“Previous research on teacher strikes in Argentina, Canada, and Belgium, where work stoppages lasted much longer, found large negative effects on student achievement from teacher strikes. (In the Argentina study, the average student lost 88 school days.)
In contrast, the researchers find no evidence that US teacher strikes, which are much shorter, affected reading or math achievement for students in the year of the strike, or in the five years after. While US strikes lasting two or more weeks negatively affected math achievement in both the year of the strike and the year after, scores rebounded for students after that.
In fact, Lyon said they could not rule out that the brief teacher strikes actually boosted student learning over time, given the increased school spending associated with them. A recent influential meta-analysis on school finance found that increasing operational spending by $1,000 per student for four years helped student learning.
It’s possible higher wages could reduce teacher burnout, or the need to work second jobs, leading to improved performance in the classroom. Still, Lyon explained, it’s also possible that increased spending on teachers would not lead to higher student test scores, if wage gains went primarily to more experienced teachers, or to pensions, or if teachers were already maximizing their effort before the strike.”
“Russia under the czars and in the era of the Soviet Union imposed its language, symbols and cultural institutions on Belarus. But with the demise of the USSR in 1991, the country began to assert its identity, and Belarusian briefly became the official language, with the white-red-white national flag replacing a version of the red hammer and sickle.
But all that changed in 1994, after Alexander Lukashenko, a former Soviet collective farm official, came to power. The authoritarian leader made Russian an official language, alongside Belarusian, and did away with the nationalist symbols.
Now, with Lukashenko in control of the country for over three decades, he has allowed Russia to dominate all aspects of life in Belarus, a country of 9.5 million people. Belarusian, which like Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, is hardly heard on the streets of Minsk and other large cities anymore.
Official business is conducted in Russian, which dominates the majority of the media. Lukashenko speaks only Russian, and government officials often don’t use their native tongue.
The country depends on Russian loans and cheap energy and has created a political and military alliance with Moscow, allowing President Vladimir Putin to deploy troops and missiles on its soil, which was used as a staging area for the war in Ukraine.
“I understand that our Belarus is occupied. … And who is the president there? Not Lukashenko. The president is Putin,” said Svetlana Alexievich, who won the 2015 Nobel Prize for literature and lives in Germany in effective exile. “The nation has been humiliated and it will be very difficult for Belarusians to recover from this.”
Belarusian cultural figures have been persecuted and hundreds of its nationalist organizations have been closed. Experts say Moscow is seeking to implement in Belarus what the Kremlin intended to do in neighboring Ukraine when the war there began in 2022.
“It is obvious that our children are being deliberately deprived of their native language, history and Belarusian identity, but parents have been strongly advised not to ask questions about Russification,” said Mikalay’s father, Anatoly, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition his last name not be used, for fear of retribution.”
“A 21-year-old Yazidi woman has been rescued from Gaza where she had been held captive by Hamas for years after being trafficked by ISIS.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said Thursday that Fawzia Amin Sido was freed this week in an operation coordinated between Israel, the United States and other international actors.
Fawzia told CNN that she has been returned to Iraq after enduring years of captivity.
She said that she was initially kidnapped by ISIS as a child in August 2014 when the group captured the city of Sinjar in the Nineveh Governorate of northern Iraq, executing Yazidi men and boys and committing acts of sexual violence and rape against women and girls, among other crimes.
Over the next few years, Fawzia was trafficked to different locations across several countries.
“We ended up in Al-Hol camp (in Syria) before we were smuggled to Idlib in 2019, and from there, we went to Turkey. In 2020, they arranged a passport for me in Turkey so I could fly from Istanbul to Hurghada, Egypt, and then to Gaza,” she said.
She told CNN that she stayed in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip for a year, where life was “unbearable.”
“Hamas constantly harassed me due to my Yazidi background and contact with my family, even going so far as to format my phone [erase its contents] during their investigations. After a year, they moved me to a guest house.”
When the Israel-Hamas war broke out in 2023, she was again moved around frequently – until October 1, when she said an NGO rescued her.
The IDF said that her captor was killed, “presumably during IDF strikes” in Gaza, allowing her to flee to a hideout, from where she was rescued and taken to the Kerem Shalom border crossing.”
“The fighting between the U.S.-funded army of Israel and the U.S.-funded army of Lebanon seems to be another such consequence of U.S. policy. When the Lebanese militia Hezbollah and Israel began fighting last year, the Lebanese government tried its best to stay out of the fray. It reportedly even pulled troops away from the border when Israel announced a ground invasion and ordered Lebanese citizens to evacuate north of the Awali River. But on Thursday, the Lebanese army announced that it had, in fact, been sucked into the conflict.
“One of the soldiers was martyred as a result of the Israeli enemy targeting an army center in the area of Bint Jbeil South, and the center’s personnel have responded to the source of fire,” the army stated on social media. An official in Lebanon told Agence France-Presse that it was the first time the Lebanese army fired on Israeli forces throughout the war.
Two hours before, the Lebanese army had announced that one of its soldiers was killed by Israeli fire while “carrying out an evacuation and rescue mission alongside the Lebanese Red Cross in the town of Taybeh-Marjayoun,” down the road from Odaisseh, a town that several Israeli troops were killed trying to enter on Wednesday morning. The Red Cross said that four of its paramedics were injured, and the Israeli army said that it would be investigating the incident.”
“whether they are open or closed, many American ports rank among the least efficient in the entire world. The ports in New York, Baltimore, and Houston—three of the largest of the 36 ports that could have been shut down by the ILA strike—are ranked no higher than 300th place (out of 348 in total) in the World Bank’s most recent report on port efficiency. Not a single U.S. port ranks in the top 50. Slow-moving ports act as bottlenecks to commerce both coming and going, which “reduces the competitiveness of the country…and hinders economic growth and poverty reduction,” the World Bank notes.”
…
“The problem is that American ports need more automation just to catch up with what’s considered normal in the rest of the world. For example, automated cranes in use at the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands since the 1990s are 80 percent faster than the human-operated cranes used at the port in Oakland, California, according to an estimate by one trade publication.
It’s worth noting that the lack of automation, and the resulting inefficiencies, at American ports was a major factor in the supply chain issues that popped up during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.”
…
“Additionally, the tradeoff between automation and jobs is not a zero-sum game. A study published in 2022 found that the partial automation of the Port of Los Angeles had resulted in “significant gains in throughput, productivity, and efficiency, resulting in more hours than ever for workers.” As with other forms of automation, some job losses are inevitable, but efficiency gains benefit dockworkers too—and the truckers, manufacturers, and others in the supply chain who are waiting for goods to be loaded or unloaded.
Indeed, if maximizing the number of union jobs at ports was the highest value to society, Daggett and the ILA might want to change their demands. Why not demand a ban on cranes, forklifts, and tractor-trailers too? It would take a lot more workers to unload a freighter if everything had to be lifted by hand, after all.”