Archives for October 2021

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday said it would not get involved in a lawsuit over a disputed Pentagon cloud computing contract, a decision that follows the contract’s cancellation earlier this year.

The case was one of hundreds the high court said it wouldn’t hear Monday.

The Pentagon in July announced it was canceling its contract with Microsoft for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Cloud computing project. At the time it said it would instead pursue a deal with both Microsoft and Amazon and possibly other cloud service providers.

The Biden administration had told the high court that the case was moot.

Copyright
© 2021 . All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.

Stocks are closing lower Monday as big technology companies such as Apple and Microsoft take losses.

The S&P 500, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the tech-heavy Nasdaq all fell. Meanwhile, the price of U.S. oil rose to its highest close since 2014, as OPEC and allied oil producers stuck to a plan for cautious production increases even as global demand for crude rises.

On Monday:

The S&P 500 fell 56.58 points, or 1.3%, to 4,300.46.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 323.54 points, or 0.9%, to 34,002.92.

The Nasdaq fell 311.21 points, or 2.1%, to 14,255.48.

The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies fell 24.16 points, or 1.1%, to 2,217.47.

For the year:

The S&P 500 is up 544.39 points, or 14.5%.

The Dow is up 3,396.44 points, or 11.1%.

The Nasdaq is up 1,367.20 points, or 10.6%.

The Russell 2000 is up 242.62 points, or 12.3%.

Copyright
© 2021 . All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.

NEW YORK (AP) — The CEO of Ozy Media on Monday said it had been “premature” to shut down the company and that he wants to keep operating, despite a scandal-ridden week that exposed Ozy as an outlet without much of an audience.

Carlos Watson, a former former cable-news commentator and host who founded Ozy in 2013, told CNBC that he met with advertisers and investors over the weekend and that he wants Ozy to continue.

In an emailed statement Monday, the company characterized the troubles of the past week as “a bump in the road” that it is “committed to getting past,” saying “we are excited to reopen and expect to start resuming operations over the next few days.” Ozy is trying to get employees to come back and said newsletters would resume this week and video production at the end of the month.

Ozy’s board of directors said Friday that the company was ceasing operations. The shutdown came less than a week after a New York Times column raised questions about the media organization’s claims of millions of viewers and readers, while also pointing out a potential case of securities fraud.

The story triggered canceled shows, an internal investigation, investor concern and high-level departures at the company before it shut down Friday.

The Times story also said Ozy’s chief operating officer and co-founder, Samir Rao, impersonated a YouTube executive on a call with Goldman Sachs while attempting to raise money from the investment bank. Regarding that call, Watson said: “I don’t know. I wasn’t there.” He then went on to say that they eventually “figured out what happened,” but did not explain further. “Look — it’s heartbreaking, it’s wrong, it’s not good, it’s not OK,” Watson said. “I love Goldman, I worked there, I’ve got a lot of friends there.”

Mountain View, California-based Ozy, which had raised more than $70 million from investors as of late 2019, according to the website Crunchbase, has long been suspected of inflating its audience size. Watson claimed last week that Ozy had 25 million subscribers to its newsletter and 30 million YouTube views. The New York Times, with a much bigger brand presence, says it has 15 million newsletter readers. The newspaper reported that fewer than 500,000 people went to Ozy’s website in June and July, according to Comscore data. Ozy was seemingly paying for much of its audience rather than building a real base of readers and viewers.

To restart, the company would have to reestablish trust with employees, advertisers and investors. It shut down abruptly, distressing workers. It has been caught in several dishonest situations apart from traffic. It reportedly told people who worked on its interview series, “The Carlos Watson Show,” that it would be on cable TV, but then episodes were just uploaded to YouTube. Watson interviewed celebrities like Bill Gates and Matthew McConaughey for the online show. On CNBC Monday, Watson said “We originally conceived the show with A&E,” and then ”shifted to YouTube,” and there was “lots of miscommunication in that.”

On Thursday, Marc Lasry, the hedge-fund billionaire and Milwaukee Bucks co-owner who had been named Ozy’s chairman in September, resigned, citing Ozy’s need for someone experienced in crisis management and investigations. He remained an investor. A high-profile employee, former BBC anchor Katty Kay, had resigned earlier in the week, and an early investor, a venture capital firm, gave up its Ozy shares. The board had reportedly hired a law firm to review Ozy’s business activities.

___

Matt Ott contributed to this report.

Copyright
© 2021 . All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.

Facebook is asking a federal court to dismiss a revised complaint against it by the Federal Trade Commission, arguing that the agency has not provided enough evidence to show that the company is a monopoly.

In a motion filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Facebook said the FTC failed to prove that it has a monopoly in the “personal social networking space” because no reliable data exists to show the size of the market or of Facebook’s share of it.

“The FTC’s fictional market ignores the competitive reality: Facebook competes vigorously with TikTok, iMessage, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, YouTube, and countless others to help people share, connect, communicate or simply be entertained,” Facebook said in a statement. “The FTC cannot credibly claim Facebook has monopoly power because no such power exists.”

Facebook’s motion was filed on the day it and its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms suffered a worldwide outage. It also came a day after whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, went public on CBS’s “60 Minutes” program to discuss internal documents exposing the company’s awareness of harms caused by its products and decisions.

A federal judge in June dismissed earlier antitrust lawsuits brought against Facebook by the agency and a broad coalition of state attorneys general that were among multiplying efforts by federal and state regulators to rein in tech titans’ market power.

The FTC’s new, revised complaint filed in August alleges that the social network giant pursued a laser-focused strategy to “buy or bury” rivals to suppress competition.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg had ruled in June that the FTC’s original lawsuit was “legally insufficient” and didn’t provide enough evidence to prove Facebook was a monopoly. He dismissed the states’ separate complaint outright.

But his ruling only dismissed the FTC’s complaint, not the case, giving the agency a chance to file a revised complaint. In the new filing, the FTC laid out a detailed analysis to substantiate its monopoly power claim.

“Direct evidence, including historical events and market realities” confirms the allegation, the complaint says. The harm to consumers from the lack of competition “is particularly severe,” it says.

The FTC did not have a comment on Facebook’s motion to dismiss.

___

Associated Press Writer Marcy Gordon in Washington contributed to this story.

Copyright
© 2021 . All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — A New York mother and son have been charged with theft in aiding the disappearance of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s laptop during the Jan. 6 insurrection after the FBI initially raided a home 4,500 miles away in Alaska, looking for the computer.

The FBI on Friday arrested Maryann Mooney-Rondon, 55, and her son, Rafael Rondon, 23, of Watertown, New York, in connection with the stolen laptop, according to court documents. Both also face other charges related to the riot at the Capitol.

Rafael Rondon also faces possession of an unregistered sawed-off shotgun charge

Both appeared in federal court Friday in Syracuse, New York, and released pending further proceedings, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of New York.

A message left at a listing for Mooney-Condon in Watertown was not immediately returned Monday. Attempts to locate Rafael Rondon were not immediately successful.

The Capitol riot was well documented by those who took part. Law enforcement used photos from the social media accounts of those who took part to search for the suspects.

A tip to the FBI led them to the mother and son, according to a statement of facts documented by an unnamed FBI special agent.

Mooney-Rondon allegedly admitted to being in both the Capitol the day of the riots and Pelosi’s conference room, the document says. She allegedly provided gloves or a scarf to a man to steal Pelosi’s laptop without leaving fingerprints.

“He asked, he said, give me – I don’t know if it was gloves or a scarf I was wearing – and like I said he scared me,” the documents quotes her as saying.

There was an ethernet connected to the computer, her son told FBI agents.

“If I recall, the guy was going to yank it out. I’m like, dude, don’t do that, I mean that’s, I mean just the computer, you can’t pull the cables out, it’ll ruin everything,” Mooney-Rondon said, according to the document.

Mooney-Rondon then said she believes she saw the man put the computer in his backpack. Her son told investigators that be thinks he might have pushed the computer “in his bag a little bit using a glove ’cause he didn’t want to get his fingerprints on it,” the document says.

“So I assisted him a little bit, and that was probably stupid of me,” he’s quoted in the document as saying.

She and her son then went to the Senate Gallery and then left the building when they saw it was overrun with protesters.

Rafael Rondon told officers that he and mother took the metro into Washington on Jan. 6 “because I’m not taking my car into the city which, the Capitol building I’m about to break into,” the FBI agent’s statement alleges.

Both mother and son admitted they were the ones depicted in the photos taken at the Capitol during the riots and distributed by the FBI, the document says.

In late April the FBI raided the Homer, Alaska, business owned by Paul and Marilyn Hueper, who were in the Washington for then-President Donald Trump’s rally that preceded the breach at the Capitol but said they didn’t take part in that. Marilyn Hueper told reporters it was a case of mistaken identity.

Photos of the two women showed they had similar hairstyles and wore a similar black coat that day.

Hueper said when an FBI agent arrived at the boutique resort, they said they were looking for Nancy Pelosi’s laptop. “That still doesn’t explain why you’re in my home. Or in Homer, Alaska,” Hueper told agents, she later recalled to The Associated Press.

In the FBI statement filed in the case of the New York residents, it notes that a search warrant was obtained for the Alaska residence “based in part on evidence showing that residents (a married couple) trespassed on the ground of the U.S. Capitol.” It also says two people in Homer identified Marilyn Hueper as being the person seen in photos taken inside the Capitol during the riot.

However, the document states, the FBI now says “there is probable cause” to believe the mother and son are the two people shown in the photographs, plus their alleged admissions to being there and other evidence.

“I feel like a cloud has lifted for sure,” Hueper said in a text message to The Associated Press. However, she said she remains concerned about the freedom that the FBI and others seem to have “to run amuck over peaceable people, and are without concern for how their poor investigative skills and super aggressive tactics are causing harm while they’re on their ‘noble cause’ quests.”

A message sent to the FBI Anchorage office seeking comment was not immediately returned Monday.

___

This story has been updated to correct the spelling of the Alaska woman’s last name. She is Marilyn Hueper, not Huepner.

Copyright
© 2021 . All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.