A former United Parcel Service delivery driver demanding restitution for discrimination she allegedly faced while pregnant just won a favorable ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a 6-3 decision on Wednesday, the justices tossed out a lower court ruling that had dismissed the case of the plaintiff, Peggy Young. The decision effectively sends the complaint back to the lower courts, giving new life to a case that has broad implications for pregnant workers across country.

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When Young became pregnant in 2006, she requested a temporary change in job duties to avoid lifting heavy packages—at the recommendation of her doctor. UPS said no and forced her to take unpaid leave. As a result, Young lost her health benefits, in addition her income.

A political declaration from the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, aimed at achieving global gender equality by 2030, “lacks ambition,” according to nearly 1,000 women’s rights and feminist organizations from around the world.

In the document, which was formally adopted on Monday, world governments pledge to: bolster implementation of laws related to gender equality; bolster institutions vital to women’s empowerment; transform discriminatory norms and stereotypes; close resource gaps; boost accountability; and enhance capacities and data to track progress.

“The overwhelming lack of political commitment and financial resources, plain old sexism and misogyny, along with increasing religious fundamentalisms have affected the quality of the agreements produced by governments within the UN and at other levels.”
—Lydia Alpízar, Association for Women’s Rights in Development

But a coalition of groups working to advance the human rights of women and girls say the declaration is milquetoast and must be strengthened.

“The text of the political declaration is weak and does not go far enough towards the transformative change that is needed for gender equality,” said Lydia Alpízar, executive director of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development, in a speech Monday. “We, women of the world in all our diversity, deserve much better than this. We deserve that you put aside your ideological, political and religious differences and fully recognize and affirm the human rights of women and girls and gender justice. Nothing less.”

A joint statement issued by 974 groups blasts the UN declaration as “a bland reaffirmation of existing commitments” that “threatens a major step backward” in the realm of women’s rights. The organizations also decry the lack of transparency around the crafting of the declaration, which they claim is the result of “several months of closed-door negotiations” from which women’s groups were largely excluded.

“[M]any of the gains that women and girls have made are under threat and women and girls worldwide face extraordinary and unprecedented challenges, including economic inequality, climate change and ocean acidification, and rising, violent fundamentalisms,” reads the statement. “At a time when urgent action is needed to fully realize gender equality, the human rights and empowerment of women and girls, we need renewed commitment, a heightened level of ambition, real resources, and accountability.”

Specifically, the groups are calling for stronger language that:

• The attempt of governments to marginalize the role of these groups is an affront to women, everywhere.
• including detailed measures to reform and strengthen public institutions to address the structural causes of gender inequality; ensuring an enabling economic environment for women’s rights and gender equality beyond sector-specific financing and gender-responsive budgeting; and more.
• The Political Declaration must reaffirm the links between the human rights of women and girls and development, particularly as women and girls disproportionately are affected by the consequences of under-development.

Less than a month after the Federal Communications Commission passed a set of groundbreaking net neutrality protections, both sides of the fight for the internet’s future have thrown down their gauntlets.

Republicans are reintroducing previously abandoned legislation that could kill net neutrality protections before they take effect, in a maneuver which is unlikely to be successful, but will serve as, according to Politico‘s Tony Romm, a “new springboard for sustained political attacks on the White House.”

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), head of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, told Politico on Friday that the team of GOP lawmakers who have banded together to oppose net neutrality rules is “simply trying to figure out the facts” of the FCC’s decision to approve landmark open internet protections. That group is currently suggesting that the commission bowed to political pressure from President Barack Obama—a narrative that allows them to transform the fight against net neutrality into “the same sort of drawn-out controversy as Benghazi and Obamacare,” Romm writes.

In that vein, the committee on Tuesday held the first of five hearings on the FCC’s rules, which heard theories that chairman Tom Wheeler capitulated to the Obama administration’s demands when he moved away from cable-friendly legislation and voted to protect consumer interests instead.

However, the anti-net neutrality lobby is up against several formidable opponents, spanning Democrats in Congress, government watchdogs, and civil rights activists, all of whom campaigned for more than a year for Wheeler to accept the most progressive proposals for internet regulations.

Matt Wood, policy director for media reform group Free Press, confirmed the organization’s staunch support of net neutrality and criticized Republicans for their tactics on Tuesday, stating in a press release, “The phone and cable lobby and their allies in Congress need to stop spreading lies about the net neutrality rules.”

Aid organizations and residents are warning of a mounting humanitarian disaster in Syria’s Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp, where approximately 18,000 residents are caught between an ongoing offensive by ISIS militants and air bombardments from the Syrian government’s armed forces.

ISIS launched an attack on the camp on April 1 and was met with fierce fighting from the militia Aknaf Beit al-Madqis, which is described by the Electronic Intifada as “an anti-government militia in the camp aligned with the Palestinian faction Hamas.”

The Yarmouk-based human rights NGO Jafra Foundation for Relief and Youth Development reports that the onslaught on the camp was coordinated between ISIS and the Syrian al-Qaeda aligned Jabhat al-Nusra. According to the Jafra Foundation, numerous civilians volunteered to help defend the camp against the offensive.

Meanwhile, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is based in Britain, reported over the weekend that the Syrian Air Force, led by President Bashar al-Assad, dropped bombs on Yarmouk.

Major media outlets have been unable to verify key information about the fighting, due to the lack of security and access. However, witnesses and organizations on the ground describe the situation as dire.

“There are no definitive numbers reported for those injured or deceased but as of now 15 people have been confirmed as deceased and around 60 people have been reported in critical condition,” said the Jafra Foundation over the weekend.

Nearly 300 U.S. soldiers have arrived in Ukraine to act as ‘trainers’ for the county’s newly-formed National Guard as part of what is being called Operation Fearless Guardian.

The operation involving paratroopers will last for six months, according to a statement by the U.S. Army on Friday.

U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey R. Pyatt tweeted the development:

Canada is also taking part in the operation.

Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a statement Friday rebuking the troops’ arrival.

“The participation of instructors and specialists from a third country on the territory of Ukraine, where an unresolved intra-Ukrainian conflict remains, where problems persist in carrying out the Minsk agreement, is far from helping resolve the conflict. To the contrary, it enables destabilizing the situation,” spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated.

Adding one more pillar beneath an increasingly solid progressive movement platform, New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio unveiled on Tuesday a new “Progressive Agenda to Combat Income Inequality,” calling for universal pre-kindergarten, a higher minimum wage, paid family leave, and higher taxes on the wealthy. 

The 13-point agenda has been presented as “the left’s answer to the Contract with America, which helped propel Newt Gingrich and the Republican revolution of 1994,” according to Politico, which first reported on DeBlasio’s plan last week.

The planks of the newly launched platform are in line with a new report on the root causes of—and proposed fixes for—the current wealth gap, authored by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and also published Tuesday by the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank.

DeBlasio and Sen. Elizabeth Warren both spoke at an event earlier on Tuesday touting the release of the Stiglitz report, leading Bloomberg to dub the DeBlasio-Warren-Stiglitz trio “inequality avengers.”

Titled (pdf), the 115-page manifesto argues that “inequality is not inevitable,” and is in fact the result of rules and the regulatory frameworks—favored by corporations and put in place by elected officials—that form the backbone of the U.S. economy.

“Over the last 35 years, America’s policy choices have been grounded in false assumptions, and the result is a weakened economy in which most Americans struggle to achieve or maintain a middle-class lifestyle while a small percentage enjoy an increasingly large share of the nation’s wealth,” it reads.

Those choices, according to Stiglitz and his co-authors, have entrenched in the U.S.: “a tax system that raises insufficient revenue and encourages the pursuit of short-term gains over long-term investment; weak and unenforced regulation of corporations; a de facto public safety net for too-big-to-fail financial institutions; a dwindling support system for workers and families; and a reorientation of monetary and fiscal policy to promote wealth rather than full employment.”

In short, “The problems we face today are in large part the result of economic decisions we made—or failed to make—beginning in the late 1970s,” the report declares. In turn, “[t]he policies of today are ‘baking in’ the America of 2050: unless we change course, we will be a country with slower growth, ever more inequality, and ever less equality of opportunity. Inequality has been a choice, and it is within our power to reverse it.”

Writing at the Washington Post‘s Wonkblog, reporter Jim Tankersley described the plan as “seemingly designed to rally liberals, enrage free-market economists and push a certain presumptive presidential nominee to the left.”

Two years since he met with a trio of journalists in a Hong Kong hotel room and explained for the first time why he leaked some of the NSA’s most closely-guarded secrets about its global surveillance empire, whistleblower Edward Snowden has penned an op-ed for the New York Times declaring relief that his decision was not in vain and championed those who have picked up the fight against the expansive practices of the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies.

“As a society, we rediscover that the value of a right is not in what it hides, but in what it protects.” —Edward SnowdenThough recognizing that he and the key journalists that assisted him—including Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald—put their own “privileged lives at risk” by bringing the documents to the world, Snowden said his initial worries that the world would respond with “indifference, or practiced cynicism” to the information they contained were fortunately not realized.

“Never have I been so grateful to have been so wrong,” Snowden writes. “Two years on, the difference is profound. In a single month, the N.S.A.’s invasive call-tracking program was declared unlawful by the courts and disowned by Congress. After a White House-appointed oversight board investigation found that this program had not stopped a single terrorist attack, even the president who once defended its propriety and criticized its disclosure has now ordered it terminated.”

Earlier this week, thanks to the firestorm created since the public first became aware of its existence, one of the most contested portions of the NSA’s domestic surveillance—the bulk collection of American’s phone records—was put to an end. But for Snowden, the impact and power of what he describes as an “informed public” has—like the NSA operations themselves—had truly global reach.