135,000 Jews lived across Iraq. Today only a handful remain.
This end of the millenia old Babylonian Jewish exile is referred to as Sant al-Tasqit.
This pattern was varied and repeated in every country across SWANA.
Famously vengeful Knicks owner Jim Dolan has long spied on people at his iconic arenas. WIRED goes deep inside the operation that allegedly
reading an article about the guy who owns the Knicks and Madison Square Garden and they used facial recognition to track every move of a trans Knicks fan to try to make sure she didn't end up on game broadcasts and eventually just banned her from the arena.
She is not directly paid for her work to vet papers, she has been hit with legal action & death threats by scientists who hate that she's exposing them and their financial fraud, and she keeps at it every single day, combing through thousands of papers to make science more fair. Please consider supporting her!
people telling diabetics in that last post to ‘go to the bathroom to do their insulin’ do you understand how awful that is, like for a million reasons but protip from someone on an injection based medication: Please do not put anything inside your body in a bathroom, that’s where the shit and piss live, disabled people don’t owe you a major infection because you can’t look away and handle your own issues with needles while they take their meds.
Like you know how people started/have started pointing out that it's disgusting to expect/want/tell nursing parents to go nurse their baby in the bathroom? Because it's uncomfortable, demeaning, dehumanizing, unsanitary, and dangerous?
I have shocking news about how all this applies to the disabled as well.
Yes all cops. Do Piracy. Trans rights. @captain-acab - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
