Corporations in the news

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Here’s something to think about the next time you plug your phone into a rental car: The vehicle may be slurping up and recording all sorts of data, including your location, personal contacts, and even your text messages and web browsing.

Today, a strange car is just like a strange computer, and you should be careful how them connect to them.

Rental cars can not only access and record your phone data, but hold on to it for an indefinite period. The risk is obvious.

Unless you delete that data before you return the car, other people may view it, including future renters and rental car employees or even hackers.

To reduce the risk, avoid using rentals cars’ USB ports to charge their phones, and rely on the cigarette lighter as a charging device instead. But while this is a nice suggestion, it may not be very practical because some cars don’t have a lighter port. Furthermore, many people don’t own the necessary adapter—meaning it’s much more likely they will just use their phone charger to plug into the USB port.

Check out the permissions setting on a car’s infotainment system, and granting access only to your phone’s music but not its contact list.

Delete any data from the system before returning the rental car.




http://fortune.com/2016/09/01/rental-cars-data-theft/
 
The price of getting parcels to their destination via United Parcel Service is going up.

UPS said Thursday that daily rates for ground and air service would increase an average of 4.9%. The package delivery company said an average 4.9% general rate increase on freight would take effect Sept. 19.

The rate increases will support "ongoing expansion and capabilities enhancements," UPS said in a statement.




http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2016/09/01/ups-rates-go-up/89734864/
 
U.S. tax law gives the Obama administration power to double tax rates for European companies should it choose to dramatically escalate a dispute with the European Union over Apple's tax bill.

Experts said the administration was unlikely to take such a drastic measure, and even if it did, courts might strike down that action because of treaties.

Section 891 of the U.S. tax code, passed in 1934 but never used, allows the president to double tax rates for citizens and corporations of any country the administration considered was discriminating against U.S. companies.

The U.S. Treasury on Wednesday declined to comment on whether Washington was considering such drastic measures, which Democratic and Republican lawmakers have proposed putting on the table due to what they see as overreach by the European Commission in a tax grab targeting American companies.







http://www.reuters.com/article/us-g20-china-obama-taxation-idUSKCN11763G
 
Drug maker Mylan, under fire for sharply raising prices of a life-saving allergy treatment, urged executives to hit ambitious five-year sales and profit targets with a special incentive plan.

If achieved, the special award, offered to more than 100 "key employees," would mean tens of millions of dollars in bonuses for the executives of the Netherlands-based company.

The plan's goal is to double Mylan's earnings per share of $2.89 to $6 by the end of 2018, an "ambitious" 16% compound annual growth rate, according to the company.

Since the incentive plan was enacted, the cost of EpiPen has risen to more than $600.



http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2016/09/01/epipen-maker-ties-bonuses-profit-targets/89710582/
 
Legion Troll said:
Drug maker Mylan, under fire for sharply raising prices of a life-saving allergy treatment, urged executives to hit ambitious five-year sales and profit targets with a special incentive plan.

If achieved, the special award, offered to more than 100 "key employees," would mean tens of millions of dollars in bonuses for the executives of the Netherlands-based company.

The plan's goal is to double Mylan's earnings per share of $2.89 to $6 by the end of 2018, an "ambitious" 16% compound annual growth rate, according to the company.

Since the incentive plan was enacted, the cost of EpiPen has risen to more than $600.



http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2016/09/01/epipen-maker-ties-bonuses-profit-targets/89710582/
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Given the fact that upper level mgmt. always takes stock options/shares as bonus compensation...the 12% drop in share price proved to be a catastrophe for these slobs.
 
Current and former Chipotle employees claim that the company made them work extra hours "off the clock" without paying them. It's a practice known as wage theft, and Chipotle is doing it all over the United States.

"Chipotle routinely requires hourly-paid restaurant employees to punch out, and then continue working until they are given permission to leave," according to the class action lawsuit known as Turner v. Chipotle. It's named after a former Chipotle manager in Colorado, Leah Turner, who had to work without pay and was told to make workers under her do the same in order to meet budget goals.

Chipotle has faced similar lawsuits before, but this is the first time there has been such a large class action case against the company for wage theft. As of Friday, 9,961 current and former workers have sent in consent forms to join the lawsuit.

They come from about every state that Chipotle operates in.

Chipotle's system automatically clocks workers out by 12:30am in most places, but workers are often asked to stay longer to finish cleaning and preparing for the next day. Managers are supposed to adjust the hours, but workers allege that doesn't always happen.




http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/29/news/economy/chipotle-lawsuit-nearly-10000-workers/
 
Hanjin Shipping Co's parent firm plans to raise $90 million to fund the unloading of billions of dollars worth of cargo aboard vessels stranded around the world in the wake of its court receivership filing last week.

Those funds may be matched by a separate 100 billion won in loans that South Korean government officials have said government-backed creditors are ready to provide if Hanjin Group, the parent firm, provides collateral. Hanjin Group is considering the offer.

The collapse of the world's seventh-largest container carrier has caused havoc in global trade networks and a surge in freight rates, as more than half of Hanjin's ships have been blocked from docking with ports and lashing firms fearing they won't be paid. Some vessels have also been seized.

Whether those funds would be sufficient to resolve cargo unloading problems was not clear. A spokeswoman for Hanjin Shipping was not immediately available for comment on the issue.

Hanjin Shipping, which many analysts and industry insiders expect eventually to be liquidated, had about 600 billion won in unpaid obligations such as charter fees and terminal use fees as of end-August. Its debt stood at 6 trillion won at the end of June and a bankruptcy would be the container shipping industry's largest.

HP, one of roughly 8,000 current Hanjin cargo owners, has tens of millions of dollars worth of computers and printers in more than 500 of the carrier's containers, it said on Monday in documents supporting Hanjin's U.S. bankruptcy filing.



http://www.reuters.com/article/us-hanjin-shipping-debt-idUSKCN11C05P
 
Wells Fargo will pay $185 million to resolve claims that bank employees opened deposit and credit-card accounts without customers’ approval to satisfy sales goals and earn financial rewards, U.S. regulators said.

The lender opened more than 2 million accounts that consumers may not have known about, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said in a statement Thursday.

Wells Fargo agreed to pay a $100 million fine to the CFPB, $35 million to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and $50 million to the Los Angeles city attorney to settle the matter.

The bank also will compensate customers who incurred fees or charges, the agencies said.




http://www.wsj.com/articles/wells-fargo-to-pay-185-million-fine-over-account-openings-1473352548
 
Three former Tesco executives have been charged with fraud by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) as part of an investigation into an accounting scandal at the supermarket.

Carl Rogberg, Chris Bush and John Scouler - the supermarket's former finance chief, managing director and food commercial head respectively - will be requisitioned to appear at Westminster Magistrates' Court on September 22.

The trio, who worked under former chief executive Philip Clarke, have been under investigation for their alleged role in an accounting scandal in which Tesco was found to have inflated its profits by £263 million in 2014, later revised up to £326 million.




http://home.bt.com/news/uk-news/three-ex-tesco-executives-charged-with-fraud-over-black-hole-in-accounts-11364085126857
 
A U.S. government safety agency on Friday urged all consumers to stop using Samsung Galaxy Note 7 phones, which are prone to catch fire, and top airlines globally banned their use during flights.

Following reports that the phones’ batteries have combusted during charging and normal use, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said it was working on an official recall of the devices and that users should turn them off in the meantime.

Samsung Electronics said it was working with the agency. It voluntarily issued a recall last week for 10 markets including the United States, and it was expediting shipments of replacement phones to customers.

The U.S. government action heralds more fallout for the South Korean manufacturer, which may take a financial hit from the recall and lose customers who are concerned about the quality of its flagship phones.

For Samsung, which prides itself on manufacturing prowess, the scale of the recall is expected to be unprecedented. Some 2.5 million of the premium devices have been sold worldwide, the company has said. Its shares closed down 3.9% on Friday.

Samsung said users in the United States can exchange their phones for one of several models and receive a $25 gift card.

“The cost of the recall is going to be astronomical,” said product liability expert and chief executive officer of Real-World Forensic Engineering, Jahan Rasty. “They have to compensate people, fix the problem and give them a revised version of the product that doesn’t have the same manufacturing or design defect.




fortune.com/2016/09/09/samsung-galaxy-note-7-advisory/
 
Legion Troll said:
A U.S. government safety agency on Friday urged all consumers to stop using Samsung Galaxy Note 7 phones, which are prone to catch fire, and top airlines globally banned their use during flights.

Following reports that the phones’ batteries have combusted during charging and normal use, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said it was working on an official recall of the devices and that users should turn them off in the meantime.

Samsung Electronics said it was working with the agency. It voluntarily issued a recall last week for 10 markets including the United States, and it was expediting shipments of replacement phones to customers.

The U.S. government action heralds more fallout for the South Korean manufacturer, which may take a financial hit from the recall and lose customers who are concerned about the quality of its flagship phones.

For Samsung, which prides itself on manufacturing prowess, the scale of the recall is expected to be unprecedented. Some 2.5 million of the premium devices have been sold worldwide, the company has said. Its shares closed down 3.9% on Friday.

Samsung said users in the United States can exchange their phones for one of several models and receive a $25 gift card.

“The cost of the recall is going to be astronomical,” said product liability expert and chief executive officer of Real-World Forensic Engineering, Jahan Rasty. “They have to compensate people, fix the problem and give them a revised version of the product that doesn’t have the same manufacturing or design defect.




fortune.com/2016/09/09/samsung-galaxy-note-7-advisory/
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OOPS!​
 
A veteran Volkswagen AG engineer’s guilty plea to a criminal charge Friday for his role in the automaker’s diesel emissions scandal has uncovered new revelations of a decade of deceit and coverups.

Federal documents unsealed Friday detail how VW engineers from the very beginning of the automaker’s so-called “clean diesel” program intentionally developed and installed a “defeat device” on roughly 500,000 cars from 2009 through 2015 in the United States so that they could appear to pass U.S. emissions tests.

The details were made public as James Robert Liang, leader of diesel competence for VW from 2008 through June, appeared in U.S. District Court in Detroit. He entered a guilty plea to a grand jury indictment of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government, to commit wire fraud and to violate the Clean Air Act. The maximum penalty is five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

It marks the first criminal charge in the year-long scandal at the German automaker and could indicate more charges against VW officials are coming in the Department of Justice investigation into the company.



http://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/foreign/2016/09/09/vw-charges/90118226/
 
A security company that employed a gunman who massacred dozens at a Florida nightclub faces a $151,400 fine for falsely listing psychological testing information on forms that allowed employees to carry guns.

Multiple news outlets report the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services fined G4S Secure Solutions on Friday.

Investigators found the Palm Beach Gardens company listed the wrong psychologist's name on over 1,500 forms between 2006 and 2016.

One form belonged to Omar Mateen, the gunman in the June 12 Pulse nightclub massacre. The company had filed the form to let him carry a gun.



http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/florida-fines-security-company-employed-pulse-gunman-41998359
 
Newly uncovered documents reveal that 50 years ago the sugar industry gave secret support to prominent Harvard researchers to write an influential series of articles in the New England Journal of Medicine that downplayed the negative effects of sugar.

Instead, the articles shifted the blame from sugar to fat as the "dietary culprit" behind heart disease.

In recent years there has been growing awareness that decades of dietary policy demonized fat and ignored or played down the dangers of increased consumption of carbohydrates and sugars. This policy had a significant adverse effect on public health, contributing to the obesity and diabetes epidemics.

In the new paper, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, Cristin Kearns, DDS, MBA, of U.C. San Francisco and colleagues examined archives containing letters between the Sugar Research Foundation (SRF), the predecessor to today's Sugar Association, and prominent Harvard researchers, including the late Fredrick Stare, chair of Harvard's School of Public Health Nutrition Department, and D. Mark Hegsted, a professor in Stare's department. Hegsted died in 2009.

In the mid-1960s the SRF sought to counter research suggesting that sugar was a more important cause of atherosclerosis than dietary fat.

The SRF invited Stare to join its scientific advisory board and approved funds to support a review article that would respond to the research showing the danger of sucrose. In a letter to Hegsted the SRF gave a clear indication of its agenda:

"Our particular interest had to do with that part of nutrition in which there are claims that carbohydrates in the form of sucrose make an inordinate contribution to the metabolic condition, hitherto ascribed to aberrations called fat metabolism. I will be disappointed if this aspect is drowned out in a cascade of review and general interpretation."

Hegsted reassured the SRF: "We are well aware of your particular interest in carbohydrate and will cover this as well as we can." As the paper was being written the authors shared drafts with and gave progress updates to the SRF.

In 1967 NEJM published a two-part review article, "Dietary Fats, Carbohydrates and Atherosclerotic Disease" with no mention of the SRF's support and participation. The authors state that there is "only one avenue by which diet may affect the development and progression of atherosclerosis" and that this can be done "by influencing the levels of serum lipids, especially serum cholesterol."

They go on to "conclude, on the basis of epidemiologic, experimental and clinical evidence, that a lowering of the proportion of dietary saturated fatty acids, increasing the proportion of polyunsaturated acids and reducing the level of dietary cholesterol are the dietary changes most likely to be of benefit." By contrast, they "conclude that the practical significance of differences in dietary carbohydrate is minimal in comparison to those related to dietary fat and cholesterol."

The paper shows that early on, in the 1950s, the sugar industry was alert to the idea that if Americans adopted the low-fat diet, they'd shift their calories over to eat more carbs -- and that those carbs would include sugar.

This is exactly what happened when the American Heart Association adopted the low-fat diet in 1970 and when the U.S. Dietary Guidelines adopted the low-fat diet in 1980. Now we know that this low-fat, high-carb diet has clearly been a disaster for American health, which is why the Guidelines, just last year, dropped it. Hopefully the harm caused by the food industry can now start to be undone.

Kearns and colleagues show that the Harvard authors applied different levels of rigor in their assessment of the literature examining dietary fats and carbohydrates. Evidence suggesting that dietary fat was not important was heavily discounted.

Like nearly all other medical journals NEJM now requires authors to disclose all relevant conflicts of interest, but this has not put an end to industry influence. In recent years, for instance, the role of Coca Cola in supporting research emphasizing the importance of exercise over nutrition in weight control became a public scandal.

In a statement the Sugar Association said it acknowledged that it "should have exercised greater transparency in all of its research activities, however, when the studies in question were published funding disclosures and transparency standards were not the norm they are today." But the Association continues to defend sugar, stating that "the last several decades of research have concluded that sugar does not have a unique role in heart disease."

The article shows how the food industry manipulates nutrition science -- something that still goes on today and has largely been given a pass. Most nutrition news is reported without scrutinizing conflicts of interest, and researchers themselves often try to obscure their industry funding. Yet this has been the state of the field in nutrition science in the US from its start -- going back to the 1940s, when food manufacturers realized that they could influence nutrition science by funding the trusted academic experts who produce it.



http://www.medpagetoday.com/Cardiology/CardioBrief/60177
 
Legion Troll said:
Wells Fargo will pay $185 million to resolve claims that bank employees opened deposit and credit-card accounts without customers’ approval to satisfy sales goals and earn financial rewards, U.S. regulators said.

The lender opened more than 2 million accounts that consumers may not have known about, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said in a statement Thursday.

Wells Fargo agreed to pay a $100 million fine to the CFPB, $35 million to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and $50 million to the Los Angeles city attorney to settle the matter.

The bank also will compensate customers who incurred fees or charges, the agencies said.




http://www.wsj.com/articles/wells-fargo-to-pay-185-million-fine-over-account-openings-1473352548
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Hard to believe they actually pulled that crap...... I have not used them in over 20 years....
 
Bill said:
Hard to believe they actually pulled that crap...... I have not used them in over 20 years....
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The Wells Fargo executive who oversaw a unit that created almost 2 million unauthorized customer accounts is set to retire from the company with a nearly $125 million payday, and reports say the bank isn’t likely to cut the strings on her golden parachute as she walks out the door.

Carrie Tolstedt, 56, announced her retirement, effective at the end of the year, and is set to receive $124.6 million via stock, options and restricted shares.

Tolstedt headed the infamous community banking unit where employees created unauthorized deposit accounts and credit accounts in an effort to meet sales goals. The dummy accounts charged individual customers up to $50 in fines for a service they never requested.

"There are two possibilities: Customer abuse was part of business model, in which lots of high-ranking people need to go to prison," Bart Naylor, a financial policy advocate for Public Citizen, told The Washington Post. "Or the bank is too big to manage, and folks high up don’t even know that laws are being broken a few levels down."

It’s unclear when Tolstedt became aware of the scam and she was not named in any Consumer Financial Protection Bureau paperwork. The fallout from the scandal resulted in the firing of 5,300 employees and a massive $185 million fine levied by various regulators.

“Those issues should have been caught sooner and dealt with more forcefully,” Mike Mayo, an analyst at CLSA Ltd., wrote Monday.

Tolstedt not only escaped getting axed, she was praised for her tenure at the company. In a statement about her retirement, CEO John Stumpf hailed Tolstedt as “a standard-bearer of our culture” and “a champion for our customers.”

Her decision to retire was “personal,” a Wells Fargo spokesperson said.



http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/09/13/wells-fargo-exec-who-headed-unit-involved-in-scandal-due-125-million-in-retirement.html
 
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