By this weekend, tens of thousands of private sector workers could be on strike—a genuinely exciting moment for labor.

Science can find a cure for our diseases, but not for our societal ills. Almost 95 percent of those over 65 in the United States have received at least one dose. This is a remarkable number, given that polling has shown that this age group is prone to online misinformation, heavily represented among Fox News viewers, and more likely to vote Republican. Clearly, misinformation is not destiny. Second, reality has refuted dire predictions about how Americans would respond to vaccine mandates. In a poll in September, 72 percent of the unvaccinated said they would quit if forced to be vaccinated for work. There were news articles warning of mass resignations. When large employers, school districts, and hospital systems did finally mandate vaccines, people subject to mandates got vaccinated, overwhelmingly. After United Airlines mandated vaccines, there were only 232 holdouts among 67,000 employees. Among about 10,000 employees in state-operated health care facilities in North Carolina, only 16 were fired for noncompliance. The remarkable success of vaccine mandates shows that for many, it is not firm ideological commitments that have kept everyone from getting vaccinated, and that the stubborn, unpersuadable holdouts may be much smaller than we imagine.

Ian Brackenbury Channell was paid $16,000 a year to provide ‘acts of wizardry’ for the city of Christchurch

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich observed Wednesday that with employees in industries across the spectrum set to strike in the coming days following corporate leaders' failure to meet their demands for fair pay and working conditions, the U.S. is closer than it has been in decades to experiencing a general strike. "You might say workers have declared a national general strike until they get better pay and improved working conditions," wrote Reich in The Guardian. "No one calls it a general strike. But in its own disorganized way it's related to the organized strikes breaking out across the land — Hollywood TV and film crews, John Deere workers, Alabama coal miners, Nabisco workers, Kellogg workers, nurses in California, healthcare workers in Buffalo." Labor advocates are calling the nationwide show of union power and worker solidarity "Striketober," as work stoppages across numerous industries are expected in the coming hours and days if unions' demands aren't met.

Attendees at a Wednesday night Virginia rally for the state's Republican ticket recitedthe Pledge of Allegiance to a flag allegedly flown during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot (which they claimed to be a "peaceful" event).

Is it the function of an armed robot dog that raises eyebrows, or its form? Or is it the non-zero possibility that the latest privacy policy update might cause it to accidentally shoot us?

Black students were suspended from their high school for planning a protest after another group of students came to school waving a Confederate flag.Last week, a group of students at Coosa High School in Rome, Ga., were filmed waving the Confederate flag and hurling racial slurs.

A new report details how the moderate Arizona Democratic Senator has increasingly alienated long-time friends and political allies.

A fundamental difference between the immune responses generated by vaccines and natural infection is their specificity. In a natural infection, whole SARS-CoV-2 viruses infect cells in the respiratory tract. Responding immune cells can target any number of facets of those whole viruses. This creates a relatively large diversity of antibodies that bind to different bits of SARS-CoV-2. The vaccines, meanwhile, only offer to the immune system key snippets of SARS-CoV-2—namely the virus's spike protein. This is the protein that SARS-CoV-2 uses to enter human cells, and it's a key target of neutralizing antibodies. All antibodies in vaccinated people will target the spike protein. Though vaccinated people have less antibody diversity than previously infected people, they have high levels of highly targeted antibodies. Think of it as the difference between hunting a tiny virus with a shotgun and a sniper rifle.

The discovery of this massive structure beneath Réunion nearly coincides with another recent discovery, reported in November, that found additional structures in the plumes under Africa. Taken together, the two findings represent a significant scientific advance: They suggest that plumes can be more idiosyncratic, and can have more elaborate backstories, than traditional models presumed.

James Mault was caught on film attacking officers during the Jan. 6 attack and lost his civilian job. So he rejoined the military while under FBI investigation.

The 22-year-old convinced security and players he was a recruit, and wound up square in the Alabama upset celebration. Thanks to some quick-thinking bravado, Alex Sunderland convinced Aggies’ security and players alike that he was a kicker recruit—and even got a celebratory photo with Jimbo Fisher.

Three employees died after a shooting at a postal carrier facility in Memphis' Orange Mound neighborhood Tuesday afternoon. Among the dead at the United States Postal Service facility is the suspected shooter, who died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, said Lisa-Anne Culp, a spokesperson for the FBI. Neither Culp, nor Susan Link, a postal inspector for U.S. Postal Inspection Service, described any additional injuries. The two appeared at a brief press conference a few hours after the shooting and took no questions. The FBI has responded to a Memphis post office shooting Tuesday, in part because the office is a federal building, where FBI has jurisdiction.

A delivery driver overturned a truck carrying flammables when they took their hands off the wheel to gesture striking workers, the UCFW said.

A wide range of parties in the Czech Republic banded together despite their differences to oppose Andrej Babis, the country’s populist prime minister. Opposition parties in Hungary are hoping to duplicate the feat.

Beginning in the 1970s, the United States began an experiment in mass imprisonment. Supporters argued that harsh punishments such as imprisonment reduce crime by deterring inmates from reoffending. Skeptics argued that imprisonment may have a criminogenic effect. The skeptics were right. Previous narrative reviews and meta-analyses concluded that the overall effect of imprisonment is null. Based on a much larger meta-analysis of 116 studies, the current analysis shows that custodial sanctions have no effect on reoffending or slightly increase it when compared with the effects of noncustodial sanctions such as probation. This finding is robust regardless of variations in methodological rigor, types of sanctions examined, and sociodemographic characteristics of samples. All sophisticated assessments of the research have independently reached the same conclusion. The null effect of custodial compared with noncustodial sanctions is considered a “criminological fact.” Incarceration cannot be justified on the grounds it affords public safety by decreasing recidivism. Prisons are unlikely to reduce reoffending unless they can be transformed into people-changing institutions on the basis of available evidence on what works organizationally to reform offenders.

I would sooner get stabbed again than have someone make a podcast about me

Missouri's governor promises to seek prosecution of a reporter and news outlet that discovered a privacy flaw in a state website. On Tuesday, a reporter with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch alerted the state that Social Security numbers of school teachers and administrators were vulnerable to public exposure due to flaws on a website maintained by Missouri’s department of education. The newspaper agreed to hold off publishing any story while the department fixed the problem and protected the private information of teachers around the state. But by Thursday, Gov. Mike Parson was labeling the Post-Dispatch reporter a “hacker” and vowing to seek criminal prosecution. “The state does not take this matter lightly,” Parson said Thursday at a hastily called press conference. He refused to take questions afterward. Parson said he had referred the matter to the Cole County Prosecutor and has asked the Missouri State Highway Patrol to investigate. “This administration is standing up against any and all perpetrators who attempt to steal personal information and harm Missourians,” he said. According to the Post-Dispatch, one of its reporters discovered the flaw in a web application allowing the public to search teacher certifications and credentials. No private information was publicly visible, but teacher Social Security numbers were contained in HTML source code of the pages.

[screaming internally]

Candy corn bratwurst is here … and it's "slightly sweet & not scary at all."