Tag: activist

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Health

Barbara Kannapell, Activist Who Empowered Deaf Individuals, Dies at 83

Barbara Kannapell, Activist Who Empowered Deaf People, Dies at 83

Her parents attended Gallaudet, and Barbara, known as Kanny, followed in their footsteps and earned her bachelor’s degree in Deaf Education in 1961. In 1970 she received a master’s degree in educational technology from the Catholic University of America in Washington. For her dissertation in Georgetown, where she completed her PhD in 1985, she examined the attitudes of 200 Gallaudet students and found that 62 percent of them considered themselves bilingual in ASL and English.

After graduating from Gallaudet, she began four decades at the university, starting in 1962 as a research assistant. Her last position there was from 1987 to 2003 as an associate professor. She also taught at the Community College of Baltimore County, where she began as an adjunct professor in 1997 and retired as an adjunct professor in 2014.

She met Ms. Paul, who was a writer and editor and advisor on women’s leadership (she is now retired), in 1971 at a gay bar in Washington, Ms. Paul said in an interview. The bar had phones on the tables so people could call other tables. Ms. Paul listening was with a friend who was Dr. Kannapell’s desk called, but everyone there was deaf and couldn’t hear the phone. So Mrs. Paul and her friend went and introduced themselves personally.

“The next day I ran to the library and looked for anything I could find about the deaf,” said Ms. Paul. She then met with Dr. Kannapell for lunch, where they agreed in writing.

Their relationship blossomed. When same-sex marriage was illegal, they held an engagement ceremony; they married in 2013 in the District of Columbia. Paul is the only immediate survivor of Dr. Kannapell.

Among the many interests of Dr. Kannapell, she was fascinated by the experiences of deaf Americans during World War II. Over the decades, she gathered a wealth of data, including interviews with deaf people who had worked in war factories and material she received from deaf people and their descendants. She published an early summary of her research in 2002 in the journal of the National Association of the Deaf, entitled “Forgotten Americans: Deaf War Plant Workers in World War II”.

Ms. Paul and various colleagues plan to complete their project and publish it in the near future.

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Health

Erin Gilmer, Incapacity Rights Activist, Dies at 38

Erin Gilmer, Disability Rights Activist, Dies at 38

Erin Gilmer, a disability rights attorney and activist who campaigned for medical privacy, lower drug prices, and a more compassionate health system when faced with a cascade of illnesses that left her unable to work for long periods of time or even left her in bed, died Jan. July in Centennial, Colorado. She was 38 years old.

Anne Marie Mercurio, a friend who had given Ms. Gilmer a power of attorney, said the cause was suicide.

First in Texas and later in Colorado, where she ran her own law firm, Ms. Gilmer pushed for legislation that would better tailor health care to patient needs, including a 2019 state bill that would allow Colorado pharmacists to avoid certain drugs current prescription if the patient’s doctor cannot be reached.

She has been a frequent consultant to hospitals, universities and pharmaceutical companies, bringing with her extensive knowledge of health policy and even more extensive first-hand experience as a patient.

At conferences and on social media, she used her own life to illustrate the humiliations and difficulties she believed were inherent in the modern medical system, where she believed that patients and doctors alike were treated like cogs in a machine.

Her conditions included rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes, borderline personality disorder, and occipital neuralgia, which causes severely painful headaches. Her long medical record challenged doctors who were used to approaching patients on 15-minute visits, and she said it was often dismissed as “difficult” just for trying to stand up for herself.

“Too often patients have to ask themselves: ‘Will they believe me?'” She wrote on Twitter in May. “’Will you help me? Will they cause further trauma? Will they listen and understand? ‘”

She often spoke of her financial troubles; Despite her law degree, she is dependent on food stamps. But she admitted that her breed gave her the privilege of cutting curves.

“In the months when I couldn’t make ends meet, I dressed up in my pretty white girls’ clothes and went to the salad bar and asked for a new plate as if I had already paid for it,” she said in a speech to a medical doctor in 2014 Conference at Stanford University.

“I’m not proud of it, but I’m desperate,” she added. “It’s about survival of the fittest. Some patients die trying to get food, medicine, shelter, and medical care. If you don’t die on the way, you honestly wish you could because it’s all so exhausting and frustrating and humiliating. “

It could be violent, especially when people presumed to explain their problems to her or offer a quick fix. But she also developed a following among people with similarly complicated health conditions whom she saw as both allies and inspiration and showed them how the system worked for them.

“I used to think I had no choice,” said Tinu Abayomi-Paul, who became a disability rights activist after meeting Ms. Gilmer in 2018, over the phone. “She was the first to show me how to address medicine as an institution and not be written off as a difficult patient.”

Ms. Gilmer emphasized the need for trauma-informed care and urged the medical system to recognize not only that many patients enter the private parts of an already traumatized doctor’s office, but also that the health care experience itself can be traumatizing. Last year she wrote a handbook entitled “A Preface to the Legal Profession: What You Should Know As a Lawyer,” which she made available online for free.

“She expected the system to fail,” said Dr. Victor Montori, an endocrinologist at Mayo Clinic and founder of Patient Revolution, an organization that supports patient-centered care. “But she tried to make it so that the system wouldn’t let other people down.”

Erin Michelle Gilmer was born on September 27, 1982 in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, a suburb of Denver and grew up near Aurora. Her father, Thomas S. Gilmer, a doctor, and her mother, Carol Yvonne Troyer, a pharmacist, divorced when she was 19 and she became estranged from them.

In addition to her parents, Mrs. Gilmer also leaves her brother Christopher.

Ms. Gilmer, a competitive swimmer as a child, began developing health problems in high school. She had jaw and rotator cuff surgery, her father said in an interview, and she also developed signs of depression.

A star student, she graduated with enough credit to skip a year of college at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She studied psychology and economics and graduated in 2005 with summa cum laude.

She decided to continue her education at the University of Colorado law school to keep her student health insurance – “a cruel joke,” she said in a 2020 interview with Dr. Montori. She focused on health law and human rights and trained as both a policy expert and an activist; She later mentioned health as a human right on her blog.

She graduated in 2008 and moved to Texas where she worked for the state government and a number of health care nonprofits. In 2012 she returned to Denver to open her own practice.

At this point, her health began to deteriorate. Her existing condition worsened and new ones emerged, exacerbated by an accident in 2010 in which she was hit by a car. She found it difficult to work a full day, and eventually most of her advocacy was virtual, including through social media.

For all her mastery of the intricacies of health policy, Ms. Gilmer said the system needed more compassion.

“We can do this on a large scale by introducing trauma-informed care as a way to practice,” she said in an interview with Dr. Montori. “And we can do that on the small micro level by just saying, ‘How are you today? I am here to listen I’m glad you’re here. ‘”

If you have thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK). For a list of additional resources, see SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources.

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Business

Exxon Board to Get a Third Activist Pushing Cleaner Power

Exxon Board to Get a Third Activist Pushing Cleaner Energy

Activist investors who dealt a stunning defeat to Exxon Mobil last week secured a third seat on the company’s board on Wednesday when the oil giant announced updated results of a shareholder vote.

While the first two new dissident board members were oil company veterans, the newest member, Alexander A. Karsner, has strong environmental credentials and is expected to pose more of a challenge to senior management. Mr. Karsner’s election sharpened the investor rebuke of the company’s management, which has produced lackluster returns for about a decade.

Investor discontent with Exxon had been building because the company has invested in a number of projects, acquisitions and strategies that have not paid off, including Canadian oil sands and natural gas fields. Critics also believe that the company has been very slow to adapt to a changing energy industry and done too little to reduce carbon emissions even as many European oil companies began investing in wind turbines, solar farms and hydrogen.

The investors challenging Exxon were led by a small hedge fund called Engine No. 1. Last week the activists secured enough votes to put two people on the oil producer’s board, the first time candidates picked by the company’s management have lost an election, according to analysts. Engine No. 1 has sought to push Exxon to move toward cleaner energy and away from oil and gas.

Exxon said last week that it needed more time to determine who had won the last two of the 12 seats on its board. Engine No. 1 had put up four candidates. Exxon said that one of two remaining candidates did not secure enough votes but that Mr. Karsner was still in contention.

On Wednesday, the company said its latest results were preliminary and would be certified before being filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Having a third director on the board will give the activists greater say in big corporate decisions and Exxon’s strategy, though they will still be up against nine people picked by the company’s management, who will presumably be more likely to back executives on crucial questions.

“We are grateful for shareholders’ careful consideration of our nominees,” Engine No. 1 said in a statement, “and are excited that these three individuals will be working with the full board to help better Exxon Mobil for the long-term benefit of all shareholders.”

Mr. Karsner is a senior strategist at X, a division of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and has been an executive at various energy, technology and investment businesses. Companies he has worked at have built solar plants in Morocco. Between 2006 and 2008, Mr. Karsner was an assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy during the Bush administration.

In that role, he supervised the Energy Department’s applied science programs and helped negotiate the United States’ re-entry into the United Nations Convention on Climate Change, which eventually led to the 2015 Paris climate agreement. He has been a member of the board of Conservation International, an environmental group that works to protect forests that absorb climate-warming carbon.

Today in Business

Updated 

June 2, 2021, 4:35 p.m. ET

Exxon Mobil announced the election results in a bland statement that thanked shareholders for “their ongoing support for our company.”

“We look forward to working with all of our directors to build on the progress we’ve made to grow long-term shareholder value and succeed in a lower-carbon future,” the company said.

Darren W. Woods, Exxon’s chairman and chief executive, was re-elected to the board. His answer to the challenge posed by climate change has been to build a business that captures carbon dioxide from industrial plants and buries it deep underground. Exxon recently proposed a $100 billion carbon capture project for plants along the Houston Ship Channel that could be a model for the world. But in order to be viable, the project will most likely require a carbon tax or another mechanism to put a price on carbon emissions. Lawmakers in Washington have been reluctant to embrace a carbon price.

The new activist-backed directors may support Exxon’s carbon-capture efforts, but probably will push for other clean energy initiatives, as well. Executives at Engine No. 1 have said the new directors need to get on the board and study company businesses before pushing for fundamental changes. The directors have declined requests for interviews.

The three directors nominated by Exxon’s management who were not elected are Samuel Palmisano, a former chief executive of IBM; Steven Kandarian, a former Met Life chief executive; and Wan Zulkiflee, chairman of Malaysia Airlines and the former chief executive of Petronas, Malaysia’s state-owned oil company.

The activist-backed directors who were declared winners last week are Gregory Goff, a former chief executive of the refiner Andeavor who had a long career at Conoco Phillips, and Kaisa Hietala, an environmental scientist who was a senior executive at Neste, a Finnish refiner. Both have experience in biofuels.

Categories
Business

Exxon Mobil Faces Off In opposition to Activist Buyers on Local weather Change

Exxon Mobil Faces Off Against Activist Investors on Climate Change

“I don’t expect a meaningful change in strategy such as large investments in renewables,” said Allen Good, a Morningstar analyst. But he said a victory for the dissidents “would be a signal that shareholders don’t think current initiatives have gone far enough, and that could spur further change.”

There have been several challenges to Exxon’s management over the years, but the dissidents gained strength last year when the company did not increase its dividend and slashed its $200 billion investment program by a third. And the company’s stock dropped by nearly half. Its share price has regained much of those losses in recent months but remains about 17 percent lower than it was in January 2020, before the pandemic took hold.

Engine No. 1’s candidates are Gregory Goff, a former chief executive of Andeavor, a refinery company; Kaisa Hietala, a former executive at Neste, a Finnish energy company; Alexander Karsner, a senior strategist at X, a lab owned by Google’s parent, Alphabet; and Anders Runevad, the former chief executive of Vestas Wind Systems, a wind turbine maker.

Much depends on whether shareholders with large stakes in Exxon vote with Engine No. 1.

Reuters reported on Tuesday that BlackRock, which has a 6.7 percent stake in Exxon, had backed Engine No. 1’s campaign by voting for three of the hedge fund’s candidates. A BlackRock representative declined to comment on the report or its Exxon votes.

BlackRock’s critics say its deeds have not matched its talk on getting companies to do more to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. But the investment firm has said that engaging with management has produced results, and it has contended that voting against directors proposed by management can compel companies to make changes that would benefit the environment. BlackRock said that last year it voted against 64 directors on the boards of companies that generate a lot of carbon emissions.

This year, BlackRock told The New York Times that its ambition was for its entire investment portfolio to be at “net zero” emissions by 2050 at the latest. In other words, the companies and other entities in which BlackRock invests would, in aggregate, be adding zero planet-warming gases to the atmosphere because they took out as much as they put in.

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World News

Roman Protasevich: A Belarus Activist Who ‘Refused to Dwell in Concern’

Roman Protasevich: A Belarus Activist Who ‘Refused to Live in Fear’

WARSAW — Since his teenage years as a rebellious high school student in Belarus and continuing into his 20s while in exile abroad, Roman Protasevich faced so many threats from the country’s security apparatus — of violent beatings, jail, punishment against family members — that “we all sort of got used to them,” a fellow exiled dissident recalled.

So, despite his being branded a terrorist by Belarus late last year — a capital offense — Mr. Protasevich was not particularly worried when he set off for Greece from Lithuania, where he had been living, earlier this month to attend a conference and take a short vacation with his Russian girlfriend, Sofia Sapega.

But that sense of security was shattered on Sunday when they were snatched by Belarus security officials on the tarmac at Minsk National Airport after a MiG-29 fighter jet was scrambled to intercept his commercial flight home to Lithuania from Greece. Mr. Protasevich, 26, now faces the vengeance of President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the 66-year-old Belarusian leader from whom he once received a scholarship for gifted students but has since defied with unflinching zeal.

In a short video released on Monday by the authorities in Belarus, Mr. Protasevich confessed — under duress, his friends say — to taking part in the organization of “mass unrest” last year in Minsk, the Belarus capital. That is the government’s term for weeks of huge street protests after Mr. Lukashenko, in power since 1994, declared a landslide re-election victory in an August election widely dismissed as brazenly rigged.

Stispan Putsila, the fellow dissident who described the atmosphere around Mr. Protasevich and the co-founder of opposition social media channels that Mr. Protasevich used last year to help mobilize street protests, said he had spoken to his friend and colleague before his departure for Greece about the potential risks.

They agreed, he said, that it was best to avoid flying over Belarus, Russia or any other state that cooperated with Mr. Lukashenko, but that flights between two European Union countries, Lithuania and Greece, should be safe.

He added that Mr. Protasevich might not have realized that the Ryanair flight he boarded in Athens on Sunday morning would fly over the western edge of Belarus, a route that opened the way for Mr. Lukashenko to carry out what European leaders condemned as a “state-sponsored hijacking.”

That something was amiss became clear at the airport in Athens, when Mr. Protasevich noticed a man he assumed to be a Belarus security agent trying to take photographs of him and his travel documents at the check-in counter.

Taking fright, however, was not in his character, Mr. Putsila said in an interview at the office of Nexta, the opposition news organization where Mr. Protasevich established himself as one of Mr. Lukashenko’s most effective and unbending critics.

“By his character Roman has always been very resolute,” Mr. Putsila said. “He refused to live in fear.”

Since Mr. Lukashenko took power in Belarus in 1994, however, that has been a very perilous proposition.

Mr. Protasevich has been resisting his country’s tyranny since he was 16, when he first witnessed what he described as the “disgusting” brutality of Mr. Lukashenko’s rule. That began a personal journey that would turn a gifted student at a science high school in Minsk into an avowed enemy of a government that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2005 called “the last remaining true dictatorship in the heart of Europe.”

Mr. Protasevich was raised in an outlying district of Minsk in one of the city’s anonymous, concrete high-rises by a father who was a military officer and a mother who taught math at an army academy. He studied at a prestigious high school and won an award in a Russian science contest.

But in the summer after 10th grade, Mr. Protasevich was detained by the police while sitting on a park bench with a friend watching a so-called “clapping protest,” when a flash mob clapped to show opposition to the government, without actually uttering any forbidden statements. Mr. Protasevich was just watching, Natalia Protasevich, his mother, said in an interview.

“For the first time I saw all the dirt that is happening in our country,” he said in a 2011 video posted on YouTube . “Just as an example: Five huge OMON riot police officers beat women. A mother with her child was thrown into a police van. It was disgusting. After that everything changed fundamentally.”

A letter from the security services to his high school followed. He was expelled and home educated for six months, as no other school would take him, his mother said.

The family eventually negotiated a deal with the Ministry of Education. Mr. Protasevich could attend school, though only an ordinary one, not the elite lyceum he had been enrolled in before, but only if his mother resigned from her teaching job at the army academy.

“Imagine being a 16-year-old and being expelled from school,” Ms. Protasevich said. “It was this incident, this injustice, this insult,” that drove him into the political opposition, she said. “That is how he began his activism as a 16-year-old.”

Mr. Protasevich studied journalism at Belarusian State University but again ran into trouble with the authorities. Unable to finish his degree, he worked as a freelance reporter for a variety of opposition-leaning publications. Frequently detained and jailed for short periods, he decided to move to Poland, working for 10 months in Warsaw with Mr. Putsila and others on the Nexta team disseminating videos, leaked documents and news reports critical of Mr. Lukashenko.

Convinced that his work would have more impact if he were inside Belarus, Mr. Protasevich returned in 2019 to Minsk. But the political climate had only darkened there as Mr. Lukashenko geared up for a presidential election in 2020.

In November 2019, the police in Belarus detained a fellow dissident journalist, Vladimir Chudentsov, on what were denounced as trumped up drug charges as he was trying to cross the border into Poland.

Sensing serious trouble ahead, Mr. Protasevich decided to flee. On short notice, carrying only a backpack, according to his mother, he again left for Poland, Belarus’s western neighbor with a large population of exiles who had fled Mr. Lukashenko’s rule.

His parents followed him there last summer to avoid arrest after security agents pressured neighbors to speak with the parents about encouraging their son to return to Belarus, where he faced certain detention.

Mr. Protasevich stayed put in Warsaw, becoming a key opposition figure along with Mr. Putsila at Nexta, posting regular reports on the social media site Telegram. Mr. Putsila described their work as “activist journalism,” but added that Mr. Lukashenko had left no space for traditional journalism by shutting down any outlet inside Belarus that did more than parrot the government line.

Working from an apartment in central Warsaw near the Polish Parliament, Mr. Protasevich moved further away from traditional journalism after the disputed presidential election last August, taking an active role in organizing street protests through Nexta’s account on Telegram.

“He was more interested in organizing street action” than disseminating news, recalled Mr. Putsila, who also goes by the name Stepan Svetlov, an alias. “I would not say he was more radical, but he definitely became more resolute.”

Mr. Protasevich’s work crossed into the realm of political activism, not only reporting on the protests but also planning them. “We’re journalists, but we also have to do something else,” he said in an interview last year. “No one else is left. The opposition leaders are in prison.” Mr. Putsila said that Mr. Protasevich never advocated violence, only peaceful protests.

In September last year, Mr. Protasevich left Poland for neighboring Lithuania to join Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the principal opposition candidate in the August election who had been forced to flee. With Mr. Lukashenko’s other main rivals in detention, Ms. Tikhanovskaya had become the main voice of the Belarus opposition.

In November, prosecutors in Belarus formally charged Mr. Protasevich under a law that bans the organization of protests that violate “social order.” The security services also put him on a list of accused terrorists.

But Mr. Protasevich felt safe in the European Union, and even took to mocking the charges against him in his homeland.

“After the Belarusian government identified me as a terrorist, I received more congratulations than ever in my entire life for a birthday,” he told Nashe Nive, a Belarusian news site.

Mr. Putsila said he was stunned that Mr. Lukashenko would force a commercial airliner to land just to arrest a youthful critic but, with the benefit of hindsight, thinks the operation should not have come as a big surprise. The autocrat, he said, wanted to show that “we will reach you not only in Belarus but wherever you are. He has always tried to terrify.”

A measure of that was that when the plane was forced to land in Minsk on Sunday, Belarus security agents arrested not only Mr. Protasevich but Ms. Sapega, 23. Ms. Sapega, a law student at the European Humanities University in Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, appeared to have been arrested over her association. She was not known to be a target in her own right. Her lawyer said Wednesday she would be jailed for at least two months and face a criminal trial.

A young woman who identified herself as Ms. Sapega, who had not been seen in public since her arrest, appeared in a video posted on Twitter on Tuesday by NTV, a state-controlled Russian television channel.

The woman said she had been on the same plane as Mr. Protasevich to Lithuania, where she said she served as an editor for the “Black Book of Belarus,” a Telegram channel that focuses on exposing police brutality and is banned by Belarus as an “extremist” organization. Clearly speaking under duress in Russian, she confessed to publishing the personal information of Interior Ministry officers, a criminal offense in Belarus.

Mr. Putsila noted that Nexta had received so many threatening letters and abusive phone calls that Polish police officers stand permanent guard on the stairwell leading to the office.

“The Lukashenko regime considers Roman one of its main enemies,” he said. “Maybe it is right.”

Another colleague, Ekaterina Yerusalimskaya, told the Tut.by news service that she and Mr. Protasevich once noticed a mysterious man tailing them in Poland, and reported it to the police. Still, Mr. Protasevich remained nonchalant. “He calmed himself by saying nobody would touch us, otherwise it would be an international scandal,” Ms. Yerusalimskaya said.

Mr. Protasevich’s mother said she worried about his safety but, breaking down in tears as she contemplated her son’s fate after his arrest in Minsk, added: “We believe justice will prevail. We believe all this terror will pass. We believe political prisoners will be freed. And we are very proud of our son.”

Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting from Moscow.

Categories
Business

Amazon Illegally Fired Activist Staff, Labor Board Finds

Amazon Illegally Fired Activist Workers, Labor Board Finds

SEATTLE – Amazon illegally battled two of its most prominent internal critics when it fired them last year, the National Labor Relations Board found.

Employees Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa had publicly urged the company to reduce its impact on climate change and address concerns about warehouse workers.

The agency told Ms. Cunningham and Ms. Costa that they would accuse Amazon of unfair labor practices if the company did not resolve the case. This emerges from correspondence Ms. Cunningham shared with the New York Times.

“It is a moral victory and it really shows that we are on the right side of history and the right side of the law,” said Ms. Cunningham.

The two women were among dozens of Amazon workers who told the Labor Department of the company’s retaliation last year, but in most of the other cases the workers had complained about the safety of pandemics.

“We support the right of every employee to criticize the working conditions of their employer, but that does not imply blanket immunity from our internal guidelines, which are all lawful,” said Jaci Anderson, a spokeswoman for Amazon. “We fired these employees because they did not speak publicly about working conditions, safety or sustainability, but because they repeatedly violated internal guidelines.”

Allegations of unfair labor practices at Amazon were common enough for the employment agency to convert them into a national investigation, the agency told NBC News. The agency usually conducts the investigation in its regional offices.

While Amazon’s starting wage of $ 15 an hour is twice the federal minimum, its labor practices in Washington and elsewhere are under scrutiny. The focus has increased over the past year as online orders soared during the pandemic and Amazon expanded its US workforce to nearly a million people. Amazon’s warehouse workers are considered key employees and have not been able to work from home.

This week, the National Labor Board is counting thousands of ballots determining whether nearly 6,000 workers will unionize at an Amazon warehouse outside of Birmingham, Alabama. This is the largest and most viable work threat in the company’s history. The union has stated that workers are under excessive production pressures and are closely monitored by the company to ensure quotas are respected.

The results could change the shape of the labor movement and one of America’s largest private employers.

Ms. Costa and Ms. Cunningham, who worked as designers at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, began publicly criticizing the company in 2018. You were among a small group of employees who wanted the company to do more to manage the climate impact. The group, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, has more than 8,700 colleagues to support their efforts.

Over time, Ms. Cunningham and Ms. Costa have expanded their protests. After Amazon told them that they had violated its external communications guidelines by speaking publicly about the company, their group organized 400 people to speak up and deliberately violated the guidelines to make a point .

At the start of the pandemic, they also raised concerns about the safety of Amazon’s warehouses. Amazon fired Ms. Costa and Ms. Cunningham last April, not long after their group announced an internal event where warehouse workers would speak to technical staff about their working conditions.

After the women were released, several Democratic senators, including Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Kamala Harris of California, wrote to Amazon of concerns about possible retaliation. And Tim Bray, an internet pioneer and former vice president of the Amazon Cloud Computing Group, stepped down in protest.

Mr Bray said he was delighted to hear the employment office’s findings and hoped Amazon had settled the case. “The policy so far has been ‘don’t admit anything, don’t admit anything’,” he said. “This is your chance to think it over a little.”

Ms. Cunningham said that despite the company’s rejection, she and Ms. Costa felt that they and Ms. Costa were primary targets for Amazon as they were the most visible members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice.

The Labor Authority also upheld a complaint involving Jonathan Bailey, co-founder of Amazonians United, a workforce advocacy group. The agency filed a complaint against Amazon based on Mr Bailey’s allegations that the company was breaking the law when it interrogated him after a strike last year at the Queens warehouse where he works.

“They realized that Amazon violated our rights,” said Bailey. “I think the message that employees should hear and understand is, yes, we all experience it. But many of us struggle too. “

Amazon has resolved Mr Bailey’s case without admitting any wrongdoing and has agreed to post notices informing employees of their rights in the break room. Ms. Anderson, Amazon’s spokeswoman, said the company contradicts allegations in Mr. Bailey’s case. “We pride ourselves on providing an inclusive environment in which employees can perform excellently without fear of retaliation, intimidation or harassment,” she said.

Kate Conger contributed to the coverage.

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Politics

Far-right activist ‘Baked Alaska’ is among the many newest Capitol rioters to be arrested.

Far-right activist ‘Baked Alaska’ is among the latest Capitol rioters to be arrested.

Anthime Joseph Gionet, a far-right media personality nicknamed “Baked Alaska” known for engaging in illegal activities, was arrested by the FBI on Friday and charged with illegally using the Capitol during the attack on the building by President Trump’s supporters to have stormed earlier this month.

Mr Gionet, who was banned from Twitter and YouTube for his content, has streamed himself live in the crowd on DLive, a streaming service that is growing in popularity after a mass exodus of right-wing figures from more mainstream platforms. He posted a video showing supporters of President Trump taking selfies with officials at the Capitol, who quietly asked them to leave the premises. The video showed Trump supporters talking to each other, laughing and telling the officers and each other, “This is just the beginning.”

According to the Justice Department website, Mr. Gionet was arrested in Houston on Friday and charged with two federal crimes. In a lawsuit, Nicole Miller, an FBI agent, said Mr. Gionet recorded a 27-minute live video in which he appeared to be singing, “Patriots are in control,” and says, “We’re in the Capitol, 1776 is about to start again.” . ” . ”

Over 70 people have been arrested and at least 170 cases opened in connection with the riots. Many of the mob participants could be easily identified from their social media posts.

Emily Hernandez, a woman who was photographed with part of the wooden nameplate ripped from the entrance to Spokeswoman Nancy Pelosi’s office, was arrested and charged in federal court Friday, according to the Kansas City star.

Ms. Hernandez was featured in numerous videos and photos depicting Ms. Pelosi’s shattered nameplate like a precious souvenir. According to the FBI, friends and acquaintances said they got tips about Ms. Hernandez after she posted pictures and videos of herself messing around with the nameplate on Facebook and Snapchat.

Jenna Ryan, a Frisco, Texas real estate agent who took a private plane to Washington to join the mob, was also charged on Friday. She was easy to identify after reporting on her attendance in a variety of ways, including livestreaming it at the Capitol saying, “Life or death doesn’t matter. Here we go.”

Just before entering, she turned to the camera and said, “You know who to hire for your agent. Jenna Ryan for your agent. “