Saudi and foreign workers unite to strike over unpaid wages | Middle East Eye

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Saudi Arabia: Prestigious private hospital has not paid its staff since May, and refuses to return the workers’ passports and allow them to leave unless they sign a document saying that they have been paid in full. The international staff has united and is on strike despite labor unions/protests being banned in the country.

Saudi and foreign workers unite to strike over unpaid wages | Middle East Eye

Syrian Writers, Artists, and Journalists Speak Out Against US and Russian Policy | The Nation

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A destroyed Syria is the symbol of the state of the world today. The Syrian revolution was broken against the solid wall of the international community, and not only against the wall of the forces aligned with Assadist fascism. This international community allows politicians like Obama and Putin, along with their agents and clones—people lacking all sense of humanity—to take decisions that violate our right to self-determination, as individuals and groups but also as a nation. We have not elected them, and we have no access to any mechanism that can call them to account. This is an unfair system that fiercely opposes democracy. Therefore it must change.

Syrian Writers, Artists, and Journalists Speak Out Against US and Russian Policy | The Nation

1916 ad chides Congress for not investing in pneumatic tubes for first class mail delivery

mostlysignssomeportents:

Scott Edelman writes, “An ad in the December 1916 issue of The Scoop, a magazine ‘written by newspaper men for newspaper men,’ decries the fact Congress appropriated funds for continued mail delivery by pneumatic tubes in New York City, but failed to do the same for Chicago, and insists the loss of that technology ‘would be calamitous.’ At the time, 10 miles of two-way, eight-inch tubes running under Chicago delivered 8,000,000 pieces of mail daily. To the suggestion that mail should instead be delivered by trucks rather than pneumatic tubes, the question is asked, ‘If we are going backward, why not get a wheelbarrow?’”

http://boingboing.net/2016/09/21/1916-ad-chides-congress-for-no.html