Britain’s youngest female terror plotter has been found guilty of preparing an attack on London with the first all-woman Islamic State cell.

Safaa Boular, now 18, secretly discussed the murderous plans with her sister and mother, using coded language which had an Alice in Wonderland tea party theme.

But instead of cucumber sandwiches and cakes, her sister Rizlaine, 22, bought a large knife to Westminster in April last year.

Boular first began planning a grenade and gun attack on the British Museum when she was thwarted from joining her husband, who was a member of ISIS in Syria.

She passed the baton to her sibling after she was arrested and remanded in custody for trying to travel to the war zone.

Following an Old Bailey trial, she was found guilty of preparing acts of terrorism abroad and in the UK.

Boular made no reaction in the dock as she was found guilty on Monday by a jury after two days of deliberations.

Judge Mark Dennis QC put off sentencing for around six weeks for a report to be compiled.

Boular is the youngest female to be charged with planning an ISIS attack in the UK. Her fellow plotters admitted their roles before the trial and they will be sentenced at a later date.

The women were snared in a “pro-active” investigation involving surveillance by counter-terrorism police and MI5 agents posing online as IS operatives.

Counter-terrorism chief Dean Haydon, of Scotland Yard, said the case demonstrated a worrying rise in youngsters being arrested for terrorism.

The court heard how Boular was just 16 when she was wooed online by Coventry-born Isis fighter Naweed Hussain, 32.

The couple got married in an online ceremony and talked of donning his-and-hers suicide belts to achieve martyrdom together.

Police uncovered Boular’s plans to join him following an airport stop in August 2016 and confiscated her passport.

While on bail, Boular turned her attention to an attack on the British Museum, encouraged by Hussain in “lovey-dovey” messages.

Boular also scoped out the MI6 headquarters near her home, and took a selfie in front of the building, the court heard.

Hussain was lured into revealing his intentions to British secret service agents posing as ISIS supporters online, before he was killed in a drone strike.

When an agent pretending to be his commander informed Boular of his death on April 4 last year, she was wracked by grief and resolved to join him.

She revealed to the undercover officer that Hussain had talked about attacking the British Museum with a “tokarev” Russian-made pistol and “pineapples” – code for grenades.

On being remanded in custody over her attempt to travel to Syria, Boular persuaded fellow Isis supporter Rizlaine Boular to take up the baton.

In coded telephone calls involving their mother Mina Dich, 44, the sisters discussed a traditional English tea party with an Alice in Wonderland theme.

Rizlaine Boular said she knew “a few recipes for some amazing cakes” for a “proper like English tea party kind of thing”.

Safaa Boular suggested a “Alice in Wonderland theme” telling her sister: “You can be the Mad Hatter ’cause your hair’s crazy.”

Mother-of-four Dich responded: “That will be fun.”

Rizlaine Boular then set about reconnaissance around the Palace of Westminster, and bought knives and a rucksack from Sainsbury’s.

She was accompanied by Dich, unaware that they were under surveillance by counter-terrorism police.

Rizlaine Boular shared her plans with her friend Khawla Barghouthi, 21, and even practised a knife attack at her home in Willesden, north west London.

She was shot when armed police moved in to arrest the gang but went on to make a full recovery.

Safaa Boular, who lived at home in the “dysfunctional” family, claimed she had been groomed by Hussain, who she met online through a female Isis recruiter in the wake of the Paris terror attacks.

She wanted to get married and live peacefully in Raqqa, where women were not called “umbrella” or “post box” for wearing Islamic dress, she said.

Three times, she said Hussain urged her to attack the UK – over Christmas 2016, Valentine’s Day and around her birthday in March last year – but she rebuffed him.

Boular, who viewed gory beheadings and chatted about killing US President Barack Obama, told jurors: “Nothing online is real.”

In the year since she had been in custody, she said she had changed and now opts to wear western clothes rather than a burka.

Rizlaine Boular, and Dich, from Vauxhall, south London, pleaded guilty to preparing acts of terrorism and Barghouthi admitted failing to alert authorities.

Haydon, Senior National Coordinator for Counter Terrorism, said: “This was without doubt a major investigation, a proactive investigation. This involved a family with murderous intent, the first all-female terrorist plot in the UK connected to Daesh.

“It’s difficult to say if we will see more females. We have seen young children involved in martyrdom attacks. We have seen Daesh using young children.

“Here in the UK, we have seen an increase in young people, teenagers, getting involved.

“Arrests of youngsters have increased over the last 12 months and clearly that is a concern for us.”

He described Safaa Boular as a “confident, articulate, intelligent and a relatively mature 18-year-old” who had been “quite devious” in the way she hid her plans

He added: “As a family unit they are pretty dysfunctional. On the evidence we can see they had access to a vast amount of extremist material.”

Last week HuffPost reporter Luke O’Brien published a story identifying the woman behind @AmyMek, a massively popular pseudonymous Twitter account followed by people like Sean Hannity, Roseanne Barr, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Ryan Zinke and endorsed by people like President Donald Trump and former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

O’Brien revealed the person behind the 220,000-follower account: a New York woman who also ran a website where she posted the names, photos and contact information of people and groups she believed were collaborating with terrorists. The story struck a chord. Hundreds of thousands of people read it in the days after it was published. It resonated because it’s shocking to realize that the person in the apartment next door (or your kid’s teacher or a consultant you met at a bar) might have a second life as an online hatemonger.

But the reaction to O’Brien’s piece revealed something even deeper and more disturbing about the way U.S. journalism and politics work in the age of the internet. He received dozens of threats via tweet, phone and email in the days after the story published. People published his family members’ addresses and phone numbers and those of at least five other HuffPost employees and seven of their family members. HuffPost’s editor-in-chief got calls on her cellphone from people saying racial slurs. Other people with the name Luke O’Brien had their addresses and phone numbers and pictures of their children posted online. Right-wing sites published stories falsely accusing O’Brien of violating journalistic ethics.

Some people even complained to executives at HuffPost’s parent companies, hoping to get O’Brien fired. He wasn’t. But this story could easily have ended differently. So we wanted to explain what happened before and after the story was published.

O’Brien had a good reason to investigate @AmyMek: Investigating influential people is part of his job. Social networks like Twitter and Facebook have made it easier than ever to become a public figure with enormous influence while remaining anonymous. One especially quick way to do this is to spread hate. Americans have a First Amendment right to spread hate speech anonymously without punishment from the government. But the identities of influential anonymous people are inherently newsworthy. So for months, HuffPost has been investigating the most influential anonymous Twitter and Facebook users that spread hate — and identifying the people behind them. O’Brien’s story about @AmyMek was part of that effort.

Before publishing the story, which I edited, O’Brien made multiple attempts to reach Amy Mekelburg, the woman behind @AmyMek, for comment. For days, she didn’t respond. Shortly before publication, she referred him to a lawyer — who told O’Brien he didn’t represent her. Then she tweeted out a string of accusations that O’Brien was “stalking” her and “viciously harassing me, my husband and my loved ones.”

That was not true: O’Brien was contacting Mekelburg, her husband and other people mentioned in the story to give them the chance to comment before publication. He was doing his job as a journalist.

But Mekelburg’s tweets — sent before O’Brien’s story went up — unleashed the torrent of threatening tweets, emails and phone calls directed at O’Brien and other HuffPost reporters. Prominent figures in the so-called alt-right and alt-lite, movements O’Brien has covered aggressively, piled on.

O’Brien hadn’t published Mekelburg’s address or phone number — an act known as doxing that HuffPost’s editorial standards do not permit. But people accused him of doing it anyway and then published the addresses and phone numbers of his family members, as well as those of several other HuffPost journalists and their families.

On Twitter and 4Chan, an anonymous online message board, people suggested throwing bricks at reporters. “Brick a Journalist” is a far-right intimidation campaign targeting journalists by threatening to attack them with bricks; O’Brien received at least a dozen images of bricks. Andrew Anglin, an American neo-Nazi O’Brien profiled in The Atlantic, even trollishly attempted to brand O’Brien as a Nazi ally (no, we’re not going to link to his site), encouraging his followers to support the reporter who had tracked him for months, even as neo-Nazis harassed O’Brien and targeted his family on Twitter.

O’Brien is a professional journalist covering political extremists. He’s not hiding: His name is on his articles, and his phone number is in his Twitter bio. He knows that receiving threats comes with the job. But what happened next shows exactly what sort of complaints platforms like Twitter take seriously — and which ones they don’t.

When one writer accused O’Brien of “going after” Mekelburg’s husband — because O’Brien called the WWE, where her husband is a vice president, to ask for comment — O’Brien, who had already received scores of threats, tweeted back to correct the record:

“Nobody went after his job, you insufferable stuffed shirt,” he wrote. “I called WWE to give them a chance to respond to info from a source who told me WWE knew about AmyMek. That’s EXACTLY how ethical journalism works. They fired him. I was shocked. Take it up with them, then go DDT yourself.”

Twitter decided to suspend O’Brien’s account — it has since been reinstated —saying his DDT suggestion amounted to encouraging self-harm. (He was referring to a pro-wrestling move, not to the pesticide.)

Many of the people who sent him threats have not been suspended. (Twitter itself uses the term “permanent suspension” to refer to a ban and “temporary locking” to refer to a suspension.)

That O’Brien was suspended but the people who threatened him are still on the site reveals a larger problem: Twitter (which provided a formulaic “taking this seriously” statement in response to questions for this story) relies heavily on its users to police the platform. The company says it has tools to identify content that violates its terms of service and remove the accounts responsible. But spending even a small amount of time on Twitter makes clear that those tools are not effective at making it the home for the “healthy conversation” the company says it wants.

Twitter matters: For all its faults, it is an essential tool for many people and the place where a lot of news breaks. That means it has a lot of users. But because Twitter is so huge, it would cost the company enormous sums to hire people to monitor all the harassment on its site. So it outsources a lot of the initial work of flagging threats, harassment and abuse to the victims of those attacks. That doesn’t work particularly well on normal days. And over the past few days, when thousands of tweets were spamming O’Brien’s account, it didn’t work well at all. No one person could have tracked and reported all the threats O’Brien received. There were too many, and they were blended in with all the rest of the crap he was getting. That means most of the users responsible for harassing and threatening O’Brien will stay on Twitter — or get new accounts if they’re suspended.

All of this gives brigades of trolls and extremists enormous power to dictate the tone and content of Twitter.

That complaint isn’t new. People have been making it for years. But Twitter is as toxic as ever. Maybe that’s because Twitter isn’t actually taking these problems seriously. Maybe the Twitter we have now — the one swamped by harassers, trolls and hatemongers — is exactly the one the company wants.

Travis Waldron contributed reporting.

A woman in Kelowna, British Columbia, is haunted by an experience she had nearly a month ago when she was sprayed by “liquid poo.”

Susan Allan said that on May 9, she and her adult son were sitting in her car at a stoplight when the feces came pouring in through the sunroof.

“While we were sitting there, our car was inundated with liquid poo falling from the sky,” Allan told GlobalNews.ca. “I had it on my face, down my shirt, my entire car, and the vehicle beside us were all covered in it.”

Allan said she and her son, Travis Sweet, watched the excrement fall as a large passenger plane flew overhead.

The actual sensation of crap hitting their skin was something Travis will never forget. First, he said, he felt a cold sensation hit the side of his face and shoulder.

“Then the smell hit my nose,” he said. “I almost vomited instantly. It was terrible.”

Allan contacted Kelowna Airport for answers.

An administrator for Transport Canada told her the government department would investigate the possibility of frozen lavatory waste, called “blue ice,” falling from an aircraft, according to The Globe and Mail newspaper. 

A spokesperson for the airport told Fox News that as of Monday, “there is no connection to an aircraft as Transport Canada’s investigation is still ongoing.”

Allan claims that, as a result of the feces rain, she now has conjunctivitis in both eyes.

“I feel they should compensate me for the injuries. What if it had let go in a big chunk? What if it went through my son’s head and killed him? What if it came through my head and killed me?” Allan told CBC. “This could be a much different circumstance than just poop in my eye, you know?” 

Transport Canada said aircraft with washroom facilities on board are equipped with an enclosed sewage holding tank that is designed to be emptied at special facilities at airports.

“It is possible that a valve malfunctions and allows some leakage of the tank’s content,” the agency told The Globe and Mail by email. “If this happens, the liquid seeping from valves freezes and adheres to the outside of the aircraft when the aircraft is flying at high altitudes.”

The department said it does not keep statistics of “blue ice” incidents, but the Kelowna International Airport told CTV News that it believes the liquid poo came from one of three planes that were passing over that area at the time.

Allan said that her husband fixed her car’s air conditioning so she doesn’t have to drive with the sunroof open.

She wants whoever was responsible to pay for her car to be professionally cleaned, even though she and her granddaughters have already scrubbed it down.

“We used bleach and peroxide and cleaned the poop that was there. Then they just covered it with perfume — so now it smells like Calvin Klein One,” Allan quipped to CBC.

She might be joking now, but Allan is still shaken by her stinky situation.

“All we want people to know is that it was quite devastating to be covered in poop, and I hope it never happens to anybody else,” Allan said.

New York-based designer Kate Spade died Tuesday, the eponymous company she launched in the ’90s confirmed. She was 55. 

“We honor all the beauty she brought into this world,” read a statement released by Kate Spade New York in the hours after her death became known.

The designer reportedly died by suicide. She was found by her housekeeper at her Manhattan home, where she left a note, several outlets reported.

Spade, born Katherine Noel Brosnahan, was best known for her namesake brand of high-end modern handbags that grew to incorporate other womenswear. She was honored twice by the Council of Fashion Designers of America throughout a career marked by cheerful colors and peppy patterns.

Spade leaves behind one daughter, Frances Beatrix Spade, 13, along with her husband Andy Spade, 55.

“We are all devastated by today’s tragedy,” the Spade family said in a statement provided to The New York Times. “We loved Kate dearly and will miss her terribly. We would ask that our privacy be respected as we grieve during this very difficult time.”

Spade was born on Christmas Eve of 1962 in Kansas City, Missouri. She met her frequent collaborator and future husband Andy Spade in the mid-1980s, when both were students at Arizona State University working in the same clothing store, they told The Impression, a fashion publication.

After getting her start at Mademoiselle magazine, Spade turned her attention to her own creations. In 1993, she and Andy founded Kate Spade New York with business partner Elyce Arons, debuting a line of sleek handbags that became a smash hit.

The group opened their first storefront in 1996. More than 140 Kate Spade stores operate today, offering brightly hued accessories as well as clothing, eyewear and home decor. The husband-and-wife duo parted ways with their successful company in 2007, after selling to Liz Claiborne Inc. (Today, the brand is part of Tapestry Inc. along with Coach.)

Spade took a break from fashion until around 2015, when she and Andy rejoined with Arons to launch a new venture: Frances Valentine.

Asked why she wanted to get back into the industry, the Spades told Business of Fashion that they thought it would be good for their daughter “to see her mother work.”

Frances Valentine, with which she was involved until her death, focuses solely on shoes and handbags. Like Kate Spade, its name held special significance. “Frances” is a family name on Spade’s paternal side, she once told WWD, and “Valentine” was her grandfather’s middle name. 

Upon the company’s launch, the designer known for her eponymous offerings added “Frances Valentine” to her own name, she told NPR. She is officially Katherine Noel Frances Valentine Brosnahan Spade. (“It’s pretty long,” she said.)

Celebrities and fashion elite reacted to her death with shock and sympathy on Tuesday. 

On behalf of the CFDA, CEO Steven Kolb and designer Diane von Furstenberg released a statement to say they felt “devastated.”

“She was a great talent who had an immeasurable impact on American fashion and the way the world viewed American accessories,” they said. “We want to honor her life and her major contribution to the fashion business and express our most sincere condolences to the family.”

If you or someone you know needs help, call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. You can also text HOME to 741-741 for free, 24-hour support from the Crisis Text Line. Outside of the U.S., please visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention for a database of resources.

When Texas’ Victoria Islamic Center was gutted in a suspected arson attack last year, several local churches reportedly opened their doors and offered the Muslim community temporary spaces to worship.

Now the Victoria mosque is paying it forward by offering its own property as a worship space after a local church was damaged when a car crashed into it.

About 30 members of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Victoria packed into an auxiliary building on the Victoria Islamic Center’s property on Sunday for a morning worship service.

Abe Ajrami, the Islamic center’s treasurer, told members of the displaced Unitarian Universalist Association congregation to treat the space like their own, according to the Victoria Advocate.

“You can use this place as long as you want — as many Sundays as you wish,” he said. “When you’re finished, just turn out the lights.” 

The UUA group’s permanent home was damaged on May 29 after a car plowed through an exterior wall, its library and its worship space. The car’s driver apparently lost control of the vehicle after a collision with another car. No one was in the church at the time, and no one was hurt in the crash. However, the building sustained extensive damage.

The Victoria Islamic Center is still rebuilding its own worship space after a fire ripped through its main building in January 2017. In June prosecutors charged Marq Vincent Perez with a hate crime for allegedly setting the fire.

An online fundraiser for the mosque raised over $1 million. While the reconstruction takes place, the mosque’s members are worshiping in a temporary portable building on its property.

The UUA congregation was reportedly one of the local religious groups that offered to house the Victoria Islamic Center last year. The Unitarian Universalist movement traces its roots to liberal Christianity but in recent years has grown to embrace many different religious traditions.

The church will use the Islamic center’s building for several months while it determines its next steps, its president, Manuel Zamora, told the Victoria Advocate.

“It was a sacred space,” he said about his congregation’s building. “We have a lot of history there.”

“The Late Show” host Stephen Colbert offered former President Bill Clinton a second chance on Tuesday night after Clinton delivered what many considered “tone-deaf” comments on the Me Too movement and his affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky. 

“I watched on the ‘Today’ show yesterday morning, I noticed you didn’t enjoy that entire interview,” Colbert told Clinton. “I want you to enjoy this one, but I do want to ask you something.” 

Colbert proceeded to describe the reaction to Clinton’s comments on Monday, in which he told NBC News’ Craig Melvin that he didn’t feel more responsibility or think differently about the affair he had with Lewinsky 20 years ago in light of the Me Too movement. The movement has caused a nationwide reckoning on sexual harassment, assault and power. Instead, Clinton defended his reaction and employed a strategy used by perpetrators of sexual harassment: painting themselves as a victim. 

“My question is: Would you like a do-over on that answer?” Colbert asked. “Do you understand why some people thought that was a tone-deaf response to [Melvin’s] questions about the Me Too movement and how you might reflect on your behavior 20 years ago and how that reflection may change based on what you’ve learned through the Me Too movement?” 

“Absolutely,” Clinton said, before suggesting the editing of the interview made it look like he did not apologize about the affair.

“I was mad at me,” Clinton said, referencing how his response came off.

The former president, who appeared on “The Late Show” with The President Is Missing co-author James Patterson, took another stab at responding to the question, though his remarks still fell short of fully acknowledging how his affair with a 22-year-old intern while serving as president can be viewed with respect to the Me Too movement.

Take a look at Clinton’s response in the video above.

The fashion industry has lost one of its most iconic accessories designers in Kate Spade. The businesswoman, born Katherine Noel Brosnahan, was found dead in her New York apartment on Tuesday morning. She was 55. 

Throughout the years, Spade’s name became one of the most recognizable in fashion. The Kansas City native got her start working as an accessories editor at Mademoiselle magazine in New York, a position she held from 1986 to 1993. After finding herself bored with the handbags she was seeing regularly, she decided to leave the publication to design her own collection. 

That’s how Kate Spade New York was born.

With the help of her boyfriend Andy Spade, whom she married in 1994, Spade launched a debut collection featuring six different bag silhouettes. According to the brand’s website, the bags “combined sleek, utilitarian shapes and colorful palettes in an entirely new way.” 

Spade wanted to create the perfect handbag that would be “timeless” and “more personal, less serious” than the high-end handbags available at the time, she told The Boston Globe in 1999. 

Spade’s bags, which have always been a mix of fun and feminine, fashionable and functional, were a hit with the fashion set. In 1996, the first Kate Spade shop opened in New York, and just two years later, the company had reportedly generated $28 million in sales, according to The Boston Globe. In 1999, Neiman Marcus bought more than half the company for over $33 million, Racked reported. Around the same time, the Kate Spade brand grew to include shoes and a brother brand, Jack Spade, featuring men’s accessories. 

At one point, Spade’s bags were featured in the pages of Vogue, which catapulted them into the fashion spotlight. The San Francisco Examiner even wrote that the Kate Spade logo was on par with Gucci’s double-G’s and Chanel’s double-C’s.

Fashion insiders like Anna Wintour and Linda Wells were spotted carrying the bags ― a true seal of approval from the industry. Celebrities like Rosario Dawson, who carried a Kate Spade bag on the red carpet at the Met Gala in 2006, also loved them.

Spade was often photographed carrying her own designs, too.

Over the years, Spade’s namesake label grew into a billion-dollar brand that now includes clothing, jewelry, stationery, housewares and a kids’ line. While she wasn’t part of the brand at the time of her death ― she and Andy Spade left the company in 2007 ― her influence on its quirky-yet-sophisticated designs will continue to live on.

In fact, just this year, the brand (now owned by Tapestry, the parent company of Coach) brought back one of Spade’s designs ― the Sam ― to the delightof many fashion fans. 

Spade didn’t leave fashion behind altogether. Years after stepping away from her namesake brand, she and her husband launched a new shoe and bag brand, Frances Valentine, in 2015. (To distance herself from the Kate Spade brand, the designer changed her name to Kate Valentine; she told The Wall Street Journal in 2016 her full legal name was Katherine Noel Frances Valentine Brosnahan.)

Upon hearing the news of the designer’s untimely death, tributes and condolences from the fashion and entertainment industries came pouring in. 

The Kate Spade New York brand also responded with a statement of its own, saying, “We honor all the beauty she brought into this world.” 

Spade carved a unique place for herself in the fashion industry, bringing her fun sense of style to the masses and leaving a lasting impact on fashion lovers everywhere. 

As many speculated, the control unit ― or that little marble-looking brain ball ― Bernard was shown printing earlier this season was, in fact, for Ford. (Remember when we saw him slip the unit into his pocket in Season 2, Episode 4?) 

The United States Supreme Court offered dangerous encouragement on Monday to those scheming to undermine marriage equality and otherwise deny civil rights to LGBTQ people.

The court issued what many are calling a “limited ruling” in the much-anticipated case of the Colorado baker who refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple: Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Human Rights Commission. The ruling focused on the argument that certain members of the commission had demonstrated bias against religion, and thus deprived the baker of the impartial hearing he deserved. But that only makes the ruling slightly less troubling. There was no outright decision made about whether religious freedom entitled the baker to discriminate against LGBTQ customers.

The Supreme Court did affirm that religious beliefs do not give a broad free pass to violate civil rights laws. And yet, whether intended or not, the court majority’s musings about potential exemptions invite both more discrimination and more lawsuits crafted to undermine marriage equality and civil rights protections more generally.

Religious freedom under our Constitution has always meant the right to believe whatever you wish ― but not to act on your beliefs in ways that harm others. The Supreme Court should have simply applied that principle, as every one of a dozen state appeals courts has done in nearly identical cases. Instead, the Court described the issue as “difficult” and hypothesized numerous contexts in which religion- and speech-based exemptions might be warranted.

In doing so, the Supreme Court has become an accomplice in Christian conservatives’ strategy to hollow out the right to equal marriage. This risks creating what Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg memorably termed “skim-milk marriages.”

The court’s previous marriage equality decisions were emphatic that LGBTQ couples’ marriages are equal in every respect to the marriages of different-sex couples. There is no such thing as “same-sex marriage” ― there’s just marriage, and if you’re married, you are entitled to the same protection under the law as any other married couple, regardless of sex or race. That needs to mean equality when a couple enters a business that offers services to everyone else.

There’s nothing unfair about this.  When you open a business, you have wide latitude in choosing what product to sell and how to run your store ― but you can’t choose your customers. You don’t have to like them, you don’t have to approve of them, and you certainly don’t have to invite them into your home. But you can’t reject them because of who they are, and you can’t be coy about your reason for doing so, pretending it’s not the customer you dislike, just the fact of their marriage.

At least not until now. As Ginsburg said in her dissent, “Phillips declined to make a cake he found offensive, where the offensiveness of the product was determined solely by the identity of the customer requesting it.”

Lambda Legal, together with the Family Equality Council and 11 other organizations, filed a friend-of-court brief in the case, documenting the pervasiveness of the discrimination LGBTQ people already face. The brief detailed the everyday experiences of hundreds of LGBTQ individuals, spouses, parents and children who have contacted our organizations. We hear from people facing discrimination at every stage of life, from being rejected from a childbirth class because “the other couples wouldn’t feel comfortable with a lesbian couple here,” or having a pediatrician refuse to treat the child of gay parents, to more quotidian rejections: at the post office, changing your name on a post office box or being turned away by a tax preparer who wouldn’t do a married couple’s taxes.

Monday’s ruling was a step backward for LGBTQ rights, and for America at large, because it accepted the idea that discriminatory beliefs about a group of people deserve special respect and solicitude if they’re based in religion. It’s one thing to say such beliefs have firm constitutional protection. It’s quite another to say they deserve respect and kid-glove treatment by state civil rights enforcers.

The lives and livelihoods of LGBTQ people and so many other minorities are at stake when we excuse prejudice of any kind. As movements striving for social justice in this country, we all have worked too hard and for too long for the court to defend the honor of discriminators and castigate those who call it out when religious liberty is misused as a tool of dominance and exclusion.

We will continue to fight in every arena and in every court until LGBTQ people and people living with HIV have full equality under the law in every aspect of our lives. We will fiercely resist the coming effort that will seek to turn this ruling into a broad license to discriminate. We deserve no less.

Rachel B. Tiven is the CEO of Lambda Legal.

She’s the Thelma to your Louise, the gin to your tonic and the yin to your yang.

If you’re looking for a reason to celebrate your patriarchy-smashing BFF, you’re in luck. National Best Friends Day is June 8, which means it’s the perfect time to thank her for being your brunch companion, workout partner and unpaid therapist. 

In honor of National Best Friend Day, here are 40 perfect gifts destined for your one and only BFF:

HuffPost may receive a share from purchases made via links on this page.

Apple has announced its biggest crackdown yet on data companies like Facebook and their ability to track people around the internet.

The new tools are built into the Safari web browser on both iOS and Macs and will scramble the ‘digital fingerprint’ that companies use to track users and then sell to advertisers.

Unveiled at the company’s WWDC 2018 conference, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Craig Federighi called out data companies including Facebook, saying they were “clever and relentless” in their ability to track users.

The new features will be enabled in September when Apple releases iOS 12 and macOS Mojave.

How can companies track me?

The first way is through cookies. These are tiny packets of data that are stored on computer and used as a means of identifying us. They allow online stores to remember our shopping baskets, but they also allow companies to track our movements and even the way we behave online.

One of the ways that companies can use this to track us is through the social share buttons and comment boxes we see dotted around the web. The example that Apple used was the Facebook comments plug-in that allows you to comment on articles or on websites through a Facebook-powered comments system.

“It turns out that these can be used to track you, whether you click on them or not.” Explains Federighi.

The other way is through something called ‘Fingerprinting’. This is a method of tracking where companies can create a digital fingerprint of your computer on the internet. It does this by compiling the fonts you use, the configuration of your computer and the plug-ins you have installed. Once combined these create a unique fingerprint that can then follow you around.

What’s Apple doing to stop this?

Regarding the cookies, share buttons and comment boxes, Apple announced that it’s “shutting that down” by issuing a pop-up warning every time a company tries to use those features to track you. 

Regarding fingerprinting, Apple claims that it will drastically reduce the amount of information that it allows to be tracked, effectively scrambling a data company’s ability to track you.

It will disable older plug-ins that aren’t being used, provide only standard fonts and provide only a simplified set of system configurations.

“As a result, your Mac will look like everyone elses Mac and it will be dramatically more difficult for data companies to uniquely identify your device and track you.” Says Federighi.

For better and worse, marriage changes a person fundamentally.

A new study from the University of Georgia suggests that couples undergo significant personality changes during the first year and a half of marriage. Most notably, both partners become less agreeable and cooperative as they get used to married life. 

Researchers studied 169 newlywed heterosexual couples, checking in with them at different points in their marriage to see how they were hanging in: at the six-month mark, around their first anniversary and at 18 months. (A limitation of the research is that it took into account only straight pairings.)

At each check-in, the research team asked the couples to assess their levels of what psychologists call the big five personality traits: extraversion (how social and outgoing a person is), openness to experience (how intellectually curious or adventurous someone is), conscientiousness (how dependable and plan-oriented a person is), agreeableness (how cooperative or compassionate a person is) and neuroticism (how anxious, depressed or angry a person is).

Some of the findings are a ringing endorsement for marriage. On the whole, husbands became more conscientious as they adjusted to their new roles, and wives became less anxious, depressed and angry.

On the less rosy side of things, husbands became less extroverted, and both husbands and wives became less agreeable. 

Interestingly, the results did not differ by spouses’ age, demographics, cohabitation before marriage, initial marital satisfaction, parenthood status or even how long the pair had been an item before marrying. 

That relationship length mattered very little took lead researcher Justin Lavner by surprise.

“I think these findings point to the fact that getting married is an exciting time for couples but is also one that may involve some adjusting to new living arrangements, increased levels of interdependence and in some cases a coming to terms with the fact that the idealized marriage may not be the actual marriage,” said Lavner, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Georgia. 

There’s something about putting a ring on it that changes a person, he said.

“The patterns of change we observed suggests there’s something about the transition to marriage itself rather than other factors, such as getting older or being with your partner for longer,” Lavner said. “The newlywed period may be marked by even more changes than we had previously thought.” 

Of all the numbers in the Marvel Cinematic Universe — 19 movies, more than $15.5 billion at the box office, etc. — the most staggering is the amount of gay superheroes:

Zero. Zilch. Nada.

(For anyone who’s unclear, those aren’t the names of a superpowered trio; they’re just different ways of saying none.)

It’s not like this in the comics. If you open some Marvel books, you’ll find characters of all different gender identities and sexual preferences. LGBTQ themes were kept out of comics as recently as 30 years ago because of the now defunct Comics Code Authority, but since then, things have changed. Marvel had a character come out as gay in 1992. It staged the first same-sex wedding in a major comic back in 2012. Some of the well-known characters that appear in the movie franchise count themselves as queer on paper, including MCU staple villain Loki.

None of that, however, is confirmed on-screen. It’s 2018 — Pride month, no less— and we’re still wondering whether or not Marvel is done erasing queer characters.

Now, we should clarify: There are allegedly some LGBTQ characters in the existing MCU. As “Guardians of the Galaxy” director James Gunn once said, “I imagine that there are probably gay characters in the Marvel universe. We just don’t know who they are yet.”

In “Spider-man: Homecoming,” a character named Seymour (J.J. Totah) was perceived by fans to be one of such LGBTQ characters. However, Totah told The Wrap that Seymour “was never decided to identify with a specific orientation,” and there’s nothing in the movie that necessarily points to the character’s sexuality.

So really, the problem isn’t that there are no characters in existence, it’s that Marvel has provided no visibility for those characters and their queer identities.

If there are any LGBTQ superheroes or associates, their queerness is relegated to being behind the scenes — or worse, deleted before fans could see it. Some MCU movies have had queer scenes disappear faster than Thanos can snap his fingers. 

For example, “Thor: Ragnarok” actor Tessa Thompson confirmed on Twitter that her Marvel character, Valkyrie, is bisexual, but a scene showing a female lover leaving her bedroom didn’t make the final film. Thompson said director Taika Waititi wanted to keep the scene, but it was ultimately cut.

“He kept it in the film as long as he could; eventually the bit had to be cut because it distracted from the scene’s vital exposition,” Thompson explained to Rolling Stone.

The moment didn’t show up on the “Thor: Ragnarok” DVD’s deleted scenes either.

A similar thing happened in “Black Panther.”

Vanity Fair writer Joanna Robinson first brought our attention to some early footage that contains a moment between two of the film’s characters, Ayo (Florence Kasumba) and Okoye (Danai Gurira).

According to Robinson:

Okoye eyes Ayo flirtatiously for a long time as the camera pans in on them. Eventually, she says, appreciatively and appraisingly, “You look good.” Ayo responds in kind. Okoye grins and replies, “I know.”

The moment isn’t surprising given that Ayo is queer in Marvel’s “World of Wakanda” comics. But, like the scene in “Ragnarok,” it didn’t make it into the movie, nor did it appear in the deleted scenes on DVD.

“Black Panther” writer Joe Robert Cole confirmed the existence of the scene to Screen Crush’s E. Oliver Whitney, and Kasumba herself opened up to Vulture about it, admitting she didn’t know the reason it was cut.

Before the release of “Avengers: Infinity War,” I asked writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely about the deleted scene, and though the pair didn’t know specifics about the footage, they suggested it might have been dropped because of the film’s focus on the relationship between W’Kabi (Daniel Kaluuya) and Okoye, who are married in the movie.

″[There are] a lot of good things from a lot of good movies that are cut because they’re simply not on [the script] and the thing’s running long. I personally don’t think Marvel would ever cut anything just because gay characters [are] in it,” Markus said.

“Black Panther” producer and Marvel executive Nate Moore backed up this assumption in a recent interview with HuffPost around the release of “Black Panther” on DVD.

“What was interesting about that beat is that it wasn’t scripted,” he said of Ayo and Okoye’s scene. “Actually, it was improvised by Florence Kasumba, because what we had always intended, and what was even in the deleted scenes, were that Okoye and W’Kabi had a relationship, which I think is there in the final film but is definitely there even more when you watch the deleted scenes.”

Though a Marvel representative previously told Vanity Fair’s Robinson that the relationship between Gurira and Kasumba’s characters “is not a romantic one,” Moore talked about the moment with me, referring to it as the “Ayo/Okoye flirtation.”

He continued: “The Ayo/Okoye flirtation was something Florence improvised on the day because she was also a fan of the books and brought that to set, and we thought it was a fun moment. Again, that becomes one of those things in a world where you could have a four-hour cut that would be fun to sort of have in there, but as we started to pare down the film and make it as streamlined as possible, it was unfortunately something that went away.”

The producer added that it is “an idea again that I think we can revisit in future films.”

When it comes to queer representation in the Marvel movies, Moore said, “It is something that will definitely happen sooner rather than later.” But he wants to make sure it’s done right. To the producer, the “Ayo/Okoye flirtation” wasn’t enough.

“If you’re asking me personally, and I don’t know if [Marvel boss Kevin Feige] would have the same opinion, I think if we do it, it needs to be an important part of the storytelling, and I think the Ayo flirtation almost wouldn’t be enough for me,” he said. “I think there are ways to make that a bigger character story than just a throwaway because it hasn’t happened before, so it is important.” 

To the producer, having queer representation doesn’t mean “it has to be what the movie is about,” but “it has to be part of the character that we can explore a little bit, because you don’t get to see it a lot.”

“I’m always for telling the best version of the story and not the fastest version of the story, and it’s something very personal to me to get right, frankly,” Moore said.

Writers Markus and McFeely similarly said they would “love it” if there was more representation moving forward, so like Moore suggested, perhaps that will happen “sooner rather than later.” 

But with so many LGBTQ characters allegedly waiting behind the scenes, in this case, seeing is believing.

 #TheFutureIsQueer is HuffPost’s monthlong celebration of queerness, not just as an identity but as action in the world. Find all of our Pride Month coverage here.