Uber Ordered To Pay $8.5 Million In Trial Over Driver Sex Assault Claims

 A U.S. jury ordered Uber on Thursday to pay $8.5 million to a woman who said she was sexually assaulted by a driver, a verdict that could shape the course of thousands of similar lawsuits pending against the ride-hailing company.

The Uber logo is shown on the building in Los Angeles, Calif., on Feb. 14, 2024. Mike Blake/Reuters

The case, brought by Jaylynn Dean, was the first bellwether trial among more than 3,000 claims consolidated in federal court. Bellwether trials are designed to test legal theories and help both sides assess potential settlement values. Jurors sitting in Phoenix found that the driver acted as an agent of Uber, holding the company responsible for his conduct. They awarded $8.5 million in compensatory damages but declined to impose punitive damages. Dean’s attorneys had sought more than $140 million.

Dean, an Oklahoma resident, sued in 2023, one month after the alleged assault in Arizona. Her complaint argued that Uber knew of a pattern of sexual assaults by drivers but failed to take basic steps to improve rider safety—claims that have followed the company for years and drawn congressional scrutiny.

During closing arguments, Dean’s attorney Alexandra Walsh said Uber had marketed itself as a safe option for women traveling at night, particularly after drinking. “Women know it’s a dangerous world. We know about the risk of sexual assault,” Walsh told jurors. “They made us believe that this was a place that was safe from that.”

Uber has long argued it shouldn’t be held liable for criminal acts committed by drivers using its platform. The company maintains that drivers are independent contractors and that, regardless of classification, it cannot be responsible for actions outside the scope of their duties. “He had no criminal history. None,” Uber attorney Kim Bueno said of the driver during closing arguments, noting that he had completed about 10,000 trips with a near-perfect rating. “Was this foreseeable to Uber? And the answer to that has to be no.”

According to the lawsuit, Dean was intoxicated when she requested a ride from her boyfriend’s home to her hotel. The driver allegedly asked harassing questions during the trip, then stopped the car and raped her.

The trial was overseen by U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer, who is managing the federal cases centralized in San Francisco. Uber also faces more than 500 similar suits in California state court. In the only one of those cases to reach trial so far, a jury last September sided with the company, finding that while Uber had been negligent in its safety measures, that negligence wasn’t a substantial factor in causing the plaintiff’s harm.

The broader financial impact of Thursday’s verdict remains uncertain. Mark Giarelli, an analyst at Morningstar, said the ruling nonetheless highlights the importance of screening measures on app-based platforms. “This underscores the importance of robust background checks on convenience applications such as Uber, Lyft and DoorDash where there is interaction between customers and the supply side—drivers and delivery agents,” he said.

Uber shares fell 1.5% in after-hours trading. Shares of rival Lyft, which faces similar claims, declined 1.8%.

In a statement, an Uber spokesperson said the company would appeal, adding that the jury rejected other claims that Uber was negligent or that its safety systems were defective. “This verdict affirms that Uber acted responsibly and has invested meaningfully in rider safety,” the spokesperson said.

Sarah London, another attorney for Dean, called the decision a validation for plaintiffs across the country. The verdict, she said, “validates the thousands of survivors who have come forward at great personal risk to demand accountability against Uber for its focus on profit over passenger safety.”

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/uber-ordered-pay-85-million-trial-over-driver-sex-assault-claims

FCC probes ABC's "The View" for violation of equal time rules

 The Federal Communications Commission is opening an investigation into whether ABC’s “The View” daytime talk show violated equal time rules for interviews with political candidates after an appearance by a Democratic Texas Senate candidate ‍this week, a source told Reuters on Saturday.

The Republican-led FCC said last month that daytime and late-night TV talk shows are no longer considered “bona fide” news programs that are exempt from equal time rules that require them to give airtime to the views of opposing candidates. In September, FCC Chair Brendan Carr said the agency should consider reviewing whether “The View” runs afoul of equal time rules.

President Donald ‌Trump has repeatedly pushed Carr to take action against U.S. broadcasters ‌and criticized networks for what he views as one-sided coverage. The move is the first significant step by the FCC to go after networks for interviews with political candidates.

TALK SHOWS WERE PREVIOUSLY EXEMPT

Until January, talk shows have qualified for the equal opportunities exemption as genuine news interviews, ever since ​the FCC Media Bureau granted an exemption to the interview portion of Jay Leno’s “The Tonight Show” in 2006. Networks have relied on the ruling as a precedent for recent ‍interviews with political candidates.

The FCC did not immediately respond ​to a request for comment. Disney and its ABC News unit ​declined to comment on Saturday. The probe was first reported by Fox News Digital. Trump posted ‍a link to the story on his social media account.

FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, a Democrat, denounced the probe. She suggested it was meant to bully networks and said broadcasters’ First Amendment rights allow them to air candidate interviews.

“Like many other so-called ‘investigations’ before it, the FCC will announce an investigation but never carry one out, reach a conclusion, or take any meaningful ‍action,” she said. “This is government intimidation, not a legitimate investigation.”

“The View” aired an interview on Monday with Democratic Texas State Representative James Talarico, who is running for his party’s nomination for ‍the U.S. Senate in a ‍state no Democrat has won since 1994. Representative Jasmine Crockett, a ​Texas Democrat, is also running and appeared on “The View” in January.

Trump, ​in December, ⁠singled out an ABC News correspondent for asking Saudi Arabia’s crown ‌prince about the 2018 killing of a Washington Post columnist. He suggested the FCC should move to revoke the broadcast licenses of stations airing Disney-owned ABC programming.

Carr faced bipartisan criticism after pressuring broadcasters to take ABC late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel off the air in September, warning they could face fines or loss of licenses, and said “it’s time for them to step up.”

https://wkzo.com/2026/02/07/us-agency-investigating-if-abcs-the-view-violated-equal-time-rules/

HHS seeks input on diagnostic imaging interoperability

 HHS is asking for public comments on the potential implementation of regulations on diagnostic imaging technology to improve interoperability.

The input will help the agency “explore the best and least burdensome ways to support the access, exchange, and use of electronic health information, including diagnostic images, through the adoption of standards and the certification of health IT,” according to a Feb. 5 Small Business Administration news release.

HHS released the request for information Jan. 30 and will accept comments through March 16. The input could shape possible rulemaking in the future.

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information-technology/ehrs/hhs-seeks-input-on-diagnostic-imaging-interoperability/

California can’t shed a history of persistent government corruption

 Susan Shelley, a columnist at the Orange County Register, recently reminded her readers — and the whole state — that California has a corruption problem.

She focused mainly on a string of corruption cases involving Southern California politicians, particularly members of the Los Angeles City Council.

However, she touched on others outside of Southland, including a recent scandal involving Gov. Gavin Newsom’s former chief of staff accused in an alleged scheme to raid political campaign funds for personal gain and the indictment of Oakland’s mayor for bribery.

California was notoriously corrupt after it became a state in 1850. The freewheeling Gold Rush era’s rampant lawlessness morphed into an equally unseemly political ethos. The Southern Pacific Railroad notoriously controlled the state Legislature, using its clout to gain control of vast tracts of land and squeeze farmers into paying usurious freight rates.

In the early 20th century, a political reform movement bloomed, led by Hiram Johnson, the era’s dominant political figure. The creation of agencies to regulate the railroad and other entrenched interests; the adoption of initiative, referendum and recall powers to bypass a corrupt Legislature, and the shift to non-partisan local governments all seemed to curb institutional corruption.

However, it didn’t go away. Throughout the 20th century, California saw periodic outbreaks, usually when the law caught up with miscreants. The most famous case was that of Artie Samish, a lobbyist for liquor and other interests who openly boasted, during the 1930s and 1940s, of his control over the Legislature.

Samish finally went to prison, a few new laws passed and Californians once again were told their governments were clean. However, the illusion was punctured in the 1980s when the FBI conducted a sting operation in the state Capitol.

Agents posed as businessmen seeking special legislation for a shrimp-processing project. They videotaped legislators, staffers and lobbyists offering help for bribes. Quite a few caught up in what was dubbed “Shrimpgate” wound up behind bars.

Meanwhile, something was happening among the small cities that ringed the City of Los Angeles. Many were captured, in effect, by crooked politicians who sold favors, such as franchises and contracts, to the highest bidders and voted themselves lavish salaries and pensions.

The syndrome was first revealed in a 2010 series of Los Angeles Times articles about the tiny city of Bell, revealing how the city manager and other officials had essentially looted the city.

Since then, similar scandals involving other small Los Angeles County cities and at least one in Anaheim, a city in Orange County, have emerged. When Anthony Rendon was speaker of the state Assembly, he once called the San Gabriel Valley region he represented a “corridor of corruption.”

More recently, as Susan Shelley’s column points out, the Los Angeles City Council has seen a string of corruption prosecutions alleging its members sold favors or steered city contracts into entities that benefited them financially.

Currently, Councilman Curren Price is being charged with corruption for a variety of schemes prosecutors say put money into his pocket.

Meanwhile Newsom’s former chief of staff, Dana Williamson, faces federal charges, including bank fraud, for allegedly falsifying documents to obtain a pandemic era federal business loan and an alleged scheme to drain hundreds of thousands of dollars from a campaign account that Xavier Becerra, a former Biden cabinet member and attorney general, maintained.

A former Becerra staffer, Sean McCluskie, and Sacramento lobbyist Greg Campbell have pleaded guilty, while Williamson awaits trial.

Even though political figures wind up behind bars when their schemes are revealed, it doesn’t seem to deter others from lining their pockets, so one must wonder how much corruption goes undiscovered.

https://calmatters.org/commentary/2026/02/california-persistent-government-corruption/

Democrats Are Truly the Party of Nonsense

 Senator Chuck Schumer and Congressman Hakeem Jeffries may call it common-sense solutions, but I would call their list of 40 demands for amnesty-like attacks on Immigration and Customs Enforcement, nothing less than abolishing ICE altogether, and returning to President Biden’s catastrophic open-borders policy is their not-so-hidden agenda.

If you go through their list, you can see that they are siding once again with the far-left wing of the Democratic party that wants to abolish, defund, and damage ICE.

They can’t defund it cause it’s already funded from the One, Big, Beautiful, Bill, with roughly $75 billion, but then again the Democrats would love to undo the one BBB, and slap a $5 trillion tax hike on American families and businesses, along with defunding and abolishing ICE.

Well they’re not gonna get any of it. If they want to shut the government down again, they’re still not gonna get any of it.

Republicans in Congress and President Trump are not gonna allow any of it. Not the tax hikes, not ending ICE, not opening the border.

Here’s the Senate majority leader, John Thune, putting his foot down to stop all of this Democratic nonsense:

“Democrats have to be willing to actually reach an agreement if they’re coming to the table demanding a blank check or refusing to consider any measures but their own. They’re likely to end up with nothing, which is fine if Democrats just want a political issue.”

In fact, Senator Lindsey Graham has a much better idea, he wants to not just defund sanctuary cities, but abolish them. Because sanctuary cities have become the root cause of violence and shootings. 

Even in blue cities, police have said they are more than happy to cooperate with ICE, and release criminal illegals to ICE agents inside the prison. That keeps the illegals off the streets and removes the need for large scale ICE sweeps.

Yet this is way too sensible for Democrats who want to defend sanctuary cities and attack ICE, and go back to some cockeyed amnesty that will wind up returning to the disastrous policy of open borders.

Some of these Democratic ideas in case you haven’t read them: no masks for ICE officers and they should wear ID tags. This just leads to exactly what the anti-ICE protesters want.

It also endangers the ICE agents and their families, and if nothing else, helps to dox them.

The Democrats also want to bar ICE arrests without a judge’s warrant, which of course  just slows down the whole process of removing dangerous criminals, and in so many cases, left-wing prosecutors will go judge shopping in order to stop ICE from doing its job by finding left-wing judges.

Then Democrats say ICE should not be allowed to arrest migrants in certain sensitive locations, quote on quote, which just expands sanctuary cities, and on top of that, the Schumer demands would attach all kinds of race and ancestry criteria for rounding up criminals, and then even give local police jurisdiction over the federal ICE agents, which local police don’t want.

Yet this is a wondrous idea since the federal ICE agents and federal laws supersede local laws. Really sanctuary cities don’t legally exist outside of the blue states and localities, because they violate federal laws.

The Democrats’ 40-plus demands are bundled into 10 bullet points, and virtually prevent any kind of deal to fund the remaining unfunded parts of DHS, like FEMA or TSA or the Secret Service.

For once, it is surely the Democrats who are truly the stupid party, and they are going to lose this battle big time, because the country won’t tolerate open borders, or rampant crime from illegals.

Larry Kudlow is a columnist for the New York Sun. From Mr. Kudlow’s broadcast on Fox Business Network.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2026/02/06/democrats_are_truly_the_party_of_nonsense_153812.html

Most employees aren’t saving time with AI, even though CEOs think they are: report

 When it comes to artificial intelligence, there’s a growing disconnect between CEOs and their employees.

Top executives apparently think their companies’ AI deployments are going swimmingly and that the technology is saving employees’ time. However, staffers said the technology isn’t actually saving them much time.

Many also report feeling overwhelmed by trying to incorporate it into their jobs, according to a recent report from Section AI reported on by the Wall Street Journal.

The survey of 5,000 workers from the knowledge sector found that people are using AI — just not very effectively.

Among the survey’s findings were that:

• 97 percent of the workforce are using AI poorly or not at all
• 25 percent say they save no time with AI
• 40 percent say they would be fine never using AI again

Leadership, meanwhile, seems oblivious to the growing gap between usage and value.

Of the C-suite respondents surveyed:

• 81 percent thought their company had a clear, actionable policy for AI guidance, compared to just 28 percent of individual contributors
• 80 percent felt the tools exist with a clear process for accessing the technology, compared to just 32 percent of individual respondents
• 71 percent said there are clear, enforced policies that directly connect to AI strategy, compared to just 46 percent of individual contributors
• 66 percent felt their company had a formal AI strategy, compared to 20 percent of their workforce

Individual contributors, defined by the report as knowledge workers who do not manage a team, are benefiting least from their companies’ deployment of the technology. Many lacked clear access to an AI tool, tool reimbursement or training.

As a result, they were more likely to say they felt anxious or overwhelmed by the technology, that to say it was having a transformative impact on their work. Even industries where you’d expect a high-level of AI adoption like tech companies, most use of the emerging tech is for surface-level tasks like Google search, generating drafts and editing for grammar and tone.

With 85 percent of the workforce reportedly lacking any kind of value-driving AI use case, and 25 percent saying they don’t use it for work at all, there remains a persistent gap between AI usage and return on investment, the report indicates.

The first step in closing that gap may lie in waking CEOs up to the gap between how they think their companies’ AI deployments are going and how their employees actually feel about it.

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5721857-employees-artificial-intelligence-study/

Use of GLP-1 Drugs Under Scrutiny at Winter Olympics

 As the Winter Olympic Games get underway, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is monitoring an unexpected class of drugs: GLP-1 receptor agonists.

An advisory group that makes recommendations about WADA's list of prohibited substances discussed the status of GLP-1 medications, and added semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy, Rybelsus) and tirzepatide (Mounjaro, Zepbound) to its monitoring program, a spokesperson for WADA told MedPage Today in an email.

That means patterns of use of these drugs will be tracked both in and out of competition: "The monitoring program includes substances which are not on the prohibited list, but that WADA wishes to monitor in order to detect potential patterns of misuse in sport," the spokesperson said.

The prohibited list is reviewed annually and may include any substance or method that meets two of three criteria: it has the potential to enhance sport performance; represents a health risk to the athlete; or violates the spirit of sport.

How will WADA be keeping tabs on the use of GLP-1 drugs? Athletes are tested regularly as part of its monitoring program.

"Since semaglutide and tirzepatide are not prohibited, if found in a sample, it is not reported as an adverse analytical finding, so there are no consequences for the athlete," the spokesperson added.

The findings will be reported as part of its regular monitoring program, and will then be reviewed by its advisory group to make recommendations about whether GLP-1 agonists should be added to the prohibited list, the spokesperson explained.

WADA said it doesn't yet have any data it can share on monitoring of GLP-1 agonist use.

It is certainly possible that elite athletes are taking GLP-1 drugs for weight loss, but there are risks to consider, sports medicine experts told MedPage Today.

Taking a GLP-1 medication "does burn fat, but it also will burn muscle," Steven Isono, MD, of Stanford Medicine in California, who has served as head physician for Team USA at previous Olympic Games, told MedPage Today. In turn, an elite athlete can lose speed, endurance, and explosiveness, he said, and "that's going to obviously cut down on peak performance."

Nonetheless, some athletes might seek out GLP-1 drugs to rapidly reduce their weight, to improve their power-to-weight ratio, and to alter their body composition beyond what is achieved through normal training, said Stephen Henry, DO, MS, of the University of Miami.

Jeremy Kent, MD, of University of Virginia Health in Charlottesville, said athletes might mistakenly think that GLP-1 receptor agonists "can help them increase their insulin, and by that measure, increase their muscle mass." But that's "not the case at all," he said.

Other athletes, such as the coxswain on a rowing team or an equestrian, may simply seek benefit in low weight, he said.

Ultimately, "we don't want to use [a GLP-1 drug] just to cut weight and improve performance," Henry said. But "if indicated," say for diabetes or cardiovascular reasons, "we'll use it."

Henry said it's essential that athletes meet with a sports medicine specialist to discuss plans for reducing body fat or managing their health and performance while taking a GLP-1 medication that's indicated. Side effects can include loss of lean muscle mass, he reiterated, and gastrointestinal issues such as nausea, vomiting, and delayed gastric emptying. If already present, relative energy deficiency from not taking in enough calories also may be worsened.

Many questions remain about the use of GLP-1 drugs among elite athletes since it hasn't been studied in clinical trials, Henry noted.

He believes the dearth of data on the use of GLP-1 agonists in a population the drugs were not designed for is likely a reason they are being closely watched in the athletic community. While GLP-1 drug use is not currently prohibited, that could change before the next Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 2028, he noted.

"In the initial stages, when it's a new drug and there's so much publicity," it makes sense to look at who's taking it, Kent said.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/popmedicine/cultureclinic/119770