✊✊Workers at Apple’s flagship Grand Central Terminal retail location in Manhattan have begun to formally collect signatures to form a union, according to a newly updated website launched by the organizers, setting the stage for a showdown between the iPhone maker and the employees who sell them.

The organizers, who have dubbed themselves “Fruit Stand Workers United,” say they voted on Feb. 21 to affiliate with Workers United, a national labor union that has supported the successful unionization efforts of Starbucks employees around the country, according to the site.

People involved in the organizing effort told The Washington Post that they have endured months of efforts by Apple to convince employees that unionizing is a bad idea, accusing the company of “union-busting” tactics. Now, they are handing out signature cards to would-be union members.

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🔻A fourth bus carrying migrants from Texas arrived in Washington, D.C., Saturday carrying fewer than 10 migrants fleeing Venezuela’s capital city, Caracas.

In an interview with Fox News Digital, a 23-year-old asylum seeker who asked to remain anonymous said he was fleeing poverty in an attempt to provide more for his family back home.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott vowed to bus migrants crossing the border into his state to D.C. in retaliation for President Biden’s plans to end Title 42 expulsions by the end of next month.

"There's not just one simple reason for somebody to leave their country and come here," the migrant told Fox News Digital through a translator. "Because of the corruption and because of the really high food prices in Venezuela right now," he was motivated to make the journey north to the U.S. to find work.

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The latest updates on the Ukraine op from the Russian Defence Ministry:

▪At the request of Turkey’s President Erdogan, a special operation was carried out in Mariupol to free hostages held by neo-Nazis in a Turkish mosque: 29 militants were killed, there were foreign mercenaries among them. The hostages were released and taken to a safe place;

▪The Kiev regime banned negotiations on surrender and ordered the Azov neo-Nazis to shoot anyone among the Ukrainian troops wanting to lay down arms;

▪In total, up to 400 foreign mercenaries are now surrounded on the territory of the Azovstal plant: most of them are citizens of European countries and Canada;

▪Since the beginning of the special operation, Kiev has attracted 6,824 foreign mercenaries from 63 countries. The most numerous group to join Ukrainian forces came from Poland (1,717 people);

▪The Russian military has eliminated 1,035 foreign mercenaries since the beginning of the operation, while 912 mercenaries fled from Ukraine;

▪Russian high-precision air-launched missiles hit an ammunition factory in the Kiev region

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🎥The Russian Defence Ministry has published a video of Mi-28N attack helicopters firing at the positions of Ukrainian air defence equipment

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A Sputnik correspondent reports from the basement of the Yalta health complex in the village of Urzuf, near Mariupol, where Azov neo-Nazis had set up an ammunition depot

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🎥Cancel culture, Ukrainian style: Azov neo-Nazis have demolished a monument to Soviet Marshal Zhukov in Kharkov. Zhukov oversaw some of the Red Army's most decisive victories over Nazi Germany.

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❗A shooting at a party in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with as many as 200 people attending left two teenagers dead and nine people injured, police say

❗Estonia, Bulgaria ban Russian ships from entering their ports

❗DPR reports 24 houses destroyed by Ukrainian shelling during past day

⚡Ukrainian militants in Mariupol refuse to surrender, hostilities in the city continue - Sputnik correspondent

❗Russian investigators launch probe into demolition of Marshal Zhukov monument in Kharkov

⚡Russian Forces down 2 Ukrainian fighter jets in Kharkov Region - Russian MoD

"Something serious" is flying towards the Azovstal plant, where Ukrainian neo-Nazis are holed up, refusing to surrender, a Sputnik correspondent reports.

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❗DPR forces down Ukrainian missile Tochka-U, fragments damage over 20 houses

💬Zelensky tells CNN Ukraine ready to fight Russia for 10 years

☣Plague and typhus: What have American scientists been up to in Ukraine’s biolabs?

👉Read the full story on our website

🎥 Sputnik drone footage of the Azovstal plant territory in Mariupol, where Ukrainian neo-Nazis are blocked

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🐬😖🐬A Miami Seaquarium trainer was attacked by a dolphin during a live Flipper Dolphin Show Saturday.

"It looked like the dolphin rammed into the trainer," Shannon Carpenter, a photographer who was in the audience to see the show, told WSVN. "There was a struggle, some kind of collision underwater happened. The lady on the paddleboard, she paddled out of the water pretty quick, and then the lead trainer started swimming back towards the dock, and it looked like she got ran into a couple more times."

The Seaquarium said in a statement Tuesday that the trainer accidentally scratched Sundance the dolphin with her hand which led to the aggressive reaction. Miami Seaquarium says this is the first time a dolphin has broken its routine and attacked. The trainer was reportedly sent to the hospital.

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😷😬A deep sense of unease has descended on Shanghai, China’s largest city and the economic and cultural capital, amid a surging Covid-19 outbreak that has brought the metropolis to its knees.

Stuck in a citywide lockdown that started on March 28 with no end in sight, the emotions coming out of Shanghai have fluctuated between anger, frustration, reluctant resolve, and small moments of joy.

And yet, the anxieties have been fuelled by images of pandemic prevention workers killing dogs, hungry residents looting grocery stores, and drones flying over skyscrapers telling residents to “control your soul’s desire for freedom”

While Shanghai has this week allowed some neighborhoods to step outside their homes, the city recorded 27,000 cases on Wednesday, rewriting the daily record for the 12th time in 13 days. As Shanghai embarks on its new future, the South China Morning Post gauged the temperature of its residents stuck in Covid-19 limbo.

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😲😢A university student died while acting in a recreation of Jesus's crucifixion - and onlookers thought it was part of the act.

Sule Ambrose, 25, was training to be a priest at the Clariantian University seminary in Nekede, southeastern Nigeria. Ambrose took the part of Simon Peter, Jesus's most important Disciple, dressing up in a long white toga for the Good Friday reenactment.

But he slumped to the ground during the performance and began bleeding. Onlookers thought it was part of the reenactment, local media reported.

Eyewitness Micheal Eluwa told Vanguard: 'Initially when it happened we thought it was a joke, and that it was part of the drama. 'It was when he could not get up that was when we knew it was a serious matter and he was rushed to a school hospital.

'Later, when the case became worse, he was taken to a nearly Federal Medical Center. It was from there we heard he could not survive it.'

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📚 🚫On Friday, Florida’s Department of Education announced the rejection of 54 math textbooks over the presence of “prohibited topics or unsolicited strategies, including [critical race theory].” Last year, Florida’s Department of Education banned CRT.

“It seems that some publishers attempted to slap a coat of paint on an old house built on the foundation of Common Core, and indoctrinating concepts like race essentialism, especially, bizarrely, for elementary school students,” DeSantis said in a statement. The insertion of social-emotional learning (SEL) and Common Core into textbooks was also cited for rejection. 71% of math textbooks for grades K-5 were rejected.

Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis believes that these rejected textbooks were a trojan horse for banned topics and concepts.

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