European companies dumping toxic ships on Bangladesh beaches, HRW says

European maritime companies are ditching their old ships for scrap on Bangladeshi beaches in dangerous and polluting conditions that have killed workers pulling them apart, says Human Rights Watch.

Bangladesh’s southeastern Sitakunda beaches have emerged as one of the world’s largest shipbreaking yards, fuelling the South Asian country’s booming construction industry and its need for cheap sources of steel.

European firms are among the shipping companies to have sent 520 vessels to the site since 2020, where thousands of workers take apart ships without protective gear.

Philips Kept Complaints About Dangerous Breathing Machines Secret While Company Profits Soared

The first complaints landed at the offices of Philips Respironics in 2010, soon after the company made a fateful decision to redesign its bestselling breathing machines used in homes and hospitals around the world.

To silence the irritating rattle that kept users awake at night, Philips packed the devices with an industrial foam — the same kind used in sofas and mattresses. It quickly became clear that something had gone terribly wrong.

The reports coming into Philips described “black particles” or “dirt and dust” inside machines that pump air to those who struggle to breathe. One noted an “oily-like” substance. Others simply warned of “contamination.”

The complaints targeted some of the company’s most celebrated devices built in two factories near Pittsburgh, including ventilators for the sick and dying and the popular DreamStation for patients who suffer from sleep apnea, a chronic disorder that causes breathing to stop and start through the night.

Crypto king or conman: is Sam Bankman-Fried about to be sent down for a century?

Sunil Kavuri is not a novice investor. Sure, he hasn’t always been involved in finance: 20 years ago, he was a model. He and his identical twin brother were the stuff of local newspaper human-interest stories, straight-A lads from Rugby in Warwickshire who got firsts in economics, were both on the way to do master’s degrees in finance at Cambridge and got picked up by O2 to do the adverts for Big Brother. You might remember the ad: two floppy-haired guys horseplaying on a sofa.

After that, though, Kavuri worked for Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley and then JP Morgan, leaving in 2012 to do his own investing. In 2015, he started investing in cryptocurrencies, mainly bitcoin, which he saw as “digital gold”: “It has all the attributes of gold, but it’s easier to store, so it’s better than gold.” The premise of bitcoin is that the supply is fixed at 21m, so it’s a finite resource. “I saw bitcoin as a better, more portable version,” he says. “It has finance supply, it’s perfectly divisible, it’s fungible.”

But then, in the autumn of 2022, the value of crypto nosedived. As a creditor of the crypto exchange platform FTX, founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, Kavuri lost $2.1m (£1.8m). He is trying to retrieve those funds as part of a class-action lawsuit.

Elon Musk is a lesson in the dangers of unchecked corporate leaders

Elon Musk is not the most reckless, destructive or dangerous corporate leader in world history. But he just might be the most reckless, destructive and dangerous corporate leader at this moment.

For the past year, as Musk destroyed Twitter from the inside and expanded the influence of his rocket-and-satellite company, SpaceX, we have read accounts of how dependent Ukraine is for military and civilian internet service on a SpaceX subsidiary called StarLink. Meanwhile, Musk’s financial debts to the sovereign investment fund of the Saudi royal family have generated significant scrutiny among policy makers and human rights advocates around the world.

127,000 New York Workers Have Been Victims of Wage Theft

For Marcelino Zapoteco, the final straw came on a quiet night in 2018 at the restaurant Brioso on Staten Island. He was working alongside one of the managers who had been pulled in by the restaurant’s co-owner Pietro “Peter” DiMaggio to help as a waiter. At one point during the shift, Zapoteco watched the manager slip tip money into his pocket, when he was supposed to pool it to be shared with others.

Zapoteco, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, said he knew that the restaurant was grossly underpaying him during the more than seven years he worked there. When he served as a runner, bringing food to customers’ tables, he received as little as $10 for lunch and dinner shifts — far below the required minimum wage even when tips were included, he said.

"Control, humiliation, and unabating anxiety": Amazon's labor conditions under fire in new report

A new research paper accuses Amazon of spying on its employees in order to thwart potential unionization efforts — a characterization that aligns with the corporation's recently-posted job opening for a pair of intelligence analysts to monitor "labor organizing threats" among its employees.

The research paper, which was written by an anti-monopolist research and advocacy group called the Open Markets Institute, found that Amazon uses analytics to try to catch workers before they can unionize. As one example, Open Markets describes how the company uses demographic and socioeconomic data points to figure out which Whole Foods stores (which the company owns) are at risk of unionizing, something that had been alluded to in previous reports. Open Markets writes that Amazon does so by studying data which includes the number of families below the poverty line and how diverse the staff is. It also claims that Amazon has created a "heat map" so that management can better assess who might unionize and uses security cameras to spread out workers who are potentially discussing unionizing activity.

States Allow For-Profit Pipeline Companies to Seize Private Property

According to Misha Mitchell, an attorney for a conservation group in Louisiana’s ecologically sensitive Atchafalaya Basin, Energy Transfer Partners and other private oil interests broke the law when they began building a section of the Bayou Bridge Pipeline on a parcel of private land in the iconic river swamp without permission from the landowners.

Mitchell filed a lawsuit against the pipeline project on behalf of landowner Peter Aaslestad and his family after construction began on their property in late July, but work continued on the property until Monday, when Energy Transfer Partners struck a deal in a local court with the plaintiffs to temporarily halt construction.

Ties that Bind

In the summer of 2016, Adam Merberg was offered a job as a data scientist at AbleTo, a behavioral health care company based in New York City. After he verbally accepted the job offer, a corporate recruiter sent him an email letting him know the company would be running a routine background check. “Also attached is a confidentiality agreement,” the recruiter wrote. “Please review, complete, sign, and return to me as soon as possible.”

The agreement included a non-compete clause prohibiting Merberg from working at any of the company’s competitors for twelve months after leaving. Merberg, who had recently completed a Ph.D. in mathematics, didn’t consider how this might later affect him.

Wells Fargo apologizes after hundreds of customers lose their homes due to ‘computer glitch’

Wells Fargo is making things right for its customers, building a better banking experience, identifying and fixing its problems, and becoming better and stronger each day. This is what the company’s website says, anyway.

However, Wells Fargo’s actual banking practices continue to be at odds with the increasingly cheerful and apologetic tone of their advertising copy. This week, a new regulatory filing revealed that hundreds of customers — 625 in total — were denied loans and, in many cases, foreclosed upon because a company computer glitch marked “certain accounts” between April 2010 and October 2015 as undergoing the foreclosure process. The company said in the filing that it set aside $8 million to pay off those affected. It later issued a statement saying it was “very sorry,” according to CNN. 

A Major Bank Slipped Up And Showed Why Women Rarely File Sex Discrimination Cases

Of all the tactics companies use to silence women who speak up about sexual harassment, the way corporate lawyers question victims in depositions may be the most brutal.

In these taped confrontations, defense lawyers interrogate people on every aspect of their sexual histories, medical records and traumas from childhood.

Fossil Fuel Industries Outspend Clean Energy Advocates on Climate Lobbying by 10 to 1

Fossil fuel producers, airlines and electrical utilities outspent environmental groups and the renewable energy industry 10 to 1 on lobbying related to climate change legislation between 2000 and 2016, according to a new analysis released Wednesday.

The research, which will be published Thursday in the journal Climate Change, suggests that, at a time when the majority of Americans understand global warming and support government action to deal with it, industry lobbying still has far greater influence in Washington.

Fossil fuel industry spent nearly $2 billion to kill U.S. climate action, new study finds

Legislation to address climate change has repeatedly died in Congress. But a major new study says the policy deaths were not from natural causes — they were caused by humans, just like climate change itself is.

Climate action has been repeatedly drowned by a devastating surge and flood of money from the fossil fuel industry — nearly $2 billion in lobbying since 2000 alone.

This is according to stunning new analysis in the journal Climatic Change on “The climate lobby” by Drexel University environmental sociologist Robert J. Brulle.

European Union fines Google record-breaking $5 billion

European regulators on Wednesday slapped Google with a record-breaking $5 billion fine for violating anti-trust laws and abusing the popularity of its Android mobile Operating System.

According to the European Commission, Google used a number of underhand tactics with Android, which “denied rivals the chance to innovate and compete…[and] denied European consumers the benefits of effective competition in this important sphere.”

Walmart Patents Technology to Eavesdrop on Workers

Just the latest corporation to spark privacy concerns over worker surveillance efforts, Walmart has patented audio technology that would allow the retail giant to eavesdrop on conversations among employees and between clerks and shoppers, to measure employee performance.

According to the patent document filed with the U.S. government, Walmart is calling the invention “listening to the frontend.” The patent reads, in part:

    Many different types of sounds result from people in a shopping facility. For example, guests of the shopping facility may talk amongst each other or with employees of the shopping facility. Additionally, guests and employee movements and activities can generate additional sounds. A need exists for ways to capture the sounds resulting from the people in the shopping facility and determine performance of employees based on those sounds.

This Mine Threatens America’s Largest Wild Salmon Run

July 4 marks the peak of the largest, most valuable wild salmon run left in America.

The sockeye salmon migration into Bristol Bay, Alaska, can exceed 40 million fish. As they charge into the Kvichak and Nushagak rivers and fan out across myriad tributaries, the sockeye and four other species of Pacific salmon are pursued by commercial and sport fisheries valued at over half a billion dollars. When they reach the region’s clear, wild headwaters, those millions of salmon spawn and produce billions of offspring that then find their way down into Iliamna, Alaska’s largest lake. Then the fish head out toward the Bering Sea, get big and fat on omega-3-rich krill, and in three more years return to their headwaters to begin the cycle anew. Whether marketed to Americans or exported to other countries, Bristol Bay salmon are a major bulwark against America’s “seafood deficit,” which in 2016 exceeded $14 billion.

Drugmakers Blamed for Blocking Generics Have Jacked Up Prices and Cost the US Billions

Makers of brand-name drugs called out by the Trump administration for potentially stalling generic competition have hiked their prices by double-digit percentages since 2012 and cost Medicare and Medicaid nearly $12 billion in 2016, a Kaiser Health News analysis has found.

As part of President Donald Trump’s promise to curb high drug prices, the Food and Drug Administration posted a list of pharmaceutical companies that makers of generics allege refused to let them buy the drug samples needed to develop their products. For approval, the FDA requires so-called bioequivalence testing using samples to demonstrate that generics are the same as their branded counterparts.

5 Million Gallons of Freshwater Used to Frack a Single Gas Well

A lot has been said about the toxic slurry of fracking fluids and its impact on water quality, but what about the millions of gallons of water that's sucked up by the drilling process and its impact on water quantity?

A new study highlights how the five million gallons of freshwater used to fracture just one gas well in the U.S.—or more than enough to fill seven Olympic-size swimming pools—has depleted water levels in up to 51 percent of streams in Arkansas, as Motherboard reported from the research.

Exposed: Chevron Has a Secretive Drilling Site in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

It’s the middle of the frigid, long midnight at Tapkaurak Point, a spit of gravel curling out into the Beaufort Sea off the northern coast of Alaska. Up in the middle of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the largest remaining wilderness area in the U.S., the sun set weeks ago and won’t peek above the horizon until the middle of January.

If you were there now, bundled up against the minus-20-degree chill, you could climb the low bluff at Tapkaurak, turn away from the frozen sea, and in the dim light cast by the moon and the stars you’d take in the expansive arctic plain giving way to the craggy Brooks Range to the south. In the middle of the plain, if the aurora borealis is bright enough, you might see poking out of the snow cover an upright post—physically insignificant but utterly out of place in the treeless Arctic landscape.

A Fracking Company Is Suing a Victim of Its Own Pollution for Speaking Out

Cabot Oil & Gas, a petroleum, natural gas and natural gas liquids exploration and production company based in Houston, Texas, has filed a $5 million lawsuit against water pollution victim Ray Kemble and his lawyers for speaking out about his polluted water well.

Kemble, who lives in Dimock, Pennsylvania, a tiny town in the rural northeast corner of the state whose aquifer was famously polluted by gas extraction, hasn't had clean water since Cabot started hydraulically fracturing, or fracking, near his home eight years ago. The town’s fracking-related pollution was featured in the HBO films Gasland and Gasland II.

This Weed Killer Is Wreaking Havoc on America’s Crops

When farmer Darvin Bentlage surveyed his southwestern Missouri soybean fields in August, he knew something was amiss in one of them. “I’ve been looking at soybeans for about 60 years, and these didn’t look right,” he says. The plants’ leaves had shriveled upward, taking the shape of little cups: a telltale sign they’d been exposed to dicamba—a potent herbicide that Bentlage does not use. It had wafted onto his farm from his neighbors’ fields.