Random Politics & Religion #00

The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday sided with a former driver for UPS Inc by throwing out a lower court ruling blocking her lawsuit accusing the package delivery company of discrimination for refusing to lighten her work duties while she was pregnant.

On a 6-3 vote, the justices revived Peggy Young's discrimination claim against UPS and sent the case back to a lower court.

The case focused on whether employers must provide accommodations for pregnant workers who may have physical limitations on tasks they can perform. The justices gave Young another chance to litigate whether UPS should have granted her request for temporary changes in work duties - she asked not to lift heavier packages - after she became pregnant in 2006.

Writing on behalf of the majority, liberal Justice Stephen Breyer said the lower court is required to determine if the employer had "legitimate, nondiscriminatory, nonpretextual justification" for treating employees differently.

A federal district court judge and an appeals court had ruled in favor of UPS, which was backed by business groups in the case.

Breyer said the lower court failed to consider the effects of UPS policies that covered non-pregnant workers who might have disabilities, injuries or otherwise might need accommodations, and asked, “Why, when the employer accommodated so many, could it not accommodate pregnant women as well?”

Breyer said there is a "genuine dispute as to whether UPS provided more favorable treatment to at least some employees whose situation cannot reasonably be distinguished from Young's."

The two sides in the case disagreed over whether UPS agreed to accommodate non-pregnant workers requesting light-duty assignments.

The case concerned whether the package delivery company violated a federal law, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, by denying Young's request. Young, who worked at a Maryland facility, had acted on a midwife's advice that she not be required to lift packages weighing more than 20 pounds (9 kg).

Conservative Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas dissented, accusing the court majority of going beyond the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and imposing new requirements on employers to offer stronger justifications for workplace policies that could burden pregnant women.

UPS said last October that starting this past January it would begin providing accommodations for pregnant women. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission last July issued enforcement guidance saying employers must offer accommodations to pregnant women just as they do for other workers with similar physical limitations.

I found this amusing

25 Unbelieavable Things Americans Believe

Warplanes from Saudi Arabia and Arab allies struck Shi'ite Muslim rebels fighting to oust Yemen's president on Thursday, a gamble by the world's top oil exporter to check Iranian influence in its backyard without direct military backing from Washington.

Riyadh's rival Iran denounced the assault on the Houthi militia group, which it backs, and made clear the kingdom's deployment of a Sunni coalition against Shi'ite enemies would complicate efforts to end a conflict likely to inflame the sectarian animosities fuelling wars around the Middle East.

Warplanes bombed the main airport and the nearby al Dulaimi military air base of the Houthi-held capital Sanaa, residents said, in an apparent attempt to weaken the Houthis' air power and ability to fire missiles.

A Reuters witness in the capital said four or five houses near Sanaa airport had been damaged. Rescue workers put the death toll from the air strikes at 13, including a doctor who had been pulled from the rubble of a damaged clinic.

Yemen's crisis now risks spiraling into a major war with Iran backing the Houthis, and Sunni Muslim monarchies in the Gulf supporting Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi and his fellow Sunni loyalists in Yemen's south.

"We will do whatever it takes in order to protect the legitimate government of Yemen from falling," Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, told a news conference in Washington.

In Aden, a local official reported that fighters loyal to Hadi retook the airport, a day after it was captured by forces allied to the Houthis advancing on the city. The facility remains closed and flights are canceled.

Saudi-owned al-Arabiya TV reported that the kingdom was contributing 100 warplanes to the operation - dubbed "Storm of Resolve" - and more than 85 more were provided by the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Morocco and Sudan.

Egypt, Jordan, Sudan and Pakistan were ready to take part in a ground offensive in Yemen, the channel said.

A Saudi official familiar with defense matters told Reuters that a "land offensive might be needed to restore order."

Meanwhile, Iran's Foreign Ministry on Tuesday demanded an immediate halt to the "aggression and air strikes" in Yemen, the semi-official Fars news agency reported on Thursday.

"Military actions in Yemen, which faces a domestic crisis ... will further complicate the situation," Fars quoted Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham as saying.

A United Arab Emirates official expressed Gulf Arab concerns about Iranian influence in Yemen.

"The strategic change in the region benefits Iran and we cannot be silent about the fact that the Houthis carry their banner," UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Mohammed Gargash wrote on Twitter.

The other Arab countries along with Pakistan reported to be willing to take part in the operation are also mostly Sunni.

Saud al-Sarhan, director of research at King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh: “It is a clear message on the ‘Saudi defense doctrine’. Security and stability in the Arabian Peninsula is a red line, and Saudi Arabia doesn’t tolerate any attempt to destabilize the region."

Saudi Arabia, allies launch air strikes in Yemen against Houthi fighters

Indiana's governor signs bill allowing businesses to reject gay customers
Awww, the final death cries of a dying movement. Looking forward to the first SCOTUS challenge and subsequent overturn.

And now for a word from the Don of Homosexuality.

I guess we can at least look at it this way, as I've seen a few standup comedians point out: issues of homosexuality are frequently what this country feudes over when we've got nothing better to do, so if you've got radical christians wanting to hate on the gays, and radical liberals wanting to fight them on it, it means we've got nothing more divisive to fight over, so...

...call it a win?

Indiana's governor signs bill allowing businesses to reject gay customers
Awww, the final death cries of a dying movement. Looking forward to the first SCOTUS challenge and subsequent overturn.

I guess we can at least look at it this way, as I've seen a few standup comedians point out: issues of homosexuality are frequently what this country feudes over when we've got nothing better to do, so if you've got radical christians wanting to hate on the gays, and radical liberals wanting to fight them on it, it means we've got nothing more divisive to fight over, so...

...call it a win?

Well, it's easy to view it as a junk issue when you don't potentially have to deal with its consequences.

Is this about gay wedding cakes ?

My point is, we're lucky enough to live in a country where, though far from perfect, we're able to even have these discussions.

Hey wanna fight about it !

he co-pilot of the Germanwings jet barricaded himself in the cockpit and intentionally rammed the plane full speed into the French Alps, ignoring the captain's frantic pounding on the door and the screams of terror from passengers, a prosecutor said Thursday.

In a split second, all 150 people aboard the plane were dead.

Andreas Lubitz's "intention (was) to destroy this plane," Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin said, laying out the horrifying conclusions French investigators reached after listening to the last minutes of Tuesday's Flight 9525 from the plane's black box voice data recorder.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the conclusions brought the tragedy to a "new, simply incomprehensible dimension."

The prosecutor said there was no indication of terrorism, and did not elaborate on why investigators do not suspect a political motive. He said they are instead focusing on the co-pilot's "personal, family and professional environment" to try to determine why he did it.

The Airbus A320 was flying from Barcelona to Duesseldorf when it lost radio contact with air traffic controllers and began dropping from its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet. The prosecutor said Lubitz did not say a word as he set the plane on an eight-minute descent into the craggy French mountainside that pulverized the plane.

He said the German co-pilot's responses, initially courteous in the first part of the trip, became "curt" when the captain began the mid-flight briefing on the planned landing.

Robin said the pilot, who has not been identified, left the cockpit when the plane reached cruising altitude, presumably to go to the lavatory. Then the 28-year-old co-pilot took control of the jet as requested.

"When he was alone, the co-pilot manipulated the buttons of the flight monitoring system to initiate the aircraft's descent," Robin said.

The pilot knocked several times "without response," the prosecutor said, adding that the cockpit door could only be blocked manually from the inside.

The co-pilot said nothing from the moment the captain left, Robin said. "It was absolute silence in the cockpit."

The A320 is designed with safeguards to allow emergency entry into the cockpit if a pilot inside is unresponsive. But the override code known to the crew does not go into effect — and indeed goes into a lockdown — if the person inside the cockpit specifically denies entry.

During the flight's final minutes, pounding could be heard on the cockpit door as the plane's instrument alarms sounded. But the co-pilot's breathing was calm, Robin said.

"You don't get the impression that there was any particular panic, because the breathing is always the same. The breathing is not panting. It's a classic, human breathing," Brice said.

No distress call ever went out from the cockpit, and the control tower's pleas for a response went unanswered.

Air traffic control cleared the area to allow the plane to make an emergency landing if needed, and asked other planes to try to make contact. The French air force scrambled a fighter jet to try to head off the crash.

Just before the plane hit the mountain, passengers' cries of terror could be heard on the voice recorder.

"The victims realized just at the last moment," Robin said. "We can hear them screaming."

The victims' families "are having a hard time believing it," he said.

Many families visited an Alpine clearing near the scene of the crash Thursday. French authorities set up a viewing tent in the hamlet of Le Vernet for family members to look toward the site of the crash, so steep and treacherous that it can only be reached by a long journey on foot or rappelling from a helicopter.

Lubitz' family was in France but was being kept separate from the other families, Robin said.

Helicopters shuttled back and forth form the crash site Thursday, as investigators continue retrieving remains and pieces of the plane, shattered from the high-speed impact of the crash.

The prosecutor's account prompted calls for stricter cockpit rules.

Airlines in Europe are not required to have two people in the cockpit at all times, unlike the standard U.S. operating procedure, which was changed after the 9/11 attacks to require a flight attendant to take the spot of a briefly departing pilot.

Europe's third-largest budget airline, Norwegian Air Shuttle, announced Thursday that it plans to adopt new rules requiring two crew members to always be present in the cockpit.

Neither the prosecutor nor Lufthansa indicated there was anything the pilot could have done to avoid the crash.

Robin would not give details on the co-pilot's religion or his ethnic background. German authorities were taking charge of the investigation into him.

Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr said that before Thursday's shocking revelations, the airline was already "appalled" by what had happened in its low-cost subsidiary.

"I could not have imagined that becoming even worse," he said in Cologne. "We choose our cockpit staff very, very carefully."

Lubitz joined Germanwings in September 2013, directly out of flight school, and had flown 630 hours. Spohr said the airline had no indication why he would have crashed the plane.

He underwent a regular security check on Jan. 27 and it found nothing untoward, and previous security checks in 2008 and 2010 also showed no issues, the local government in Duesseldorf said.

Lufthansa's chief said Lubitz started training in 2008 and there was a "several-month" gap in his training six years ago. Spohr said he couldn't say what the reason was, but after the break "he not only passed all medical tests but also his flight training, all flying tests and checks."

Robin avoided describing the crash as a suicide.

"Usually, when someone commits suicide, he is alone," he said. "When you are responsible for 150 people at the back, I don't necessarily call that a suicide."

In the German town of Montabaur, acquaintances told The Associated Press that Lubitz appeared normal and happy when they saw him last fall as he renewed his glider pilot's license.

"He was happy he had the job with Germanwings and he was doing well," said a member of the glider club, Peter Ruecker, who watched Lubitz learn to fly. "He gave off a good feeling."

Lubitz had obtained his glider pilot's license as a teenager, and was accepted as a Lufthansa pilot trainee after finishing a tough German college preparatory school, Ruecker said. He described Lubitz as "rather quiet" but friendly.

Lubitz's Facebook page, deleted sometime in the past two days, showed a smiling man in a dark brown jacket posing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. The Facebook page was restored after the French prosecutor's news conference.

The principal of Joseph Koenig High School in Haltern, Germany, which lost 16 students and two teachers in the crash, said the state governor called him to tell him about the probe's conclusion.

"It is much, much worse than we had thought," principal Ulrich Wessel said. "It doesn't make the number of dead any worse, but if it had been a technical defect then measures could have been taken so that it would never happen again."

The circumstances of the crash are reviving questions about the possibility of suicidal pilots and the wisdom of sealing off the cockpit.

Philip Baum, London-based editor of the trade magazine Aviation Security International, said, "The kneejerk reaction to the events of 9/11 with the ill-thought reinforced cockpit door has had catastrophic consequences."

Robin would not give details on the co-pilot's religion or his ethnic background. German authorities were taking charge of the investigation into him.

Lubitz's Facebook page, deleted sometime in the past two days, showed a smiling man in a dark brown jacket posing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. The Facebook page was restored after the French prosecutor's news conference.

My point is, we're lucky enough to live in a country where, though far from perfect, we're able to even have these discussions.

You need to raise your expectations. A lot.