Month: June 2021

Enlarge / Houston Methodist Hospital at the Texas Medical Center campus in Houston, Texas. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

After staging weeks of protest and being called “reprehensible” by a federal judge, 153 workers of a Houston-based hospital system lost their jobs Tuesday for refusing to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

Houston Methodist hospital system had placed 178 employees on a two-week, unpaid suspension on June 7 for failing to meet the hospital system's vaccination mandate, which it had set on April 1. The unpaid two-week suspension was essentially the employees' last chance to get vaccinated before facing termination.

During that time, some of the workers “became compliant with the policy,” a hospital spokesperson told the Houston Chronicle Tuesday. But 153 did not and either quit during their suspension or were fired on Tuesday. Houston Methodist CEO Marc Boom had previously noted in a letter to employees that 27 of the 178 suspended workers had received one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine going into the suspension.

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  The Nokia G20 will release in the US on July 1. It comes in dark blue and white. [credit: HMD ]

HMD's latest Nokia phone to hit the US is the Nokia G20. That might sound like an international meeting of world smartphone leaders, but it's an actual device arriving in the US on July 1 for just $199. For this low price point, the phone doesn't look bad.

The specs include a 6.5-inch, 1600×720 LCD; a Mediatek G35 SoC; 4GB of RAM; 64GB of storage; and a 5050 mAh battery. HMD says a full charge will provide "three-day battery life." There's a USB-C port for 10 W charging, a 3.5 mm headphone jack, a side fingerprint reader, a microSD slot, NFC, Wi-Fi up to 802.11n, and a hardware Google Assistant button, along with the usual power and volume buttons.

It's notable when an Android phone launches in the US without a Qualcomm processor. The G20 gets the Mediatek G35 SoC, a 12 nm chip with eight ARM Cortex A53 cores—four at 2.3 GHz and four at 1.8 GHz. An equivalent Qualcomm SoC would be something like the Snapdragon 439.