A former Massachusetts Uber driver has been sentenced to 10 to 12 years in prison after raping a female passenger, adding to a growing list of Uber drivers accused of sexual assault.
Boston native Alejandro Done, 47, who pled guilty, was sentenced last Friday on charges including kidnapping, assault and battery, and aggravated rape, according to USA Today.
On Dec. 6, 2014, Done picked up a woman heading to her home in Cambridge. Done told the woman that she would have to pay him in cash. The two went to an ATM to withdraw money, then Done drove her to a secluded location, reported the Star Tribune.
Done kept the victim trapped in the car as he strangled and sexually assaulted her.
The felon has previously been charged with five other unsolved sexual assaults that happened in the Boston area between 2006 and 2010. That case is still pending. Uber told USA Today that Done had passed a background check, and had no prior criminal record.
"The defendant preyed upon a young woman who trusted that he was who he portrayed himself to be," District Attorney Marian Ryan said in a statement. "I encourage the public to take precautions when using any ride-sharing service."
In another recent case, in South Carolina, a sixth-grade teacher, who was moonlighting as an Uber driver was arrested on charges of kidnapping and forcible rape. Patrick Aiello, 39, allegedly assaulted a 23-year-old woman in August. The woman managed to escape from the car and was struck by another one in the process.
A former Uber driver in India, Shiv Kumar Yadav, was convicted of raping a female passenger Tuesday.
Many states in the U.S. are demanding that Uber ensure its background checks are more thorough. Last year, prosecutors in California filed a complaint against the ride-hailing service for failing to adequately vet drivers, some of whom have been convicted sex offenders, kidnappers and murderers.
Last April, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker proposed a bill giving his state oversight in background checks. Uber has backed the legislation proposal, and hosts a petition on its website in favor of the governor's plan, which has more than 30,000 signatures.
Uber faces a litany of other problems. Last weekend, drivers called for a strike and demanded better pay and higher fares. The service has been suspended in Spain for creating unfair competition and it is banned in Italy for not adhering to licensing rules. French taxi drivers, who were upset by having to compete with Uber, took to the streets last summer, smashing cars and setting tires on fire.
You've probably heard that keeping your rear planted in your desk chair for hours on end may be as much of a health hazard today as smoking was for previous generations.
Prolonged sitting has been linked to an increased risk of heart disease, cancer and even premature death. But at least we have standing desks to combat the problem, right? Maybe not.
According to a new study, published online in the International Journal of Epidemiology on Oct. 9, standing at your desk may be no better than sitting, and that's because it's the being still that has the negative impact on your health. (Maybe it's time to replace your standing desk with a treadmill desk.)
For the study, the researchers monitored the behavior and health of 3,720 men and 1,412 women over the course of 16 years. Beginning in 1985, the London-based volunteers recorded how many hours a week they spent sitting.
At the end of the 16-year period, the researchers tallied the hours and then checked the National Health Service Central Registry and determined that 450 of the participants had died. But the researchers found no correlation between time spent sitting and mortality.
The findings challenge previous research showing that sitting for long periods can shorten your lifespan even if you exercise often.
"Any stationary posture where energy expenditure is low may be detrimental to health, be it sitting or standing. The results cast doubt on the benefits of sit-stand work stations," Dr. Melvyn Hillsdon, associate professor of Sport and Health Sciences at the University of Exeter in England and a co-author of the study, said in a written statement.
The researchers concluded that sitting itself won't kill you. Rather, a sedentary lifestyle in general may be what's harmful to your health.
"Research is not black and white, and if a single study finds X or Y that doesn’t mean that this is the truth we should all go along with," Dr. Emmanuel Stamatakis, associate professor at the University of Sydney in Australia and a co-author of the study, said in an email. "The recent study findings are in disagreement with the rest of the literature and there must be a reason for this."
You've probably heard that keeping your rear planted in your desk chair for hours on end may be as much of a health hazard today as smoking was for previous generations.
Prolonged sitting has been linked to an increased risk of heart disease, cancer and even premature death. But at least we have standing desks to combat the problem, right? Maybe not.
According to a new study, published online in the International Journal of Epidemiology on Oct. 9, standing at your desk may be no better than sitting, and that's because it's the being still that has the negative impact on your health. (Maybe it's time to replace your standing desk with a treadmill desk.)
For the study, the researchers monitored the behavior and health of 3,720 men and 1,412 women over the course of 16 years. Beginning in 1985, the London-based volunteers recorded how many hours a week they spent sitting.
At the end of the 16-year period, the researchers tallied the hours and then checked the National Health Service Central Registry and determined that 450 of the participants had died. But the researchers found no correlation between time spent sitting and mortality.
The findings challenge previous research showing that sitting for long periods can shorten your lifespan even if you exercise often.
"Any stationary posture where energy expenditure is low may be detrimental to health, be it sitting or standing. The results cast doubt on the benefits of sit-stand work stations," Dr. Melvyn Hillsdon, associate professor of Sport and Health Sciences at the University of Exeter in England and a co-author of the study, said in a written statement.
The researchers concluded that sitting itself won't kill you. Rather, a sedentary lifestyle in general may be what's harmful to your health.
"Research is not black and white, and if a single study finds X or Y that doesn’t mean that this is the truth we should all go along with," Dr. Emmanuel Stamatakis, associate professor at the University of Sydney in Australia and a co-author of the study, said in an email. "The recent study findings are in disagreement with the rest of the literature and there must be a reason for this."
Should Nestlé be allowed to take spring water from a national forest in drought-plagued Southern California, bottle it and sell it nationwide?
Under fire from locals, former forest employees and environmental groups, the Swiss-based company insists there's nothing wrong with piping tens of millions of gallons of water out of San Bernardino National Forest every year -- despite the fact that Nestlé's permit to extract water from the park technically expired in 1988.
On Tuesday, three environmental groups filed a suit in a California federal court against the United States Forest Service, demanding it stop Nestlé from taking the water, sold in its "premium" Arrowhead brand. The company has no right to pipe out water since its permit expired almost 30 years ago, plaintiffs claim. They say that Nestlé's operation is damaging the forest.
“The ecosystem in San Bernardino forest is being harmed,” said Eddie Kurtz, the executive director of the Courage Campaign Institute, one of three groups that filed the suit. “It’s not an environment that can afford to send its water to Nestlé to profit off of.”
The suit not only sheds light on the ethics and optics of bottling water during a historic drought. It also raises questions about the very idea of large corporations profiting off of what is widely considered a shared public resource.
"This is exactly what happens when water is treated as a commodity and is sold for profit," John Stewart, deputy campaigns director at the nonprofit Corporate Accountability International, told The Huffington Post. "It is forcing us all as a society to say, 'Who is providing our water? Is it Nestlé or our own democratically governed towns and cities?'" Stewart's organization is not a party to the suit but works on other water issues.
The litigation comes at a time of enormous growth in the bottled water industry. Americans bought a record 10 billion gallons of bottled water in 2014, spending nearly $26 billion, according to data from the Beverage Marketing Corporation, a research and consulting firm.
The litigation is another knock in Nestlé's shaky reputation on water. The company, which pulled in about $15 billion in profits last year, is the leading bottled water company in the world. In a 2012 documentary called "Bottled Life," Nestlé came up for harsh criticism for extracting ground water from poor communities. Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe caught flack the following year after an interview with the Guardian in which he parsed the idea of whether or not water is a human right. The multinational lost a battle with activists in Michigan in 2009 over a plan to pump millions of gallons of water out of the state for pennies on the gallon and sell it back customers in bottles at much higher prices.
In San Bernardino, Nestlé is paying around $500 a year for the right to pipe out natural spring water. You can watch this explainer video from Story of Stuff Project, a nonprofit environmental group and one of the plaintiffs in the suit.
The suit follows a damning investigation earlier this year from reporter Ian James at the Desert Sun. The article, which revealed Nestlé's permit had lapsed, received widespread attention, triggering protests and petitions against the Swiss-based multinational and was the driving force behind Tuesday's lawsuit.
A spokeswoman from Nestlé emphasized that the company is not named in Tuesday’s lawsuit, but said it is operating lawfully in San Bernardino. “Our permit for the pipeline remain in full force and effect,” she said.
A press officer from the Forest Service's regional office in California confirmed that the permit was under review and that it was fine for Nestlé to continue to operate because it had requested a renewal and the agency hadn't gotten to it yet.
The company is now working with the Forest Service on getting its permit reviewed and renewed, a process that could take up to 18 months. That review only began after critics and the Desert Sun started asking about the expired permit, according to the Sun.
“Bottled water is not a contributing factor to the drought,” the chief executive of Nestlé’s water subsidiary in the U.S., Tim Brown, wrote in a recent op-ed for the San Bernardino County Sun. Nestlé uses about 705 million gallons of water in the state each year, “roughly equal to the annual average watering needs of two California golf courses,” he said.
Brown went even further in an interview with a California public radio station: "If I stop bottling water tomorrow, people would buy a different brand of bottled water. We see this everyday," he said. "In fact, if I could increase [bottling], I would.”
Environmental groups say regardless of how much water the company is using, it’s simply not OK to extract and profit from local waters during a drought. “This doesn’t make sense,” Kurtz told HuffPost.
Other companies have decided to avoid the negative public relations hit that bottling water during a drought brings.
Starbucks agreed to stop sourcing its bottled water brand Ethos in California earlier this year, noting the “serious drought conditions and water conservation efforts in California,” in a press release.
Environmental groups say regardless of how much water the company is using, it’s simply not OK to extract and profit from local waters during a drought.
Nestlé referred HuffPost to a defense of the San Bernardino operation on its website. The company says it removes 25 million gallons of water a year from the forest and that this does not harm the environment.
Yet, no one has studied the environmental impacts of the operation. Former forest service employees and activists said that such research was imperative.
"They're taking way too much water. That water's hugely important,” Steve Loe, a biologist who retired from the Forest Service in 2007, told the Desert Sun. "Without water, you don't have wildlife, you don't have vegetation."
Loe, who’s was among the first to raise the issue with Nestlé, told the Desert Sun that the removal of water was responsible, in part, for the disappearance of at least one rare species of fish from the ecosystem.
BEIJING (AP) — China's September imports fell by an unexpectedly wide margin of 20.4 percent from a year ago in a new sign of weakness in the world's second-largest economy.
The fall in imports worsened from August's 5.5 percent contraction, defying stimulus efforts aimed at halting an economic slowdown, customs data showed Tuesday. Exports shrank 3.7 percent, though that was an improvement from the previous month's 13.8 percent decline.
Weakness in trade has fueled doubts Beijing can hit its economic growth target this year of about 7 percent.
Much of China's slowdown over the past five years was self-imposed as the ruling Communist Party tries to steer the economy to more self-sustaining growth based on domestic consumption. But the past year's unexpectedly deep decline has raised fears of politically dangerous job losses.
The government has cut interest rate five times since November and pumped money into the economy through spending on public works construction.
"Import growth appears to have come in weaker than expected," Julian Evans-Pritchard of Capital Economics said in a report.
"This suggests that domestic demand may have softened," though part of the decline is due to a drop in global commodity prices, which makes foreign goods cheaper, he said. "Import volumes are holding up much better."
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Things are not going well for American Apparel founder and former CEO Dov Charney.
American Apparel's board fired Charney for misconduct, including sexual harassment, last December. He then turned around and sued the company for defamation. That lawsuit's prospects aren't looking good after the latest hearing.
At the Sept. 30 proceeding, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Terry Green blocked the suit -- but not before a few harsh words for Charney.
"You know, I think there’s a greater likelihood that I’ll be the first American astronaut stranded on Mars before [Charney] wins this lawsuit," Green said, according to Litigation Daily.
He didn't stop there. According to the Wall Street Journal, Green went on to describe how the case would go if it went to trial. He didn't think it would end well for Charney.
"No rational company would hire this guy,” Judge Green said at the Sept. 30 hearing, describing the arguments that would be made if Mr. Charney’s case went to trial. “It would be insane. This is sexual harassment. This is the mother of all sexual harassment cases. I mean, this is so far over the top, that you can’t see the top anymore. I mean, it’s just…”
Prior to Charney's outster, multiple former employees filed lawsuits against him alleging all sorts of misconduct, from choking a store manager to forcing an employee into "sex slavery."
The judge ended the hearing almost wistfully, according to Above the Law: "This would be certainly an entertaining trial. It certainly beats your usual breach of contract case." However, he went on, "I just don’t see it.”
American Apparel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday.
Machines won't bring about the economic robot apocalypse -- but greedy humans will, according to physicist Stephen Hawking.
In a Reddit Ask Me Anything session on Thursday, the scientist predicted that economic inequality will skyrocket as more jobs become automated and the rich owners of machines refuse to share their fast-proliferating wealth.
If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.
Essentially, machine owners will become the bourgeoisie of a new era, in which the corporations they own won't provide jobs to actual human workers.
As it is, the chasm between the super rich and the rest is growing. For starters, capital -- such as stocks or property -- accrues value at a much faster rate than the actual economy grows, according to the French economist Thomas Piketty. The wealth of the rich multiplies faster than wages increase, and the working class can never even catch up.
But if Hawking is right, the problem won't be about catching up. It'll be a struggle to even inch past the starting line.
