The move came after Future group firms defaulted on loans taken against the pledged shares of Future Retail in March, which also impacted its share price.

Big brands have quit Amazon's platform due to sales of counterfeit products and unauthorised sellers which undermines the value of the original brands.

Xbox will be available for Rs39,990, while the model with Kinect, an interface that allows the use of gestures to play games, will cost Rs45,990.

On Thursday, gold futures for June on MCX closed at Rs 46,352/10gm. So, in about one and a half years, gold prices in India could gain about 75%. In the international market, gold is currently trading at about $1,750 level.

Amazon’s India unit has contracted 2 million sq ft while Walmart-backed Flipkart has contracted 1 million sq ft across Bengaluru, Mumbai Metropolitan Region, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad, Lucknow and Coimbatore, said multiple persons aware of the development.

Amazon has become a lifeline for consumers facing lockdowns and restrictions around the world, and the company is in the process of adding some 175,000 new employees to cope with the surging demand. But the company has also faced protests from warehouse workers and activists who claim Amazon has failed to do enough to keep them safe.

As per estimates by Forrester Research, regions in Green and Orange zones accounted for 30-35% sales of ecommerce firms prior to the lockdown.

The death marks the fourth confirmed COVID-19-linked death of an Amazon worker, following deaths in Hawthorne, California; Tracy, California and the death of a Staten Island, New York, worker who was stationed at the JFK8 fulfillment centre.

Under the initiative, Amazon will deliver orders to a designated delivery point in the vicinity of the containment zone, from where volunteers will further deliver the packages to customers' doorstep, the company said in a statement.

The Centre, in its revised guidelines on May 1, had allowed “standalone shops” to operate in the red zones, while it restricted operations of e-commerce companies to sale of essential items only.

Even at locations open to deliveries, e-commerce players are facing manpower crunch due to travel restrictions on delivery partners.

Its total income from operation was up 7.59 per cent at Rs 419.29 crore during the quarter under review as against Rs 389.68 crore in the same period last fiscal.

Amazon is a leader in online shopping. It has warehouses across the country to sort and deliver its products. Recently, Amazon Air announced it will expand its delivery network into Rockford. Chicago Rockford International Airport is already a major hub for UPS. The airport also has maintenance facilities capable of repairing the world's largest aircraft. But Amazon took particular interest due to the airport's cargo operations. Director Sarah Rhoads says it's part of the retailer's "Middle Mile" network for two-day deliveries. "That package would go from a fulfillment center to one of our 21 air gateways that we have throughout the United States for transport to then another air gateway for downstream transit to a sort center where that package would be sorted for final delivery to your location," she explained. Amazon has been operating at Rockford's airport in some capacity since September 2016. Airport executive director Mike Dunn says they operated under a different corporate name

During this time of social distancing, finding ways to stay connected to the people in our lives is essential. Our project, "Shortening the Distance," focuses on how the people in our community are reaching out to their neighbors, friends and loved ones.

On this edition of Your Call’s One Planet Series, we're speaking with journalist and author Antonia Juhasz about the 10th anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, which spewed over 130 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, making it the worst oil spill in US history.

This week on Open Air, KALW’s radio magazine for the Bay Area performing arts, host David Latulippe talks, appropriately socially distant, with Mark Streshinsky, general director of West Edge Opera , about the annual summer festival, thus far going full steam ahead from July 25th through August 9 th at The Bridge Yard in Oakland.

Regular contributor and critic at large Peter Robinson explores how My Fair Lady turned Shaw’s Pygmalion into a fine musical. ===================== his week on Open Air, KALW’s live radio magazine for the Bay Area Performing Arts in Times of Corona, we raise the virtual curtain for the first installment of Open Air’s Corona Radio Theater . Featuring this week is theater company Word for Word ; renowned for bringing short stories from the page to the stage, fully theatricalized; and their reading - on Zoom - of Tobias Wolff's story, Firelight .

Zoom meetings have become ubiquitous during the COVID-19 pandemic, but so have concerns about the tool's security. Should you be worried? Not if you use the tools Zoom offers to make meetings more secure, say our experts.

Output Syndication makes it easy to publish directly to social media platforms, while Content Control simplifies the creation of live linear channels and Smartplay Prebid improves the ad bidding process

Shop. Click. And the next day, your purchase is on your doorstep. Amazon has changed the face of shopping, but at a surprisingly high cost to its workers. With Black Friday and Cyber Monday coming soon, we look at what’s behind those smiling packages to reveal the dangers of working at Amazon.

Don’t miss out on the next big story. Get the Weekly Reveal newsletter today.

This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 11, the NASA mission that first put men on the moon. In the decades since Apollo 11, the American space program has atrophied. No manned American space mission has left low Earth orbit since 1972. But recent developments in the space programs of other nations, along with new interest in space from private industry, have instigated a new interest in an American space program. The Trump Administration has announced plans to build an American military presence in space, as well as its intentions to send another manned mission to the moon. Rivka Galchen joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss what’s next in outer space.

So you're trying to spice up your video conferences and looking into custom backgrounds (Zoom tutorial; Microsoft Teams guide; Skype guide), but what image to pick? Studio Ghibli shared 8 suitable movie backgrounds [via Spoon Tamago and Mltshp], or you can get official Star Wars scenery [via Mltshp]. Or you could browse through One Perfect Shot, a Twitter account from Film School Rejects [also via Mltshp]. Or get artistic and pick up something from the The British Museum's "major revamp" of its digital collection, with nearly 1.9 million images free to use for anyone under a Creative Commons 4.0 license [via Open Culture, who link to more interesting and educational resources; via Mltshp].

"Firing whistleblowers isn't just a side-effect of macroeconomic forces, nor is it intrinsic to the function of free markets. It's evidence of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture. I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison." Tim Bray, VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon, resigns.

He talks about (archive link in case his blog is down) the power dynamics that led to his resignation:

The victims weren't abstract entities but real people; here are some of their names: Courtney Bowden, Gerald Bryson, Maren Costa, Emily Cunningham, Bashir Mohammed, and Chris Smalls. I'm sure it's a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both. Right?

...

Amazon is exceptionally well-managed and has demonstrated great skill at spotting opportunities and building repeatable processes for exploiting them. It has a corresponding lack of vision about the human costs of the relentless growth and accumulation of wealth and power. If we don't like certain things Amazon is doing, we need to put legal guardrails in place to stop those things. We don't need to invent anything new; a combination of antitrust and living-wage and worker-empowerment legislation, rigorously enforced, offers a clear path forward.

Don't say it can't be done, because France is doing it.

...

Amazon Web Services (the "Cloud Computing" arm of the company), where I worked, is a different story. It treats its workers humanely, strives for work/life balance, struggles to move the diversity needle (and mostly fails, but so does everyone else), and is by and large an ethical organization. I genuinely admire its leadership.

Of course, its workers have power. The average pay is very high, and anyone who's unhappy can walk across the street and get another job paying the same or better.

Spot a pattern? At the end of the day, it's all about power balances. The warehouse workers are weak and getting weaker, what with mass unemployment and (in the US) job-linked health insurance. So they're gonna get treated like crap, because capitalism. Any plausible solution has to start with increasing their collective strength.

Excitement! Adventure! Zoom! Witty Banter!* Mefites beamed directly to your home! Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! (Monster truck voice intensifies) *wittiness of banter not guaranteed, offer void in Taito-ku, Saitama, and some parts of Aichi, consult your doctor if banter causes itchiness or swelling

We had a nice crowd on Monday, hopefully we can have a decent one this week, too. I'll send out the invites Sunday morning, hope to see you all there.

A powerful Senate Democrat is asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Zoom for deceptive practices, adding to the growing chorus of concerns over the popular video chat software's privacy and security flaws . Several state attorneys general are also probing Zoom, after users, including government officials, reported harassment, known as "Zoombombing," on the platform. Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, the ranking member of the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, sent a letter Friday to the FTC. In the letter , obtained by NPR, Brown said Zoom had made "deceptive" claims to users that their communications would remain private. Brown said Zoom incorrectly suggested its service offered end-to-end data encryption, which means that communications couldn't be accessed by anyone other than the sender and the recipient at any point. Zoom walked back on Wednesday its claim of end-to-end encryption. In a statement, it said, "While we never intended to deceive any of our customers, we

Hey, have we thought about switching up our affiliate links (at least for books) from Amazon to Bookshop? It's apparently a platform for indie bookshops set up specifically to keep them afloat and to break Amazon's stranglehold over online book purchases.

Bookshop is designed for generating affiliate revenue. Our team is working to build a network of publishers, authors, bookstagrammers, celebrity book clubs, and other media sites to target socially-conscious online consumers who are not yet buying their books online through an independent bookstore.

Pros:

- It's a B-Corp and supports indie bookstores and it isn't Amazon, so almost certainly more in line with MeFi's moral compass (at least until a couple of years down the line, when we find out that they've sold out to a PE consortium led by Northrop Grumman or whatever);
- More affiliate cash (10.0% vs 4.5% for Amazon);
- Seems to be on the level, with big affiliates already (NYT, Slate and Vox per the insidehook article)
- Presumably can be achieved at relatively low cost and posters could link to whichever they prefer / we could always switch back to Amazon.

Cons:

- The affiliate scheme is kind of complex? I don't know anything about affiliate marketing but it's explained in their FAQ for anyone who does. I don't really get the pool part, although it sounds great?;
- Currently don't ship internationally (although I always use Amazon dot com links on here anyway, rather than a local site, and Bookshop apparently intends to add this functionality anyway);
- Don't do ebooks, audiobooks, secondhand books, store merch, etc (although again, they apparently intend to);
- Don't sell cookware and electronics and shoes and so on, although of course we still have Amazon;
- Possibly more expensive than Amazon and less convenient for Mefites with Prime;
- Probably a load of other things that haven't occurred to me.

Is this something worth experimenting with?

Everyone Expects The Spanish Influenza: There is one solution and one solution only: Stop using Amazon. Period. Nothing else will work. Nothing.

The other solution is to get laws passed which don't allow them to engage in these practises. Laws like that have been passed before; they can be passed again.

Tim Bray is a smart guy who's been around tech for a long time. Presumably most people here know that, but in case you don't, he's got a very solid nerd pedigree.

To have him get near the top of Amazon, and then walk away because of his principles, says both that things at Amazon are really bad, and also that he's got integrity.

Yes, he probably has a decent retirement nest egg stashed away, but it's still nice to see someone with privilege (particularly in Silicon Valley) be vocally on the correct, humane side of an issue.

Good must always be ditched in favor of a theoretical Perfect.

Nach Boris Palmers umstrittenen Äußerungen über Corona-Patienten rät ihm sein grüner Landesverband zum Parteiaustritt. Sollte Palmer rausfliegen, befürchten aber selbst Gegner des Tübinger Bürgermeisters diskursive Totenruhe bei den Grünen

From seeing a UFO to advancing a conspiracy theory, often the simplest explanation is the most likely one. Yet we still tend to fancy convoluted ideas with lots of moving parts, just because they sound good to us. On this episode of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke discuss Occam’s Razor.

HI everyone, I have started a forum over on cigar box nation about a circuit for electrify a banjo. Does anyone here have experience with designing circuits for passive and active guitars, in particular using piezo transducer? The main thing I n ...

Special guest Ben Thompson returns to the show. Topics include the latest Surface hardware announcements from Microsoft, the state of the iPhone, and bulk purchases of charcoal.

The new season of This Song starts Wednesday, November 16th and it’s going to be a good one! Tegan and Sara, Andrew Bird, Paul Banks and RZA, Nathaniel Ratliff, Andrew WK and lots of other artists will talk about the songs that changed their lives and give you insight into their artistic process.

Paul Banks and RZA, aka Banks and Steelz, describe their shared love of the music of Leonard Cohen. Then Lizzo explains the powerful impact Lauryn Hill’s “Zion”, Radiohead’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” and the city of Minneapolis had on her music.

Lizzo delves into her love for Lauryn Hill ‘s “Zion” and Radiohead’s “Subterranean Homesick Alien,” takes the listener on a journey through her musical influences, and explains why Minneapolis made it possible for her to find her musical way. Listen to this episode on Stitcher  Subscribe via the Podcasts App, iTunes or Stitcher to get […]

This Week on The Breaks Fresh wonders why Nick Cannon decided to go after Eminem on the diss track "The Invitation," he defends Lizzo's right to twerk at the Lakers Game and he implores artists to prioritize their mental health after the recent death of Juice Wrld. Plus Confucius & Fresh interview Alesia Lani's manager Reno Dudley.

MCI Inc.'s board of directors embraced a cash-rich offer from Qwest Communications International Inc. after months of saying the company was a financially weaker and strategically less desirable merger partner than Verizon Communications Inc.
-The Washington Post

While the three tenor saxophone soloists with piano, bass, and drums was already a proven sextet formula, the Tiberian Mode is one of vast reproportioning and accelerated creativity. Led by big band divinity Frank Tiberi and two of his disciples, George Garzone, and Joe Lovano, the project unleashes power, vigor, and contrasting jazz sensibilities... [ read more ]

Plugin Boutique is running a no-brainer 96% OFF deal on the Music Maker’s Bundle by iZotope. The bundle includes eight popular iZotope plugins like Stutter Edit, Break Tweaker, Iris 2, Ozone Elements, and more. iZotope Music Maker’s Bundle contains all four Elements plugins from iZotope (Ozone Elements, Neutron Elements, Nectar Elements, and Rx Elements, along [...]

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MCI Inc.'s board of directors embraced a cash-rich offer from Qwest Communications International Inc. after months of saying the company was a financially weaker and strategically less desirable merger partner than Verizon Communications Inc.
-The Washington Post

The potential prize: attracting millions more people to Amazon’s ecosystem of services. Over the past decade, video games have blossomed into one of the world’s most popular — and lucrative — forms of entertainment.

Seattle U guard Terrell Brown announced on Monday that he will transfer to Arizona over UW, Washington State and more.

Carroll on Thursday found a way to liven things up calling in an old friend — Will Ferrell — to make a special appearance, as the team revealed Thursday night on its Twitter account.

The company’s first-quarter earnings report will provide a view of how the pandemic has accelerated trends already working in its favor, and the extent to which coronavirus restrictions on businesses and consumers have boosted Amazon’s sales.

The onset of the coronavirus and the subsequent classification of many of these workers as "essential" have heightened some existing tensions. Workers have accused companies of being slow to provide protective gear and implement precautions, something that may put them in danger.

Before the pandemic, many brands and wholesalers kept Amazon at arm's length. Now, consultants that help brands navigate Amazon's marketplace say the company is attracting a broad range of vendors that sold at physical stores.