Apple Withholding Benefits

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Apple’s first unionized workers say the company is withholding new benefits

Organizers at Apple’s first unionized store in the US say the company is withholding details about the benefits it’s giving other workers and spreading ‘misinformation’

Organizers at Apple’s Towson Town Center store in Maryland claim that the company isn’t telling the whole truth when it comes to withholding benefits from workers at the location. As the company’s first retail location to unionize in the US pushes to negotiate a contract, workers say it’s making it difficult for them to bargain for their benefits.

In a letter addressed to Tim Cook, the negotiating committee says they’re disappointed to learn the company won’t be offering workers at the location some new health and education benefits that are rolling out to other retail employees. The union also says that Apple has been spreading “misinformation” by saying workers would have to bargain for those benefits to be included in their contract.  READ MORE...

Ridiges of South Seitah

NASA’s Perseverance rover captures a geologic feature with details that offer clues to the area’s mysterious past.

Ask any space explorer, and they’ll have a favorite photograph or two from their mission. 

For Jorge Núñez, an astrobiologist and planetary scientist working on the science team of NASA’s Perseverance rover, one of his current favorites is a rover’s-eye panorama of the “South Séítah” region of Mars’ Jezero Crater. 

Exploring the geologic unit was among the major objectives of the team’s first science campaign because it may contain some of the deepest, and potentially oldest, rocks in the giant crater.

“Just like any excited tourist approaching the end of a major road trip, we stopped at a lookout to get a first view of our destination,” said Núñez, who is based at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. 

“This panorama is spectacular because you feel like you are there. It shows not only the incredible scale of the area, but also all the exploration possibilities South Séítah has to offer. With multiple intriguing rocky outcrops and ridgelines, each one is seemingly better than the last. If it’s not a field geologist’s dream, it’s pretty close.”

Composed of 84 individual enhanced-color images that were later stitched together, the mosaic was taken on September 12 (the 201st Martian day, or sol, of the mission) by the Mastcam-Z camera system as the rover was parked on an elevated overlook just outside its entry point into South Séítah. 

Perseverance had just completed a record 190-yard (175-meter) drive the previous sol.  READ MORE...

Documented Slavery Pages Found

About 2,000 pages of historical documents related to the lives of free and enslaved Black Americans from the 1600s to 1800s were discovered in the attic of a house in Maryland. The 200-year-old house was being demolished, and the papers were put up for sale by a local auction house.  Historians and members of the local Black community raised funds to preserve the documents and archive them for the public.

Thousands of papers, some documenting the auction and sale of enslaved Black Americans, were headed for the auction block themselves before Black historians and community members stepped in to reclaim ownership over their past.

“It was important to the community because this will connect the dots for people and the younger generation, to let them know how things were. To move forward, you have to see what the past was like,” said Carolyn Brooks, a community historian with the Chesapeake Heartland Project.

About 2,000 pages dating from the late 1600s to early 1800s were found in a plastic trash bag in the attic of a 200-year-old house near Chestertown, Md., as the owner, Nancy Bordely Lane, was cleaning it out this spring. The foundation of the house, built in 1803 on property that had remained in the family since 1667, was reportedly damaged and the structure was going to be demolished. The documents were headed for the garbage, but were rescued and delivered to Dixon’s Crumpton Auction in waxed seafood boxes, John Chaski, an antique-manuscript expert, told the Washington Post.

Darius Johnson, a Washington College alum, was one of several people who saw pictures of the documents up on the auction house’s Facebook page. After moving back to Kent County from Baltimore, Johnson became part of the Chesapeake Heartland project at Washington College, in collaboration with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and local partners. For him, the documents couldn’t have shown up at a better time.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...