Tuesday, October 24, 2023

From Jenna Orkin Jon Stewart’s ‘The Problem’ Not Moving Forward at Apple Amid Creative Differences Ukrainian Spies with Ties to CIA Wage Shadow War Against Russia Comprehensive study of West Antarctic Ice Sheet finds collapse may be unavoidable WHERE MALARIA IS SPREADING Police: Vehicle reportedly drives through pro-Palestinian rally in Minneapolis Venezuelans back candidate to challenge Maduro — if she’s allowed Already, the feds are running a deficit that will reach up to $2 trillion this year. That’s 4% of GDP – in year of full employment and positive GDP growth…a sh*thole country level…not a level for a responsible, mature, honest nation. The European Union, for example, specifically forbade deficits of more than 3% of GDP. Is the UK Giving Up on Solar Power? Yale University, with an endowment of forty billion dollars, is the largest landowner in New Haven, Connecticut, where one in four residents live at or below the federal poverty level. The juxtaposition is unmissable: the city is, as the labor leader and former resident Gwen Mills describes it, a “post-industrial manufacturing town with a multibillion-dollar education corporation plopped right into the middle of it.” And, because of its status as a nonprofit, Yale isn’t even required to pay taxes on all that property it owns. It would seem like a perfect setup for the kinds of intractable town-grown conflicts that roil many similar American cities. But, as E. Tammy Kim reports in a compelling new story, the situation in New Haven has been playing out differently, owing in large part to the unusual political success of Yale’s organized workers. For more than a decade, New Haven’s city council has been dominated by Local 35 and 34 of the large North American union UNITE HERE, which represent Yale’s mechanics, janitors, dining-hall workers, receptionists, librarians, and lab researchers. The council has been credited with pressuring Yale to give more back to the community, including making higher voluntary payments in lieu of taxes. Meanwhile, the union has been growing, and, this past year, achieved a major breakthrough when graduate-student teachers won their own union, Local 33. This expansion has strengthened the power of labor at Yale, but it brings new challenges as well. As Kim asks, “Could the Yale unions find enough common ground between graduate students and custodians and billing clerks to keep the experiment going?” Xi Makes Unprecedented PBOC Visit

Saturday, October 14, 2023

From Jenna Orkin Saudi Arabia puts Israel deal on ice amid war, engages with Iran, sources say Arnold Schwarzenegger Is Here to Pump You Up (Emotionally) More than four in 10 seniors meet none of the college readiness benchmarks; 70% of seniors fall short of college readiness benchmark for mathematics Harvard Student Groups Face Intense Backlash for Statement Calling Israel ‘Entirely Responsible’ for Hamas Attack The Tangled Grief of Israel's Anti-Occupation Activists The Man Who Would Be Britain’s Next Prime Minister The Luxury Office Building That Became a Horrific Migrant Shelter Underneath every mushroom is a sprawling, branching network of rootlike structures called a mycelium. Now researchers have successfully grown these networks into Pop Tart–size sheets that could act as a fire retardant in building materials. Mycelium contains a lot of carbon. When exposed to fire, the sheet briefly burns, releasing water and carbon dioxide into the air, before petering out and leaving behind a black layer of carbon. If you stop thinking of atoms and electrons as minuscule tennis balls and instead imagine any “quantum object” as something like a wave created in water, a lot of the weirdness of quantum phenomena is removed, write Jasper van Wezel, Lotte Mertens and Jans Henke. Van Wetzel and Mertens are at the University of Amsterdam, and Henke is a science writer in the Netherlands. Several so-called strange quantum phenomena can be achieved by water waves too, they say. Cory Mills in Israel to Rescue Americans

Thursday, October 12, 2023

From Jenna Orkin Reality is finally asserting its rugged old self to say that our country is as broke as broke can be and there has to be a painful adjustment. It will be presented as a Hobson’s choice: you can have no money… or you can have plenty of money that’s worthless. What’s it gonna be? NYC felony assaults against women have soared more than 40% over four years: NYPD data Introduction of the Zimbabwe Gold-Backed Digital Token (Zig) as a Means of Payment House Republicans meet behind closed doors to pick speaker nominee A tantalizing detail in a new Trump legal filing Israel ordered a ‘complete siege’ of Gaza. Here’s what that looks like. Someday Robots Will Be Made of Memory An excerpt from the graphic novel “Artificial: A Love Story.” An effective treatment for chronic wounds and burns might be sitting in your pantry: a mixture of honey and vinegar that has been used in traditional medicine for thousands of years. Honey stresses bacteria and fights infections with its high sugar content and acidity. Similarly, vinegar's active component, acetic acid, is a natural antiseptic that breaks down bacterial DNA and proteins. When combined, the mixture is called oxymel. In a recent study, oxymel killed up to 1,000 times more bacteria in a laboratory-grown biofilm than vinegar alone and up to 100,000 times more than honey alone. Bill Ackman calls on Harvard to release the names of students in groups holding Israel responsible for Hamas violence — so CEOs don't 'inadvertently hire' them Why Israel's Iron Dome couldn't stop every rocket strike from Hamas

Tuesday, October 10, 2023

From Jenna Orkin Vermont Utility Plans to End Outages by Giving Customers Batteries Heather Cox Richardson re Israel Fury as Palestinian protester waves a SWASTIKA at anti-Israel rally in New York City's Times Square as thousands of demonstrators take to the streets across the US - while rockets and gunfire flies in the Middle East Environmental agencies look for radioactive materials in Erie, Niagara counties The US announced the deployment of USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group to the eastern Mediterranean on Sunday amid a major crisis in Israel. This represents a 9% increase in ‘self-generated’ reports from 2021 to 2022 in terms of the number of actioned webpages. (Child pornography) The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services is working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help prevent the spread of rabies. Starting this week, Wildlife Services will be distributing oral rabies vaccine for wild raccoons in Western North Carolina. Beginning Oct. 4, 2023, baits containing the oral rabies vaccine will be aerially distributed in Alleghany, Ashe, Buncombe, Cherokee, Clay, Graham, Haywood, Henderson, Jackson, Madison, Macon, Mitchell, Swain, Transylvania, Wilkes and Yancey Counties. Egypt intelligence official says Israel ignored repeated warnings of ‘something big’ The insider: how Michael Lewis got a backstage pass for the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried Dozens of University of Florida Students Injured as Stampede Breaks out at Israel Vigil