Tag Archives: Amazon

The New York Times reports: Workers at Amazon’s massive warehouse on Staten Island voted by a wide margin to form a union, according to results released on Friday, in a landmark win for a campaign targeting the country’s second-largest employer and one of the biggest victories for organized labor in a generation. Employees cast 2,654 votes to be represented by …

USA Today reports: Jeff Bezos’ superyacht is too large to pass through the Dutch port city of Rotterdam, so the town decided to dismantle the bridge. In retaliation, local residents vow to egg Bezos’ yacht as it passed through. As of Thursday, more than 14,000 people were “interested” and 4,000 confirmed they will attend a Facebook event titled “Throwing eggs …

The Insider reports: “Maus,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, surged to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list over the weekend after a Tennessee school board removed it from its eighth-grade curriculum. As of Monday morning, “The Complete Maus,” which includes all volumes of the graphic novel, was number one on Amazon. Individual editions for volumes one and …

The Data Center reports: Amazon Web Services is down again, in its third outage this month. There is a problem with AWS at its US-East-1 (Virginia) cloud region, impacting a number of customers and users. Among those impacted are Coinbase, Fortnite, Hulu, Instacart, Rocket League, Acadly, Peloton, Hinge, Quora, the Epic Games Store, Slack, GitHub rival Bitbucket, Samsung Smart Lights, …

The Washington Post reports: AmazonSmile, a charitable-giving arm that donates a half percent of every purchase from its online store to the nonprofit of a shopper’s choice, gave more than $42,000 to a dozen anti-vaccine nonprofits last year, according a Washington Post analysis of its tax returns. We respect that our customers have a wide variety of viewpoints on this …

Media Matters reports: The bestselling “LGBTQ+ Book” on Amazon is Johnny the Walrus — a hateful picture book by The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh that compares the gender identities of trans youth to a young boy who imagines he is a walrus. Amazon mislabeled the book into its LGBTQ+ Books section and, as a result, is promoting harmful anti-trans views …

The Washington Post reports: Amazon doesn’t distinguish well enough between paid ads and organic search results, something that could trick consumers, according to a new complaint filed with the Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday. More than a quarter of search results on Amazon are paid ads, according to the complaint filed by the Strategic Organizing Center, a coalition of labor …

The Associated Press reports: Amazon Web Services suffered a major outage Tuesday, the company said, limiting service at many key and popular sites. The company provides cloud computing services to many governments, universities and companies, including The Associated Press. Amazon said in a post an hour after the outage began that it had identified the root cause and was “actively …

Just in via press release: California Attorney General Rob Bonta today announced a first-of-its-kind stipulated judgment requiring Amazon to end harmful labor practices that concealed COVID-19 case numbers from workers and to provide key information on workplace protections in line with California’s “right-to-know” law, Assembly Bill 685 (AB 685) authored by Assembly Majority Leader Eloise Gómez Reyes. Throughout the pandemic, …

CNBC reports: Macy’s is embroiled in a legal battle with its landlord to prevent Amazon from using a billboard that sits on top of its most iconic flagship store. The department store chain is asking the Kaufman Organization to stop a potential deal with Amazon to use the billboard atop its storied Herald Square location. “The damages to Macy’s customer …

Ars Technica reports: Amazon is rolling out (literally) a robot that can help monitor your home. Powered by Amazon Alexa and a bunch of artificial intelligence (AI) technology while patrolling about on a set of wheels, the Astro robot can handle numerous tasks, from providing a view of inside the home when you’re out to delivering a message to Mom. …

CNBC reports: Amazon said Thursday it will offer to pay 100% of college tuition for its 750,000 U.S. hourly employees. The e-commerce giant is following the lead of other large U.S. companies that are dangling perks such as education benefits or more pay to woo workers in a tight job market. Starting in January, Amazon said, it will cover the …

The Verge reports: Amazon is set to release Amazon-branded TVs as soon as October in the US, according to Insider. The TVs will have Alexa, screen sizes “in the range of 55 to 75 inches,” and will be designed and manufactured by third parties such as TCL. The company is also developing a TV designed in-house, but it’s unclear when …

The Verge reports: Amazon is planning to expand its in-house moderation team for Amazon Web Services, according to a new report from Reuters. Citing two sources within the company, the report says Amazon is planning to develop a proactive threat monitoring capability within AWS, which will seek out prohibited content on AWS servers and remove it before it’s reported by …

Bloomberg News reports: Amazon.com Inc. has a solution for a potentially crippling shortage of delivery drivers: Recruit pot smokers. The company is advising its delivery partners — the mom and pops that operate the ubiquitous blue Amazon vans — to prominently advertise that they don’t screen applicants for marijuana use, according to correspondence reviewed by Bloomberg and interviews with four …

The Wall Street Journal reports: Amazon.com Inc. plans to open several large physical retail locations in the U.S. that will operate akin to department stores, a step to help the tech company extend its reach in sales of clothing, household items, electronics and other areas, people familiar with the matter said. The plan to launch large stores will mark a …

Via press release from the Smithsonian: The Smithsonian will receive a $200 million donation from Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chair of Amazon, and founder of aerospace and space flight company Blue Origin. The donation is the largest gift to the Smithsonian since the Institution’s founding gift from James Smithson in 1846. A $70 million portion of the donation will …

Axios reports: The Department of Defense announced Tuesday it was canceling the massive cloud contract awarded to Microsoft in 2019, saying it “no longer meets its needs.” The JEDI contract was the largest-ever of its kind, with an estimated value of roughly $10 billion over a 10-year stretch. The deal, initially intended to modernize the Pentagon’s IT operations, was the …

Business Insider reports: Jeff Bezos’ reign as Amazon CEO will come to an end on Monday, and he’ll be stepping down as the world’s richest person. He will be retiring from the role at the age of 57 with an estimated $199 billion in wealth, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire’s Index. The fortune largely consists of his hefty Amazon holdings and …

NBC News reports: Jeff Bezos announced on Monday that he and his brother will join the first crewed spaceflight from his private rocket company on July 20 — just 15 days after he is set to step down as chief executive of Amazon. “Ever since I was five years old, I’ve dreamed of traveling to space,” he wrote in an …