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Airbnb has a secretive team to keep disaster stays out of the press and gives staff blank checks to help rape victims and pay to clean up dismembered human remains, according to a report. The short-term property rental company, which went public in December, has spent an estimated $50 million every year on payouts to hosts and guests when things go wrong, according to Bloomberg Businessweek which interviewed several former members of the secretive safety team. The team - known as the 'black box' inside the firm - is made up of around 100 agents across cities including Dublin, Montreal...

Posted on January 12, 2021 Here’s all the companies boycotting Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and other Republicans for objecting last weekFiled Under: Mark Speaks

Cops busted a massive party with as many as 400 people who were stuffed in a Long Island mansion early Monday. Officers responded to the 10-acre mansion in Brookhaven around 12:30 a.m. and began shutting down the party, which violated the state’s mandate to keep small gatherings to 10 people, according to Suffolk County police.

Airbnb has vowed to crack down on members belonging to hate groups “like the Proud Boys” ahead of pro-Trump rallies in Washington, DC, this weekend — by canceling their reservations and banning them from the platform, the company said. The home-share and vacation rental site has already banned at least one reservation associated with the far-right group — after receiving backlash on Twitter for hosting the person. The company acted after a public Telegram chat thread run by the Proud Boys made the rounds on social media this week. -snip The banned member later went on Telegram to complain about...

The months of protests and riots in Portland have prompted some businesses in the city to opt to move out completely or relocate outside its central district, according to a report on Monday. Greg Goodman, the co-president of the Downtown Development Group, said in a letter to Mayor Ted Wheeler and members of the Portland City Council that the exodus of companies wasn’t related to the Black Lives Matter movement “but does have most everything to do with the lawlessness you are endorsing downtown.” “The number is like nothing I have seen in 42 years of doing business in downtown,”...

Home rental company Airbnb is shutting down properties that ignore social distancing guidelines and company policy to host massive parties. On Friday, the company announced that 35 listings in New Jersey that have received complaints or violated party or event policies are being suspended or removed for "irresponsible behavior." Hoboken, Jersey City, Newark, Trenton and Atlantic City are among the 25 cities in the state that have impacted listings. Airbnb is not releasing the addresses of the listings "out of respect for the privacy of the hosts and homeowners." "While the vast majority of hosts in New Jersey take important...

Airbnb is letting go of a quarter of its workforce, co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky told employees in a memo on Tuesday, as the coronavirus pandemic has decimated demand for his company’s services. The home-sharing platform, which was widely expected to go public this year, becomes the latest sharing economy company to institute or consider instituting significant layoffs. Uber is reportedly considering laying off 20% of its workers while Lyft has already laid off 17% of its employees. "We are collectively living through the most harrowing crisis of our lifetime, and as it began to unfold, global travel came to...

The UN Human Rights Council has released a report detailing a “black list” of international companies operating in Judea and Samaria. The council listed 112 companies which it claims violate international law by continuing to operate in the Jewish communities in the area, including Airbnb, Expedia, and TripAdvisor. Foreign Minister Yisrael Katz responded to the black List, saying that “the UN Human Rights Council’s announcement of the “black list” of business companies is a shameful surrender to the pressures of countries and organizations interested in hurting Israel, even though most countries in the world have refused to join this political...

Four men were arrested Thursday on suspicion of murder in the deaths of five people in a shooting at a Halloween party at an Airbnb rental home in the San Francisco Bay Area. A fifth man was arrested on a charge of being an accessory to the crime, the Contra Costa Sheriff's Department said. Sheriff David Livingston said search warrants were executed in several Northern California cities Thursday. He did not address a possible motive in the fatal shootings in Orinda that sent more than 100 terrified partygoers running for safety, but he said in a statement that investigators found...

The killings of five people at a Halloween party remain unsolved more than a week later as a victim's family clashed with the company in the aftermath of violence at an Airbnb rental home in the San Francisco Bay Area. Police have not addressed a possible motive in the fatal shootings in Orinda that sent more than 100 terrified partygoers running for safety, nor have they announced any arrests, though local media has reported that the violence may have stemmed from a fight between two rival groups. Authorities have not addressed the reports and Contra Costa County Sheriff's Office spokesman...

<p>Voters in some states are deciding whether to roll back conservative policies adopted in earlier eras. Ballot measures in Tucson, Arizona and the states of Colorado and Washington gave voters another say on hot-button social issues: immigration, gambling, taxes and affirmative action.</p>

Four dead, others injured at Halloween party in Orinda The yellow house was rented on Airbnb for a private Halloween party. Elissa Harrington reports ORINDA, Calif. - Four people were killed and others were injured at a Halloween party in Orinda and the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Office said nothing about a shooter being in custody, Friday morning. The shooting was reported at 10:45 p.m. Thursday on the 100 block of Lucille Way near Knickerbocker Lane, not too far from Highway 24, according to sheriff's spokesman Jimmy Lee. The street is narrow and winding, lined with multimillion dollar homes. Three...

The Koch Brothers are teaming up with tech companies, universities and other fellow billionaires to combat online extremism. On July 17, the After Charlottesville Project will host its second summit in San Francisco, California. Founded in the aftermath of the deadly 2017 white supremacist attacks in Virginia, the conference brings together political and business leaders to discuss solutions for curbing political terrorism. While last year’s gathering in Missouri involved grassroots and city response initiatives, the focus of this year’s summit will involve the “private tech sector” and “best practices on the fight against hate and extremism online,” according to the...

Here are some places in Florida where you can reasonably expect to encounter an alligator: a storm sewer, the end of an airport runway, your local golf course. But this might be a first — while in town for a wedding, Georgia resident Dave Jacobs and his family spotted a gator casually chilling on an alligator-shaped pool float at their Airbnb in South Miami. "My daughter, who’s 14, was like, 'Dad, this is soooo meta,'" Jacobs tells New Times.

Last June, the Supreme Court overturned a rule requiring businesses to have some form of physical presence in a state in order to be subject to sales tax collection liability within that state. Hoteliers think that’s as good a reason as any to hit at upstart competitors who threaten their privileged incumbent status.At issue are lodging taxes assessed by states and local governments, a source of much consternation for government officials and homesharers alike ever since the inception of the sharing economy. Hotels have argued that homeshare services like Airbnb should be treated the same as the biggest hotels are...

Last year, we learned that Boston had passed a new set of laws specifically designed to essentially run Airbnb (along with their competitors in the home-sharing, gig economy market) out of business. Not only did they want to levy new taxes on hosts, but force the company to turn over virtually all of their internal records and develop registries to track hosts. The state of Massachusetts quickly followed suit with similar laws. Airbnb challenged them in court and the process has been tied up since then. But this week, a judge ruled that two of the three provisions in the...

Conservative commentator and former candidate for Mayor of Toronto Faith Goldy has been banned by Airbnb.

Facebook is investigating News for Democracy, an organization backed by liberal megadonor Reid Hoffman, over misleading news pages the group operated prior to the 2018 midterm elections, the social network said Monday. News for Democracy created several active Facebook pages that may have broken the social network’s advertising policies and rules against misleading users during the race, The Washington Post reported. **SNIP** Mr. Hoffman, a LinkedIn co-founder and Microsoft board member, did not return requests for comment, The Post reported. Dmitri Mehlhorn, his top political adviser and a News for Democracy, declined to comment, the report said.

Liberal abuse of Facebook to manipulate elections didn’t stop in 2017. A new Washington Post report indicated the same strategy was widespread in 2018 and earned as many as 16 million views in just a two-week span. Liberal billionaire Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and member of the board of directors for Microsoft, was exposed last week for funding a project that created fake Facebook pages to manipulate the 2017 Alabama special election between Roy Moore and Doug Jones. A new Washington Post article has revealed that the group that created the project, News for Democracy, had created 14 fake...

>We’ve been covering this story for a while, so we knew it was coming, but now it’s official. Massachusetts has passed a new law that was basically designed to run Airbnb out of business in their state. Governor Charlie Baker has signed it and it takes effect in July. Baker and his supporters continue to issue bizarre claims about how they’re being “fair” to all sides, but what this boils down to is a huge win for the lobbying interests who forced this issue through behind the scenes. (Boston Globe) Governor Charlie Baker on Friday signed first-of-its-kind legislation to tax...