Month: October 2019

The longest auto workers’ strike in 50 years is officially over.

General Motors employees voted overwhelmingly in favor of a deal struck by the United Auto Workers union and company executives. Nearly 48,000 workers who were on strike will return to work on Saturday.

The vote ends a painful work stoppage that has lasted six weeks, costing GM nearly $2 billion in lost production and employees nearly $1 billion in lost wages.

“Our members not only joined together in solidarity but felt the support of their whole community throughout this important stand,” Terry Dittes, the lead UAW negotiator at GM, …

Wildfires once again ignited this week across California, with conditions for more severe blazes remaining high. Utilities are responding by shutting off power to their customers, with blackouts in many parts of California likely to extend through the weekend.

The National Weather Service warned Friday that “extreme fire behavior” was possible in the southern part of the state and that “extreme fire weather conditions are likely” in the interior of Northern California through the weekend.

The largest blaze is the Kincaid Fire in Sonoma County, which has burned through more than 21,900 acres so far and …

Facebook’s News section, which launches Friday, is a big deal for newspapers, because Facebook is finally going to start paying them for their work.

It is also an interesting, tacit admission from Facebook: The best way for Facebook to act like a newspaper, it turns out, is for Facebook to actually behave like a newspaper.

Facebook isn’t changing its main “News Feed” — an almost-anything-goes jumble of dog pictures, rants from your uncle, and whatever news stories you and your friends want to share with each other. That one is run almost entirely by Facebook software, powered by free …

Come winter, it seems like you’re never more than 10 feet away from a puffer coat. People run down subway stairs bundled into jackets that look like duvets with sleeves. Restaurants are packed with puffy jackets thrown over the backs of chairs, sleeves poking out into the aisles. They’re found in Costco next to the paper towels and in Balenciaga next to the $900 fanny packs. Moms wear them, Rihanna has one the size of a Christian tent revival, and in South Korea, it’s the mark of class divide.

Down coats never go out of style, but they had …

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Trump ends Turkey sanctions

• President Trump announced that he would be lifting the sanctions against Turkey on Wednesday. [Washington Post / Felicia Sonmez and David Nakamura]
• Sanctions were first imposed against Turkey as a congressional response to Turkish “Operation Peace Spring” into northern Syria to establish a safe zone and eliminate Kurdish forces. Trump initially supported the sanctions if “Turkish leaders

Not to be outdone by their House counterparts, Senate Republicans are piling onto attacks about the process behind Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, the latest GOP attempt to derail the focus on the substance of the probe itself.

Trump ally and Senate Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham, who’s at the forefront of this push in the upper chamber, introduced a resolution on Thursday that condemns the House inquiry and its interviews with impeachment witnesses behind closed doors. The resolution, which has 41 Republican cosponsors, also urges the House to hold a formal vote to initiate an impeachment inquiry, a move that could give …

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg went to Washington this week to convince Congress that it’s a good idea to let his company launch its own global currency.

The new payment system — Libra — would purportedly solve a few problems. First, it’s meant to benefit the many “unbanked” people around the world — those who are they don’t have access to a bank account or can’t use the one they have because the fees are too high. Second, transferring money from country to country is currently quite expensive and Libra wants to cut out those fees. And third, most transactions …

The fifth Democratic presidential debate is set to take place on November 20 in the Atlanta area, and will be hosted by MSNBC and The Washington Post. It could feature the smallest slate of candidates yet, and will be a crucial opportunity for top-tier contenders to further establish themselves as the early primaries approach.

The debate is expected to air on MSNBC and Radio One, and stream live on MSNBC.com and WashingtonPost.com. Since the criteria for making the stage is significantly tougher than that of past debates, the pool of candidates who’ll participate is expected to narrow some.

Thus …

Pete Buttigieg wants women to know that he is an ally. That he gets their frustration over the gender pay gap. That he knows what consent means and what the “motherhood penalty” is all about.

On Thursday, he released a 26-page agenda focused entirely on women’s rights. It’s one of the most detailed plans focused on women so far in the Democratic primary.

Much of the agenda includes promises that other candidates have already made, such as guaranteeing 12 weeks of paid leave to new parents and endorsing the Equal Rights Amendment. But he goes even further than others in …

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Google’s big milestone in quantum computing

• Google claims their experimental quantum processor computed a problem that would have taken any other supercomputer thousands of years. [AP News / Rachel Lerman and Matt O’Brien]
• A newly released paper revealed that Google’s 54-qubit computer was able to complete a task in 200 seconds that Google estimated would take over 10,000 years on non-quantum