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Many Fired for Refusing COVID Vaccine Await Decision in Suit Against Blue Cross Blue Shield

WXYZ ABC Detroit reported:

Lawsuits against Blue Cross Blue Shield continue to pour in, one year after hundreds of people were fired for refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine.

Two people say their religious beliefs were mocked when their exemption requests were denied, and attorneys say the verdict in cases like this could set the precedent for generations to come.

Karla Lockard filed for a religious exemption and was later told she would have an interview with a representative from the health insurance company. Three weeks later via email, she learned her exemption request was denied, and if she did not comply, she would lose her job.

Matt Housepian’s religious exemption request was also denied. He along with Lockard and about 250 others were fired, and the majority are now suing.

The U.S.’s Largest Education Department Just Blocked ChatGPT

TechRadar reported:

Students and teachers at New York City schools no longer have access to OpenAI’s text generation language model ChatGPT, following fears that it may “spell the end of high school English.”

As reported by Chalkbeat, Jenna Lyle, a spokesperson for NYC’s Department of Education claimed that “negative impacts on student learning, and concerns about the accuracy and safety of content” drove the ban.

Simply put, the local education authority is worried that students will use the artificially intelligent ChatGPT to write their graded work for them, making them unlikely to engage with the material, and harder for those grading the work to tell it apart from work written entirely by a human.

If high school students are so unmotivated about the subject in front of them that they’re driven to let AI writers do the work rather than engage, that should be ringing alarm bells to educators not that their system is crumbling, but that the system was never use-appropriate in the first place.

ABC Argues Ingo Rademacher’s COVID Vaccine Refusal Wasn’t Based on Religion

The Hollywood Reporter reported:

ABC is asking an L.A. judge to toss Ingo Rademacher’s lawsuit over his firing from General Hospital for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine, arguing that the actor’s beliefs aren’t religious in nature and he was likely going to be written off anyway.

Rademacher was fired from the long-running soap in November 2021 after refusing to comply with the network’s vaccine mandate. The actor in December 2021 sued the network. His claims include religious and disability discrimination, invasion of privacy and political retaliation, all of which ABC argues don’t survive legal scrutiny.

Rademacher submitted a vaccine exemption request because of his “deeply and sincerely held moral belief that my body is endowed by my creator with natural processes to protect me and that its natural integrity cannot ethically be violated by the administration of artificially created copies of genetic material, foreign to nature and experimental.”

The network says the actor stonewalled the employee relations department during the review process and refused to give details about his religious views, claiming the questioning was discriminatory and a violation of his civil rights.

EU Agrees on Response to China’s COVID Wave — but It’s Not Mandatory

Politico reported:

European diplomats have agreed on a raft of travel-related measures including facemasks, pre-flight testing and wastewater surveillance in response to the COVID wave currently engulfing China — raising the prospect of retaliatory action from Beijing.

However, none of the agreed measures are mandatory, leaving it to individual countries to decide whether to implement them.

The diplomats agreed that EU countries would recommend all passengers on flights to and from China wear high-grade face masks, and would issue advice to travelers on hygiene and health measures. However, the wording of the remaining actions leaves countries with a fair bit of wiggle room. They are “strongly encouraged” to introduce requirements for negative pre-departure tests 48 hours before leaving China, as well as “encouraged” to randomly test passengers arriving from China and sequence positive results.

“Lots of countries actually want a restrictive approach a lot, but scientific evidence is not too supportive of this,” one diplomat told POLITICO.

Cobb County Families Win Appeal in Lawsuit Over Mask Order

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported:

A victory for four Cobb County families in an ongoing lawsuit over COVID-19 policies in schools could mean more classroom support for students with disabilities across Georgia, said lawyers for the students.

In fall 2021, four students with medical conditions like acute myeloid leukemia and severe asthma and their parents sued the Cobb school district, school board members and Superintendent Chris Ragsdale for violating the students’ rights. The suit alleged the students were unable to attend in-person schooling and would not receive an equitable education remotely if the district didn’t implement recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including a mask mandate.

Cobb stopped requiring masks in the fall of 2021. A federal judge in the Northern District of Georgia denied the families’ request to impose stricter COVID-19 regulations in the school district. But after a yearlong appeal process, the U.S. Court of Appeals in the 11th Circuit recently reversed that decision.

Sweden to Require Negative COVID Tests for Travelers From China

Reuters reported:

Sweden will require travelers from China to show they have tested negative for COVID before they can enter the country, the Nordic country’s government said on Thursday.

“The Swedish government has this morning decided on temporary restrictions on entry for journeys from China to Sweden,” Health Minster Jakob Forssmed told reporters.

On Wednesday, the EU’s Integrated Political Crisis Response group (IPCR) recommended that member states should introduce restrictions.

WhatsApp Launches a Tool to Fight Internet Censorship

Wired reported:

Internet shutdowns, at their worst, can involve connections being completely shut, while censorship measures can block access to specific websites or apps. Disrupting the internet is widely considered a tactic to undermine people’s human rights. There are multiple ways people can try to dodge censorship and internet shutdowns — although, there’s no one simple way to restore connectivity for millions of people at once.

Tools to help people get around censorship are increasing. Today, WhatsApp — Meta’s end-to-end encrypted messenger that’s used by more than 2 billion people a month — is expanding its anti-censorship measures.

In particular, the company is making it possible for people facing censorship to use WhatsApp through proxy connections, potentially allowing them to communicate when a country has blocked the app.

Proxies can help people avoid censorship by essentially disguising their traffic. If WhatsApp is blocked in a country, for example, officials doing the blocking are likely to stop devices communicating with WhatsApp’s infrastructure. When someone connects to a proxy server, their traffic is routed through this server before being passed to WhatsApp. The extra step dodges filters and blocks that may have been put in place.

Nature’s Soundtrack Reveals the Secrets of Degradation

Wired reported:

Digital listening is becoming the most powerful new scientific tool for observing and preserving our natural environment. From the Arctic to the Amazon, scientists are covering the globe with networks of digital microphones. Citizen scientists are using open-source, DIY devices like the AudioMoth — a handheld device not much larger than a credit card — to listen in on nature’s sounds. These devices detect sounds inaudible to humans: from low-frequency infrasounds made by elephants and whales to high-frequency ultrasounds made by mice, bats and even plants.

In 2023, our newfound listening powers will allow us to exponentially accelerate environmental monitoring, measure the health of ecosystems, track the sonic signatures of climate change, reveal the existence of entirely new species and even rediscover species once thought to be extinct.

But these innovations are also being used to attempt to domesticate new species. At the Free University of Berlin, researchers have devised AI algorithms to train robots that buzz and hum like honeybees, successfully communicating simple commands to the hive. In 2023, these robots will be inserted into networked “smart” beehives to coordinate and direct honeybee behavior, including the choice of nectar-harvesting sites.

In 2023, the United Nations Environment Program will advance a new framework that treats environmental data as a global commons, establishing open global standards and governance frameworks for environment data as a digital public good and implicitly condemning environmental data hoarding.

The debate over the dangers of surveillance capitalism will extend into the environmental arena. We hope that the use of digital bioacoustics to expand our ability to monitor the environment, regenerate ecosystems and engage in rudimentary attempts at interspecies communication will deepen humanity’s affinity with other species, instead of enabling us to further domesticate and dominate them.

Black Man Wrongfully Jailed for a Week After Face Recognition Error, Report Says

Ars Technica reported:

Police in Louisiana reportedly relied on an incorrect facial recognition match to secure warrants to arrest a Black man for thefts he did not commit.

Randal Reid, 28, was in jail for almost a week after the false match led to his arrest, according to a report published Monday on NOLA.com, the website of the Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate newspaper. Reid told the newspaper that he had never even been to Louisiana.

Reid was booked into the DeKalb County jail as a fugitive but was let go on Dec. 1, a jail official said.

Reid’s lawyer, Tommy Calogero, said that Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office detectives “tacitly” admitted the error and rescinded the warrant, the report said. “I think they realized they went out on a limb making an arrest based on a face,” Calogero said.