Lawsuit Claims Chipotle Tried To Cover Up A Norovirus Outbreak Last Year

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The same norovirus outbreak last summer at a Chipotle in Simi Valley, Calif. that has attracted the attention of criminal investigators now is also the subject of a civil lawsuit alleging the restaurant tried to "conceal all evidence of the outbreak" before contacting public health officials.

The plaintiffs, who were infected with norovirus, are seeking damages. Chipotle spokesman Chris Arnold said in an email, "As a matter of policy, we don’t discuss details surrounding pending legal actions."

Here are the main points from the complaint, which is embedded in full below:

1. The kitchen manager at the Simi Valley Chipotle started showing symptoms of illness Tues., Aug. 18, 2015 but continued working until Thurs., Aug. 20.

2. That Thursday, Chipotle closed the restaurant "in response to multiple customer complaints of gastrointestinal illness," the complaint stated. The area manager posted a sign in the restaurant instead saying that it was closed "due to a severe staffing shortage."

via Chipotle lawsuit

3. "Rather than immediately contacting the Ventura County Public Health Division to notify health officials and its customers of this foodborne illness outbreak, Chipotle chose instead to try and conceal all evidence of the outbreak by disposing of all food items, bleaching all cooking and food handling surfaces and replacing its sick employees with replacement employees from other restaurants before notifying county health officials of the outbreak," the lawsuit claimed.

4.The restaurant reopened on Friday. Chipotle left a voicemail
message on Sat., Aug. 22 notifying health officials that 17 of its employees at the Simi Valley restaurant were sick with gastrointestinal illness, and had
been replaced with crew from other Chipotle restaurants.

A total of 234 customers and employees reported gastrointestinal illness to
the Ventura County Environmental Health Division that week, although "the actual number of customers who became ill from this Norovirus outbreak is likely to be substantially higher," the lawsuit claimed.

Doug Beach, a manager of the food program for Ventura County's Environmental Health Division told Ventura County Star earlier this month that while the state doesn't specify a timeframe in which a restaurant must notify health officials, "normally, we are informed much earlier than that." Also, because all the food had been thrown out and the restaurant sanitized by the time officials arrived, it was difficult to investigate the outbreak. Health officials did note in their inspection report, however, that the workers handling food did not possess a food handler card from an accredited training program, that the floors were in "an unsanitary condition," and that they spoke with the operator about the importance of hand washing.

Several lawsuits have been filed against Chipotle related to the string of food-borne illness outbreaks linked to the chain last year.

The company — which since July has offered paid sick leave to workers who have been with the company for at least a year — is implementing new food safety and testing measures in restaurants, commissaries, and farms. It will close all restaurants the morning of Feb. 8 for an employee meeting to discuss the raft of new protocols.

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Chipotle Will Close Restaurants Nationwide On Feb. 8 For Employee Meeting

Chipotle Has A Plan To Woo Customers Back Into Restaurants. Will It Succeed?

Why Is Chipotle Having So Many Food Safety Issues?

Gap Plans To Halve Its Greenhouse Gas Emissions By 2020

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Gap is one of the first major retailers to commit to cutting its absolute greenhouse gas emissions after the landmark climate change agreement in Paris last month.

In a report published Thursday, the company says it plans to halve emissions at its stores, offices and distribution facilities around the world from 2015 levels by the end of 2020, after successfully reducing them by 38% from 2008 levels as of the end of 2015.

While the containing the world's rising greenhouse gas emissions is an almost impossibly complex global undertaking, Gap's efforts, focused on more than 3,000 Gap, Old Navy and Banana Republic stores, are easier to understand.

Much of the reductions so far have come from installing longer-lasting, more efficient LED lighting and smart thermostats at stores, turning off unnecessary lights at night and using an industry shipment program to improve fuel efficiency. Shuttering stores has also contributed, but to a lesser extent, said Melissa Fifield, the senior director of sustainable innovation at Gap Inc.

Gap's commitment only extends to facilities it owns or operates, and therefore the factories that produce its clothes — a significant chunk of the company's environmental footprint. But it underscores a growing acknowledgment among retailers that they need to find ways to make their businesses less harmful both to workers and the environment.

"Certainly in response to the climate negotiations in Paris and with what we're seeing in the world, we feel this is an appropriate step for our company," she told BuzzFeed News. "We have a large store footprint and the greenhouse gas emissions lighting those stores has a fairly sizable impact."

Leaders at Gap, H&M, North Face-owner VF Corp. and Levi's called for a strong climate change agreement during last month's Paris talks. It helps that for clothing retailers, reducing environmental impact can also be good for the bottom line.

"The beautiful thing about energy savings, unlike some other areas, is it's very directly tied to cost, and as the cost of energy goes up, there's an incentive in the business to save that energy as well," Fifield said. "There's a significant environmental impact and savings to the business as well."

The fashion industry and the relatively recent rise of disposable clothing haven't been great for the planet. There are the toxic chemicals used to make certain clothes, lots of wasted and polluted water and the mountains of apparel tossed into landfills every year. And then there's all the energy expended along the life of a garment, from manufacturing to transportation to a sales floor.

Gap, as part of its announcement, also said it will try to divert 80% of the waste from its U.S. facilities away from landfills by 2020 — that means finding ways to recycle things like boxes, plastic wrapping and hangers used to ship products. In 2014, it diverted just 29% of that waste.

Gap / Via Gap Inc.

Critics often dismiss corporate responsibility reports out of retailers and commitments to using sustainable materials as little more than lip service, or say it's too little, too late.

But it's worth noting that such efforts are being made despite a deeply competitive environment for selling apparel and that shoppers are paying more attention to good corporate behavior than they used to.

Gap CEO Art Peck said as much in the report, as he mused about the bigger stories behind various products.

"Was a shirt or jacket sewn by someone who works in safe and fair conditions?" he wrote. "Was care taken to mitigate any potential environmental harm caused by the manufacturing process? Were the people whose lives were touched by the creation of a piece of clothing affected in a positive way?"

He continued: "I’m convinced that this part of the story matters – and will come to matter even more in the future. Products that are disconnected from people will leave people feeling, well, disconnected. And retail is nothing if it is not about emotion."

How America's Top Colleges Plan To Fix The Admissions Process

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More than 50 elite universities have signed onto a report that aims to dramatically reform the frenzied college admissions process — a high-pressure race that the report says looks for the wrong qualities in students and disadvantages low-income and middle-class applicants.

The Harvard Graduate School of Education report, "Turning the Tide," calls for colleges to emphasize "meaningful contributions" that better cross lines of class and race and make it more difficult for parents and students to game the system. And it asks the schools to "redefine" academic achievement in ways that don't benefit the wealthy: by de-emphasizing test scores that correlate directly with family income, for example, and advanced classes that are only available to a fraction of high school students.

The unifying idea, the report says, is to create an equitable admissions process that emphasizes the lofty idea of the "common good" — kindness, community-building, family support, humility and ethical behavior — over personal achievement.

The report feeds off of a long-standing sentiment that the elite college admissions process rewards an endless litany of extracurriculars, advanced classes, and test preparation. Those priorities can both create intense stress for applicants and lead to a dramatic underrepresentation of low and middle-income people at the country's best colleges, the report said, because they typically reward those who know how to "package" themselves and game the system.

"Turning the Tide" asks colleges to make concrete reforms to address those structural problems. It encourages, for example, crafting essay questions that ask students about the contributions they have made to their families — giving space for applicants who take care of younger siblings or work part-time to support their parents — or ask students to reflect on the parts of their life "that are built on previous generations," allowing schools to look at character traits like humility and cultural awareness.

The report also recommends drastically limiting the number of extracurriculars students are encouraged to report — forcing them to focus only on one or two things things they truly care about. It suggests explicitly warning students against submitting applications that are primarily shaped by parents or admissions counselors. Private college admissions counseling is a booming business, with counselors who charge in the thousands and tens of thousands to get students into competitive schools.

It remains to be seen, of course, whether colleges will actually follow through with the recommendations, especially those — like de-emphasizing SAT scores — that might hurt their competitiveness with other colleges, or their rankings on the coveted U.S. News & World Report list.

The report acknowledged that many schools were unlikely to embrace all of its recommendations. "What we are convinced of," the report's authors wrote, "is that far too often colleges, high schools and parents are placing more and more pressure on young people to focus on personal success at the expense of others and our common goals."

One Big Winner From Minimum Wage Increases: Cigarette Makers

Fried Dough / Via Flickr: 42787780@N04

This year, the minimum wage will rise in 23 states — welcome news not only for the hourly workers who will get raises, but all the companies who sell things to them.

One of those beneficiaries will be tobacco companies, according to a report by investment firm Cowen and Co., with smoking more common among the country's low-income consumers, who'll suddenly have a little more money to spend.

"Looking ahead, we believe higher minimum wages will disproportionately benefit these consumers," Cowen stated in the report. To the chagrin of anti-smoking groups, this is likely to support better cigarette volume sales, trade ups to premium cigarette brands, and higher pricing for the U.S. cigarette industry in 2016, the firm expects.

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show 26.3% of people below the poverty line smoke, compared to 15.2% of those who live above the poverty line.

Cowen and Co.

Discount retailer Dollar General, which is focused on serving low-income consumers, started selling tobacco products in 2013 to increase visits by existing customers and draw new customers, particularly as other stores like CVS stopped selling tobacco. In 2014, tobacco was among Dollar General's fastest growing product categories, and these products continued to boost sales in 2015.

Despite such boosts for cigarette makers, the overall gains remain limited. As the chart above shows, the number of smokers in the U.S. is declining. In 2015, volume sales of cigarettes fell less than 1%, according to Cowen, and they are expected to drop another 2% to 4% this year.

Cowen and Co.

The bright side for the cigarette industry is although volume sales are down, "declines have eased and have returned to pre-recession levels," according to Cowen (the drop was steepest in 2009, during the depths of the recession), and those who still smoke are buying higher-priced cigarettes like Natural American Spirit, which has helped owner Reynolds American gain market share in the West.

Other industries that could benefit from the minimum wage increases, according to Cowen, include energy drinks (popular with young consumers, who tend to earn less) and fast food restaurants.

A Bad Day On Wall Street As Global Markets Plunge

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The Great Freakout of 2016 gathered steam on Wednesday as stock markets all over the world continued their sharp falls. While the big gains made in recent years began to be reversed in 2015, the markets have begun the new year in a continuous plunge.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 500 points, or 3.5%, before an afternoon recovery helped it finish the day down 1.6%. The S&P 500, a broad index of large U.S. stocks, closed the day down just over 1%, but was down almost 3.5% at its low point for the day.

Google Finance

"It’s an anxious market, people are very risk averse for the moment, they don't want to be the last one holding the bag," JJ Kinahan, the chief strategist at TD Ameritrade, told BuzzFeed News.

The S&P 500 is down 9% since the beginning of the year and down almost 13% from its all-time high last May.

The FTSE 100, an index of U.K. stocks, fell 3.5% on Wednesday, bringing it down 20% from its highs last April. Farther east, the Nikkei 225, an index of Japanese stocks, was down almost 4%, bringing it down almost 20% from last April.

The continuing slide in oil and commodities prices has hammered emerging market economies that depend on such exports, and has put the global energy industry into crisis mode. Crude oil prices fell to $26.55 a barrel, near their lowest levels in 12 years and a more than 50% drop since July of last year, when the price was last above $60.

Citi analysts said that gold, which has fallen in value 43% since September, 2011, "is back in vogue" as a "safe haven" thanks to instability and fear in markets all over the world. "Geopolitical issues typically tend to be short-lived in terms of lending support to gold prices, we expect ongoing global macro concerns to lend support this quarter," the analysts said.

The unrelenting fall in oil and commodities prices has dragged down currencies for major exporters — the value of the Russian ruble has fallen to an all-time low of 82 to the dollar, and last week the Australian dollar hit a 7-year low.

A woman walks past a board listing foreign currency rates against the Russian ruble in Moscow, on January 20, 2016.

Vasily Maximov / AFP / Getty Images

"The first couple of weeks of the year have been difficult from a market perspective, and the last half of the year and continuing the dramatic decline in commodity prices broadly has been disruptive to the market," Goldman Sachs chief financial officer Harvey Schwartz said on a call with analysts to discuss the company's earnings this morning.

Worries about Chinese growth have also scared investors and the Chinese stock market has been dragged down this year about 15%. "To some extent that the market is responding to China," Schwartz said.

Alan Ruskin, an analyst at Deutsche Bank, said in a note that low oil prices are "suggestive of weak global demand" and that "the world is still likely to be awash with oil" through the middle of the year, pointing to recent data from the International Energy Agency showing the world could "drown in oversupply."

But despite the major declines all over the world, many analysts are cautioning that we're not experiencing a rerun of financial crisis. "It just isn't 2008, with all due respect," wrote Tobias Levkovich, an analyst at Citi, pointing to more stable banks in the U.S., higher consumer confidence, and finally some signs that low energy prices in the U.S. will boost consumer spending meaningfully.

The labor market in the U.S. has been strong, adding an average of 284,000 jobs in the past three months, and US households have far less debt compared to their incomes than in 2008.

A team of Nomura analysts said that while the economy will likely grow only around 2% this year — it has been expanding for the last six years — "the probability of a recession does not appear to be particularly high."

Ben Carlson of Ritholz Asset Management, wrote over the weekend: "Double-digit losses and even bear markets can certainly occur without a big economic downturn," pointing out that one out of every five years since the late 1930s has has seen the S&P 500 decline at least 10% with out a recession."

Carlson told BuzzFeed News that precisely because the recovery has been, in a sense, so lackluster, it is unlikely to crash. "Typically a recessions comes from a huge excess built-up, but it’s just been plodding along," Carlson said. "It’s really hard to kill yourself jumping off a two foot ledge."

Can The Labor Movement Support Both Black Lives Matter And Police Unions?

Brooke Anderson / Via Facebook: movementphotographer

As union members gathered in the nation's capital over the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day weekend, some of the country's top labor leaders faced tough questions about how the movement can reconcile its support for racial justice with its embrace of police unions.

Over the last year, the AFL-CIO, America's largest federation of unions, has faced calls from some in its membership to end its affiliation with the International Union of Police Associations.

At a union conference in Washington, D.C. on Friday, Roosevelt Institute Fellow Dorian Warren interviewed AFL-CIO President Trumka, as well as some younger activists, including Bree Newsome, the woman who scaled the statehouse flagpole in South Carolina to take down the Confederate Flag.

Warren specifically pressed Trumka on labor's position regarding police unions and communities of color, quoting a speech the union leader gave in Ferguson, Missouri after the shooting of Michael Brown.

"Lesley McSpadden, Michael Brown’s mother who works in a grocery store, is our sister, an AFL-CIO union member, and Darren Wilson, the officer who killed Michael Brown, is a union member, too, and he is our brother," Trumka said at the time. "Our brother killed our sister’s son and we do not have to wait for the judgment of prosecutors or courts to tell us how terrible this is."

In response to Warren's questions, Trumka said the federation's Commission on Racial and Economic Justice, formed after the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012, has been speaking with union members on the ground about race in their communities, with the goal of creating a plan of action for labor.

But while Trumka emphasized the need for conversations between police and community members, and for mobilizing voters to turn out for the upcoming presidential election, younger organizers called for more direct public action.

Adam Anderson / Via Twitter: @alexismadrigal

Such actions were on display over the MLK Day weekend, when one Black Lives Matter-allied group targeted a police credit union. "BYP100 just occupied a Fraternal Order of the Police Bank in Chicago," the movement messaged its supporters. On Sunday, a blast went out: "Did you see the shut down of the Bay Bridge? Black resistance is the true legacy of the Civil Rights Movement."

Activists and union members both at the conference and protesting elsewhere throughout the weekend drew additional connections between their fight for police reform (and for the end of mass incarceration, for-profit prisons, and prison labor) and the fights of working-class people of color.

Charlene Carruthers, national director of the Black Youth Project 100, the organization that shut down the police credit union, has called for "taking the profit out of punishment," from ankle bracelets to bail bonds, while Newsome spoke at the conference about how mass incarceration often means that private companies profit off the unpaid labor of prisoners.

Such calls leave union leaders like Trumka threading a particularly difficult needle: trying to embracing a new wave of worker activism driven largely by minority communities, while not alienating the large, well-funded police unions that remain a major constituency of the union movement.

"When you think about things, you have a couple of different points of view," Trumka said. "You have police officers doing incredibly important work and very dangerous work... And then you have the citizens who need the police but in many communities are afraid of the police... I personally can’t imagine how it breaks your heart every day, to see your child walk out the door and wonder, 'Is my baby coming home at night?' Nobody should have to do that."

Trumka said that members were initially "reluctant" to talk, and the Commission on Racial and Economic Justice had to work to create an "atmosphere of trust" in the room when officers sit down to talk with community members, emphasizing the need for police not to feel "ambushed in the process but feel respected as well."

At one point Trumka admitted the process, which began nearly four years ago, is slow-going. "I thought it would be a little quicker," he said. "I really underestimated what it would take to get the trust in that room."

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka in D.C.

Alex Wong / Getty Images

Some union members want the AFL-CIO to cut its ties with police unions.

In late July, a United Auto Workers (UAW) local chapter representing 13,000 workers in the University of California system formally called on the AFL-CIO to end its affiliation with the International Union of Police Associations (IUPA), denouncing the union after Freddie Grey's death in police custody in Baltimore. “How can there ever be solidarity between law enforcement and the working class," the union group asked, "when elites call upon police and their organizations to quell mass resistance to poverty and inequality?”

The letter was a product of the UAW's Black Interests Coordinating Committee (BICC), formed in December 2014 after the acquittals of police in the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and it recounts a history of police suppression of protest and complicity in race-related violence.

Asked about the letter at the conference Friday, Carmen Berkeley, the AFL-CIO's Civil, Human & Women's Rights Director, said the federation had no plans to end its affiliation with the IUPA.

"We are not in the business of kicking people out of unions," she said. "What we are in the business of is having conversations with our law enforcement brothers and sisters about how they can have different practices... I do think there’s a lot of reconciliation that needs to happen between communities of color and law enforcement, and we want to be the bridge that helps them get there."

Chocolate Giant Cadbury Gives Nestlé The Finger In A Feud Over Kit Kats

Nestlé has been trying to trademark the shape of its classic Kit Kat since 2010 but rival Cadbury is not having a bar of it.

Kit Kat / Via youtube.com

Nestlé, which has been attempting to prevent rivals from copying the shape of its classic Kit Kat bar, had its hopes dashed today after the UK high court blocked its appeal to register the shape as a trademark.

It is not the first time the firm has had its hopes dashed. Nestlé had been trying to register the trademark since 2010 but rival Cadbury successfully challenged the move leading to a series of appeals.

The high court decision follows a long-running war between the competitors, which have been challenging each other's trademark bids in a "tit for tat" dispute stretching back more than a decade.

The feud dates back to 2004 when Nestlé opposed Cadbury's moves to trademark the purple colour of its Dairy Milk wrapper.

Cadbury exhausted all avenues to attempt to prevent other chocolate brands from being able to use the shade and hit a dead end in 2014 when the UK supreme court rejected its right to appeal further.

"Kit Kat is much loved and the iconic shape of the four-finger bar, which has been used in the UK for more than 80 years, is well known by consumers," said a spokesperson for Nestlé.

"We believe the shape deserves to be protected as a trademark in the UK and are disappointed that the court did not agree on this occasion. We are taking the necessary steps to appeal this judgment."

Lee Curtis, a trademark expert at HGF, said: "To a degree this dispute could be viewed as an ongoing 'tit for tat' battle between Nestlé and Cadbury, Nestlé having successfully challenged Cadbury's attempt to register the colour purple for milk chocolate.

"However, this dispute is more about stopping a competitor potentially obtaining a competitive advantage over the other, here Nestlé potentially preventing others, including Cadbury, from marketing four-finger-shaped chocolate bars."