Link Roundup April 2021

Fired, interrogated, disciplined: Amazon warehouse organizers allege year of retaliation

Labor experts said that the surge in such charges reflects a dramatic increase in organizing among a small but vocal portion of Amazon’s 500,000 warehouse workers across North America during a coronavirus-led boom in online retail, leading to record sales and an almost 200 percent increase in profits for Amazon.

Google Promises Not to Muzzle Staff on Pay, Settling Labor Case

The settlement ends a National Labor Relations Board complaint filed by the Alphabet Workers Union in February alleging that management at the data center forbid workers from discussing their pay and also suspended a data technician, Shannon Wait, because she wrote a pro-union post on Facebook. Wait was reinstated earlier this year, although she left soon after.

Stanford Scientists Reverse Engineer Moderna Vaccine, Post Code on Github

The GitHub post is four pages long. The first two are an explanation by the team of scientists about the work, the second two pages are the entire mRNA sequence for the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. “RNA vaccines have become a key tool in moving forward through the challenges raised both in the current pandemic and in numerous other public health and medical challenges,” the scientists said on GitHub. “Despite their ubiquity, sequences are not always available for such RNA. Standard methods facilitate such sequencing."

Documents Show Amazon Is Aware Drivers Pee in Bottles and Even Defecate En Route, Despite Company Denial

While Amazon technically prohibits the practice — documents characterize it as a “Tier 1” infraction, which employees say can lead to termination — drivers said that this was disingenuous since they can’t meet their quotas otherwise. “They give us 30 minutes of paid breaks, but you will not finish your work if you take it, no matter how fast you are,” one Amazon delivery employee based in Massachusetts told me. Asked if management eased up on the quotas in light of the practice, Brown said, “Not at all. In fact, over the course of my time there, our package and stop counts actually increased substantially.”

Document: Amazon Security Staff Reported Its Own Hostile Tweets as “Suspicious,” Fearing They’d Been Hacked

According to Recode, the suspicious tweets in fact came at the behest of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who had recently conveyed disappointment to Amazon officials that the company was not pushing back against criticisms that he considered misleading.

We Could Solve Homelessness if We Wanted

More than two-thirds of the city’s homeless population consists of families with children; a third of those include at least one working adult. Their average length of stay in city facilities is more than a year. The many reasons they end up in a shelter or city-rented hotel room may include job loss, eviction, or domestic violence. But there is one clear way they get out: Only 1 percent of families who exit the shelter system for subsidized housing are back within a year.

The incredibly frustrating reason there’s no Lyme disease vaccine

As Julia Belluz reported at Vox, Lyme cases doubled since 1991, spread by an increased number of infected ticks. It’s now the most common vector-borne (meaning transmitted by an insect or animal) disease in the United States. And climate change seems to be partly to blame: As temperatures warm, a greater proportion of the US becomes hospitable to the ticks. Overall, vector-spread diseases like chikungunya, Zika, and West Nile are spreading faster than ever.

An unholy union

Workers are pulled off the line and into classroom-style meetings in which management delivers long anti-union speeches that can last hours, and have had managers pull them aside to quiz them on their company loyalty. The company created a “Do It Without Dues” anti-union website, and has been requiring some of its contract workers — many of whom are formerly incarcerated and have little power to fight back without fear of losing their jobs — to wear anti-union buttons. Amazon sought to block mail-in votes for the union effort (it failed) and reportedly even requested that the county change the traffic light patterns in front of the warehouse to stymie organizers, who have been stationed at the light for months, handing out union information and chatting with workers.

As daily deaths near 4,000, worst may lie ahead for Brazil

Brazil currently accounts for one-quarter of the entire world’s daily COVID-19 deaths, far more than any other single nation, and health experts are warning that the nation is on the verge of even greater calamity. The nation’s seven-day average of 2,400 deaths stands to reach to 3,000 within weeks, six experts told the Associated Press. That’s nearly the worst level seen by the U.S., though Brazil has two-thirds its population. Spikes of daily deaths could soon hit 4,000; on Friday there were 3,650.

For Some Parolees Facing Homelessness, Communal Houses Fill the Gap

Because of all these factors, former inmates are almost 10 times more likely to be homeless than the general public, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.

French Senate Votes to Ban the Hijab for Muslim Women Under the Age of 18

On March 30, the French senate voted in favor of the “prohibition in the public space of any conspicuous religious sign by minors and of any dress or clothing which would signify an interiorization of women over men.” In addition, hijabi mothers would be prohibited from accompanying school field trips and burkinis would be banned at public swimming pools.

The George Floyd Act wouldn't have saved George Floyd’s life. That says it all

But instead, Congress does what it always does when the police kill people: give cops more money. The George Floyd Act, named after someone who died because he didn’t have money to cover cigarettes, gives millions of dollars to police in grants. And lawmakers gave the police more money right after they failed to secure a $15 federal minimum wage and failed to deliver on the $2,000 checks they promised to voters who put Democrats in office. But, Congress made sure to include $750m in the George Floyd Act to investigate the deadly use of force by law enforcement. Protesters have been demanding to defund the police to keep us safe; not spend millions of dollars to investigate how we die. We know how we die – the police.

Teenage Girls Are Developing Uncontrollable Tics During Lockdown

So far, anxiety has been deemed the root cause of the sharp flurry of unintentional twitching, shouting, hitting and collapsing among teenage girls. Dr Holan Liang, the Great Ormond Street psychiatrist behind the recent study says: “Many girls themselves and/or their parents can identify increased anxiety prior to onset and also as a trigger for symptom worsening."

In-Q-Tel: The CIA's Tax-Funded Player In Silicon Valley

Peter Hadrovic says an investment from In-Q-Tel helped his company, Sonitus Medical, turn a novel hearing aid into a two-way radio you can hide in your mouth. It conducts sound through the bones in your head and gives people wearing it "the ability to receive incoming wireless sound literally without using your ears," Hadrovic explains. Instead of wearing headphones or earplugs, users attach the device to their teeth. Hadrovic says the device could even be shaped like a tooth.

Yahoo Answers will be shut down forever on May 4th

Users will also have until June 30th to request their data or it’ll be inaccessible after that. That includes “all user-generated content including your Questions list, Questions, Answers list, Answers, and any images,” Yahoo says, but “you won’t be able to download other users’ content, questions, or answers."

Arkansas lawmakers enact transgender youth treatment ban

The Republican-controlled House and Senate voted to override GOP Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s veto of the measure, which prohibits doctors from providing gender confirming hormone treatment, puberty blockers or surgery to anyone under 18 years old, or from referring them to other providers for the treatment.

Arkansas governor signs medical conscience objections law

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson on Friday signed into law legislation allowing doctors to refuse to treat someone because of religious or moral objections, a move opponents have said will give providers broad powers to turn away LGBTQ patients and others. The measure says health care workers and institutions have the right to not participate in non-emergency treatments that violate their conscience. The new law won’t take effect until late this summer.

NYPD “Goon Squad” Manual Teaches Officers to Violate Protesters’ Rights

Leading the violent crackdown was the New York Police Department’s Strategic Response Group, or SRG, a heavily militarized, rapid-response unit of several hundred officers. Since its founding in 2015 to deal with public disorder events and terrorist acts, civil rights advocates have objected to the deployment of the unit to protests, and then-NYPD chief of department and later Commissioner James O’Neill pledged at the time that the SRG would “not be involved in handling protests and demonstrations.” The pledge turned out to be hollow. That same year, the SRG was deployed against Black Lives Matter protesters.

Discord will block NSFW servers on iOS

The NSFW marker does two things. First, it prevents anyone under the age of 18 from joining. But the bigger limitation is that it prevents NSFW servers from being accessed on iOS devices — a significant restriction that’s almost certainly meant to cater to Apple’s strict and often prudish rules around nudity in services distributed through the App Store. Tumblr infamously wiped porn from its entire platform in order to come into compliance with Apple’s rules.

Bolivia ended its drug war by kicking out the DEA and legalizing coca

From 1997 to 2004, a US-funded program seeking to eradicate coca in Bolivia by force plunged the Chapare into traumatic conflict. "They would turn up suddenly, at any time of day or night, and start interrogating us — they would hit you or kick you for no reason," the farmer says, recalling the paramilitary anti-narcotics police forces once backed by the US Drug Enforcement Administration. "We used to sleep out in the open, in the coca field, so they couldn't find us." Even though his crop has been fully legal since 2004, when the Bolivian government took the unprecedented step of legalizing production for domestic consumption, these dark memories still prompt the farmer to insist his name does not appear in print.

'We Aren't Terrorists': Coca Farmers Are Relieved Bolivia's New Government Is Leaving Them Alone

Between 1997 and 2001, 33 coca growers and 27 members of the security forces were killed and 570 growers injured. Legal coca cultivation in Chapare was first introduced as a stopgap solution by the government of Carlos Mesa to stem those human rights abuses and spiralling protests. The government of Evo Morales, Bolivia’s former leftwing president and a Chapare coca grower himself, went much further and expanded the legal growing agreement into a progressive social control policy. He kicked out the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in 2008. Bolivia - unlike other major drug cultivation countries such as Mexico and Colombia - has in recent years had one of the lowest homicide rates in Latin America, and much of that is likely due to its progressive policy towards coca.

House Democrats Pass Bill That Would Protect Worker Organizing Efforts

It would establish monetary penalties for companies and executives that violate workers' rights. Corporate directors and other officers of the company could also be held liable.

Alphabet shareholder pushes Google for better whistleblower protections

“Whistleblowers protect investors, not management,” says Jonas Kron, chief advocacy officer at Trillium. “You naturally expect management not to be supportive of whistleblower protections because it’s not in their narrow personal interest. Whistleblowers are always an embarrassment to management and always a way for investors to protect the long term value of the company.”

The Biggest Tech Unionization Effort Is Happening at the New York Times

Almost half the Times is already unionized, including most of the journalists, along with more traditional newspaper technologists: the printers. Now, the tech workers want to join the journalists in their union, The NewsGuild.

BCA identifies officer in Daunte Wright shooting

Potter has worked for the department for nearly 25 years and is president of the Brooklyn Center Police Officer's Association. In that role, she has represented other officers involved in deadly shootings.

US police and public officials donated to Kyle Rittenhouse, data breach reveals

In many of these cases, the donations were attached to their official email addresses, raising questions about the use of public resources in supporting such campaigns.

N.C. bill would ban treatment for trans people under 21

Senate Bill 514 would also compel state employees to immediately notify parents in writing if their child displays “gender nonconformity” or expresses a desire to be treated in a way that is incompatible with the gender they were assigned at birth. LGBTQ advocates fear the bill would out people under 21 who tell state workers that they may be transgender.

Millions of black people affected by racial bias in health-care algorithms

But a closer look at the data revealed that the average black person was also substantially sicker than the average white person, with a greater prevalence of conditions such as diabetes, anaemia, kidney failure and high blood pressure. Taken together, the data showed that the care provided to black people cost an average of US$1,800 less per year than the care given to a white person with the same number of chronic health problems.

There Is No After

It’s always been true that the advice lifestyle writers offer tends to obscure more difficult realities. Financial bloggers recommend investing early and forgoing the morning latte as if thrifty habits could combat the forces that have conspired to grant 50 people control of almost half of the United States’ wealth. Tactics that claim to combat burnout or encourage self-care rarely dwell on how, exactly, most Americans have come to work harder for less money than in generations before. Most service journalism is a workaround, a way of rendering specific and material failures as issues of personal choice. There’s no life hack that gets around the knowledge your government was happy to let a vast swath of its population die, no radical acceptance of such a monumental chain of loss. Reading pages filled with recommendations on navigating a slightly altered future feels like receiving a missive from another world—a final and devastating cruelty that we’d all have to soldier on pretending the loss isn’t collective and omnipresent, that in the end not so much has really changed.

America Is a Sham

All over America, the coronavirus is revealing, or at least reminding us, just how much of contemporary American life is bullshit, with power structures built on punishment and fear as opposed to our best interest. Whenever the government or a corporation benevolently withdraws some punitive threat because of the coronavirus, it’s a signal that there was never any good reason for that threat to exist in the first place.

U.S. races to find bed space for migrant children as number of unaccompanied minors in government custody hits 15,500

Since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) allowed shelters to relax social distancing measures and return to pre-pandemic capacity in early March, the U.S. refugee office has reactivated more than 500 beds, an agency spokesperson told CBS News earlier this week.

What to do instead of calling the police

Fortunately, organizers have been working on this for years. “People who are often the most criminalized and targeted by police” — like BIPOC communities, poor communities, sex workers, and immigrants — “already often have systems in place to not get the police involved,” Misha Viets van Dyk, national chapter organizer with the group Showing Up for Racial Justice, told Vox.

‘Held to ransom’: Pfizer plays hardball in Covid-19 vaccine negotiations with Latin American countries

Officials from Argentina and the other Latin American country, which cannot be named as it has signed a confidentiality agreement with Pfizer, said the company’s negotiators demanded more than the usual indemnity against civil claims filed by citizens who suffer serious adverse events after being inoculated. They said Pfizer also insisted the governments cover the potential costs of civil cases brought as a result of Pfizer’s own acts of negligence, fraud, or malice. In Argentina and Brazil, Pfizer asked for sovereign assets to be put up as collateral for any future legal costs.

COVID funeral reimbursement now $9,000. Here's how to apply today

The FEMA measure was part of the December COVID-19 relief law, which also included a second stimulus check of up to $600.

Planting Trees Sounds Like A Simple Climate Fix. It’s Anything But.

Ideally, trees should be planted in areas that used to be forests but were degraded or destroyed. Planting trees in other areas — such as grasslands or peat bogs — or replacing natural forests with rows of identical species, will result in a loss of biodiversity, which makes ecosystems less resilient to threats such as fire and pests, and potentially a loss of stored soil carbon. Placing tree plantations on cropland risks pushing farmers to clear new land — possibly forests — for cultivation.

An Oregon Woman Says a Police Officer Raped Her. She Was the One Arrested

According to Johnson, who observed the protest but did not participate, the event was peaceful until St. James or another protestor pulled a string of blue lights off of a wall next to the station. “That’s when the police basically stormed that group of people. Probably 20, 30 cops in riot gear storming out, tackled her, hit everyone to the ground around them,” he said. Johnson said he wasn’t able to tell who had grabbed the lights amid all the people. St. James denies pulling the blue lights off the wall of the station. “I didn’t touch anything,” she said. “I was in front of a line of people. There’s no videos of me touching anything. There’s no photos of me touching anything. I didn’t touch anything.”

Muslim ICE detainees forced to choose between expired meals or eating pork, advocate groups say

The groups allege that Muslim detainees at the Krome detention facility in Miami have been forced to accept pork because the "religiously compliant or halal meals that ICE has served have been persistently rotten and expired." Expired halal meals have been an issue for over two years, but the situation for the detainees at the facility was exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, according to Muslim Advocates and Americans for Immigration Justice.

State Legislatures Make “Unprecedented” Push on Anti-Protest Bills

Since the day of the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, at least nine states have introduced 14 anti-protest bills. The bills, which vary state by state, contain a dizzying array of provisions that serve to criminalize participation in disruptive protests. The measures range from barring demonstrators from public benefits or government jobs to offering legal protections to those who shoot or run over protesters. Some of the proposals would allow protesters to be held without bail and criminalize camping. A few bills seek to prevent local governments from defunding police.

America’s anti-democratic Senate, in one number

If the Senate were anything approaching a democratic institution, however, the Democratic Party would have a commanding majority in Congress’s upper house. The Senate is malapportioned to give small states like Wyoming exactly as many senators as large states like California — even though California has about 68 times as many residents as Wyoming. Because smaller states tend to be whiter and more conservative than larger states, this malapportionment gives Republicans an enormous advantage in the fight for control of the Senate. Once Warnock and Ossoff take their seats, the Democratic half of the Senate will represent 41,549,808 more people than the Republican half.

ACLED’s data also shows that US law enforcement agencies were more likely to intervene in leftwing versus rightwing protests in general, and more likely to use force when they intervened. American law enforcement agencies made arrests or other interventions in 9% of the 10,863 Black Lives Matter and other leftwing protests between 1 April 2020 and 8 January, compared with only 4% of the 2,295 rightwing protests.

Neo-Nazis Boast About Participation In Capitol Hill Invasion

One violent white supremacist street gang, which calls itself the “Nationalist Social Club” and is led and was founded by Chris Hood—a former member of neo-Nazi terror group the Base—bragged online that it not only showed up to the protests on Wednesday afternoon, but were there to “ensure white safety."

Jacob Chansley, other Capitol riot suspects apologize as consequences sink in

As a procession of rioters ended up before federal judges, some issuing apologies before they got to court, it was impossible to discern who was sincerely sorry and who was expressing contrition in a preemptive bid for leniency from the court.

GitHub still won’t explain if it fired someone for saying ‘Nazi,’ and employees are pissed

Another GitHub employee documented roughly 50 times the word “Nazi” was used in Slack prior to the events on January 6th. Employees often talk about politics, and some engineers have made Nazi jokes in the past. In a Slack message from 2014, one staffer wrote that “nazis gave the jews free healthcare.” He still works at GitHub today.

People's Expensive NFTs Keep Vanishing. This Is Why

When you buy an NFT for potentially as much as an actual house, in most cases you're not purchasing an artwork or even an image file. Instead, you are buying a little bit of code that references a piece of media located somewhere else on the internet.