Starbucks and Union Agree to Work Out Framework for Contract Talks
Business

Starbucks and Union Agree to Work Out Framework for Contract Talks

Connected media - Connected media Workers who have helped lead the organizing said the development had surprised them. “It still feels pretty surreal right now,” said Michelle Eisen, a longtime barista at a Starbucks in Buffalo that was the first company-owned store to unionize during the current campaign. “There has not been a single call I’ve been on today where either I wasn’t crying or everyone else wasn’t crying.” If a framework is agreed to and quickly leads to contracts, experts said, it could be a major development in labor relations in corporate America, where companies like Amazon and Apple have resisted union organizing to varying degrees. “If Starbucks genuinely intends to respect workers’ right to organize, stop its intimidation and harassment of pro-union workers, and e...
Bosnia Was Once Emptied by War and Now Faces Peacetime Emigration
World

Bosnia Was Once Emptied by War and Now Faces Peacetime Emigration

Related media - Associated media “It is evident that people are leaving all parts of the country,” said Emir Kremic, the director general of Bosnia’s state statistics agency. But how many have gone, he said, is not known with any precision, in a large part because it is not clear how many people remain. “We just don’t know how many people there are living here,” he said. For that, he added, “We need a new census.” That, however, is not something ethnonationalist politicians, fearful of the results, want. Bosnia’s three main ethnic groups — Muslim Bosniaks, Orthodox Christian Serbs and Roman Catholic Croats — each worry about losing out in the numbers game. It took three years of wrangling after the 2013 census for the results to be released, because each group wanted to see bigger nu...
Everybody’s Ejected After a Senators-Panthers Fight
Sports

Everybody’s Ejected After a Senators-Panthers Fight

Associated media - Related media Geraldine Tkachuk, the players’ grandmother, was spotted in the stands looking less than impressed. As remarkable as the 10-man ejection may have been, it barely seemed to faze the participants. “I mean, I don’t think it’s bad to play with emotion,” Brady Tkachuk told The Associated Press. “I think when this group plays with emotion, we’re a tough team to beat, and I think we rely on our emotion and it shows that we care, shows that we care about what we’re doing here and about the guy next to us.” Two more players got misconduct penalties later in the third period, bringing the total penalty minutes in the game to 167. Still, this being hockey, that wasn’t close to a record. In 2004, a series of brawls late in a game between the Senators and the Phil...
Apple Vision Pro Review: First Headset Lacks Polish and Purpose
Technology

Apple Vision Pro Review: First Headset Lacks Polish and Purpose

Related media - Associated media About 17 years ago, Steve Jobs took the stage at a San Francisco convention center and said he was introducing three products: an iPod, a phone and an internet browser. “These are not three separate devices,” he said. “This is one device, and we are calling it iPhone.” At $500, the first iPhone was relatively expensive, but I was eager to dump my mediocre Motorola flip phone and splurge. There were flaws — including sluggish cellular internet speeds. But the iPhone delivered on its promises. Over the last week, I’ve had a very different experience with a new first-generation product from Apple: the Vision Pro, a virtual reality headset that resembles a pair of ski goggles. The $3,500 wearable computer, which was released Friday, uses cameras so you ca...
UnitedHealth Cyberattack Disrupts Prescription Drug Coverage
Health

UnitedHealth Cyberattack Disrupts Prescription Drug Coverage

Associated media - Connected media Updated on Feb. 27 to include new company statements. A cyberattack on a unit affiliated with UnitedHealthcare, the nation’s largest insurer, has disrupted drug prescription orders at thousands of pharmacies for about a week. The assault on the unit, Change Healthcare, a division of United’s Optum, was discovered last Wednesday. The attack appeared to be by a foreign country, according to two senior federal law enforcement officials, who expressed alarm at the extent of the disruption on Monday. UnitedHealth Group, the conglomerate, said in a federal filing that it had been forced to disconnect some of Change Healthcare’s vast digital network from its clients, and as of Tuesday, had not been able to restore all of those services. The company has no...
Alabama IVF Ruling: What to Know About the Costs of Moving Embryos
Business

Alabama IVF Ruling: What to Know About the Costs of Moving Embryos

Related media - Related media “There’s a lot that goes into moving these safely and properly,” said Angeline Beltsos, chief executive physician at Kindbody, which has 35 clinics across the country and provides fertility benefit coverage for employers, including Walmart. Will my health insurance cover the cost to move my embryos if I can no longer get I.V.F. in my home state? Maybe. Some coverage could be broad enough to pay for the transport of embryos. “It is likely that employees working for large employers have some kind of coverage,” said Elizabeth Mitchell, the chief executive officer of Purchaser Business Group on Health, which represents large employers that provide benefits for their workers. Would fertility coverage pick up my treatment elsewhere? Maybe, and it’s more likely...
Navalny’s Funeral to Be Held on Friday, Spokeswoman Says
World

Navalny’s Funeral to Be Held on Friday, Spokeswoman Says

Related media - Connected media Aleksei A. Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, will be buried on Friday after a funeral service in Moscow that will be open to the public, his spokeswoman said on Wednesday, setting up the possibility of a rare display of opposition sentiment in the Russian capital. “Come early,” the spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, wrote on social media. But mourners will still be taking a risk by attending. Hundreds of people who turned out across Russia at spontaneous memorials for Mr. Navalny after his death were detained, according to OVD-Info, a Russian-based rights group that tracks arrests. Ever since the Russian authorities reported Mr. Navalny’s death, on Feb. 16, his associates have said that the Kremlin has tried to prevent a funeral for him in Moscow that co...
Rafael Nadal is ready to play again. In America. On hard courts. Should he?
Sports

Rafael Nadal is ready to play again. In America. On hard courts. Should he?

Connected media - Associated media For more than a month, the smoke signals out of Rafael Nadal’s camp have kept the tennis world on its toes, sparking predictions of everything from a triumphant spring on the red clay of Paris to him never playing another competitive match following yet another hip injury in Australia in January. The only thing that seemed clear was that the 22-time Grand Slam champion was prioritizing the clay court season in Europe this spring. Nadal said as much in January when he returned following a year-long layoff because of hip surgery. Sure, he was happy to be back and competing in Australia, where he won the year’s first Grand Slam as recently as 2022, but he was singularly focused on being in top form — or, at least, as close as he can get to it at this p...
OpenAI Seeks to DismissParts of The New York Times’s Lawsuit
Technology

OpenAI Seeks to DismissParts of The New York Times’s Lawsuit

Linked media - Connected media Representatives for OpenAI and the Times Company did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The motion asked the court to dismiss four claims from The Times’s complaint to narrow the focus of the lawsuit. OpenAI’s lawyers argued that The Times should not be allowed to sue for acts of reproduction that occurred more than three years ago and that the paper’s claim that OpenAI violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, an amendment to U.S. copyright law passed in 1998 after the rise of the internet, was not legally sound. The Times was the first major American media company to sue OpenAI over copyright issues related to its written works. Novelists, computer programmers and other groups have also filed copyright suits against the start-up and...
A Doctor’s Lifelong Quest to Solve One of Pediatric Medicine’s Greatest Mysteries
Health

A Doctor’s Lifelong Quest to Solve One of Pediatric Medicine’s Greatest Mysteries

Associated media - Associated media At the Kawasaki Disease Clinic at Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego, led by Dr. Burns, caring for children affected by Kawasaki disease is always linked to the search for the cause. On a recent Wednesday morning, Dr. Kirsten Dummer, a pediatric cardiologist, was examining the heart scans of a 2-year-old who showed signs of a large aneurysm on the right side of the heart. “The biggest question from parents is: How did this happen? How did my child get this? In every patient room, that’s what they fundamentally want to know,” she said. “Year after year after year, they come back and ask us, ‘Do you guys know more yet?’” Dr. Burns, who has continued to see patients herself, said those inquiries motivated her. “If we were all Ph.D.s in the la...