St Thomas’ Black Empowerment Student Alliance held their annual Black Excellence Gala Sunday in the Anderson Student Center.

As the final BESA event of the year, the formal event had performances, awards and a dinner for the attendees. The full photo slideshow can be viewed here.

Three Muslim workers at an Amazon warehouse in Minnesota accuse the company of discrimination and retaliation for denying them time and space to pray.

A federal complaint filed last week claims Amazon created a hostile work environment for the three women from Somalia at its Shakopee warehouse. They allege Somali and East African employees were denied promotions and training that went to white workers and were assigned more difficult tasks, such as packing heavy items.

The women say they worried about taking breaks to pray or go to the bathroom because they were under pressure to meet certain quotas.

Amazon spokeswoman Ashley Robinson tells the Washington Post that prayer breaks shorter than 20 minutes are paid and that employees can request longer unpaid prayer breaks.

The U.S. on Wednesday ordered all nonessential government staff to leave Iraq, and Germany and the Netherlands both suspended their military assistance programs in the country in the latest sign of tensions sweeping the Persian Gulf region over still-unspecified threats that the Trump administration says are linked to Iran.

Recent days have seen allegations of sabotage targeting oil tankers off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, a drone attack by Yemen’s Iranian-allied Houthi rebels, and the dispatch of U.S. warships and bombers to the region.

At the root of this appears to be President Donald Trump’s decision a year ago to pull the U.S. from Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers, embarking on a maximalist sanctions campaign against Tehran. In response, Iran’s supreme leader issued a veiled threat Tuesday, saying it wouldn’t be difficult for the Islamic Republic to enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels.

TommieMedia has a new arts and entertainment podcast called The Medium, hosted by ad/PR rep. Reid Neeser and columnist Maddie Peters.

On this week’s show, they discussed Disney’s surge in live-action movies and hosted slam poet Bailey LePage.

The episode is available on can be found here.

Emily Haugen can be reached at haug7231@stthomas.edu.