Uber is not having the uberprofitable day it was hoping for.
The ride-hailing company set its IPO at $45 per share on Thursday night, but ended up selling at $42 as soon as the market opened on Friday morning. Shares soon fell even lower to $41.06, nearly recovered to their original asking price by mid-day, and dropped once again to point Uber toward one of the worst first-day IPO performances of the decade.
Forecasts originally predicted Uber would price itself at $46-$48 per share, though its eventual decision of $45 per share with an $81 billion IPO was still massive. Still, the company never actually saw that set price materialize, and only peaked at $44.74 around 1 p.m. Uber's immediate 6 percent fall after the floor opened makes it one of just 60 companies who've seen a debut day loss of 5 percent or more in the past 10 years, Bloomberg notes. And there's a strong chance it could become the eighth of those companies to actually end up in the red for its first day.
Uber has barely gone a day without some kind of public scandal or outcry in the past two years, and this past week was no exception. Drivers for Uber and rival companies went on strike by turning off their apps on Wednesday to protest low wages and a lack of worker benefits. Uber later said it reached settlements with many of the 60,000 drivers who've protested, adding that those settlements would cost upwards of $170 million. The strike was planned to coincide with Uber's first day on the market, though it's unclear if the uproar had anything to do with Uber's dismal performance. Kathryn Krawczyk
The Espionage Act just became relevant again.
For the first time in the law's 100-year history, the Department of Justice has accused a journalist of violating it, charging Wikileaks founder Julian Assange with 16 counts of receiving or publishing classified information. Thursday's indictment also charges Assange with one count of conspiracy to receive the leaked documents from Chelsea Manning, and reinstates Assange's April charge of conspiring to violate computer hacking laws, The Daily Beast reports.
Assange's charges stem back to 2010, when then-Army intelligence analyst Manning allegedly leaked classified Department of Defense information to Assange for publication. Assange was charged in April with conspiring to help Manning hack those computers after London's Ecuadorian embassy revoked his asylum claim.
Thursday's charges immediately rang alarm bells for journalists, with The Daily Beast writing that it is a "stunning escalation of the Trump administration's war on the press." "Legal scholars believe that prosecuting reporters over their work would violate the First Amendment," The New York Times continues, which is partly why former President Barack Obama's administration never charged Assange under the Espionage Act. The DOJ's National Security Division head John Demers countered those concerns by saying "the department takes seriously the role of journalists in our democracy ... But Julian Assange is no journalist."
Assange was also sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for skipping bail in the U.K., and Sweden has reopened a 2010 rape investigation into him. Sweden and the U.S. have both moved to extradite Assange after his prison stay. Kathryn Krawczyk
Kids who are the victims of racially-motivated bullying may be at risk in more ways than one, a new report has found.
The report analyzed data from the California Healthy Kids Survey, a voluntary survey administered to children through their schools. The results point to a worrying link between bullying and drugs and alcohol for children in California high schools from 2013 to 2018, U.S. News reported on Thursday. The data suggests that children who were bullied for their race, ethnicity, or origin were 11 percent more likely to drink alcohol, 9 percent more likely to use marijuana, and 8 percent more likely to use opioids or other medication not as prescribed.
The study found that black and Asian students were the most targeted for bullying, with 22 percent and 20 percent of each group reporting having been bullied at least once in the 2017-2018 school year. White students were the least affected by bullying, but that figure was still at 11 percent.
Being under stress can lead to risky or unhealthy habits even in adults. So the fact that it's affecting adolescents in schools is concerning, given that the still-developing brains of teenagers are already "more likely to engage in risky behavior," explained Virginia Huynh, a professor in child and adolescent development.
Read more about the survey and its results U.S. News. Shivani Ishwar
Facebook removed nearly as many fake accounts in the first quarter of 2019 as it has monthly active users, and it estimates fake accounts make up a growing percentage of the platform.
The company in its Community Standards Enforcement Report released on Thursday revealed that from January to March of this year, it removed a staggering 2.19 billion fake accounts. To put that record number in perspective, Facebook in the first quarter of this year said it had 2.3 billion monthly active users, The Washington Post reports.
The number of fake accounts deleted in this first quarter was up significantly from Q4 2018, when Facebook says it removed 1.2 billion accounts. Facebook on Thursday explained it has seen a "steep increase in the creation of abusive, fake accounts" in the past six months, especially because of "automated attacks by bad actors who attempt to create large volumes of accounts at onetime."
Facebook said that most of these accounts are deleted "within minutes of registration" and not counted as part of its number of monthly active users. But in its report, the company also said that "we estimated that 5 percent of monthly active accounts are fake," which The Associated Press reports is up from from between 3 and 4 percent in the previous report.
Facebook VP of Analytics Alex Schultz on Thursday said the "prevalence number for fake accounts includes both abusive and user-misclassified accounts," with an example of the latter being "when a person sets their pet up with a profile, instead of a Page." Overall, he said the company is "confident that the vast majority of people and activity on Facebook are genuine." Brendan Morrow
A Chicago judge has just ordered the unsealing of Empire star Jussie Smollet's criminal case file, NBC News reports.
Judge Steven G. Watkins said on Thursday that although Smollett's lawyers had argued the court documents should remain sealed to protect Smollett's privacy, this is inconsistent with Smollett's decision to speak publicly to the media about the case after the charges against him were dropped. "These are not the actions of a person seeking to maintain his privacy or simply be let alone," CNN reports.
Watkins also said that the "court cannot credit his privacy interest as good cause to keep the case records sealed." It remains unclear when the Smollett case file will be made publicly available, as multiple media outlets had been requesting.
Smollett in January claimed he was the victim of a hate crime, telling police that two men attacked him in Chicago. After an investigation, police accused Smollett of orchestrating the attack against himself because he was dissatisfied with his salary on Empire, and he was hit with criminal charges. But in March, those charges were suddenly dropped. Numerous questions remained about what led to that stunning turn of events, but the case file was sealed. Now that they've been ordered unsealed, once the documents are released, this could help elucidate prosecutors' decision to drop the charges, The New York Times notes.
Smollett has continued to maintain his innocence, saying that he only paid the two men who attacked him for personal training but not to help orchestrate the attack. After the charges were dropped, Chicago police and then Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel blasted the decision, with Emanuel saying the situation is "making a fool of all of us." Brendan Morrow