London regulators have just rejected Uber’s request for a five-year license to operate within the city’s limits. The ride-hailing service will not be (legally) available in the city starting next week.

The Transport For London (TFL) refused to renew the U.S. company’s private hire license which expires Sept. 30. The TFL declined to renew the license amid mounting pressure from licensed cab drivers operating in London.

Business Insider had anticipated the outcome since taxi drivers have always opposed Uber because its on-the-spot drivers put them out of business without having to pay any fees and without any knowledge of the city’s roads.

What’s more, the public is concerned about the many safety issues posed by Uber drivers, with many not trusting the company’s background checks of its partners. There are countless reports of Uber drivers stalking and even sexually assaulting their customers worldwide.

Uber Raises Serious Safety Concerns

Some members of the British Parliament are pushing for a bill to ban the app in the country entirely following reports that the taxi service had failed to report all the instances of sexual assaults on riders. The British MPs recently deemed the firm an “unfit and improper operator”.

The TFL sided with the MPs and argued that the recent refusal is due to Uber’s failure to accurately report “serious criminal offense”. The agency also criticized the company for the way it obtains medical certificates and the Enhanced Disclosure Barring Service (DBS) checks.

Uber will be able to appeal the decision within the next 21 days.

Shortly after the decision was announced, Uber’s GM for London Tom Elvidge criticized the TFL for putting thousands of drivers out of work and stripping millions of Londoners of a convenient means of transport. Elvidge added that the company plans to challenge the decision in court.
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A group of former Google employees named their latest start-up “Bodega” after the name of the very business they want to destroy. Their plan, however, drew a lot of criticism especially in New York where bodegas are commonplace.

Paul McDonald and Ashwath Rajan say their new concept offers nonperishable goods in an “unmanned pantry box”. While the term may seem so fancy that only a hipster could use, it refers to the good ol’ fashioned vending machine.

Customers will be able to buy the products via a special app. The vending machines will be placed in key locations so the system can beat any two-hour delivery. The company’s owners claim that their system is better even than the half-hour delivery.

McDonald thinks his startup could soon make bodegas obsolete.

Twitterers Are Enraged

The idea in itself sparked a tweetstorm, with people identifying several major issues with the startup. First, the term used to describe the concept – “unmanned pantry box” – is meant to lure in investors for a vending machines-based business. This is one of those ideas that look superb on paper but fail in the implementation phase.

Second, it is hard to believe that a high-tech glass case can replace bodegas. Twitter users argued that bodegas also sell fresh egg sandwiches and allow people communicate, two things an unmanned box would never do.

Can their bodega app make this? I think not. pic.twitter.com/qbKIortMrS

— This Is How I Mom (@howimom) September 13, 2017

Weird that they’re calling this heinous vending machine “Bodega” and not “Gentrification Box” https://t.co/xPCozclRRD

— Tristan Cooper (@TristanACooper) September 13, 2017

What’s more, the startup’s logo is a cat which is a reference to the many cats that populate bodegas. But New Yorkers love cats and don’t want them put out of work:

I don’t understand why they don’t understand that customers get this when they walk into a bodega and it’s awesome. pic.twitter.com/CAeySIFj8z

— Patty (@PattyLibrarian) September 13, 2017

tfw you just heard about Bodega pic.twitter.com/0HVVRaARq4

— Daniel Radosh (@danielradosh) September 13, 2017

also think of all the bodega cats. bodega cat in my old hood had *2* stores. they want to put him out of not one but TWO jobs

— Tracy Clayton (@brokeymcpoverty) September 13, 2017

And last but not least, the ‘Bodega’ could leave without food on the table millions of recent immigrants and their families, which is to say the least heartless.
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Big-box retailers are pressing prepackaged food companies to lower their prices in their efforts to lure in more shoppers.

Campbell Soup Co recently announced that its sales would be badly hit this winter following a failed deal with an unnamed retailer over pricing for its most important product, canned soup.

Campbell’s failed negotiations refer to Walmart, which accounts for 20% of the American canned soup producer. Other retailers including Target and Sprouts Farmers Market are also looking for new ways to attract new customers.

Brick-and-mortar retailers are also concerned that Amazon Inc. may become a success in the grocery business after its acquisition of Whole Foods Market.

Packaged-food producers have experienced lower sales in recent years as customers have become more interested in fresher and healthier food options than older brands. Now, retail giants are making things worse for those companies.

Campbell Chief Executive Denise Morrison recently noted that the retail landscape has changed “dramatically”. Morrison made the comment Thursday after the group reported its eleventh quarter of continual sale declines.

Walmart Eyes 15% Lower Prices 80% of the Time

Campbell unveiled that the current negotiations with retailers focus mainly on promotional pricings and product assortment. On Thursday, the company’s stock slipped seven percent.

Walmart is squeezing lower prices in its effort to become more competitive. The company’s executives want prices to be at least 15 percent lower than other retailers’ 80 percent of the time.

Meanwhile, Walmart is investing millions in the price war, which has taken a heavy toll on its own margins. Walmart is reportedly reducing prices without announcing brands beforehand. When one major retailer lowers prices, brands will have to lower prices when dealing with other retailers as those will add pressure on suppliers as well.

If things continue at this pace, experts expect the degradation of some large, more mature brands for especially struggling products like canned soup.
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Google and Walmart decided to take their rivalry with Amazon to the next step, so they decided to start a partnership which they hope will help them beat their adversary. Near the end of September, Walmart will start selling many of its products on Google Express. Also, Google Home Assistants will support voice shopping from Walmart.

Google and Walmart build a new online shopping alternative

This move will be welcome by thousands of customers, as they have one more alternative to go shopping from the comfort of their couch. If things weren’t already good enough, Google made another exciting announcement. The Google Express fee is gone.

Google used to charge Google Express users a $95 membership fee. Now, the fee is gone. This means they can order anything and get it delivered to their homes for free, as long as they reach the minimum order set by the store.

Intense efforts to overcome Amazon

Google and Walmart picked the perfect time to start a partnership. Amazon currently owns the supremacy of the e-commerce market, with about 43 percent of all online sales which take place in the US. This is given mainly by the Amazon Prime membership and, more recently, by its Whole Foods purchase.

Walmart is the biggest grocery store in the US, but its business is greatly threatened by Amazon. At the same time, Amazon is a threat for Google as well. The company’s inventory became so big that people started using it as a shopping search engine. Besides, Amazon started mingling with online ads as well, which is a bit hit for Google.

Lately, both Google Express and Walmart have started growing, and are making progresses in their fight to take over Amazon. This new partnership might really be successful, by offering people another shopping alternative. Google Express has already been collaborating with Costco and Target, while the chain store greatly increased its inventory and purchased other online shopping platforms.
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This Saturday, First Amendment supporters plan to take to Pittsburgh’s streets to protest Google’s firing of a software engineer for voicing his anti-diversity views, but the city’s mayor is concerned the event could lead to violence.

On Tuesday, Pittsburg Mayor Bill Peduto said he hadn’t received any permit requests, so it is unclear if the “March on Google” is something planned or just a social media thing. Pittsburg is one of the nine cities that announced similar protests.

The mayor noted that any type of speech, even “hate speech,” is protected under the U.S. Constitution. But Pittsburgh doesn’t want anti-Google protesters on its streets since people don’t believe in what protesters say, the mayor added.

Rally Likely to Be Moved Into Isolated Area

Even though the protest is not linked to Neo-Nazi groups or the alt-right movement, Peduto thinks the Neo Nazis, KKK members, and alt-right sympathizers might join the rally. At one point, Peduto said he wouldn’t refuse to issue the permit, but the rally will likely be located in an isolated area.

“It’s our intention to be able to find an area that is an area where it can be isolated but still be able to occur,”

the mayor said.

On their website, the march’s organizers claim the event has nothing to do with the “alt-right”. The march is a protest against Google for terminating engineer James over a memo that said the biological differences between men and women may explain why there are so few women engineers within the company. Protesters believe the web search giant infringed its former employee’s freedom of speech.

The protest’s organizers underlined that hate groups are not welcome, but Mayor Peduto claims intelligence reports show that right wingers may join the protests this weekend.
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A Google engineer has recently written a memo which sparked a lot of controversy, after claiming biology is what keeps women from enjoying as much success as men in the industry of tech. The company couldn’t stay indifferent to such claims, and a recent report confirmed the dismissal of the engineer.

The engineer who wrote the memo was James Damore, and he has already confirmed he had been dismissed via an email. As the reason why Google made this decision, Damore said the company accused him of propagating gender stereotypes.

Google’s CEO also wrote a memo for the other Google employees

Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, declared Damore violated important rules of the company after writing the document and then making it public. Therefore, the engineer needed to be dismissed. In this sense, Pichai also wrote a memo addressed to all employees.

In this memo, titled “Our words matter”, Pichai sends some warnings to all employees not to violate the company’s rules or suffer the consequences. Also, making assumptions based on biological reasons directed towards other members of the company is offensive, and people should refrain from doing so.

Damore made several outrageous claims in his memo, but still wants to take legal action against Google

In fact, what Damore’s memo did was to criticize Google for promoting diversity among workers. Initially, it was posted on an internal network, but it quickly went viral. As expected, it gave rise to a lot of controversy among other Google employees.

The document is called “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”, and claims women are not placed on a lower rank in the tech industry because of discrimination, but because of biology. According to him, biology dictates certain preferences and differences which make women different, including at the workplace.

Damore believes he was illegally dismissed, and is thinking of pursuing legal action against Google. Before writing the document, he issued a complaint for the National Labor Relations Board, where he said the company shamed him to silence his dissatisfaction.
Image Source: Pixabay

The gap between what the U.S. sells to other countries and what it buys from them shrank to $43.6 billion in June, as exports jumped to the highest level since December 2014.

According to a Commerce Department report published Friday, the trade gap decreased 5.9 percent. May’s trade deficit was initially reported $46.5 billion, but it was recently adjusted as $46.4 billion. Analysists had expected the trade gap to shrink to $45 billion in June.

When the figures were matched to inflation. The U.S. trade deficit decreased to $61 billion, which is $1.8 billion lower than the May levels. The decrease is mainly due to a surge in real goods ($126.9 billion) and oil exports.

A couple of weeks ago, the Commerce Department reported that two-tenths of percentage point in the annual economic growth are due to trade in the second quarter.

The report shows that good and service exports jumped 1.2 percent in June, which is the highest level in two and a half years. Food, cars, and capital goods were the most exported items by the U.S. By contrast, China’s exports slipped 4.7 percent during the same time period.

Imports on a Downward Trend

In June, U.S. imports fell 0.2 percent to $238 billion. Americans imported fewer materials and industrial supplies. Imports of smartphones and home appliances also slipped by $0.9 billion. Imports of goods made in China saw an uptick of 1.2 percent, while the trade deficit between the two countries expanded 3.1 percent to hit $32.6 billion in June.

While a shrinking trade deficit may be good news for the U.S.A., we cannot say the same thing about Canada. The Lumberjack Country’s trade deficit widened to $3.6 billion in June. Canadian authorities noted that a sharp decrease in exports while imports kept rising caused the imbalance.

Between April and June, Canadian exports sank 4.3 percent to $46.5 billion, while imports increased 0.3 percent. Many of the good and services Canada is exporting go to the U.S. The two countries currently have a trade surplus of $2.2 billion.

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Carrier, the Farmington, CT-based factory Trump ‘saved’ nine months ago, announced a first round of layoffs, with 338 employees expected to lose their jobs. The plant was at the center of a national discussion last November when Trump cut a deal that prevented it from moving hundreds of jobs to Mexico.

On Thursday, the 338 workers will be let go under a plan that was announced months ago. The company made the layoffs public Wednesday, and announced that it still plans to give Mexicans some of the jobs since they make in a day what American workers make in an hour.

Carrier plans a second round of layoffs for December 22, when 290 more workers will lose their jobs three days before Christmas. A representative for the manufacturing plant said the company remains committed to hiring around 1,100 people in Indianapolis.

Nearly 30 employees will undergo retraining programs under the new restructuring plans. All other employees will be given a one-time payment and the possibility to apply for any other positions within the company.

Trump decided to help the company during the campaign after a video taken by a worker showed an executive announcing the relocation. Trump supporters who wanted their jobs to stay in the country were shocked.

Carrier to Remain in Indiana

In April 2016, Trump promised that the company would not be leaving Indiana, if he were president. The factory was then often cited during the campaign, and several days after winning the election, Trump announced that he and former Indiana Governor Mike Pence were able to convince Carrier to keep the 1,100 in the Hoosier State.

Trump fans were excited about the deal, because they hoped Trump to intervene in the lives of other workers and put American worker interests first. Other companies announced new investments in the U.S. and the jobs they created. Meanwhile, the president took credit for part of the jobs generated.

As part of the deal, Carrier got $7 million in tax cuts from the state of Indiana. In return, the firm pledged to pour $16 million in new investment projects and leave the 1,100 jobs in the state. However, the $16 million will boost automation at the plant which will result in even more lost jobs.
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The U.S. Department of Energy announced that its experts would help U.S. power companies, of which at least one is a nuclear-powered, to help build a defense against hackers. The Feds warned that hackers have run a hacking campaign aimed at these companies recently, but the attacks have not reached the grid or electricity production.

Reuters reported the the attacks a week ago after the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security warned industrial firms of hackers trying to breach the nuclear and power infrastructure.

“DOE is working with our government and industry partners to mitigate any impact from a cyber intrusion affecting entities in the energy sector,”

a DOE official told reporters Friday.

The official also said that the past attacks only affected the business and administrative networks; no critical infrastructure was impacted.

The federal government couldn’t tell who the hackers were. They did say that the hacking campaign is “an advanced persistent threat.” This phrase is usually used in official documents to describe operations conducted by culprits.

Hackers Target Kansas Nuclear Plant

The DOE made the announcement after Bloomberg News reported that one of the power companies affected by the cyber-attack was the Kansas-based Wolf Creek nuclear facility. Bloomberg cited unnamed officials in the report.

The management of Wolf Creek power plant refused to confirm the news. They did say that the facility is out of harm’s way since the plant’s computer systems are not connected to the corporate network.

The DHS unveiled the hacking tools used in the attack, which revealed that hackers tried to use the password of one of the nuclear facility’s employees to breach the complex. It is unclear if hackers had compromised the employee’s account.

Authorities said hackers likely used phishing tactics to harvest credentials from employees. The official report reads that, traditionally, hackers are interested in power systems for cyber espionage or simply to disrupt the infrastructure in the event of an armed conflict.
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Over the last few weeks, the U.S. government has been asking many cybersecurity firms to unveil their products’ source code if they plan to stay in business. Now, U.S. authorities force Russian anti-virus maker Kaspersky Labs to do the same thing.

On Sunday, the firm announced that they are willing to share the code with U.S. authorities to prove that they have no ties to the Russian government or Russian spies.

“Anything I can do to prove that we don’t behave maliciously I will do it,”

the company’s chief executive Eugene Kaspersky said.

Mr. Kaspersky even said that he would gladly testify before the U.S. Congress to prove that his firm is not involved in anything shady. The company made the announcement a couple of days after the Senate unveiled a proposed bill to bar the Defense Department from using the Russian firm’s products on its computers. U.S. lawmakers are concerned that the anti-virus solutions may contain malware or security breaches that can be exploited by the Russian intelligence community.

Kaspersky Labs Cannot Be Trusted

Sources within Congress confirmed that the White House and Capitol Hill agree that Kaspersky Labs is not trustworthy due to its close ties to the Kremlin. The firm’s products cannot be used to shield critical infrastructure, lawmakers decided.

Kaspersky’s headquarters are located in Russia but the firm has helped both the FBI and the Russian government in past probes. The cyber security giant said it has no ties to any government, and dismissed allegations that it had helped a government spy on another.

Russia’ Communications Minister Nikolay Nikiforov warned that such measures directed at one of its companies might trigger retaliatory actions. Nikiforok thinks that the sanctions have a political origin. The Russian official underlined that his government uses a huge proportion of hardware and software which was made in the U.S.A. even in “sensitive areas”.
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