Blue Origin launches its first crew onboard its New Shepard rocket to outer space. The mission was crewed by American billionaire and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark Bezos, pilot and Mercury 13 candidate Wally Funk and Dutch student Oliver Daemen. Funk and Daemen respectively become the oldest and youngest people ever to travel to space. 2021-07-20
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announces that he will step down as CEO during the third quarter. Current Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy is expected to replace him. 2021-02-2
UN special rapporteurs Agnès Callamard and David Kaye demand an investigation into claims made by "The Guardian" yesterday that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman ordered the 2018 hacking of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos's phone. The hack was allegedly done months before the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, who was employed at Bezos's newspaper "The Washington Post" and was a fierce critic of the Saudi government. The Saudi Foreign Ministry dismisses the allegations as "absurd". 2020-01-22
Amazon agrees to buy Whole Foods Market for $13.7 billion. The takeover deal is expected to be completed in the second half of the year. 2017-06-16
A series of cyberattacks utilizing distributed denial-of-service attacks, targeting networks operated by DNS provider Dyn, makes major Internet platforms and services unavailable to large swaths of users in Europe and North America. Affected companies include Amazon, Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, PayPal, Netflix, and Airbnb. 2016-10-21
Federal District Judge Gonzalo Curiel unseals documents requested by "The Washington Post" that had been filed with the court in connection with pending civil cases against Trump University, a former business of the Republican Party's presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump. The judge noted that Trump's candidacy has increased interest in these cases, and that Trump's comments "... (have) placed the integrity of these court proceedings at issue." 2016-05-28
In American football, Twitter wins the bidding contest over Amazon, Verizon, and others, for streaming rights to 10 of 16 National Football League (NFL) regular season "Thursday Night Football Games", ones that will also be telecast by either CBS or NBC. The league streamed one game last year with Yahoo!. Verizon, meanwhile, already owns the mobile rights to all NFL games which are available to subscribers via a mobile app; the 10 NFL games on Twitter will be free. 2016-04-5
The United States Department of Defense says that last month's airstrikes in Kunduz hit three locations, mistakenly including the Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) (MSF) hospital where at least 30 were killed. Afghan commanders, whose forces were actively engaged with the Taliban, requested the attacks. "The Washington Post" reports a warehouse and a mansion in two densely populated residential areas were "pulverized" without loss of civilian lives. According to residents, earlier their neighborhoods had been conflict zones, but no militants were there the time of the attacks. "Together, the three attacks raise questions about the quality and reliability of the intelligence that Afghan security forces are providing to their American partners, as well as U.S. decisions to act on that intelligence," writes the Post. 2015-11-4
"The Washington Post" reports that U.S. special operations personnel temporarily halt the training of all Afghan army and police recruits while a full background check of 27,000 people is ongoing. 45 NATO troops have been killed this year in so-called green-on-blue attacks. 2012-09-2
Amazon.com cuts off its access to the WikiLeaks website following "heavy political pressure" applied by Joe Lieberman, a senator in the United States. The move is compared to the censorship of Google by China. 2010-12-2