Ukraine’s fears that its troops  may lose access to Elon Musk’s crucial Starlink internet service deepened in the past week after 1,300 of the military’s satellite units went offline, according to two sources familiar with the outage. Source: Ukraine suffered a comms outage when 1,300 SpaceX satellite units went offline over funding issues | CNN Politics

Source: Public Citizen: Tax Big Oil! | Filosofa’s Word

Sandra Sucher, a professor of management at Harvard University who has studied layoffs for more than a decade, said Twitter’s cuts were among the most poorly handled that she had seen. While the scale was not unprecedented, it was unusual to see layoffs done so quickly without a detailed explanation provided to workers about who was being laid off and why, she said.

“This is a master class in how not to do it,” Ms. Sucher said. “If you were going to rank order ways to upset people, telling them you’re going to do it in advance, without rationale, that is a particularly inhumane way to treat them.”

Joe Rogan has acknowledged spreading misinformation after he suggested that elementary schools were installing litter boxes for students who “identify” as furries.

The sensationalist urban legend was rooted in the right’s continued attacks on trans and gender non-conforming youth.

Rogan, the Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert, and the Minnesota Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott Jensen all swore they had heard stories of schools across the US changing their bathroom policies to accommodate wannabe felines. But an NBC News investigation determined this was untrue. The furries-in-kindergarten myth was repeated by at least 20 candidates and officials this year, the report found, but none of the school districts mentioned actually offered litter boxes for student use. (Though officials in Colorado’s Jefferson county school district said in 2017 they did keep litter in closets as an “emergency go bucket”, in the event that a student needed to relieve themselves while in emergency lockdown.)

Source: Joe Rogan admits schools don’t have litter boxes for kids who ‘identify’ as furries | Joe Rogan | The Guardian

Respiratory syncytial virus, otherwise known as RSV, causes colds and lung infections in people of all ages. This year, it’s been the biggest driver of increased hospital volume at the local children’s hospital. “It’s never been like this before,” said Emilee Lamorena, a respiratory program director who also leads pediatric issues at the American Association for Respiratory Care. “It’s all hands on deck.”

Managers and educators — clinicians who now mostly do administrative work — “have been jumping into the bedside,” she said. And the hospital is “getting creative” with its emergency department spaces, converting areas formerly reserved for evaluating mildly ill kids into beds that can be used to treat sicker children.

Similar stories are unfolding all over the US, where seasonal RSV infections shot up earlier and much higher than usual this year. And instead of rolling across the country in a sequence of regional waves, cases exploded everywhere seemingly simultaneously.

The surge of multiple respiratory viruses at once is scary. Perhaps scarier: The onslaught of sick children is catching the US on its heels following health care staffing shortages that started well before the Covid-19 pandemic but have since accelerated.

Thirty percent of health care workers quit or were laid off during the pandemic, and nearly one-third of recently surveyed nurses said they planned to leave direct patient care jobs by the end of this year.

Source: Surging RSV rates reveal America’s unsolved medical workforce crisis – Vox