Weds: I Didn't Use Chat GPI to Write This Headline.

Do they Still Have the Right to Discriminate Against Dolts?

Seattle has become the first US city to ban discrimination based on caste after a vote by the city council.

Councilwoman Kshama Sawant, who wrote the legislation, said the fight against caste bias "is deeply connected to the fight against all forms of oppression".

Advocates of the ban say that it is needed to prevent caste bias from becoming more prevalent in the US.

The caste system in India dates back over 3,000 years and divides Hindu society into rigid hierarchical groups.

The ordinance passed by Seattle on Tuesday follows similar bans on caste bias that have been introduced on the campuses of US universities in recent years.

"Caste discrimination doesn't only take place in other countries," said Ms Sawant, who is the only Indian American on the Seattle city council.

"It is faced by South Asian American and other immigrant working people in their workplaces, including in the tech sector, in Seattle and in cities around the country."

Ms Sawant, a socialist, has previously spoken of being raised in an upper-caste Hindu Brahmin household in India and witnessing such discrimination.

The measure has been opposed by some Hindu American groups, who argue a ban is not necessary as US law already prohibits such discrimination.

In an open letter, the Washington DC-based Hindu American Federation said that while the ordinance's goals were praiseworthy, it "unfairly singles out and targets an entire community on the basis of their national origin and ancestry for disparate treatment".

They added that Indian Americans made up less than 2% of Washington state's population, and argued there was little evidence of any widespread discrimination based on caste.

Caste discrimination has been banned in India since 1948, however, discrimination continues, especially against the Dalits, who were once called "untouchables".

They are Suspeding the Agreement, But Sticking to It?

Russia will stick to agreed limits on nuclear missiles and keep informing the United States about changes in its deployments, a senior defense official said on Wednesday, despite the suspension of its last remaining arms control treaty with Washington.

Both chambers of Russia’s parliament voted quickly in favour of suspending Moscow’s participation in the New START treaty, rubber-stamping a decision that President Vladimir Putin announced on Tuesday when he accused the West of trying to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia in Ukraine.

But a top defence ministry official, Major-General Yevgeny Ilyin, told the lower house, or Duma, that Russia would continue to observe agreed restrictions on nuclear delivery systems — meaning missiles and strategic bomber planes.

The RIA news agency quoted Ilyin as saying Moscow would also continue to provide Washington with notifications on nuclear deployments in order “to prevent false alarms, which is important for maintaining strategic stability”.

I Didn't Use Chat GPI to Write This Headline. It Probably Would Have Done a Better Job.

Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education and Human Development is apologizing after students learned the school used ChatGPT to compose a campus email about this month’s mass shooting at Michigan State University.

Vanderbilt’s Feb. 16 email, signed by two administrators, urged faculty, students and staff to “come together as a community” to foster “a safe and inclusive environment for all.” It noted in small print at the bottom that the message was a “paraphrase from OpenAI’s Chat GPT AI language model.”

“There is a sick and twisted irony to making a computer write your message about community and togetherness because you can’t be bothered to reflect on it yourself,” Laith Kayat, a senior whose sister attends Michigan State, told the Vanderbilt Hustler. Three students were killed in the Feb. 13 Michigan State shooting and five were wounded. The shooter died from a self-inflicted gunshot.

The AI-assisted email was sent by the Vanderbilt Peabody Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, per The Tennessean. A day earlier, Vanderbilt Provost G.L. Black issued a sincere statement of his own, which starkly contrasted the ChatGPT email’s antiseptic tone.

Nicole Joseph, a Peabody associate dean who co-signed the email, apologized and stepped aside from the equity, diversity and inclusion program as Vanderbilt investigates what led to the message, the Hustler reported. The student newspaper was the first to report on the email, which failed to list resources available to students struggling to deal with the campus mass shooting.

Monday Morning Seems So Bad

Afour-day work week may be here to stay, at least in the United Kingdom. A recent trial had 61 organizations and about 2,900 workers adopt a four-day workweek, and now, most are not going back to five days of work per week. In fact, about one in six employees who participated in the experiment said no amount of money would convince them to return to a five-day-a-week schedule.