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Staffers at Washingtonian magazine voted Thursday to strike, according to the labor union that represents them, after a five-year effort to negotiate a contract with the publication’s management.
In a press release, the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, which is part of the Communications Workers of America and represents employees at The Washington Post, said the primary area of disagreement concerns a minimum salary for unionized members.
The magazine’s guild — which includes staffers in the newsroom, art and digital departments — is asking for a $60,000 minimum salary, while it says parent company Washingtonian Media and CEO Catherine Merrill have offered “$42,500.” The guild called the offered salary minimum “completely inadequate for anyone living in the Washington, DC, area.”
A representative of Washingtonian’s management did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The guild is still finalizing the date for the one-day strike, according to Kathleen Floyd, a spokeswoman for the Washington-Baltimore News Guild.
It’s picture day at the U.S. Capitol.
New House members, who will be sworn in on Jan. 3, stepped off their buses bright and early this morning to climb the House steps and pose for their class photo.
The incoming lawmakers are in town this week and next for new member orientation. They’re attending a series of sessions to learn how to, well, be a member of Congress. They’re also learning the dynamics on the Hill, weighing which caucuses to join and connecting with the press corps.
There’s some fun stuff, too — no shortage of receptions and events honoring the new members.
The social dynamics are already fascinating. This is the largest set of incoming first-term House members since 1992, according an analysis of data compiled by Adam Bonica, a professor at Stanford University, Ballotpedia and Washington Post reporters.
On the steps this morning, it was clear friendships are already emerging. Members stood chatting and posing for photos together after the full class portrait.
Kevin Crowe and Luke Connors contributed to this report.
A grizzly bear and her three cubs were behind the attack that killed two women in British Columbia this month, Canadian authorities said.
Jennifer Balcarras, 48, and her daughter Selah Reed, 20, were found dead in Bella Coola earlier this month.
Officials captured and assessed local bears, and determined via DNA testing that the four bears were “all actively involved” in the attack, Inspector Jeff Tyre of the British Columbia Conservation Officer Service told an online briefing Tuesday.
The mother bear was in her teens, while the three cubs had all been born in the past year, Tyre said. He added that the bears were killed to protect the public, because bears involved in fatal attacks on humans “cannot be rehabilitated or relocated.”
“Our investigation also found that this attack likely involve predatory behavior, which I can tell you is very rare,” Tyre said. “That is to say, we don’t know how it started, but we know how it ended.”
Terry Webber, chief administrative officer for the Nuxalk Nation, said the incident was “deeply re-triggering for our community ,” following a separate grizzly attack on a school group in the same area last year.
San Francisco, the crusading city for gay rights and sexual liberation, closed its last legal bathhouses during the ravages of the AIDS epidemic.
Now, for the first time in nearly 40 years, the city has authorized a new gay bathhouse.
The San Francisco Planning Commission approved permits last week for Sanctum Baths. The plans call for the conversion of a two-story, 7,516-square-foot commercial building into a bathhouse and “adult sex venue” in The Hub neighborhood, next to the historic Leather & LGBTQ Cultural District. Backers of the project, first reported by the Bay Area Reporter, expect it to open by the end of next year.
Sanctum is first adult bath to be approved since the San Francisco Board of Supervisors rescinded its AIDS-era ban on them in 2020, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
San Francisco had as many as 20 baths at their peak in 1982, according to Jacob Binder writing in the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice. The spaces, which typically included saunas and steam rooms, served as gathering spaces and safe havens for sexual contact without harassment by law enforcement. In the 1970s, they became political symbols for the gay liberation movement.
“The baths were hallowed sites of queer community-building and epicenters of the city’s sexual subcultures,” Binder wrote. At first the bathhouses had few regulations or legal restrictions and hosted as many as 12,000 patrons a month. But the AIDS epidemic devastated the lives of gay men and became a new catalyst of prejudice against them. A “mix of caution, declining business, and government persecution” closed all the bathhouses by 1987.
Now, as new drugs for the treatment of HIV and AIDS have vastly reduced the transmission of the virus and the lethality of the disease, other cities such as Minneapolis and San Diego have rolled back AIDS-era policies.
“For decades sex positive spaces were systematically stigmatized and forced out of existence,” Jonathan Ohene, a local business owner and cultural district board member said in public comment.
”Approving this project is a vital step towards healing that painful chapter of our history,” he said. “It’s exactly what our neighborhood needs.”
A judge in Alaska denied a request from Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola’s campaign for information about absentee voters whose ballots have been rejected, as counting continues in the tightly contested race.
The Peltola campaign filed a lawsuit against state election officials last week, seeking the names of affected voters and the reasons for their rejection. It said it needed this information to ensure that all lawful votes were properly counted.
But Alaska Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews ruled Wednesday that the records “cannot reasonably be produced at this juncture, nor redacted of confidential information.”
The division of elections “is actively in the middle of counting ballots. It has active deadlines it must meet. … The timing of the Campaign’s request could simply not be worse,” Matthews wrote in a 17-page ruling Wednesday, that was uploaded by Anchorage Daily News.
Alaska’s division of elections welcomed the ruling. The Peltola campaign did not immediately respond to an overnight request for comment.
Alaska is the only Senate race that has not yet been called. Fewer than two percentage points separate the two main contenders, Peltola and incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan (R), with 86 percent of votes counted.
After Jensen Huang’s stunning ouster as the CEO of Nvidia, President Donald Trump weighed in that former Apple CEO Tim Cook should be the one to take the reins at the chipmaker.
“A Legend replaces a Legend,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, adding that Huang had done a “fantastic job.”
Nvidia’s chief financial officer, Colette Kress, will serve as interim CEO while the company conducts a search for a permanent leader. There’s no indication that the company is considering Cook or that Trump has a say in the decision.
Trump and Huang have enjoyed a close relationship during the president’s second term in office. Trump spoke in support of Huang in a Monday news conference.
Cook stepped down as the CEO of Apple this year after transforming the company in the post-Steve Jobs era from a spunky innovator to a global market juggernaut. While CEO, he was among the tech leaders who courted Trump, presenting him with a plaque on a gold base in the Oval Office. He remains the chairman of Apple’s board.
President Donald Trump threatened Thursday to double tariffs on Mexico if authorities there do not stop what he said were “huge CARAVANS” of migrants on their way to the border with the United States.
The warning fused two of the president’s favored issues — immigration and tariffs — as he regroups following historic losses for the Republican Party in the midterm election last week.
Exit polls showed that although the president is broadly unpopular, his intense crackdown on immigration was not the primary reason voters opted for Democrats. High prices are a major electoral concern, however, and they are likely to be pushed higher by further tariffs, which are taxes on imports.
Trump has long warned of migrant caravans at moments of political peril for him, including ahead of the 2018 midterm election, in which Republicans lost control of the House.
“With the perceived loss by the Republicans in the Midterms – I WAS NOT ON THE BALLOT- the INVASION of our Country is taking place again,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Huge CARAVANS are forming and beginning their illegal march through Mexico.”
Groups of immigrants traveling together are not uncommon in Mexico, where threats from criminal gangs can be a major concern. Reuters, citing regional government information, reported Wednesday that a caravan of about roughly 1,500 people, including many families, set off northward on Tuesday from a city near Mexico’s border with Guatemala. One of the people walking north told Reuters that he hoped that with Democrats empowered — including in the Texas governorship — a new, more lenient immigration policy would take hold in the United States. Representatives from the group said they initially planned to walk to Mexico City, a journey of several weeks, to seek assistance from the Mexican government.
“MEXICO MUST STOP THEM, NOW, and if they do not do so, the Tariffs on Mexico will be IMMEDIATELY DOUBLED. MEXICO, THE GOVERNOR OF TEXAS, THE VERY LIBERAL NEW GOVERNOR OF TEXAS, OUR GREAT BORDER PATROL, & ICE, HAVE BEEN SO INFORMED. There will be no leniency!” Trump wrote.
Trump last week elevated the main architect of his immigration push, Stephen Miller, to be his chief of staff, suggesting that he will double down on his migration policies in his final two years in office.
The post Trump reverts to an old theme, warns of immigrant caravans appeared first on Washington Post.
