Category: News and Views

Talks continue in effort to avert crippling freight rail strike | CNN

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Talks continued throughout Wednesday in hopes of averting a freight railroad strike set for early Friday that could cripple the nation’s struggling supply chain and send prices higher for goods from gasoline to food to cars.

Two rail unions, representing more than 50,000 engineers and conductors who make up the two-person crews that make the trains run, are threatening the first rail strike in 30 years as of 12:01 am ET Friday. Union leaders and the railroads’ labor negotiators were meeting throughout the day with Labor Secretary Marty Walsh at his Washington, DC, office. The talks were still continuing as of 6:30 pm ET, which was taken as a hopeful sign that perhaps progress was being made

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Watch the lunar occultation of Uranus on Sept. 14 | Live Science

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Depending on where in the world you’ll be Wednesday night (Sept. 14), you may be able to see Uranus disappear. (Don’t worry; it’ll be back again a few hours later.)

On Wednesday, the sixth planet from the sun will appear to pass directly behind Earth’s moon, going completely out of sight for three and a half hours. The great disappearing act, also known as the lunar occultation of Uranus, begins around 4:41 p.m. ET (2041 GMT) and ends by 8:11 p.m. ET (0011 GMT on Sept. 15), according to In-the-sky.org. However, only viewers in Europe, northern Africa and western Asia will be at the exact right angle to see the illusion work.

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Instagram fined €405m over children’s data privacy | BBC News

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Irish regulators have fined Instagram €405m for violating children’s privacy.

The long-running complaint concerned children’s data – particularly their phone numbers and email addresses.

Some reportedly upgraded to business accounts to access analytics tools such as profile visits, without realising this made more of their data public.

Instagram’s owner, Meta, said it planned to appeal against the decision. It is the third fine handed to the company by the regulator.

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Parsing Samsung’s data breach notice | TechCrunch

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Hours before a long holiday weekend in the United States, electronics giant Samsung announced its U.S. systems were breached a month earlier by malicious hackers, who broke in and made off with gobs of personal information about an unspecified number of its customers.

The data breach is likely significant. Samsung is one of the largest technology companies with hundreds of millions of device owners — and users — around the world. But Samsung’s poorly explained data breach notice, coupled with its unexplained delay in disclosing the data breach, left customers reading the tea-leaves and without a clear idea of what they can do to protect themselves, if at all.

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Biodegradable Sneakers | Cool Business Ideas 

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They’re known as the first fully biodegradable shoe in the world. BLUEVIEW sneakers are made entirely with plant-based materials, proving that anything and everything can be sustainable if companies are bold enough to make it happen.

When exposed to air, every single part of these shoes will completely break down. It took scientists more than six years to work out a formula using plants to create a knitted upper material that could be used for shoes.

Additionally, the uppers used for these shoes are made from hemp and eucalyptus yarn. It’s a blend called Plant Knit and it’s the first plant-based, fully biodegradable machine knitted shoe uppers. Tencel and organic cotton are also used in the shoe uppers. The insoles and outsoles are made with plant-based foam that’s similar to polyurethane, but once again biodegradable.

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NASA’s Artemis moon mission won’t launch anytime soon | Mashable

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NASA will not slingshot a spacecraft around the moon this week following two previous called-off launch attempts, officials confirmed at a news conference Saturday evening.

That means the team will likely haul the gigantic, 322-foot Space Launch System rocket back to its hangar, the Vehicle Assembly Building, and perhaps take another shot at the moon in October. The U.S. space agency is bumping up against a launch blackout period and can’t conflict with a SpaceX flight carrying astronauts to the International Space Station in a few weeks.

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Twitter is finally testing an edit button | CNN

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After years of users clamoring for such a feature, Twitter is finally testing edited tweets.

Twitter (TWTR) said in — where else? — a tweet Thursday morning that some users may start seeing edited tweets in their feed because it is testing the long-awaited edit button.

“This is happening and you’ll be okay,” the company said.

In a Thursday blog post, the company said edited tweets are being tested internally and that the feature would expand to subscribers of its paid Twitter Blue service later this month. The test will first roll out to Twitter Blue subscribers in New Zealand, with Australia, Canada and the US to follow, according to the company. Users outside the test group will also be able to see edited tweets on the platform.

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Starbucks coffee illegally denied pay to union workers: NLRB | Fast Company

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The National Labor Relations Board has sided with workers who claim Starbucks broke labor law by withholding wages and benefits from unionized stores—the latest blow to its handling of baristas’ intensifying union drive.

Over 230 locations have now joined Starbucks Workers United’s union, helping make the world’s most recognizable coffee brand the corporate face of America’s union boom. Both Starbucks and longtime CEO Howard Schultz have now spent months attempting to aggressively thwart these efforts.

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