“Fake news” can sway not just elections, but the stock market. Now the SEC is cracking down.
The stocks and securities regulator charged 27 firms and individuals Monday with fraudulently promoting stocks through secretly paid-for articles on top financial websites. The sites included Forbes.com, Yahoo Finance, Seeking Alpha, Motley Fool, Benzinga, and Wall Street Cheat Sheet. None of the sites were named in the complaint.
Another day, another public relations disaster for United Airlines.
America’s third biggest carrier is being slammed online for violently dragging a passenger – a 69-year-old Asian man, believed to be a doctor – off an overbooked flight.
This comes just weeks after the company, whose slogan is “Fly the Friendly Skies”, was ridiculed for refusing to allow two teenage girls to board a flight because they were wearing leggings.
Chief executive Oscar Munoz added more fuel to the fire with his response, which didn’t mention the use of force. “This is an upsetting event to all of us here at United. I apologize for having to re-accommodate these customers,” he said in a statement.
While Netflix remains the giant in the world of over-the-top (OTT) streaming, other services are staking their own claims to the landscape.
According to a new report by comScore, more than half of America’s wi-fi connected homes have at least one OTT streaming service (streaming services that don’t require an additional cable subscription). The dominant service, in a whopping 75 percent of those homes, is Netflix—presumably because no one wanted to miss out on Stranger Things.
Tax preparation isn’t rocket science.
That’s Kenneth Lin’s pitch to get you to use Credit Karma, his popular credit-monitoring site, to do your taxes online for free. He’s striking out at TurboTax and H&R Block, which are now charging the typical homeowner or investor more than $90. Their prices have jumped more than $20 over the past month, the tax preparer’s version of surge pricing, as the April 18 filing deadline approaches.
Want to make money from ads on your YouTube videos? Your channel had better have more than 10,000 views.
Those are the new rules for the YouTube Partner Program (YPP), home to many people who make their livings uploading original videos and attaching advertisements to them. YouTube says the 10,000-view threshold is a way to crack down on people who join the program by re-uploading original content and trying to make money off of it.
Fox News is in a jam this week as major automakers and smaller outfits pull their ads from the network’s popular “O’Reilly Factor” show, following a series of sexual harassment claims against host Bill O’Reilly.
BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, and Mitsubishi all yanked their ads after a New York Times investigation that surfaced five sexual harassment cases against the political pundit.
They were joined Tuesday by pharmaceutical maker GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi Consumer Care, insurer Allstate, asset management firm T. Rowe Price, and personal finance company Credit Karma.
Meridian Medical Technologies has issued a nationwide, voluntary recall of its Mylan EpiPen and EpiPen Jr. allergy shots.
The company said that some of devices may contain a defective part that prevents the injector from activating in the event of an allergic reaction.
“While the number of reported failures is small, EpiPen products that potentially contain a defective part are being recalled because of the potential for life-threatening risk if a severe allergic reaction goes untreated,” the company said in a statement.
YOUR HEART THUMPS, then catches. Your breath shortens. Beads of sweat emerge at your temples. Your eyes scan back and forth over the airplane-shaped diagram. Surely there must be at least one solitary aisle or window seat available. The world can’t be so cruel as to wedge you into the middle.
But if Molon Labe Designs gets its way, that panic could give way to placidity. The upstart Colorado aviation design firm wants to kill the middle seat’s middle child reputation. Its “stagger seat” concept sits slightly below and behind its neighbors, so it can be three inches wider than its window- and aisle-adjacent companions. It has its own armrests.
Alberta is one of the largest honey producing regions in the world with over 600,000 colonies of bees divided amongst 7,000 beekeepers. Yet Eliese Watson, a native of the prairies, says that modern day residents of Calgary have lost touch with the surrounding agricultural lifestyle.
Bees, she says, are an easy way for urbanites to reconnect with nature. That’s why in 2010, she started an urban beekeeping company, ABC Apiaries, with a $5,000 grant. Seven years later, she has 60 colonies, and produces over 2,000 pounds of honey in a year. But it’s not the traditional honey production; her hives are scattered throughout the city, on rooftops, in urban spaces, and in backyards.
“In my head, it’s like a non-profit, where we just focus on getting people comfortable with beekeeping and urban hives. But I run it as a company,” she says, seated at one of Calgary’s hippest coffee shops.
Two years ago, restauranteur Marc Roth didn’t know anything about making ice cream.
Today he’s the founder of A La Mode, a completely nut-free, egg-free and sesame-free ice cream that has generated sales of $2 million.
The brand, which has a successful shop in New York City, is already in more than 1,450 stores around the country.
Restaurants are Roth’s passion. By 35, he had launched and sold three of them in New York. Roth’s WestSide Steakhouse was his last one, and it was pivotal because it allowed him to expand as an entrepreneur.
