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Tag: Corporate investigations

  • Dominican sugar imports tied to forced labor rejected by US

    Dominican sugar imports tied to forced labor rejected by US

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    SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — The U.S. government announced Wednesday that it will detain all imports of sugar and related products made in the Dominican Republic by Central Romana Corporation, Ltd. amid allegations that it uses forced labor.

    A U.S. Customs and Border Protection investigation found that the company allegedly isolated workers, withheld wages, fostered abusive working and living conditions and pushed for excessive overtime, the agency said in a news release.

    “Manufacturers like Central Romana, who fail to abide by our laws, will face consequences as we root out these inhumane practices from U.S. supply chains,” said AnnMarie Highsmith with the CBP’s Office of Trade.

    A spokeswoman for the company did not immediately return a text message seeking comment. La Central Romana, which has long faced those types of accusations, is the Dominican Republic’s largest sugar producer.

    The announcement was cheered by activists who have long decried the treatment of tens of thousands of workers who live and work on sprawling sugarcane fields, many of them Haitian migrants or descendants of them.

    “This is needed to improve their situation,” Roudy Joseph, a labor rights activist in the Dominican Republic, said in a phone interview. “We’ve been asking for improvements for decades.”

    The Associated Press last year visited several sugarcane fields owned by Central Romana where workers complained about a lack of wages, being forced to live in cramped housing that lacked water and restrictive rules including not being allowed to grow a garden to feed their families since transportation to the nearest grocery store miles away was too costly.

    Joseph noted that at least 6,000 workers also are demanding pensions they never obtained despite paying their dues.

    Sugarcane workers also have organized several protests this year to demand permanent residencies after working for decades in the Dominican Republic as the country cracks down on Haitian migrants under the administration of President Luis Abinader in a move that has drawn heavy international criticism.

    Central Romana produced nearly 400,000 tons (363,000 metric tons) of sugar in the harvest period that ended last year after grinding more than 3.4 million tons (3 million metric tons) of cane, according to the company.

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  • 40 states settle Google location-tracking charges for $392M

    40 states settle Google location-tracking charges for $392M

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    HARTFORD, Conn. — Search giant Google has agreed to a $391.5 million settlement with 40 states to resolve an investigation into how the company tracked users’ locations, state attorneys general announced Monday.

    The states’ investigation was sparked by a 2018 Associated Press story, which found that Google continued to track people’s location data even after they opted out of such tracking by disabling a feature the company called “location history.”

    The attorneys general called the settlement a historic win for consumers, and the largest multistate settlement in U.S history dealing with privacy.

    It comes at a time of mounting unease over privacy and surveillance by tech companies that has drawn growing outrage from politicians and scrutiny by regulators. The Supreme Court’s ruling in June ending the constitutional protections for abortion raised potential privacy concerns for women seeking the procedure or related information online.

    “This $391.5 million settlement is a historic win for consumers in an era of increasing reliance on technology,” Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said in a statement. “Location data is among the most sensitive and valuable personal information Google collects, and there are so many reasons why a consumer may opt-out of tracking.”

    Google, based in Mountain View, California, said it fixed the problems several years ago.

    “Consistent with improvements we’ve made in recent years, we have settled this investigation, which was based on outdated product policies that we changed years ago,” company spokesperson Jose Castaneda said in a statement.

    Location tracking can help tech companies sell digital ads to marketers looking to connect with consumers within their vicinity. It’s another tool in a data-gathering toolkit that generates more than $200 billion in annual ad revenue for Google, accounting for most of the profits pouring into the coffers of its corporate parent, Alphabet — which has a market value of $1.2 trillion.

    In its 2018 story, The AP reported that many Google services on Android devices and iPhones store users’ location data even if they’ve used a privacy setting that says it will prevent Google from doing so. Computer-science researchers at Princeton confirmed these findings at the AP’s request.

    Storing such data carries privacy risks and has been used by police to determine the location of suspects.

    The AP reported that the privacy issue with location tracking affected some 2 billion users of devices that run Google’s Android operating software and hundreds of millions of worldwide iPhone users who rely on Google for maps or search.

    The attorneys general who investigated Google said a key part of the company’s digital advertising business is location data, which they called the most sensitive and valuable personal data the company collects. Even a small amount of location data can reveal a person’s identity and routines, they said.

    Google uses the location information to target consumers with ads by its customers, the state officials said.

    The attorneys general said Google misled users about its location tracking practices since at least 2014, violating state consumer protection laws.

    As part of the settlement, Google also agreed to make those practices more transparent to users. That includes showing them more information when they turn location account settings on and off and keeping a webpage that gives users information about the data Google collects.

    The shadowy surveillance brought to light by The AP troubled even some Google engineers, who recognized the company might be confronting a massive legal headache after the story was published, according to internal documents that have subsequently surfaced in consumer-fraud lawsuits.

    Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich filed the first state action against Google in May 2020, alleging that the company had defrauded its users by misleading them into believing they could keep their whereabouts private by turning off location tracking in the settings of their software.

    Arizona settled its case with Google for $85 million last month, but by then attorneys general in several other states and the District of Columbia had also pounced on the company with their own lawsuits seeking to hold Google accountable for its alleged deception.

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    Gordon reported from Washington, D.C. AP Technology writer Michael Liedtke in San Ramon, California, contributed to this report.

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    This story has been updated to reflect that the Supreme Court ruling on abortion was issued in June, not last month.

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  • Thai police investigating CNN crew’s coverage of attack

    Thai police investigating CNN crew’s coverage of attack

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    UTHAI SAWAN, Thailand — Thai police are investigating a report that a CNN crew inappropriately entered the day care center while reporting on the aftermath of the massacre in the building that left more than 20 preschoolers dead, authorities said Sunday.

    Danaichok Boonsom, head of the local township administration, told reporters that he had submitted his report alleging unauthorized entry onto the government property and that police were investigating.

    “Let the legal process run its course, I don’t want to disclose all the details,” he said as he left the Na Klang district police station in northeastern Thailand. “Let the police do their work investigating.”

    Authorities began looking into the incident after a Thai reporter posted an image on social media of two members of the crew leaving the scene, with one climbing over the low wall and fence around the compound, over police tape, and the other already outside.

    CNN tweeted that the crew had entered the premises when the police cordon had been removed from the center, and were told by three public health officials exiting the building that they could film inside.

    “The team gathered footage inside the center for around 15 minutes, then left,” CNN said in its tweet. “During this time, the cordon had been set back in place, so the team needed to climb over the fence at the center to leave.”

    The tweet came in response to criticism from the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand, which said it was “dismayed” by CNN’s coverage and the decision to film the crime scene inside.

    “This was unprofessional and a serious breach of journalistic ethics in crime reporting,” the FCCT said.

    The Thai Journalists’ Association criticized CNN’s actions as “unethical” and “insensitive,” and called for an internal company investigation of the incident in addition to the official Thai probe.

    In a later statement, CNN International’s executive vice president and general manager Mike McCarthy reiterated that his reporters sought permission to enter the building but the team “now understands that these officials were not authorized to grant this permission,” adding that it was “never their intention to contravene any rules.”

    He said CNN had ceased broadcasting the report and had removed the video from its website.

    “We deeply regret any distress or offense our report may have caused, and for any inconvenience to the police at such a distressing time for the country,” he said in the statement tweeted by CNN.

    Deputy national police chief Surachate Hakparn said the two journalists entered Thailand on tourist visas, which had now been revoked. He said they had been detained pending their expulsion from the country, but refused to provide further details.

    Surachate later told reporters that the investigation was not yet concluded, but it appeared the crew had been waved in to the center and believed they had permission to enter, making it likely they would only be fined for working while on a tourist visa and sent home.

    In the attack Thursday, police said 36 people, 24 of them children, were killed by a former police officer who was fired earlier this year on drug charges and had been due in court on Friday.

    As Thailand’s worst such massacre ever, the attack drew widespread international media attention to the small town of Uthai Sawan in the country’s rural northeast. By Sunday, few remained but a large number of Thai media continued to report from the scene.

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