Tag Archives: morning rush hour

Striking Chicago teachers to protest during morning rush hour

Striking Chicago teachers to protest during morning rush hour
By Brendan O’Brien

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Striking Chicago teachers planned to march and hold a protest during the morning rush hour in the city’s downtown on Wednesday in their push for smaller class sizes and more support staff in the third-largest U.S. public schools system.

Classes were canceled for the fifth straight day on Wednesday for the Chicago Public Schools’ 300,000 students, who have been out of school and without after-hours activities since last Thursday when the system’s 25,000 teachers went on strike.

The Chicago Teachers Union called the work stoppage after contract negotiations with CPS failed to produce a deal on pay, overcrowding in schools and a lack of support staff such as nurses and social workers.

With no end to negotiations in sight, teachers were to take part in marches beginning at four locations in Chicago’s downtown and end with a “mass protest” at City Hall where Mayor Lori Lightfoot was set to give her budget address on Wednesday morning, the union said in an email.

The strike is the latest in a wave of work stoppages in U.S. school districts in which demands for school resources have superseded calls for higher salaries and benefits. In Chicago and elsewhere, teachers have emphasized the need to help underfunded schools, framing their demands as a call for social justice.

The strike in Chicago is the longest teacher work stoppage in the United States since Union City, California, teachers staged a four-day walkout over pay last spring. Los Angeles teachers held a week-long strike last winter over similar demands involving pay, class size and support staff.

Negotiators for the CTU and CPS have been trading proposals since the strike began while teachers have picketed daily in front of many of the system’s 500 schools and have held several rallies in downtown Chicago.

On Tuesday, Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren joined striking teachers at a rally at an elementary school on the city’s West Side.

Lightfoot, who was elected in April, said the district offered a raise for teachers of 16% over five years and has promised to address class sizes and staffing levels, but could not afford the union’s full demands, which would cost an extra $2.4 billion annually.

Although the latest work stoppage has forced officials to cancel classes and sports events, school buildings are staying open for children in need of a place to go.

(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Chicago; Editing by Peter Cooney)

Kitchen devices resembling bombs cause havoc for New York commuters

New York City police officers are seen as police said they were investigating two suspicious packages at the Fulton St. subway station in Manhattan, New York, U.S. August 16, 2019. REUTERS/Catherine Koppel

By Peter Szekely

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Kitchen appliances resembling pressure cookers were left in two Manhattan locations on Friday, disrupting automobile and subway travel during the morning rush hour before police deemed them harmless and began investigating the possibility of a hoax.

The discoveries of the devices, which the city’s chief counterterrorism officer called “rice cookers that could be mistaken for pressure cookers,” raised concern because of the latter’s previous use as makeshift bombs in New York and Boston.

Surveillance video shows a dark-haired man in his 20s or 30s with a shopping cart placing the devices at two locations inside the busy downtown Fulton Street subway station, said John Miller, the New York Police Department’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism.

“Because of the timing and the placement and items we’re carrying this right now as a hoax device,” Miller told reporters at the scene. “That’s the investigative category.”

The unidentified man is “not a suspect but certainly someone we’d want to interview,” he said. Police posted two photographs on social media of the cookers at Fulton Street.

Officials said they had not determined whether the discovery about an hour later of a third implement resembling a pressure cooker next to a garbage can on a street corner in the borough’s Chelsea neighborhood was related, Miller said.

Miller noted that in September 2016 the so-called “Chelsea Bomber,” Ahmad Khan Rahimi, wounded 30 people using a device made from a pressure cooker and a cellphone timer that exploded on Manhattan’s West 23rd Street. Another pressure cooker bomb was left nearby but did not explode.

Rahimi was sentenced last year to life in prison.

There was also an explosion in Midtown Manhattan in December 2017 when a Bangladeshi man, Akayed Ullah, detonated a homemade bomb in a pedestrian tunnel connecting two subway lines and a bus terminal. Three people were wounded.

Pressure cookers were turned into bombs by a pair of ethnic Chechen brothers when they killed three people and injured more than 200 at the 2013 Boston Marathon.

The discoveries, which were first reported at about 7 a.m. EDT (1100 GMT) created havoc for thousands of motorists and commuters on the numerous subway lines that converge at Fulton Street as police and bomb squad vehicles swarmed to the scene.

Even after police deemed the devices harmless at the Fulton Street station complex, which is close to the World Trade Center, officials warned of residual delays for commuters.

(Reporting by Peter Szekely; Editing by Daniel Wallis and Steve Orlofsky)