Turns out at least one person in the news business thinks fabrications in the nation’s largest newspaper deserve attention.

Yale women faculty form a task force on tenure:

Benhabib said she hopes the WFF will be able to start an open campus dialogue about faculty issues and the tenure system. Yale is increasingly losing talented junior faculty to rival institutions with different institutional policies, such as a tenure track system, she said.

“In the case of junior faculty who move before they come up for tenure, some of them get swiped by Harvard and some get picked up by Princeton and other institutions,” Benhabib said. “A certain amount of this is going to happen in the [Ivy League schools] all the time … But the impression we have at the present is that more and more of this is happening across the board and it’s damaging to the institution at large.”

NewAlliance Bancshares Update: I’m not quite sure who at the YDN writes most of the headlines, but the italicized second lines in particular seem to have developed a propensity for unverifiable assertions of late. Like this one: NewAlliance Bank Foundation meets community needs.

TAs at U. Wisconsin vote to strike:

The union has been negotiating for a 2003-05 contract for nearly 10 months. The state’s last offer provided no wage increase for 2003-04 and a 1.7 percent increase for 2004-05. But union members were reviewing a new offer from the state Monday in an effort to head off the job action after union representatives met with state negotiators earlier in the day. TAA co-president Boian Popunkiov said the state had made a new offer for the first time in months.

Sister Souljah (Lite) Watch: Now it’s the French:

A couple of weeks ago, the Washington Post reported that G. Clotaire Rapaille, a French anthropologist known for identifying the subconscious associations that people from various cultures make in the “reptilian” part of their brains, had offered to become the Senator’s Gallic Naomi Wolf, devising ways for him to rid his speaking style of French influences.

Family members have apparently been put on a leash as well. Kerry’s wife, Berrou says, “speaks with us in French with no problem, and her press attaché has to pull her by the shirt to get her away from us.” The English-only rule doesn’t seem to hold when Kerry is speaking off the record…

From the Columbia Spectator:

The shrill whistles and drum beats of the Graduate Student Employees United picket line woke residents on 116th Street yesterday morning, as hundreds of graduate students, undergraduates, and supporters marched outside Columbia University’s Broadway gates demanding union recognition for research and teaching assistants. …A New York Police Department officer estimated that 400 to 500 marched over the course of the morning. At noon, members of various other unions on campus joined the picket lines, and the strikers then marched in the gates and around campus…

But she, along with hundreds of other teaching and research assistants, demonstrated that the issues at stake were important enough to justify their actions. Many of those walking the picket line said that one of their most important reasons for striking was showing support of their fellow graduate students.

Columbia teaching assistants on their strike:

Having a union is about giving the people who teach and do research a stronger voice in the school–we don’t know all of the problems that TAs and RAs will face in the future, but we know that with a union there will be a democratic way to deal with collective problems. We also believe that in organizing a union we are acting to protect the values that matter to us in the University: stopping the trend toward adjunct and temporary employment and away from full-time, tenure-track jobs.

With the help of a more conservative NLRB under the Bush administration, Columbia, like many other schools, has attempted to prevent TAs and RAs from forming unions. By doing so, the administration has left us no choice but to strike for union recognition.

In today’s YDN, Alyssa offers an assessment the progress behind and the challenges before the movement for equal rights for all couples in New Haven and beyond:

We will win this fight in Connecticut, and we will win it on the federal level as well, but only if we win in New Haven first. Ultimately, the fight for equal rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people will be a failure if we fight our battles only in the legislatures, and not in our neighborhoods, churches, and community centers. In New Haven, it is far easier for us to work directly within the well-traveled channels of elected officials, and challenge them to take principled stands regardless of what their constituents think; we make them heroes for standing up to popular opinion.

But we have a rare opportunity, one less exciting and dynamic than the gathering on Tax Day a year ago, but with greater long term potential in both the Connecticut legislature and New Haven’s neighborhoods…Worries about coalitions have kept some in New Haven out of this dialogue and this movement for far too long; we should all travel the high road, and travel it together.

Wal-Mart Watch: Angling for better results in Chicago than Inglewood, Wal-Mart sets out to negotiate a Code of Conduct:

In Chicago, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 881 mobilized community, labor, religious and civic support against the destructive impact of the superstores, local spokeswoman Elizabeth Drake says. The city council zoning committee threw several roadblocks in front of Wal-Mart’s planned West Side superstore, with another panel meeting scheduled for April 20…

As a result of the pressure and publicity in Chicago, Wal-Mart’s Midwestern director talked with presidents of both Local 881 and the Chicago Federation of Labor about a proposed corporate responsibility contract. That’s a first, Drake adds. “The groups have finalized a community benefits agreement” for Wal-Mart to sign, Drake explained. The pact would commit the firm “not to do things they have done elsewhere,” such as rock-bottom wages with skimpy and unaffordable health benefits.

The YDN reports on Friday’s press conference:

After issuing a tongue-in-cheek ultimatum via megaphone that the University “start investing in New Haven the way you do around the world” and receiving no response from Yale President Richard Levin’s Woodbridge Hall office, the students moved to Cross Campus to pretend to mark trees for logging, lay plans for a coal power generator and extract water from under the Women’s Table.

Human Rights Watch calls on the UN Commission on Human Rights to show leadership in the Sudan:

The U.N. Commission on Human Rights must reinstate human rights monitoring in Sudan and strongly condemn abuses in Darfur, a western region of Sudan, where one of the world’s worst human rights and humanitarian crises is unfolding, Human Rights Watch said today.

The Commission, which on Thursday is scheduled to vote on a resolution on Sudan, should unequivocally condemn crimes against humanity and other abuses committed by government forces and allied militias in Darfur and reinstate the mandate for the special rapporteur for human rights in Sudan under item 9 of the agenda, Human Rights Watch said. Last year the Commission ended a 10-year monitoring mandate in Sudan because it appeared that the 20-year civil war in the southern part of the country would be settled.

The YDN follows the 76 casualties of John Pepper’s approach to labor-management partnership:

The union always encourages its members to take advantage of learning opportunities, Smith said. But she said the union members feel there had not been sufficient communication with the workers before the layoffs occurred and dispute that the job cuts would even necessarily save Yale money.

“As one would expect, these workers are angry and disappointed that Yale would have chosen to take this action, particularly at this time when we’re trying to build a new relationship here,” Smith said.