- WorldAssociated Press
10-foot great white shark kills surfer in Australia
A 60-year-old surfer was attacked and killed by a 3-meter (10-foot) great white shark off the coast of northern New South Wales state on Sunday, officials said. The man received a bite to the back of his thigh and was brought to the shore by other surfers who had fought off the shark, a surf rescue group, Surf Life Saving NSW, said in a statement. “A shark biologist assessed photographs and confirmed a white shark was responsible for the fatal attack,” the state's Department of Primary Industries said.
8484 reactions - U.S.BBC
Two Buffalo policemen charged for shoving 75-year-old protester
The officers filmed pushing a man, 75, to the ground have been charged with second degree-assault.
- U.S.The Daily Beast
Buffalo Cops Who Shoved Elderly Man Charged With Second-Degree Assault
Two Buffalo cops were arraigned on Saturday on one count each of assault in the second degree, after they allegedly shoved a 75-year-old demonstrator during anti-police brutality protests. Martin Gugino, a longtime peace activist in the upstate New York city, hit his head on the pavement and was left on the ground as blood pooled around his head on Thursday evening. He remained in hospital in a serious but stable condition on Saturday.Initially, city officials claimed Gugino had tripped and fell. However, a video surfaced showing riot police, who were clearing Niagara Square at the time, clearly pushing Gugino over and walking by his motionless body. The video had been viewed 78 million times by Saturday.When the two officers, Aaron Torgalski and Robert McCabe, were suspended without pay on Friday, all 57 officers in the department’s Emergency Response Team quit the elite unit in protest. Hundreds of Buffalo police officers showed up to the courthouse to back the pair on Saturday, after the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association reportedly circulated text messages drumming up support. Police and other supporters reportedly cheered when one of the officers exited the courthouse.Some supporters wore “We Back The Blue” t-shirts and held up umbrellas to block news cameras attempting to show the pro-police protesters. Torgalski, 39, and McCabe, 32, both pleaded not guilty to a class D felony and were both released on recognizance after brief virtual appearances in Buffalo City Court.Shortly after, Erie County District Attorney John Flynn said in a press conference that the two officers “crossed the line” and “violated the law.” He cited a New York State law which says if a victim is 65 or older, and is assaulted by someone at least 10 years younger, a felony can be charged.Flynn added that the officers could have arrested Gugino if he was committing a crime. “You arrest him. You don’t take a baton and shove him, along with the officer next to him... You properly arrest him, if he was committing a crime.”The Terrifying History of Bad Cops in BuffaloHe denied any suggestions of unfairly targeting police, pointing out that his office had prosecuted 39 “protesters that became agitators” as well.The city’s black mayor, though, stood by the police officers, saying he had not asked for them to be fired, and it was very important that they “know they are getting due process.”Byron Brown also argued that the 75-year-old man was an “agitator” who had been asked to leave previously. “What we were informed of is that that individual was an agitator,” Brown said. “He was trying to spark up the crowd of people. Those people were there into the darkness. Our concern is when it gets dark, there is a potential for violence.”John Evans, president of the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association, said the officers were following orders to clear the square of all people, regardless of age. “They were simply doing their job. I don’t know how much contact was made. He did slip in my estimation. He fell backwards,” he told The Buffalo News on Friday.However, Erie County Executive Marc Poloncarz said Friday he was “exceptionally disappointed” by the mass resignation. “It indicates to me that they did not see anything wrong with the actions last night,” he said at a press conference.Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the video made him nauseous and he supported a criminal investigation by the Erie County District Attorney.“What we saw was horrendous, disgusting and, I believe, illegal,” Cuomo, a former attorney general, said Saturday.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
- SportsMMA Weekly
Conor McGregor announces his retirement from fighting
Conor McGregor is known for taking to social media on fight night, even when he's not fighting. He did so following UFC 250 on Saturday, surprisingly announcing his retirement from fighting."Hey guys, I've decided to retire from fighting," he declared. "Thank you all for the amazing memories! What a ride it's been!"This isn't the first time that McGregor has announced his retirement, so it is difficult to tell how serious he was about the announcement or if it would stick this time.The world is in a much different place than ever before when McGregor has made such a pronouncement. There's a worldwide pandemic, as well as an uprising over racial inequality and injustice. McGregor has been vocal about both. He also has also found a tremendous amount of success with his Proper No. Twelve whiskey, assuring that he doesn't need to fight for the money."Nothing is crazy and nuts right now because everything is crazy and nuts right now. On a certain level, I get it," UFC president Dana White said when asked about McGregor's retirement at the UFC 250 post-fight press conference."We're in a pandemic. The world is a crazy place right now and everybody feels it. I think everybody's pissed off, confused and been locked in their houses for three months."White certainly didn't seem to accept McGregor's retirement at face value considering the circumstances, but it wouldn't surprise him either, particularly noting the success of his whiskey perhaps influencing the move."Proper Twelve whisky has sold an obscene amount of liquor."White seemed to think that part of McGregor's angst could simply be that he wants to fight and it's been difficult to put him in a fight right now. Fight Island isn't ready until July and McGregor will likely have to fight there. White has also said that he thinks McGregor should wait for the winner of Khabib Nurmagomedov vs. Justin Gaethje, which won't take place until September.So perhaps McGregor is tiring of waiting, as he had planned on fighting three times in 2020 when the year began. Thus far, he has fought once, that being a quick victory over Donald "Cowboy" Cerrone at UFC 246 in January.* * *TRENDING Cody Garbrandt lands last-second bone-crushing knockout at UFC 250* * *https://twitter.com/TheNotoriousMMA/status/1269492917317533696
- BusinessBloomberg
Amazon’s Heavily Automated HR Leaves Workers in Sick-Leave Limbo
(Bloomberg) -- Tony Banks told Amazon.com Inc. right away when he tested positive for Covid-19. More than a month later, he’s on the mend, but struggling with fatigue and shortness of breath that makes most physical activity feel like he’s just sprinted up a hill. Banks says he’s in no shape to return to work at the Indiana warehouse where he walks miles every shift. Yet somewhere in an Amazon human-resources operation that already extended his medical leave once, Banks is seen as an employee abandoning his job. The company has twice in recent weeks initiated automatic termination proceedings against him for missing shifts. “I understand that it’s overwhelming right now,” Banks says. “But for all the resources they have, it’s almost like a mom-and-pop operation.”After suffering delivery delays and mass absenteeism during the early weeks of the pandemic, Amazon has hit another snag: a human resources department ill prepared to handle the thousands of requests pouring in from sick employees and those who need to stay home to care for their children or elderly relatives. It’s unclear how many employees are stuck in limbo, but Bloomberg spoke with six such workers, who work in facilities from New Jersey to Indiana. They say they’re owed back pay for time spent on sick leave or in quarantine, have been scheduled for shifts while sick, or were denied leave despite providing documentation of conditions Amazon says should make them eligible to stay home without pay.Many companies would struggle with this unprecedented emergency, made harder by the federal government’s largely ineffective response to a pandemic that has sickened more than 1.8 million people and killed more than 100,000. Meanwhile, state governments have grappled with an influx of unemployment claims.But the design of Amazon’s HR department reflects the strengths and weaknesses of the company’s culture. It’s heavily automated, which helps Amazon grow quickly and restrain costs but these days leaves employees hitting dead ends with chatbots, smartphone apps and phone trees. Three people with experience in the company’s human resources group say the unit has been weighed down by competing priorities. HR is expected to offer workers the same speedy customer service as Amazon’s customers, while practicing a level of frugality that Amazon sometimes takes to extremes, the employees say. HR “is always struggling to automate and keep pace with the scale of the company,” says one of the people, who all requested anonymity because they signed confidentiality agreements. “The horror stories happen because [HR] people are overwhelmed. And they don’t have the resources and the mental capacity to deal with [workers] because they’re pulled in so many different directions. It’s bound to have negative, real-life human impacts.” Amazon says Banks, the employee threatened with termination, shouldn’t have received those notices and that they were sent after Banks failed to submit proof of his condition when applying to extend the leave. “These are unprecedented times, and we’re working fast to support our employees, partners and provide critical services to communities in need,” Lisa Levandowski, an Amazon spokeswoman, said in an email. “We’ve created 175,000 jobs across America, increased wages, adjusted time-off options, just to name a few, to support the hundreds of thousands of employees who work in our sites. Like all companies we’re rapidly adjusting to support our teams.”Amazon has added some 2,500 full-time and temporary staffers to the human-resources teams that support its logistics group since the beginning of the year, she said.The pandemic has created one of the biggest challenges in Amazon’s quarter-century history. While the company has benefited from a surge in online orders from home-bound shoppers, Covid-19 has sickened more than 1,100 employees and killed nine, according media reports and internal information gathered by workers. Amazon, which declines to disclose how many employees have caught the virus, has kept its operations running without widespread closures thanks in part to a hiring spree and new safety measures designed to adapt the company’s logistical prowess to public health guidelines.Behind the scenes, however, the hiring binge and health crisis have put enormous pressure on a human-resources operation that was already struggling to keep up with Amazon’s growth. The company in the last half-decade has added an average of 130,000 workers a year. Then, during a six-week period beginning in March, Amazon recruited a mind-boggling 175,000 people to help it keep up with surging orders and plug warehouse slots abandoned by workers too afraid to show up.Amazon has worked for years to minimize the human effort behind administrative work. It’s part of a company-wide mandate to deploy automation and advanced software, a bet that Amazon can invent the systems of the future and keep a lid on costs at the same time. Automatic processes are a necessity for an HR department that deals with many millions of employee inquiries a year. But those systems can be of little help to an overwhelmed staffer who needs time to sift through Amazon policies and government leave laws on behalf of an employee.For a time, Amazon outsourced some of the work—sending employees seeking family or medical leave to ReedGroup, a provider of outsourced leave management services. But issues cropped up, including missed return dates and employees coming back from leave to find their paychecks hadn’t resumed. (ReedGroup didn’t immediately provide comment.)Amazon began shifting the work back in-house late last year, completing the transfer on March 2, two weeks before the first Covid-19 case was confirmed among the company’s U.S. workers. Many employees stopped showing up or cut shifts short, moves Amazon supported with an offer of unlimited unpaid time off without risk of termination. Andre Goodin, who works in an Amazon warehouse outside Baltimore, fell ill in April and was ordered into quarantine while he waited for a Covid-19 test that ultimately proved to be negative. Back at work, he had a second scare. A colleague he works with closely tested positive, days after a team meal during which a small group ate pizza together. Goodin, told by on-site HR to wait for Amazon to contact him if they determined he was at risk of exposure, decided to quarantine anyway.Amazon says it has no record of Goodin coming into contact with someone who tested positive for Covid-19. The company says it uses video footage to determine such exposure and defines contact for the purposes of its contact-tracing program, as more than 15 minutes of exposure within six feet of a person. By then, Amazon’s offer of unpaid time off had expired. The company said people suffering from Covid-19, those in quarantine and people who needed time to care for loved ones or shelter with at-risk family members, would be eligible for leave. But the deluge of requests overwhelmed Amazon’s ability to respond. Goodin, still trying to get the pay he believes he’s eligible for his first quarantine, isn’t optimistic about ever getting paid for his second. He has hit dead ends when trying to use Amazon’s self-service options and says he has spent hours on hold waiting to speak to representatives of Amazon’s Employee Resource Center. “It went from being able to call and talk to a person, to now, they automatically redirect you to the website and hang up on you,” he says. Goodin and other hourly warehouse employees typically use a smartphone app for most workplace issues. They can also ask for help from on-site human resources teams. For many tasks more complicated than requesting time off or fixing a missed time card punch, though, they must open a case with centralized HR teams in the U.S., Costa Rica and India. Staff at an employee call center in San Jose, Costa Rica, were used to the occasional call from frustrated employees worried that delayed responses from HR would mean termination or a missed paycheck, according to someone familiar with the operation. Amazon was already struggling to manage call volume as it took back management of leave services from ReedGroup, the person said. Then the virus struck, and the phones began ringing incessantly. “Obviously, no one saw that this was going to happen,” the person says. “Amazon was, and is still not ready for the volume of cases they have.” For some employees, being left in limbo has made them reconsider their choice of employer. One worker at a warehouse on the East Coast, who toiled on weekends to help Amazon deal with the surge in orders, sometimes putting in 20 hours of overtime a week, was burned out. In April, she asked for unpaid leave to catch her breath. She made sure to put in the request early, giving Amazon almost three weeks to respond. Human resources never did. “I’ve been their biggest supporter,” she says of Amazon. “I went from feeling 100% on them, to, I’m at zero. It’s like we’re replaceable.”Another employee, who recovered from a case of Covid-19 caught early in the pandemic and had her illness confirmed by an antibody test, asked HR to compensate her for that sick time. The company misinterpreted the request, she says, and put her on unpaid leave, a sequence of events Amazon says its system shouldn’t allow. After days of trying to contact someone to fix it, and hours spent on hold, the worker says she was patched through to a call center employee in India, who couldn’t help her. “They only opened a ticket,” she says. “The department I needed doesn’t work weekends.”For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
- U.S.NBC News
GOP calls own lawmaker's comments on Confederate statues 'idiotic'
"There is an overt effort here to erase white history," Sen. Amanda Chase said this week, prompting the Senate GOP caucus to call her words "idiotic, inappropriate and inflammatory."
- BusinessSheKnows
Costco Sells Surprisingly High-End Name Brands That You Need to Know About
Swarovski home decor. Coach handbags. Prada perfume. No, this isn't a shopping list for your next trip to Bergdorf Goodman. These are items you'd actually find at wholesale retailer Costco. Yes, that Costco that carries a 24-pack of Truly hard seltzer for less than $25; and yes, that Costco that sells a popular sheet cake […]
