Good piece from Josh Eidelson The Nation’s website about what is now the largest fast food workers’ strike in the country’s history. This bit about how unions are adapting stuck out to me:

Along with a shared significant supporter—SEIU—the campaigns in New York, Chicago, St. Louis and Detroit have apparent strategies in common. Rather than waiting until they’ve built support from a majority of a store’s or company’s workers, they stage actions by a minority of the workforce designed to inspire their co-workers. Rather than publicly identifying the campaign and its organizers with a single international union, these union-funded efforts turn to allied community groups to spearhead organizing. Rather than training all their resources on a single company, they organize against all of the industry’s players at once. And—faced with legal and economic assaults that have weakened the strike weapon—these campaigns mount one-day work stoppages that are carefully tailored to maximize attention and minimize, but not eliminate, the risk that workers will lose their jobs.

It looks more and more like the current economic sluggishness is the new normal. This represents an opportunity for unions to become bigger players again.

Reuters:

Finland apologized to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday after its police accidentally put him on a blacklist of people with connections to criminal activity.

Yeah, Vladimir Putin definitely has no ties to criminal activity whatsoever, so I have no idea how this ended up happening.

Hahaha, I’m just joking. I kid the re-President of Russia!

Kirk Hamilton, Kotaku:

The 2013 Game Developers Conference is over. The chatter of the show floor has faded, the bathroom lines have evaporated, and the various stacked hangovers have worn off. The week still feels like something of a blur, but squint your eyes just so, filter out the noise and the music and the glowing laptop monitors, and a theme starts to take shape: Change is in the air. Change for the better.

If I had to boil the week down to one pithy phrase, I suppose I’d choose “We can do this better.” If I was given the opportunity to add a second phrase, it’d be “We can have our cake and eat it, too.”

Really great, in-depth, thoughtful write up. It’s going to take more than one GDC to effect real change but the zeitgeist certainly seems to be shifting. Exciting stuff.

Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News:

A “gate to hell” has emerged from ruins in southwestern Turkey, Italian archaeologists have announced.

Known as Pluto’s Gate — Ploutonion in Greek, Plutonium in Latin — the cave was celebrated as the portal to the underworld in Greco-Roman mythology and tradition.

…

Announced this month at a conference on Italian archaeology in Istanbul, Turkey, the finding was made by a team led by Francesco D’Andria, professor of classic archaeology at the University of Salento.

There’s also a small photo gallery.

Going with some local news today, but it’s been an enormous story in the state of Nevada for the past several months. Sandra Chereb writing for the AP:

A troubled lawmaker whose erratic behavior dominated headlines for weeks and instilled fear among colleagues who once called him friend will go down in Nevada history as the first assemblyman ever expelled from the Legislature after his peers voted to oust him Thursday during a tearful floor session.

…

The historic move came after a series of bizarre events involving [North Las Vegas representative Steven] Brooks, who has been arrested twice in recent months and hospitalized for a mental health evaluation.

One of the incidents involved a sword, and several others involved guns. The Assembly barred him from entering the building back in February, just a week after he was sworn in.

And just hours after he was expelled, he was arrested in California after leading police on a highway chase.

The Local, Sweden edition:

In December, the [Swedish Language Council] unveiled its customary annual list of new Swedish words. Among the words that Swedes had begun using in 2012 was “ogooglebar” (‘ungoogleable’).

The California-based multinational [Google] soon got into a huff, asking the council to amend its definition. But the language experts refused to bow down to the demands, instead choosing a third option - removing the term altogether.

This is all incredibly silly.

Adam Liptak, The New York Times:

The copyright case, Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, No. 11-697, arose from the activities of a Thai student who attended Cornell University and the University of Southern California. The student, Supap Kirtsaeng, helped pay for his education by selling textbooks that his friends and relatives had bought in Thailand at low prices and shipped to him.

A publisher of some of the textbooks, John Wiley & Sons, sued Mr. Kirtsaeng for copyright infringement, and it won $600,000 in the lower courts. In a 6-to-3 decision, the Supreme Court threw out that award and ruled that imported copyrighted goods were subject to the same rules as goods bought in the United States: owners of particular copies can do what they like with them.

The legal principle here is called the first-sale doctrine, where legally bought copyrighted materials can be resold.

Sad news out of South Africa, reported by Sibongile Mashaba for the Sowetan:

AT LEAST 28% of schoolgirls are HIV positive while only 4% of young boys are infected with the virus in the country.

Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi said this was a clear indication that old men were sleeping with young girls - a statistic he said “destroyed my soul”.

Motsoaledi was speaking at a conference, so it doesn’t seem like a full set of numbers was released.

New Scientist:

The contents of this hidden ocean have long been a mystery. So Kevin Hand of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and colleague Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology used the Keck Observatory in Hawaii to look at light reflected off Europa and tease out clues from its spectrum.

They found magnesium sulphate on the side of the moon that always faces away from Jupiter. This side is bombarded by radiation channelled by Jupiter’s magnetic field, and by sulphur from volcanoes on the neighbouring moon Io.

All these worlds are yours except Europa attempt no landings there