Uber fires 20 staff after harassment investigation

Uber has fired more than 20 people, and is taking other actions against staff, after a harassment investigation.
The taxi-app firm said the sackings related to sexual harassment, bullying and issues about poor company culture.
Uber has been under fire over its treatment of women staff since a former employee wrote a scathing blog post about her experience.
It led to two investigations and the uncovering of 215 complaints about harassment and other allegations.
Uber has struggled with a series of controversies in recent months, including a backlash over aggressive corporate tactics and a lawsuit from Google-owner Alphabet over allegedly stolen technology for self-driving cars.
Several high-placed executives resigned amid the turbulence, including a former head of engineering, who had failed to disclose harassment complaints at his former employer.
Chief executive Travis Kalanick's filmed argument with an Uber driver over falling rates also fuelled criticism, leading him to say that he needed "leadership help".
Susan Fowler, who wrote the critical blog post about Uber, said the company had ignored her complaints of sexual harassment. Widely shared, the blog prompted Mr Kalanick to launch the investigations.
Law firm Perkins Coie reviewed 215 claims, which included sexual harassment and discrimination as well as other complaints, an Uber spokeswoman said.
The firm recommended no action in 100 of them; 57 remain under review, while others have received warnings or are in training, she said.
Some of those fired held senior positions, she said.

The 215 claims investigated were broken down as follows:

Discrimination, 54; Sexual harassment, 47; Unprofessional behaviour, 45; Bullying, 33; Other harassment, 19; Retaliation, 13; Physical security 3; Wrongful dismissal 1.

Action taken and cases under review:

Staff fired, 20; Staff put in training, 31; Final warnings, 7; Claims still under review, 57.
Uber has also appointed Eric Holder, who served as attorney general under former US president Barack Obama, to investigate the company's broader culture.
The findings of that report have been turned over to the board and recommendations are expected to be made public next week.
Some changes are already in place.
Uber announced the hiring of two women to high profile positions this week.
Frances Frei, a Harvard Business School professor, will serve as a senior vice president for leadership and strategy, working with the head of human resources Liane Hornsey. Ms Hornsey is herself relatively new, starting at the company in January.
Bozoma Saint John, a former marketing executive at Apple, is also joining Uber as chief brand officer.
Uber employs more than 12,000 people globally.
About 36% of the workforce is female, according to a diversity report the firm published earlier this year. Women hold about 15% of the technology positions.

By Dave Lee, BBC North America technology reporter, San Francisco

It goes without saying that this issue doesn't go away with these firings.
Uber has major questions still to answer - some of them will hopefully be addressed when more details of the report are made public.
Most troubling is why Uber's own internal HR measures weren't thorough or fair enough to see that the actions of 20 employees warranted dismissal.
Instead it took a brave former employee - and then an expensive, lengthy investigation - to get to that point.
So as well as detailing what it has done to address those existing complaints, Uber will now have to be very clear about how it will handle such issues in future.
Crucially, the lessons from this report should not be heeded by Uber alone. As many people have pointed out to me since we began reporting this story, this is a problem that affects the technology industry across the board
 
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Caught in the middle of Libya's kidnapping nightmare

Kidnapping has become a growing problem in Libya, where three governments and several militia are vying for power. The BBC's North Africa correspondent Rana Jawad has been talking to people personally affected.
"My father was kidnapped yesterday."
Not quite the text message you expect to get from a close friend on a Friday morning. I called to confirm that it was not a cruel auto-correction and rushed over to her place. She looked remarkably composed but exhausted.
Here, in the comfort and safety of neighbouring Tunisia, the insecurities engulfing Libya seem like a galaxy away.
She gets another call, and another, about a dozen in less than an hour.
She stands, frowning, and clutching the phone, trying to make sense of what was being communicated to her. She paces, kicks the kitchen chair, and eventually sits down calmly again.


In post-revolution Libya, either armed gangs or semi-official militias kidnap people. The motives vary, from ransom, to revenge, to politics but the devastation and helplessness that the victims' families experience is the same.
I saw this first-hand through my friend, Lina (not her real name).
Her 68-year-old diabetic father, university professor Salem Beitelmal, was abducted. Six weeks on, the family is still not entirely sure which armed group took him or why. But they have learned that his car was found abandoned on the side of a road, west of the Libyan capital, Tripoli.
Official statistics are not available but many Libyans I know have either first-hand experience of being kidnapped or have had a family member or friend abducted. Most families do not speak out, fearing that if they go public their loved ones will be killed or tortured in captivity.
So what happens after a kidnapping?
The power vacuum in Libya means that in case of an emergency, you call a friend, a neighbour, and every local militia under the Libyan sun.

Over the past month, I have watched Lina agonize over an investigation that often entails talking to people she mistrusts. The family has a pool of contacts she is calling, but they are strangers.
At times, she looked like she was going around in circles and slowly being sucked into a vortex of misinformation.
"You don't have institutions that you can turn to that are there to protect and serve the citizens. So the reality then becomes that it is the citizens who have to take matters into their own hands," she tells me.
"But at the same time there's a strong social network that kind of replaces that, and that's how Libyans have been dealing with everything," she says.


  • Long-serving ruler Col Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown in October 2011
  • Since then there has been no central authority
  • Myriad armed militias took control of different parts of the country
  • The UN has backed a government based in Tripoli
  • There are two other rival governments
Kidnappings in Libya have been on the rise over the past three years.
Current statistics are not available, but in 2015 the Libyan Red Crescent Society reported that more than 600 people had gone missing between February 2014 and April 2015.
No-one is immune - the victims range from politicians to activists to businessmen to doctors to children. And the stories are all equally tragic.
Abdel-Moez Banoun, a high-profile anti-militia activist, disappeared from Tripoli in the late summer of 2014 and has been deemed untraceable by human rights groups since.
Here in Tunis, I met a young Libyan woman whose entire family had fled their home country after a relative was kidnapped and killed.
Jabir Zain, a young Sudanese activist who grew up in Libya, was taken by an armed group outside a cafe in Tripoli in late September.
It happened after he led a group discussion on women's rights. Human rights groups have described his case as an "enforced disappearance".



Hanan Salah, a senior researcher with the Human Rights Watch campaign group, recently visited Libya to document cases of kidnappings. She has been researching issues in the country for several years, but the deteriorating security and the dangers that civilians are exposed to still surprise her.
"I was really shocked at the normalisation of crime, and in particular the soaring numbers of abductions for ransom, and extortions by militias and armed gangs," she says.
She remembers one victim's story in particular.
"The reason he was kidnapped was because the family he was being held by was trying to pay off the ransom of another kidnapping case," she says.

Nightmare existence

What has surprised Lina the most is the realisation of just how bad things are in her country.
"If you go to Libya today, during the day… as long as there are no clashes in the streets, life is normal; people are going to school, to work, shopping. Cafes and restaurants are filled.
"It gives you this false sense that there is in fact something that's keeping this country together.
"But then when you're put into this nightmare, you realise that there are no institutions that you can turn to, and that there is a complete breakdown."
I ask her if she is angry.
"I'm very angry. It angers me that we have three governments - not one - that claim power on the ground, and the reality is that not a single one of them have real control."

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London attack: Third London Bridge attacker named

The third London Bridge attacker has been named as 22-year-old Youssef Zaghba, a Moroccan-Italian man.
Pakistan-born Khuram Butt, 27, and Rachid Redouane, 30, both from Barking were the other two attackers.
Meanwhile, another victim has been named as Australian nurse Kirsty Boden, 28, who her family said had run towards London Bridge to help people.
Seven people were killed and 48 injured in Saturday night's attack - the three attackers were shot dead by police.

Fresh arrest

Zaghba, Butt and Redouane drove a hired van into pedestrians on London Bridge at 21:58 BST before stabbing people in the area around Borough Market.
Armed officers killed all three within eight minutes of receiving a 999 call.
The Metropolitan Police said Butt had been subject to an investigation in 2015, but there had been no suggestion this attack was being planned.
In other developments:
  • Theresa May says she expects a review will be launched by the police and security services following the attack, amid an election row over police numbers
  • The Metropolitan Police said a 27-year-old man had been arrested in Barking on Tuesday in connection with the investigation
  • A property in Ilford, east London, was also searched by police at about 01:30 BST, but no arrests had been made, the Met said
  • The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall visited injured members of the public at the Royal London Hospital
  • NHS England said 32 people remained in hospital, with 15 in a critical condition
  • A national one-minute silence was held in the UK in memory of those who were killed
  • All 12 people arrested on Sunday after the attack have now been released without charge
The so-called Islamic State (IS) group has said its "fighters" carried out the attack.
An Italian police source has confirmed to the BBC that Zaghba, who lived in east London, had been placed on a watch list, which is shared with many countries including the UK.
In March 2016, Italian officers stopped Zaghba at Bologna airport and found IS-related materials on his mobile phone. He was then stopped from continuing his journey to Istanbul.
Redouane was a chef who also used the name Rachid Elkhdar and police said he claimed to be Moroccan-Libyan. He married a British woman in Dublin in 2012 and lived in Rathmines in the Irish capital.


What did police know about Khuram Butt?

Butt featured in a Channel 4 documentary last year about Islamist extremists with links to the jailed preacher Anjem Choudary called The Jihadis Next Door.
The married father-of-two, who worked for London Underground as a trainee customer services assistant for nearly six months last year, could be seen in the programme arguing with police officers in the street, after displaying a flag used by IS in a London park.
Two people in Barking, east London, had also raised concerns about Butt, BBC home affairs correspondent Dominic Casciani said.
Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner Mark Rowley said an investigation into Butt began in 2015, but "there was no intelligence to suggest that this attack was being planned and the investigation had been prioritised accordingly".
At any one time there are about 500 active counter-terrorism investigations concerning 3,000 people of interest.

Who were the victims?

 

So far three of those killed in the attack have been named.
Ms Boden worked as a senior staff nurse at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital in London. Her family have described her in a statement as an "outgoing, kind and generous person".
"We are so proud of Kirsty's brave actions which demonstrate how selfless, caring and heroic she was, not only on that night, but throughout all of her life," they added.
The hospital said that Ms Boden was "an outstanding nurse and a hugely valued member of the staff team in Theatres Recovery, described by her colleagues as 'one in a million' who always went the extra mile for the patients in her care".
Canadian national Chrissy Archibald, 30, was the first victim to be named. Her family said she had died in her fiancé's arms after being struck by the attackers' speeding van.
And the family of 32-year-old James McMullan, from Hackney, east London, say they believe he also died.
Mr McMullan's sister said he was believed to be among those who died, after his bank card was found on a body at the scene.
A French national was also killed in the attack, according to foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian.
The Met have set up a casualty bureau on 0800 096 1233 and 020 7158 0197 for people concerned about friends or relatives.

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US contractor Reality Winner arrested after NSA leak report

A US government contractor has been arrested on suspicion of leaking top-secret information to a news outlet.
Reality Leigh Winner, 25, allegedly removed classified material from a federal site in the state of Georgia.
The charges were announced shortly after news website The Intercept published a National Security Agency briefing about alleged Russian meddling in last year's election.
The Trump administration has been seeking to fight leaks to the media.
Ms Winner was arrested on 3 June, the justice department said.
She is a contractor with Pluribus International Corporation and had been employed at an NSA facility in Georgia since February, reports NBC News.
The accused faces a count of "gathering, transmitting or losing defence information", according to the network.


Ms Winner, who graduated from basic military training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio in 2011, was caught after investigators noticed that the leaked document appeared to have been folded or creased.
That suggested it had been "printed and then carried out of a secured space", according to an FBI affidavit in support of the arrest warrant.
Investigators then determined that Ms Winner was one of only six people to have printed the document. Examination of her email on her desk computer further revealed that she had exchanged emails with the news outlet, the indictment said.
When confronted, Ms Winner admitted printing the report despite not possessing a "need-to-know" about its content and said she was aware that the information "could be used to the injury of the US and to the advantage of a foreign nation", the affidavit says.

 alleges that Moscow's military intelligence services attempted cyber-attacks on at least one US voting software supplier days before last November's US presidential election.
It also accuses them of sending spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials.
However, there is no suggestion in the document that the hackers were successful.
The NSA file in question was apparently marked for declassification not before May 2042.
American intelligence agencies have accused the Kremlin of trying to interfere in the election to ensure Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton.
Several congressional committees and the FBI are investigating the matter.
The president has repeatedly dismissed the story as "fake news", arguing that the real scandal is how the allegations are being leaked to the media.

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MMA fighter War Machine gets life for assaulting ex girlfriend

A US mixed-martial arts combatant known as War Machine has been jailed for life for kidnapping, and sexually assaulting his former girlfriend in 2014.
Jonathan Paul Koppenhaver was found guilty in March of attacking Christy Mack and her friend Corey Thomas after accusing them of having an affair.
Ms Mack suffered a fractured eye socket and nose, broken ribs and lost teeth.
In a statement to the court Koppenhaver expressed remorse, attributing the attack to anxiety and depression.
He compared himself to former NFL star Aaron Hernandez, who killed himself in prison earlier this year while serving a life sentence for murder.



"Not a day goes by that I don't seriously regret all those things that I did. I was a very, very lost, very empty person," Koppenhaver told the Las Vegas court.
"And to top it off, something's not right with my head. Plain and simple."
His comments are in contrast to comments made on Twitter in March, when he said he was unfazed at the possibility of receiving "some type of life sentence".
Ms Mack met Koppenhaver in 2013 when she was a well-known porn actress. Koppenhaver had also worked occasionally in the industry. But their relationship soon deteriorated, with Ms Mack accusing the wrestler of becoming abusive.
Ms Mack - who also suffered liver and leg injuries in the assault - told the court that she will be in fear for her life if Koppenhaver is allowed to leave prison.
"I do know when he gets out, he will kill me," she said.
Koppenhaver, 35, will only be considered for parole after 36 years in jail. The wrestler won 14 of his 19 mixed martial arts fights.
He was convicted on 29 counts including kidnap and attempted rape. The jury was unable to agree on two counts of attempted murder. 

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US warning over its UN Human Rights Council role

The US says it is considering what part it will play on the UN's Human Rights Council, highlighting what it calls a "biased" stance on Israel.
UN ambassador Nikki Haley said it was "hard to accept" that resolutions had been passed against Israel, a US ally, but none were considered on Venezuela.
She also said not enough had been done to criticise Iran, a "country with an abysmal human rights record".
Mrs Haley was making her first address to the council in Geneva.
"The United States is looking carefully at this council and our participation in it. We see some areas for significant strengthening," she said.
"Being a member of this council is a privilege and no country who is a human rights violator should be allowed a seat at the table.
"It's hard to accept that this council has never considered a resolution on Venezuela and yet it adopted five biased resolutions, in March, against a single country, Israel. It is essential that this council address its chronic anti-Israel bias if it is to have any credibility."
Venezuela has been in political turmoil for month and dozens of protesters have been killed.

'Anti-Israel circus'

Criticism of the 47-member council was repeated on the Twitter feed of the US mission to the UN on Tuesday.
The council is able only to order investigations and record criticism of countries it judges to have violated human rights, but it acts as a crucial diplomatic tool.
In recent months, it has issued resolutions on human rights in North Korea, Haiti and Myanmar, among other countries.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has previously called the body "an anti-Israel circus which attacks the only democracy in the Middle East and ignores the blatant violations of Iran, Syria and North Korea
 And in 2013, Israel ended its working relationship with the group after it decided to investigate Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
Mrs Haley's comments came after an opening address in Geneva by UN human rights chief Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein calling on Israel to withdraw from territories it captured in the 1967 war.
He condemned what he called "a half-century of deep suffering under an occupation imposed by military force".


What is the UN Human Rights Council?

  • Created in 2006 to replace the UN's Human Rights Commission, which was widely discredited for electing member states with questionable track records on human rights
  • All of the 47 members are elected for three-year terms
  • The council aims to shine a spotlight on rights abuses by adopting resolutions, but has faced similar criticism to the commission
  • US President George W Bush boycotted the council but the decision was reversed under President Barack Obama
  • In 2013, human rights groups complained when China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Vietnam were elected to the body

Israel has occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights since the war, 50 years ago this week. The UN also considers the Gaza Strip, which Israel pulled its troops and settlers out of in 2005, as part of occupied Palestinian territory.
Israel and the Palestinians blame each other for the failure to resolve the final status of the occupied territories after years of on-off peace talks.
In an opinion article for the Washington Post last Friday, Mrs Haley called for a change in the procedure in electing new members to the council, saying that "the presence of multiple human rights-violating countries on the Human Rights Council has damaged both the reputation of the council and the cause of human rights".
Among the current members is the key US ally, Saudi Arabia, which has been accused of rights violations, and whose accession to the group in 2013 was criticised.

SOURCE - BBC NEWS
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Melania Trump in black at the Vatican. Why?


Melania Trump arrived at the Vatican on Wednesday morning the picture of modesty: a knee-length black dress, arms covered and a black veil over her hair.
Her choice of outfit - in particular, the elegant veil - did not go unnoticed by those keeping a close eye on the First Lady during her husband's first overseas tour as president.
Among them was the BBC's North America editor, Jon Sopel.
"Interesting micro point," he tweeted. "Melania Trump wears head covering for meeting with @Pontifex - but not when she was in Saudi Arabia."
But BBC's David Willey in Rome was unsurprised. There is a strict protocol to be followed when meeting the Pope, which the White House will have been told about.
A quick glance at the Vatican website lays out some of the rules: modest dress, with your shoulders covered, for those attending a Papal Audience - especially if indoors.
"It goes from deep lace mantillas to just a black veil," he explained. "When the Queen went to see the Pope when she was younger, she dressed up like the Spanish infanta."
  • Weird moments from Trump's trip
  • Is 'thumbs up' actually controversial?
  • There was an outcry when Cherie Blair, the wife of Britain's then-prime minister, wore white in 2006 - but less so when Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, wore a pale gold suit, and went without a head covering, in April this year.
    "Things have become more relaxed over the last few years there are no hard and fast rules," a Vatican spokesman told The Daily Telegraph newspaper.
    Despite this relaxing of the rules, however, Mrs Trump has stuck firmly to tradition. This could be because she is believed to be a Roman Catholic, as suggested by her request for Pope Francis to bless her Rosary beads during the visit.
    It should be noted that her stepdaughter Ivanka - who also decided against covering her head in Saudi Arabia - is not Catholic, having converted to Judaism, but still chose to wear a veil while at the Vatican.
    Image copyright Reuters
    Image caption Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, did not wear black on a visit to the Vatican in April 2017
    Mr Willey was particularly impressed with Mrs Trump's choice of outfit, however.
    "To my eyes, what Mrs Trump wore was perfect. She was rather elegantly dressed, and totally in keeping with the event," he said. "The Trump party [as a whole] observed normal protocol and dress."
    Image copyright EPA
    Image caption The White House said it was told about the dress protocol by the Vatican
    But why the change from Saudi Arabia? Well, female foreign dignitaries are not required to cover their heads when they visit the kingdom - only Saudi nationals are.
    What's more, while the Vatican had spoken of a dress protocol to Mrs Trump's office at the White House, no such requests had been made by Saudi Arabia, her communications director Stephanie Grisham told CNN.

    SOURCE :- BBC NEWS
     
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Apple to scan iPhones for child sex abuse images

  Apple has announced details of a system to find child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on customers' devices. Before an image is stored on...