A steady stream of federal lawmakers have been trickling into Alabama to cheer on workers hoping to unionize at an Amazon Inc warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, cementing the union drive as the highest profile American labor fight in recent memory.

Amazon caused an uproar on Thursday when it denied reports that its delivery workers have been forced to urinate in bottles due to lack of access to bathrooms, but a leaked internal memo shows the company has been aware of the problem for at least several months.

The new controversy centers on Amazon deleting the profiles of hundreds of thousands of entry-level warehouse employees.

Amazon is well-known for its technological Taylorism: using digital sensors to monitor and control the activity of its workers in the name of efficiency. But after installing machine learning-powered surveillance cameras in its delivery vans earlier this year, the company is now telling employees: agree to be surveilled by AI or lose your job.

Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei was the latest media chief to speculate on Amazon’s reported increased interest in sports rights, telling an industry audience earlier this week that he expects streaming video companies to get more involved in sports, which should drive rights fees skyward.

Outgoing Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos plans to give away $1 billion a year for the next decade to fight climate change as part of his Bezos Earth Fund. Last year, Mr Bezos, the world’s richest man, announced the formation of the $10 billion fund. Besides an initial $791 million round of grants to major environmental organisations last year, which Bezos called “just the beginning”, there aren’t many details about how the fund would operate.

Amazon has quickly changed its main shopping-app logo, after commentators said the recent redesign made it look like Adolf Hitler. Launched in January, the icon depicts a strip of blue tape over an Amazon "smile" logo. But some observers said it resembled a toothbrush moustache, associated with the Nazi dictator.

Twitch is removing the anti-union ads that its parent company, Amazon, was running on the platform. The ads showed Amazon employees talking about why they want to vote no on unionization and directed viewers to Amazon’s “DoItWithoutDues” website. A Twitch spokesperson said the ads “should never have been allowed to run on [the] service,” as they violate its political advertising policies.

Whistleblowers say they were forced out after flagging problems with e-commerce giant’s data security and compliance. Amazon is amassing an empire of data as the online retailer ventures into ever more areas of our lives. But the company's efforts to protect the information it collects are inadequate, according to insiders who warn the company's security shortfalls expose users' information to potential breaches, theft and exploitation.

The vaccine rollout in the United States has been a national embarrassment. A doctor in Houston was fired for using ten doses of vaccine that would have otherwise expired and gone to waste. Local and state sign-up portals are impossible to navigate, even for tech-literate adult children trying to enroll their elderly parents. There is seemingly unending confusion about overall supply, which states are desperately low on shots, and when the country can expect vaccine production to scale up to meet the urgency of the demand.

On Friday, the National Labor Relations Board rejected Amazon’s attempt to delay a union vote set to begin on Monday, February 8. For many, the online giant’s bid was seen as a stalling tactic, including a motion to demand votes take place in-person — a clear health risk, as the COVID-19 virus still poses a major threat in the United States and globally.

The surprise announcement that Jeff Bezos will leave later this year and hand over the reins to AWS leader Andy Jassy marks a remarkable rise for Jassy. He began as a marketing manager in 1997 and started AWS in 2003.

Amazon submitted a new filing in federal court on Tuesday in response to an emergency motion by Parler to restore its hosting services through Amazon’s AWS. Parler was kicked offline early Monday after Amazon said the social media company had violated its terms of service and Parler couldn’t find another company willing to do business. Parler sued Amazon on Monday alleging breach of contract and an antitrust violation.

Last June, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law began an in-depth investigation into four major firms—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. The subcommittee wanted to answer one key question: did Big Tech get big playing by the rules, or does it cheat to stay at the top? After 16 months of hearings, research, and analysis, the panel's findings are out... and the results look really bad for every company involved.

Amazon said Tuesday it’s buying 11 used Boeing 767-300 jets from Delta and WestJet, the latest sign of how cargo carriers are growing while passenger airlines rush to shrink their fleets as Covid-19 hurts travel demand. The expansion comes as Amazon continues to push for faster delivery amid a pandemic-fueled surge in online orders. Stuck-at-home shoppers have turned to the service for both essential and nonessential goods, while the holiday shopping season generated further demand for speedy delivery.

Like thousands of other parents, I decided to get my kids a cheap drone for Christmas. I spent $24 for a plastic flying machine with rudimentary collision-avoidance capabilities. A plastic cage mostly kept small fingers away from the four propellers. The kids were delighted for the first couple of hours.

After almost a year of limiting our contact with the people in our lives and humanity in general, it’s hard to imagine a future where we freely move about our cities and towns going to meetings, errands, and social events. And it may be even harder to envision doing so in driverless taxis that look sort of like giant toasters on wheels. But go ahead and fire up your imagination—and your hope for a near future filled with socialization instead of social distancing—because Amazon is doing just that.

Amazon’s refusal to sell e-books published in-house to libraries is sparking backlash as demand for digital content spikes during the coronavirus pandemic. Librarians and advocacy groups are pushing for the tech giant to license its published e-books to libraries for distribution, arguing the company’s self-imposed ban significantly decreases public access to information.

Amazon is bringing macOS to its AWS cloud for the first time ever. New Mac mini instances will be available on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), allowing developers to create apps for iPhones, iPads, Macs, and more all on AWS.

Global giants such as Amazon and Apple should be made responsible for helping to collect, recycle and repair their products to cut the 155,000 tonnes of electronic waste being thrown away each year in the UK, MPs say. An investigation by the environmental audit committee found the UK is lagging behind other countries and failing to create a circular economy in electronic waste.