AFP

British online fashion retailer Boohoo on Wednesday denied allegations that staff in a UK warehouse worked in harrowing and health-threatening conditions and regarded themselves as “slaves”.

The Times newspaper, in an undercover investigation, reported that workers at Boohoo’s facility in Burnley, northwest England, complained of racism, sexual harassment, poor safety equipment, inadequate training and “gruelling” targets.

However, a Boohoo spokesperson said that it “does not believe the picture painted is reflective of the working environment at our Burnley warehouse”.

Boohoo “is taking every claim very seriously”, the spokesperson said, adding that making sure workers are safe and comfortable is the company’s “highest priority”.

The Times, whose undercover reporter worked at the warehouse for one month, said each staff member walked the equivalent of a half-marathon (13 miles, 21 kilometres) per shift.

Night-time summer temperatures reached up to 32 degrees Celsius (89.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and frequently collapsed, it alleged.

The daily added that Burnley employees are paid £11 ($13.25) per hour in shifts that are up to 12 hours long. 

Each staffer must fetch 130 items every hour, it said.

The online retail group has annual sales of almost £2.0 billion per year, and its chief executive was paid a £1.3 million bonus this year.

Boohoo had already been rocked last year by allegations that one of its suppliers in Leicester, central England, paid workers much less than the national minimum wage.

The group’s suppliers were meanwhile accused also of underpaying staff in Pakistan.

Boohoo benefited from an online sales boom during the pandemic, during which it expanded aggressively to snap up brands belonging to collapsed UK retail giants. 

It bought fashion labels Burton, Wallis and Dorothy Perkins from Arcadia, as well as assets of failed UK department store Debenhams.

The company employs about 5,000 people worldwide, according to its website.

New Twitter owner Elon Musk on Wednesday polled users on whether the site should offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, using the same method he used to handle the case of Donald Trump.

The move comes as Musk has faced pushback that his criteria for content moderation is subject to his personal whim, with reinstatements decided for certain accounts and not others.

“Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?” Musk asked in a tweet.

The poll was open until 17:46 GMT on Thursday and mimicked the strategy used just days ago for the former US president Trump.

Trump’s Twitter account was reinstated Saturday after a narrow majority of respondents supported the move.

Polls on Twitter are open to all users and are unscientific and potentially targeted by fake accounts and bots.

A blanket decision on suspended accounts could potentially alarm government authorities that are keeping a close look at Musk’s handling of hateful speech since he bought the influential platform for $44 billion.

It could also spook Apple and Google, tech titans that have the power to ban Twitter from their mobile app stores over content concerns.

Trump was banned from the platform early last year for his role in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol by a mob of his supporters seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

– ‘No mercy’ –

Musk’s reinstatement of Trump followed that of other banned accounts including a conservative parody site and a psychologist who had violated Twitter’s rules on language identifying transgender people.

The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has said that conspiracy theorist Alex Jones will not be returning to Twitter and will remain banned from the platform.

Musk on Sunday said he had “no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame” due to his own experience with the death of his first child.

Jones has been ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in damages for his lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that killed 26 people, mostly children.

Musk, who closed his buyout of Twitter in late October, did not make clear whether the bans to be covered by the poll were permanent suspensions or temporary ones.

The future of content moderation on Twitter has become an urgent concern, with major advertisers keeping away from the site after a failed relaunch earlier this month saw a proliferation of fake accounts, causing embarrassment. 

Meanwhile the teams in charge of keeping nefarious activity off the site have been gutted, victims of Musk-led layoffs that saw half of total employees leave the company.

John Wihbey, a media professor at Northeastern University, speculated that all the chaos might be because Musk is seeking to “buy himself time.”

“Regulators are certainly going to get come after him, both in Europe and maybe the United States… and therefore a lot of what he’s doing is trying to frame those fights,” Wihbey said.

A 31-year-old overnight manager at Walmart shot and killed six people at a store bustling with Thanksgiving holiday shoppers before turning the pistol on himself, authorities said Wednesday, in America’s second high-profile mass shooting in four days.

Four other people remained hospitalized in unknown condition following the Tuesday night rampage in Chesapeake, Virginia, police chief Mark Solesky said.

The gunman is believed to have died of a “self-inflicted gunshot wound,” Solesky told reporters, adding that the motive behind the country’s latest outburst of gun violence was not yet known.

City authorities identified the shooter as Chesapeake resident Andre Bing, saying he was armed with one handgun and multiple magazines. Walmart confirmed in a statement that Bing was an overnight team lead, employed with the company since 2010.

An employee named Briana Tyler — who survived the attack — earlier described scenes of terror as the store manager entered a staff break room, and opened fire. 

“He wasn’t aiming at anybody specifically,” Tyler told ABC’s “Good Morning America” program. “He just literally started shooting throughout the entire break room and I watched multiple people just drop down to the floor, whether they were trying to duck for cover or they were hit.”

She said the gunman looked right at her and fired but missed by mere inches. “He didn’t say a word, he didn’t say anything at all,” Tyler said.

The assault came two days before the quintessential American family holiday Thursday and on the heels of a weekend gun attack at an LGBTQ club in Colorado that killed five people.

And fewer than 10 days before this shooting in Chesapeake, Virginia, three students at the University of Virginia who played on its football team were killed November 13 by a classmate after a field trip.

President Joe Biden called the attack senseless and said “there are now even more tables across the country that will have empty seats this Thanksgiving.”

– ‘Extremely crowded’ –

In the Walmart attack, emergency calls were first made just after 10:00 pm Tuesday (0300 GMT Wednesday) while the store was still open. Chesapeake is about 150 miles (240 kilometers) southeast of the US capital Washington.

Officers entered the store a few minutes later, Solesky said.

The shooter and two victims were found dead in the break room, while another body was found next to the front of the store, the city said. Three people taken to hospital with gunshot wounds later died.

The youngest of the victims was 16 years old, officials said.

Terri Brown, who was in the Walmart but left just before the shooting, said the store was packed with holiday shoppers.

“It was extremely crowded,” Brown told the local ABC affiliate 13NewsNow. “All of the checkouts were extremely busy. They had most registers open. There were long, long lines at the self-checkout.”

In the store parking lot on Wednesday, a makeshift memorial of flowers and small white electric candles sat against a tree beneath crime scene tape. White, blue and golden balloons tied to a tree blew in the wind. 

Susan Neal Matousek came by the memorial display to “pay my condolences,” she told AFP. 

“I couldn’t imagine losing someone right before Thanksgiving,” the 57-year-old retired teacher said. 

Walmart said in a statement Wednesday the company is cooperating with law enforcement’s investigation and is “focused on doing everything we can to support our associates and their families.”

Gun attacks in grocery stores in America have become increasingly common in recent years. A teenage gunman killed 10 people, most of them Black, at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York in May.

Last year a shooting at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado also left 10 dead. And in a particularly gruesome attack in 2019, a young gunman killed 23 and wounded 26 as he stalked shoppers at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.

An advocacy group called Guns Down America has reported that from January 1, 2020 to May 14 of this year there were 448 “gun incidents” and 137 deaths at 12 large national retailers.

So far in 2022, the Gun Violence Archive website has tracked more than 600 mass shootings in the United States — defined as an incident with four or more people shot or killed, not including the shooter. 

Tyler, the store employee, told ABC that the manager in question had a reputation as a difficult character.

“He was the manager to look out for because there was always something going on with him, just having an issue with someone,” she said. “I would’ve never thought he would do something like this.”

Wall Street stocks rose again Wednesday following Federal Reserve minutes signaling a moderation in its aggressive policy to counter inflation, while oil prices slumped amid worries over demand.

US stocks followed up Tuesday’s rally to close higher again after a majority of Fed policymakers found that a slower pace of interest rate hikes would “likely soon be appropriate,” according to minutes of their meeting this month.

Analysts at Oxford Economics said the minutes “strengthen our conviction in our forecast for a 50-basis point rate hike at the December meeting” after the central bank previously engineered four straight 75-basis point hikes.

The minutes helped US stocks recover from an earlier swoon, while the dollar retreated.

All three major equity indices finished higher, with the S&P 500 adding 0.6 percent. 

US markets will be closed on Thursday in observance of the Thanksgiving holiday and will end trading at midday on Friday.

Earlier, reports showed surprisingly strong orders of big-ticket US manufactured goods in October, while new home sales defied expectations and rose during the same month.

Weekly jobless claims ticked higher, while a University of Michigan survey of consumer sentiment topped expectations.

Elsewhere, Paris and London also closed in positive territory, while Frankfurt ended flat.

The eurozone’s composite purchasing managers index (PMI), a key economic indicator, improved from 47.3 in October to 47.8 in November, S&P Global said.

But activity languished under 50 — signifying the fifth consecutive month of economic contraction as inflation spikes, and dampening the outlook for the fourth quarter.

Oil prices slid on fears of more painful Covid lockdowns in China that could ravage the Asian giant’s energy demand.

The main American oil contract, the West Texas Intermediate, briefly sank by more than five percent on Wednesday, eventually closing more than three percent down.

“With China also grappling with record numbers of Covid cases the macro-outlook has continued to deteriorate for oil this week, with prices on course to decline for the third week in a row,” said Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Market UK.

Analysts said oil prices had not been significantly affected by efforts of G7 countries to set a price cap on Russian oil. 

The group is looking at a range of between $65 and $70 a barrel, which is already the range the commodity trades at; that means the measure is unlikely to remove oil supply from the market, analysts said.

– Key figures around 2130 GMT –

New York – Dow: UP 0.3 percent at 34,194.06 (close)

New York – S&P 500: UP 0.6 percent at 4,027.26 (close)

New York – Nasdaq: UP 1.0 percent at 11,285.32 (close)

London – FTSE 100: UP 0.2 percent at 7,465.24 (close)

Paris – CAC 40: UP 0.3 percent at 6,679.09 (close)

Frankfurt – DAX: FLAT at 14,427.59 (close)

EURO STOXX 50: UP 0.4 percent at 3,946.44 (close)

Hong Kong – Hang Seng Index: UP 0.6 percent at 17,523.81 (close)

Shanghai – Composite: UP 0.3 percent at 3,096.91 (close)

Tokyo – Nikkei 225: closed for a holiday

Euro/dollar: UP at $1.0401 from $1.0304 on Tuesday

Dollar/yen: DOWN at 139.52 yen from 141.23 yen

Pound/dollar: UP at $1.2064 from $1.1886

Euro/pound: DOWN at 86.18 pence from 86.69 pence

West Texas Intermediate: DOWN 3.6 percent at $77.94 per barrel

Brent North Sea crude: DOWN 3.3 percent at $85.41 per barrel

A majority of US Federal Reserve policymakers found that a slower pace of interest rate hikes would “likely soon be appropriate,” the central bank said Wednesday.

The Fed has embarked on an aggressive path to cool demand and bring down prices as inflation in the world’s biggest economy surged to the highest level in decades, raising the benchmark borrowing rate six times this year.

With inflation hovering around 7.7 percent, the latest policy meeting in early November produced a fourth consecutive three-quarter point interest rate hike, a major rise.

This brings the rate to a range between 3.75 and four percent, the highest since January 2008.

But “a substantial majority of participants judged that a slowing in the pace of increase would likely soon be appropriate,” according to minutes of the November meeting released Wednesday.

“A slower pace in these circumstances would better allow the committee to assess progress toward its goals of maximum employment and price stability,” the minutes said.

Participants of the meeting noted that it would take time for the full effects of policy to be realized, and a few found that easing the pace of interest rate hikes could lower risks of instability in the financial system.

In a sign of diverging opinions, some cautioned the impact of rate hikes could “exceed what was required” to bring down inflation.

– Few signs of abating –

But policymakers agreed at the meeting earlier this month that inflation was “unacceptably high” and well above the longer-run goal of two percent.

Annual consumer inflation came in at 7.7 percent in October, down from a blistering high 9.1 percent in June but still underscoring a heightened cost of living.

With surging consumer prices showing “little sign thus far of abating,” some officials found that policy might have to be tightened more than anticipated.

They maintained that a period of slower growth would help reduce inflationary pressures.

Despite signs of slowing activity as the Fed’s rate hikes trickled through the economy, officials saw that the labor market remained tight, with elevated wage growth.

New home sales posted a surprise increase last month as well, while demand for big-ticket American-made goods picked up more than expected, data released on Wednesday showed.

“Policy makers appear set to slow the pace of rate hikes,” said economist Ryan Sweet of Oxford Economics.

But he noted that the Fed’s path toward a soft landing is increasingly narrow, adding that the Fed’s staff economists see “the odds of a US recession in the next year as basically a coin flip.”

A growing number of voices, including some Fed officials, have advocated for smaller steps in the coming months.

Last week, Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller said signs of easing inflation pressures and a slowing US economy could allow the central bank to dial back its pace of rate hikes.

Fed Vice Chair Lael Brainard also said last week that it would likely be “appropriate soon” for the Fed to slow the pace of rate increases, adding that it would take time for tightening so far to flow through to the economy.