Tag: Region US

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is dispatching one his top advisers to Saudi Arabia to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto leader of the oil-rich kingdom, later this week. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Thursday he will travel to Saudi Arabia on Saturday for talks with Saudi officials and will also meet…

NEW YORK (AP) — Fox News is opposing a renewed effort by three news organizations to unseal documents related to its recently settled defamation lawsuit, saying it would do nothing but “gratify private spite or promote public scandal.” The Associated Press, The New York Times and National Public Radio asked a Delaware judge earlier this week to reveal mostly private…

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is alleging Facebook “repeatedly violated its privacy promises” and is proposing a “blanket prohibition” on parent company Meta’s monetization of data of users under 18. The company, meanwhile, called the move “a political stunt.” The FTC on Wednesday moved to expand its USD5 billion privacy order with then-Facebook from 2020, claiming the company failed to…

A Wells Fargo boss started by mocking a female executive’s fiancé, moved on to inappropriately touching and groping her, then threatened to take sales opportunities from her if she didn’t date him, according to a new lawsuit against the San Francisco-headquartered bank and the alleged harasser.

Wells Fargo management responded to complaints by the former VP and senior portfolio manager, who filed suit anonymously as Jane Doe, by forcing her to continue working with the man, attempting to block her from receiving a hefty referral fee and commission, and finally firing her, the lawsuit claimed.

Wells Fargo spokeswoman Laurie Kight said Wednesday the bank was reviewing the lawsuit. “We take all allegations of misconduct very seriously,” Kight said.

Doe started in an executive position at Wells Fargo in 2000, in a Los Angeles unit devoted to serving high-wealth clients, and was promoted to a senior VP position five years later, according to her lawsuit filed Wednesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court. Starting in 2016 and continuing into 2020, she was subjected to sexual harassment by a superior, Carl Nelson, a VP and senior private banker, her lawsuit claimed.

Nelson has since resigned from Wells Fargo, according to Doe’s lawyer Ronald Zambrano. Nelson did not immediately respond Wednesday to messages from this news organization at his new workplace in a different bank.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — Two 10-year-olds are among 300 children who worked at McDonald’s restaurants illegally, a Labor Department investigation of franchisees in Kentucky found.

Agency investigators found the 10-year-olds received little or no pay at a McDonald’s in Louisville, the Labor Department said. The franchisee for the Louisville store was among three McDonald’s franchisees fined $212,000 in total by the department.

Louisville’s Bauer Food LLC, which operates 10 McDonald’s locations, employed 24 minors under the age of 16 to work more hours than legally permitted, the agency said. Among those were two 10-year-old children. The agency said the children sometimes worked as late as 2 a.m., but were not paid.

“Below the minimum age for employment, they prepared and distributed food orders, cleaned the store, worked at the drive-thru window and operated a register,” the Labor Department said Tuesday, adding that one child also was allowed to operate a deep fryer, which is prohibited task for workers under 16.

The Fed had to choose between capitulation on inflation or letting the banking crisis mushroom. The twin crashes in the US’s commercial real estate and bond market have collided with $9 trillion uninsured deposits in its banking system, which can vanish in an afternoon in the cyber age.

The second and third biggest bank failures in US history have followed in quick succession. The Treasury and Federal Reserve would like us to believe that they are “idiosyncratic”. That is a dangerous evasion. Almost half of America’s 4,800 banks are already burning through their capital buffers. They may not have to mark all losses to market under US accounting rules but that does not make them solvent. Somebody will take those losses.

“It’s spooky. Thousands of banks are under water,” said Prof Amit Seru, a banking expert at Stanford University. “Let’s not pretend that this is just about Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic. A lot of the US banking system is potentially insolvent.” The full shock of monetary tightening by the Fed has yet to hit. A great edifice of debt faces a refinancing cliff edge over the next six quarters.

Only then will we learn whether the US financial system can safely deflate the excess leverage induced by extreme monetary stimulus during the pandemic. A Hoover Institution report by Prof Seru and a group of experts calculates that more than 2,315 US banks are sitting on assets worth less than their liabilities. The market value of their loan portfolios is $2 trillion (£1.6 trillion) lower than book value.

These lenders include big beasts.

A report in the Wall Street Journal, published on the newspaper’s front page Monday morning, links important figures in the US business and political elite to financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who died in a federal prison in Manhattan in 2019 under circumstances that strongly suggest he was murdered to keep him quiet.

The Journal reporters wrote that they had gained access to Epstein’s private diary and other documents, “which include thousands of pages of emails and schedules from 2013 to 2017, [that] haven’t been previously reported.” The diary listed meetings with dozens of individuals, though it supplied little information about the content or subject of the meetings. The bulk of these engagements were at Epstein’s palatial townhouse in Manhattan.

Among those prominently mentioned in the Journal report were two high-level officials of Democratic administrations: William Burns, currently CIA director, formerly deputy secretary of state in the Obama administration; and Kathryn Ruemmler, currently general counsel for Goldman Sachs investment bank, who was White House counsel in the Obama administration.

In a class-action lawsuit filed March 16 by an Amazon Go customer, Amazon was accused of not properly notifying its New York Amazon Go store customers that it was tracking and collecting their biometric data.

Amazon Go stores are cashierless stores operated by Amazon, com that allow customers to enter the store, pick up the products they want, and walk out without having to wait in a checkout line or scan their items. The stores use a combination of computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep-learning technologies to detect which products customers take off the shelves and then charge their Amazon accounts accordingly.

According to the lawsuit, Amazon Go collects biometric data “by scanning the palms of some customers to identify them and by applying computer vision, deep learning algorithms, and sensor fusion that measure the shape and size of each customer’s body to identify customers, track where they move in the stores, and determine what they have purchased.”

There is reasonable concern that the biometric data allegedly collected by Amazon might find their way into federal databases, as Amazon also provides server space to the federal government.

The Chinese government has significantly increased the use of exit bans to stop people – Chinese and foreign nationals alike – from leaving the country since top leader Xi Jinping took power in 2012, according to a new report describing how a web of vague laws are being expanded for political reasons.

The report comes amid growing concern about the environment for foreign businesses in China, after the wide-ranging overhaul last week of the country’s espionage law and raids on corporate consultancies Mintz Group and Bain & Co.

House Republicans have used the power of their new majority to investigate Joe Biden and Hunter Biden’s business dealings, including examining foreign payments and other aspects of the family’s finances. Comer has obtained thousands of pages of the Biden family’s financial records through subpoenas to the Treasury Department and various financial institutions since January.

Most recently, Comer claimed one deal involving the Biden family resulted in a profit of over $1 million in more than 15 incremental payments from a Chinese company through a third party.

Both Comer and Grassley have accused both the FBI and Justice Department of stonewalling their investigations and politicizing the agency’s yearslong investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes.

Last month, an IRS special agent sought whistleblower protections from Congress to disclose a “failure to mitigate clear conflicts of interest in the ultimate disposition” of a criminal investigation related to the younger Biden’s taxes and whether he made a false statement in connection with a gun purchase.

Elon Musk has threatened to reassign NPR’s Twitter account to another company.

In a series of emails sent to this reporter, Musk suggested he would transfer the network’s main account on Twitter, under the @NPR handle, to another organization or person. The idea shocked even longtime observers of Musk’s spur-of-the-moment and erratic leadership style.

Handing over established accounts to third parties poses a serious risk of impersonation and could imperil a company’s reputation, said social media experts.

“If this is a sign of things to come on Twitter, we might soon see even more of a rapid retreat by media organizations and other brands that don’t think it’s worth the risk,” said Emily Bell, a professor at Columbia Journalism School who studies social media. “It’s really an extraordinary threat to make.”

Last month, NPR effectively quit Twitter after Musk applied a label to the news organization’s account that falsely suggested it was state-controlled. Other public media organizations, including PBS and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, followed suit and stopped tweeting following similar labeling.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the Washington Post in an interview published on Tuesday that the White House did not inform him about a leak of secret US documents that grabbed attention around the world in April.

“I did not receive information from the White House or the Pentagon beforehand,” Mr Zelensky was quoted as saying.

“It is unprofitable for us,” he added. “It is not beneficial to the reputation of the White House, and I believe it is not beneficial to the reputation of the United States.”

The materials posted online offered a partial, month-old snapshot of the war in Ukraine.

Ukraine’s Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov said on April 12 that the Pentagon document leaks contained a mixture of true and false information about his country’s military, and downplayed its negative impact.

The U.S. is sending Ukraine about $300 million in additional military aid, including an enormous amount of artillery rounds, howitzers, air-to-ground rockets and ammunition as the launch of a spring offensive against Russian forces approaches, U.S. officials said Tuesday.

The new package includes Hydra-70 rockets, which are unguided rockets that are fired from aircraft. It also includes an undisclosed number of rockets for the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, mortars, howitzer rounds, missiles and Carl Gustaf anti—tank rifles. The weapons will all be pulled from Pentagon stocks, so they can go quickly to the front lines. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the aid has not yet been formally announced.

The latest shipment comes as Ukrainian officials say they are readying a counteroffensive — with Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov declaring they are in the “home stretch, when we can say: ‘Yes everything is ready.’” Ukrainian officials have said they are stockpiling ammunition to stow it along potentially long supply lines.

Reznikov said Monday that the key things for the assault’s success would be “the availability of weapons; prepared, trained people; our defenders and defenders who know their plan at their level, as well as providing this offensive with all the necessary things — shells, ammunition, fuel, protection, etc.”

NEW YORK – US stocks ended the trading day lower on Tuesday, with regional bank stocks recording another day of plummeting values ahead of an expected rate hike from the Federal Reserve.

The Fed is widely anticipated to raise its benchmark lending rate for a 10th – and possibly final – time on Wednesday as it looks to tackle high inflation through interest rate hikes.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished 1.1 per cent lower, at 33,684.46.

The broad-based S&P 500 fell 1.2 per cent to 4,119.60, while the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite Index declined 1.1 per cent to 12,080.51.

Crude oil futures also finished the day down more than five percent on regional banking concerns.

LONDON – Apple Inc urged a London tribunal on Tuesday (May 2) to block a US$2 billion (S$2.7 billion) mass lawsuit accusing it of hiding defective batteries in millions of iPhones by “throttling” them with software updates.

The tech giant is facing a lawsuit worth up to 1.6 billion pounds (S$2.6 billion) plus interest, brought by consumer champion Justin Gutmann on behalf of iPhone users in the United Kingdom.

Gutmann’s lawyers argued in court filings that Apple concealed issues with batteries in certain phone models and “surreptitiously” installed a power management tool which limited performance.

Apple said in written arguments that the lawsuit is “baseless” and strongly denies its iPhones’ batteries were defective, apart from in a small number of iPhone 6s models for which it offered free battery replacements.

Senior managers are discussing plans to eliminate about 3,000 jobs from the global workforce by the end of this quarter, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

That would amount to roughly 5 per cent of staff, excluding financial advisers and personnel supporting them within the wealth management division.

The banking and trading group is expected to shoulder many of the reductions, one of the people said.

A spokesman for Morgan Stanley, which employs about 82,000 people, declined to comment.

The cuts come just months after the firm trimmed about 2 per cent of its workforce.

Wall Street’s biggest banks offered few reasons for cheer while reporting first-quarter results after seeing their fees from helping companies with takeovers and raising capital – a proxy for the economy’s health – slump over the past year.