9th Circuit: Religious Sect’s Attempt to Extort Land and Recruit May Create Basis For Asylum

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In Singh v. Sessions, (9th Cir., Nov. 15, 2017), the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of appeals held that an immigration judge was incorrect when he rejected claims for asylum and withholding of removal by Harbans Singh who in India had suffered at the hands of the Dera Sacha Sauda which attempted to extort his land and recruit him for membership.  The court held that this could create a sufficient nexus to find religious or political persecution since

Another Court Enjoins Trump’s Transgender Military Ban

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Agreeing with a decision last month by a D.C. federal district court (see prior posting), yesterday in Stone v. Trump, (D MD, Nov. 21, 2017), a Maryland federal district court issued a preliminary injunction against President Trump’s ban on transgender individuals serving in the military.  The court said in part:President Trump’s tweets did not emerge from a policy review, nor did the Presidential Memorandum identify any policymaking process or evidence demonstrating that the revocation of transgender rights was necessary for any legitimate national interest. Based on the circumstances surrounding the President’s announcement and the departure from normal procedure, the Court agrees with the D.C. Court that there is sufficient support for Plaintiffs’ claims that “the decision to exclude transgender individuals was not driven by genuine concerns regarding military efficacy.”Going beyond the D.C. decision, the court found that plaintiffs have standing to challenge the ban on military spending for sex reassignment surgery and enjoined the Sex Reassignment Surgical Directive as well as the Retention and Accession Directives, pending final resolution of the lawsuit. Washington Post reports on the decision.

Source: http://lslink.info/?c=27Bt

Court Refuses To Dismiss Constitutional Challenges To City’s Civil Rights Law

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In Country Mill Farms v. City of East Lansing, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 191658 (WD MI, Nov. 16, 2017), a Michigan federal district court refused to dismiss a number of plaintiff’s constitutional challenges to a city’s civil rights ordinance. Vendor Guidelines for East Lansing’s Farmers’ Market required vendors to comply with the civil rights ordinance as a general business practice. Country Mill Farms was denied a vendor permit because, while it hosts weddings at its orchard, it refuses on religious grounds to host same-sex weddings.  It announced its policy in a Facebook post.The court allowed Country Mill to move ahead with an overbreadth challenge to a portion of the ordinance, saying in part:The City is wrong that the Ordinance regulates only conduct. The Ordinance also regulates speech. Section 22-32 of the Code defines

StarSpace: Embed All The Things!

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We present StarSpace, a general-purpose neural embedding model that can solve
a wide variety of problems: labeling tasks such as text classification, ranking
tasks such as information retrieval/web search, collaborative filtering-based
or content-based recommendation, embedding of multi-relational graphs, and
learning word, sentence or document level embeddings. In each case the model
works by embedding those entities comprised of discrete features and comparing
them against each other — learning similarities dependent on the task.
Empirical results on a number of tasks show that StarSpace is highly
competitive with existing methods, whilst also being generally applicable to
new cases where those methods are not.

Source: http://lslink.info/?c=VTG

The Mad Science of Creativity

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On October 17, Scientific American hosted a special event on creativity at The Bell House in Brooklyn, New York, in collaboration with Springer Nature and The Story Collider. Watch scientists and…

— Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

Source: http://lslink.info/?c=28d6