GM workers ratify contract, ending contentious 40-day strike
ROMULUS, Mich. — A contentious 40-day strike that crippled General Motors’ U.S. production came to an end Friday as workers approved a new contract with the company.
The four-year deal will now be used as a template in bargaining with crosstown rival Ford Motor Co., the union’s choice for the next round of bargaining, followed by Fiat Chrysler.
GM workers voted 57.2% in favor of the pact, passing it with a vote of 23,389 to 17,501, the union said in a statement.
Picket lines came down almost immediately after the vote was announced, and some of the 49,000 striking workers were expected to return to their jobs as early as Friday night. Some skilled trades employees such as electricians and machinists were to enter the plants to get machinery restarted in preparation for production workers to return as early as Saturday.
“It was a good vacation, but I guess I’ve got to go back,” joked Paul Daru, a 42-year worker at GM’s engine and transmission plant in Romulus, Michigan, near Detroit. “I miss the socializing and stuff like that, seeing the guys, going out on the job and figuring out what the problem is.”
4th suspect arrested as UK truck deaths case probe deepens
LONDON — A fourth person was arrested in connection with the deaths of 39 people found in the back of a container truck in southeastern England, British police said Friday as the investigation into one of the country’s worst human smuggling cases geared up.
Police said a 48-year-old man from Northern Ireland was arrested Friday at England’s Stansted Airport on suspicion of manslaughter and conspiracy to traffic people. The arrest came after police arrested a man and a woman, both 38 and from northwestern England, earlier Friday on the same charges. The 25-year-old driver of the truck remains in custody on suspicion of murder.
Essex Police said 31 men and eight women were found dead in the truck early Wednesday at an industrial park in Grays, a town 25 miles (40 kilometers) east of London. Although U.K. police said they believed the dead were Chinese citizens, they acknowledged Friday this was a “developing picture.”
China said it could not yet confirm the victims’ nationalities or identities.
The Vietnamese Embassy in London said Friday that it contacted police about a missing woman feared to be one of the dead. An embassy spokesman said it was contacted by a family in Vietnam who says their daughter had been missing since the truck was found.
Protests rattle the postwar order in Lebanon and Iraq
BAGHDAD — Tens of thousands of people, many of them young and unemployed men, thronged public squares and blocked main streets Friday in the capitals of Iraq and Lebanon in unprecedented, spontaneous anti-government revolts in two countries scarred by long conflicts.
Demonstrators in Iraq were beaten back by police firing live ammunition and tear gas, and officials said 30 people were killed in a fresh wave of unrest that has left 179 civilians dead this month. In Lebanon, scuffles between rival political groups broke out at a protest camp, threatening to undermine an otherwise united civil disobedience campaign now in its ninth day.
The protests are directed at a postwar political system and a class of elite leaders that have kept both countries from relapsing into civil war but achieved little else. The most common rallying cry from the protesters in Iraq and Lebanon is “Thieves! Thieves!” — a reference to officials they accuse of stealing their money and amassing wealth for decades.
The leaderless uprisings are unprecedented in uniting people against political leaders from their own religious communities. But the revolutionary change they are calling for would dismantle power-sharing governments that have largely contained sectarian animosities and force out leaders who are close to Iran and its heavily armed local allies.
Their grievances are not new.
Racial bias in health care software aids whites over blacks
A widely used software program that helps guide care for millions of patients is flawed by unintentional racial bias that leads to blacks getting passed over for special care, according to a new study.
The software predicts costs rather than sickness. It is used by U.S. insurers and hospitals to direct higher-cost patients into health care programs designed to help them stay on medications or out of the hospital.
Whites tend to be higher-cost patients even when they’re not as sick as blacks. The study found the software regularly suggested letting healthier white patients into health care risk management programs ahead of blacks who were less healthy because those white patients were more costly.
Fixing the software could more than double the number of black patients enrolled in these programs, said Dr. Ziad Obermeyer of the University of California, Berkeley, who led the research published Thursday in the journal Science.
“The problem was the algorithm was built to predict who’s going to cost money next year, not who’s going to need health care,” said Obermeyer, who studies machine learning in medicine.
