UPS Teamsters members are threatening to go on strike if the United Parcel Service cannot reach a deal with its 340,000 unionized employees by July 5.
Unionized UPS members marched on Sunday in five states, carrying signs with the phrase: “Just practicing for a just contract.”
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A Minneapolis teachers union contract stipulates that white teachers will be laid off or reassigned before “educators of color” in the event Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) needs to reduce staff.
After the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) and MPS struck a deal on March 25 to end a 14-day teacher strike, the two sides drew up and ratified a new collective bargaining agreement complete with various proposals.
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Former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos offered to waive $2 billion in payments to secure his spaceflight company Blue Origin a NASA contract.
Bezos asked NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in an open letter Monday to award Blue Origin a contract to construct a Human Landing System (HLS), a lunar-landing vehicle, as part of the Artemis program, offering to waive up to $2 billion in fees. Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX had been awarded the $2.9 billion contract in April, beating out Blue Origin’s bid, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The Artemis program is intended to return human astronauts to the Moon, with a manned mission to Mars planned as well. Though the program was initially planned as a joint contract, it was awarded solely to SpaceX due to budgetary constraints which Bezos’ offer sought to alleviate, according to the letter.
“Blue Origin will bridge the HLS budgetary funding shortfall by waiving all payments in the current and next two government fiscal years up to $2 billion to get the program back on track right now,” Bezos wrote in the letter.
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Taxpayer-funded school districts across the state have spent huge sums of money hiring outside consultants to conduct “equity audits” and related work, in some cases using COVID-19 relief funds to cover the costs.
The primary beneficiaries of this scheme include Equity Alliance Minnesota and the Minnesota Education Equity Partnership, a group managed by a current state legislator.
In the Sartell-St. Stephen School District, school administrators entered into an $80,000 contract with Equity Alliance Minnesota last October, according to a copy of the contract recently obtained by a group of concerned parents.
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Olivia de Havilland, the doe-eyed actress beloved to millions as the sainted Melanie Wilkes of “Gone With the Wind,” but also a two-time Oscar winner and an off-screen fighter who challenged and unchained Hollywood’s contract system, died Sunday at her home in Paris. She was 104.
Havilland, the sister of fellow Oscar winner Joan Fontaine, died peacefully of natural causes, said New York-based publicist Lisa Goldberg.
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