Judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion, Alex Jones says
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(NEW YORK) — A bankruptcy judge rejected the sale of Infowars to The Onion, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones said during his podcast on Tuesday.
“We are deeply disappointed in today’s decision but The Onion will continue to seek a resolution that helps the Sandy Hook families receive a positive outcome for the horror they endured,” The Onion CEO Ben Collins said on social media.
“We will also continue to seek a path towards purchasing InfoWars in the coming weeks,” Collins’ statement continued.
Jones accused The Onion and Sandy Hook Elementary School families of “collusive bidding” and asked a bankruptcy court judge to halt the sale of his Infowars platform in November.
Jones, who defamed the Sandy Hook families by calling the 2012 massacre a hoax and the parents of the 20 first graders actors, called The Onion’s winning $1.75 million bid “sheer nonsense” because it’s half of what the losing bidder offered.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(NEW YORK) — Cryptocurrencies affiliated with President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump plummeted in the initial hours after Trump was sworn into office Monday.
“Official Trump,” a recently launched crypto token, plunged more than 20% in value over a 24-hour stretch ending Tuesday morning, according to crypto tracking site CoinGecko. After the drop, Official Trump stood at $38.
The decline for Trump’s meme coin reverses some of the gains enjoyed in an initial surge after it hit crypto markets last week. The coin’s price climbed from about $10 on Saturday morning to a high of about $74.59 before it began to slide.
“Melania Meme,” which also launched last week, dropped in value by more than half over a 24-hour timespan ending on Tuesday morning, CoinGecko data showed. The price of the Melania Meme was $4.19 on Tuesday morning.
The recent decline for the coins associated with Trump and Melania coincided with a slight drop for bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency. In early trading on Tuesday, bitcoin fell nearly one percentage point, putting its price at $102,853.
Many digital assets have climbed since Trump won the November election, indicating investor enthusiasm about declarations Trump made in support of cryptocurrency.
In July, Trump told the audience at a cryptocurrency conference in Nashville, Tennessee, that he wanted to turn the U.S. into the “crypto capital of the planet.”
Trump also has promised to ease regulations for the sector and establish the federal government’s first National Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.
On Monday, Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler officially resigned from his position, marking the departure long-sought by some crypto boosters who viewed Gensler as overly restrictive toward digital assets.
There have been reports that Trump would sign an executive action that would prioritize cryptocurrency policy. However, no such order was among the dozens of actions Trump signed
(NEW YORK) — Facebook plans to replace its fact checkers with “Community Notes,” a move that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said would allow the social network to return “to our roots around free expression.”
“We’re replacing fact checkers with Community Notes, simplifying our policies and focusing on reducing mistakes,” Zuckerberg said on Tuesday. “Looking forward to this next chapter.”
The changes, which will also be in place for Instagram and Threads, will lift restrictions “on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse” and will focus the company’s “enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations,” Joel Kaplan, chief global affairs officer, said in a blog post.
As the company’s fact-checking capabilities have grown, they have expanded “to the point where we are making too many mistakes,” which in turn has frustrated many of the social networks’ users, Kaplan said.
“Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in ‘Facebook jail,’ and we are often too slow to respond when they do,” he said.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
ABC News’ Michael Kreisel and Zunaira Zaki contributed to this report.
(BERLIN) — Workers for the largest online retailer in the world are planning to go on strike during one of the busiest shopping weekends of the holiday season.
Amazon employees are preparing to protest in 20 countries, including in major cities in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan and Brazil, starting on Black Friday over “labor abuses, environmental degradation and threats to democracy,” according to UNI Global Union and Progressive International, a Switzerland-based global labor union.
Dubbed the “Make Amazon Pay days of resistance,” the strike is scheduled to last from Black Friday through Cyber Monday, the union announced in a press release. Demonstrators are calling for increased wages and for employees to be permitted to unionize.
The strike could lead to delays in holiday deliveries for customers, economy experts told ABC News.
Unions and allied groups around the world are planning to participate, according to UNI Global Union.
Thousands of workers in the German cities of Graben, Dortmund Werne, Bad Hersfeld, Leipzig, Koblenz and Rheinberg will also protest, in addition to hundreds in New Delhi, who are demonstrating to demand fair treatment following the mistreatment of workers during a heat wave in July, the union said.
The Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and Citizen’s Action will hold protests in multiple cities across France, and garment workers will also take to the streets in Bangladesh, the union said.
This year marks the fifth annual Make Amazon Pay demonstration, which aims to “hold Amazon accountable around the world” by targeting a busy holiday shopping weekend. In 2023, Amazon represented 18% of the worldwide Black Friday sales, with more than $170 billion in total holiday sales, according to an earnings report released earlier this year.
“Amazon’s relentless pursuit of profit comes at a cost to workers, the environment and democracy,” said Christy Hoffman, general secretary of UNI Global Union. “[Jeff] Bezos’ company has spent untold millions to stop workers from organizing, but the strikes and protests happening around the world show that workers’ desire for justice — for union representation — can’t be stopped. We stand united in demanding that Amazon treat its workers fairly, respect fundamental rights, and stop undermining the systems meant to protect us all.”
Amazon defended its treatment of workers in a statement to ABC News on Thursday.
“This group is being intentionally misleading and continues to promote a false narrative,” Amazon spokesperson Eileen Hards said. “The fact is at Amazon we provide great pay, great benefits, and great opportunities — all from day one. We’ve created more than 1.5 million jobs around the world, and counting, and we provide a modern, safe, and engaging workplace whether you work in an office or at one of our operations buildings.”
The company announced earlier this year a $2.2 billion investment to increase pay for fulfillment and transportation employees in the U.S. As a result, the average base wage for these employees is now more than $22 per hour and the average total compensation more than $29 per hour when the value of their elected benefits is factored in, according to the company.
Comprehensive benefits for these employees that begin on the first day of employment include health, vision and dental insurance; a 401(k) with 50% company match; up to 20 weeks paid leave, which includes 14 weeks of pregnancy-related disability leave and six weeks of parental leave; and Amazon’s Career Choice program, which prepays college tuition, according to Amazon.
An earlier statement to ABC News from Amazon stated: “While we’re always listening and looking at ways to improve, we remain proud of the competitive pay, comprehensive benefits and engaging, safe work experiences we provide our teams.”
Amazon workers have been outspoken in recent years about workers’ rights, especially as the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic increased the number of online orders. E-commerce sales in the U.S. increased by $244.2 billion — or 43% — in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, rising from $571.2 billion in 2019 to $815.4 billion in 2020, according to the Census Bureau’s Annual Retail Trade Survey.
In 2022, a worker-led independent group led the first-ever U.S. union at the company, unionizing a 6,000-employee Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York.
While subsequent attempts at facilities in Alabama and New York have failed, efforts have continued.
In June 2023, nearly 2,000 Amazon workers organized a walkout after a mandate to return to the office was issued. In Kentucky, Amazon employees who spoke to ABC News alleged that the company was leading a union-busting campaign to discourage employees from organizing.
Amazon told ABC News last year that the disciplinary action taken by the company at an Amazon facility in Kentucky came in response to infractions of company policy.
“Amazon squeezes everything that it can get, but it changes its behavior depending on its jurisdiction,” James Schneider, communications director for Progressive International, told ABC News this week. “Let’s say, in Sweden, it engages much better at how it operates with trade unions. But in the U.S., it engages in union busting.”
A 2022 report by the United Nations’ International Labour Organization found that post-pandemic inflation and the rising cost of living have been decreasing the value of minimum wage globally.
The rise of inflation has paved the way for collective action, experts say. (Starbucks was also part of the 2022 union resurgence.)
“Amazon is everywhere, but so are we. By uniting our movements across borders, we can not only force Amazon to change its ways but lay the foundations of a world that prioritizes human dignity, not Jeff Bezos’ bank balance,” said Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla, Progressive International’s co-general coordinator.