A U.N. fact-finding mission on Iran said Thursday it has “reasonable grounds” to believe the United States committed the war crime of launching indiscriminate attacks. The panel, commissioned by the U.N. Human Rights Council and chaired by Bangladeshi jurist Sara Hossain, built the finding on two strikes on Feb. 28 that killed at least 178 civilians reports NPR.

The first was Tomahawk missiles into the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab. Local authorities counted at least 156 dead, 120 of them children; Iranian state media put the toll at 168. The mission’s experts didn’t call it collateral damage. They concluded the school was the intended target.

The second hit a sports complex in Lamerd, where Precision Strike Missiles scattered tungsten pellets across the grounds, killing 21 or 22 people depending on the outlet. The Pentagon denies carrying out the Lamerd strike and hasn’t released its Minab findings. The White House dismissed the council as “unserious nonsense,” and CBS News cited an unnamed official brushing off the conclusions. The State Department hasn’t answered on the record.

The same report found Iran’s government committed crimes against humanity while crushing domestic protests—that’s a detail worth holding onto, because it’s the part Tehran won’t be quoting. None of it is binding. But it’s a damning paper trail, and paper trails have a way of surfacing in international court filings years later.

Becoming an American citizen just got a lot harder. Over the past year, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has rolled out a longer civics test with a higher bar for correct answers, stricter social media vetting and a revival of neighborhood investigations into applicants’ “moral character,” PBS NewsHour reported on Citizenship Day. The agency has also proposed raising the application fee roughly 75%, to nearly $1,300.

Digging into the numbers, application processing is down more than 75% from two years ago. The rejection rate has more than doubled since September 2024, climbing from 9.2% to over 18%. Naturalization ceremonies, the part that’s supposed to be a formality, are being canceled abruptly, sometimes overnight. USCIS calls citizenship “a privilege, not a right.”

What’s still unclear is how much of this is locked in. The report doesn’t specify whether the fee hike has been finalized, when the new rules took effect or how many ceremonies have been scrapped nationwide. For someone currently living abroad, I can tell you that the ambiguity is torture.

Dictionaries keep adding internet slang, and most people keep wishing they wouldn’t. That’s the tension at the center of a New York Times Magazine piece on how lexicographers decide when a word earns its place (and why the public tends to hate the answer).

The logic of the modern dictionary is descriptive, not prescriptive: editors track usage and record what's actually being said, rather than gatekeeping what should be. The complaint is that online language moves too fast for that to mean much. By the time a term survives long enough to get an entry, it's already been drained of whatever made it fun. Which is its own kind of obituary, right?

Just take this piece, detailing the 6,000 new words (from Engagement Bait and Reply Guy to Goated) added to Dictionary.com. Then again, I guess the fight isn’t really about slang. It’s about who gets to say a word is real. Dictionaries gave that job up years ago. Everyone else is still adjusting.