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COVID Lockdown Prompts Fugitive To Surrender
Why Quit Now?
Republicans in the Pennsylvania state Senate voted Wednesday to authorize subpoenas for personal information on every voter around the commonwealth, including driver’s license information, how each voter cast a ballot, and when those voters last cast a ballot.
The Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee’s vote is seen as a step toward what Pennsylvania Republicans call a “forensic audit” into the 2020 election results.
Governor Tom Wolfe reacted by saying, “Let’s be very clear, this information request is merely another step to undermine democracy, confidence in our elections, and to capitulate to Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. It is a direct continuation of the same lies that resulted in the attack on the Capitol, and that have done so much to destabilize our political institutions over the ten months since last year’s election. We badly need Republicans to take election security seriously and stop playing games for political gain.”
COVID Lockdown Prompts Fugitive To Surrender
A 64-year-old Australian fugitive walked into a Sydney police station to give himself up after almost 30 years on the lam, saying the city’s COVID-19 lockdown had left him jobless and homeless.
Darko Desic was 35 when he used a hacksaw blade and bolt cutters to escape from a century-old prison in Grafton, 390 miles north of Sydney, over the night of July 31-August 1, 1992, after serving 13 months of a three-and-a-half-year sentence for growing marijuana.
Desic surrendered at Dee Why Police Station at Sydney’s fashionable northern beaches on Sunday morning. “He slept on the beach on Saturday night and said: ‘Stuff it, I’ll go back to prison where there’s a roof over my head,’” a source told Sydney’s Daily Telegraph.
Why Quit Now?
Research has shown that people tend to quit their jobs after experiencing a “turnover shock”: a life event that precipitates self-reflection about one’s job satisfaction. “Shocks can be positive,” reports Fortune magazine, “like grad school acceptance or a new baby, or negative, like a divorce or sick relative. Or they can be global catastrophes like Covid-19 that upend every aspect of daily life.”
The article quotes Brooks Holtom, a professor of management and senior associate dean at Georgetown University, as saying, “Most people don’t evaluate their job satisfaction every one of 365 days in a year … But with the pandemic, it’s happened en masse.”
Right now, the United States has a record number of job openings, but amidst widespread self-reflection and the increased ability to work from anywhere, it’s a “perfect storm colluding against employers,” said Holtom.
From Our Readers
“You nailed it with the statement that ‘masks need to be worn correctly.’ Not covering one’s nose is a major factor rendering them useless and not stopping spread. Data on the type of mask or face-covering is important as well. In 1918, all they had was gauze masks and millions upon millions died. The materials matter!”
Jack Polidoro
“There are teachers like myself who have asked that we be allowed to offer remoting in to students who are in quarantine, and at least for now we are allowed to do so. However, it’s at teacher discretion, and many students are choosing not to join class even so. Many of us have already noticed that our students’ learning has been more affected / disrupted this year than last. The number of positive cases reported on the district dashboard doesn’t include the number of kids isolating at home because a family member has Covid, or due to symptoms of illness that prevent them from being here, or the number awaiting test results. It’s a significant number of kids… and remoting would have reduced the disruption to their education, if it was an option.”
Sarah Cutting
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