BaldProphet

Droves of police officers descended on UC Santa Cruz early Friday morning, initiating a standoff with pro-Palestinian supporters, who have blocked off the campus' main entrance since Tuesday.

More than 1,500 graduate students, teaching assistants and researchers are expected to walk off the job at UC Santa Cruz today, launching the first labor strike over the University of California’s response to pro-Palestinian protests in the past month.

Workers will picket from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the two main roads leading into campus, disrupting package deliveries and transit into the university that’s become a hotbed for labor activity in the past few years.

The union, UAW 4811, won approval from its members last week to call for strikes at select campuses throughout the UC.

While many work stoppages are over pay and benefits, this one is in response to the union’s anger over the UC’s use of police to clear overnight encampments in support of Palestinians that propped up at multiple campuses. Some union members took part in those protests. The largely peaceful demonstrations sought to put pressure on the university to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, divest from weapons companies and cut various other economic ties to Israel. After Hamas, which governs Gaza, killed an estimated 1,200 people in Israel on Oct. 7, the country waged a military campaign in Gaza that has killed an estimated 35,000 Palestinians.

Days after police swept the encampments at UCLA and arrested scores of protesters, the union filed an unfair labor practice violation with a state labor relations agency. The union filed similar violations after police cleared encampments at UC San Diego and UC Irvine that also led to arrests of protesters.

Critical thinking and open debate are pillars of scientific and medical research. Yet experienced professionals are increasingly scared to openly discuss their views on the treatment of children questioning their gender identity.

This was the conclusion drawn by Hilary Cass in her review of gender identity services for children this week, which warned that a toxic debate had resulted in a culture of fear.

Some said they had been deterred from pursuing what they believed to be crucial studies, saying that merely entering the arena would put their reputation at risk. Others spoke of abuse on social media, academic conferences being shut down, biases in publishing and the personal cost of speaking out.

“In most areas of health, medical researchers have freedom to answer questions to problems without fear of judgment,” said Dr Channa Jayasena, a consultant in reproductive endocrinology at Imperial College London. “I’ve never quite known a field where the risks are also in how you’re seen and your beliefs. You have to be careful about what you say both in and out of the workplace.”

Her conclusion was echoed by doctors, academic researchers and scientists, who have said this climate has had a chilling effect on research in an area that is in desperate need of better evidence.

In the two years I've been writing about Americans' changing relationship to work, there's one theme that's come up over and over again: loyalty. Whether my stories are about quiet quitting, or job-hopping, or leveraging a job offer from a competitor to force your boss to give you a raise, readers seem to divide into two groups. On one side are the bosses and tenured employees, the boomers and Gen Xers. Kids these days, they gripe. Do they have no loyalty? On the other side are the younger rank-and-file employees, the millennials and Gen Zers, who feel equally aggrieved. Why should I be loyal to my company when my company isn't loyal to me?

I knew it would happen again the other month, when I was reporting on white-collar workers who secretly juggle multiple full-time jobs. Overemployment, as the phenomenon is known, violates society's implicit norms of loyalty to one's employer more flagrantly than anything else I've encountered. But when I asked these overemployed professionals whether they felt bad that they were essentially cheating on their bosses, they were unapologetic. "My parents told me, 'Don't switch companies, grow in one company, be loyal to one company, and they'll be loyal to you,'" one guy told me. "That may have been true in their days, but it definitely isn't today anymore."

On Windows 10, I often have a problem where the laptop will charge and then stop charging and then charge again with one second intervals. I've updated the firmware to the latest version and the issue persists. I'm not sure if this is caused by the charger, internal hardware, or is a Windows bug.

Anyone else experience this?

“We are not... unilaterally reopening communities.”

The first link was through MSN, my bad. Here's the link directly from The Verge.