(Reuters) – A former Facebook Inc <FB.O> employee who worked closely with racial minority groups said in a blog post https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-s-luckie/facebook-is-failing-its-black-employees-and-its-black-users/1931075116975013 on Tuesday that he left this month over frustration with the social network’s “systematic disenfranchisement of underrepresented voices” and other diversity issues.

“Black people are one of the most engaged demographics on Facebook, but their experiences are sometimes far from positive,” wrote Mark Luckie, former Strategic Partner Manager for Global Influencers at Facebook.

In an email response to Reuters, a Facebook spokesman said the company has been working to increase employee diversity.

“We want to fully support all employees when there are issues reported and when there may be micro-behaviors that add up. We are going to keep doing all we can to be a truly inclusive company,” the spokesman said.

In a detailed Facebook post, Luckie said he saw Facebook moderators remove potentially offensive posts by black users, while the same posts by white people were left up despite user complaints.

He also said he experienced discrimination in the office, as coworkers sometimes clutched their wallets when he walked by, a reactionary behavior he attributed to the color of his skin.

Racial discrimination at the company “is real,” Luckie said.

He added black employees who turn to the company’s HR for resolutions are made to believe such “disheartening patterns are a figment of our imagination.”

Shares of Facebook have had a rocky year, under pressure from revelations about privacy and operational issues as well as concerns over slowing revenue growth.

(Reporting by Akanksha Rana in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila)

By Lawrence Hurley

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump on Monday announced Brett Kavanaugh as his nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, picking a conservative federal appeals court judge who survived a previous tough Senate confirmation battle and helped investigate Democratic former President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

In picking the 53-year-old Kavanaugh, Trump aimed to entrench conservative control of the court for years to come with his second lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest judicial body in his first 18 months as president.

Kavanaugh now faces what appears to be another fierce fight for confirmation in the Senate, where Trump’s fellow Republicans hold a slim majority. If confirmed, Kavanaugh would replace long-serving conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy, who announced his retirement on June 27 at age 81.

“Throughout legal circles he’s considered a judge’s judge, a true thought leader among his peers,” Trump, who named conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch to the court last year, told an applauding audience in the White House East Room.

“He’s a brilliant jurist with a clear and effective writing style, universally regarded as one of the finest and sharpest legal minds of our time. And just like Justice Gorsuch, he excelled as a legal clerk for Justice Kennedy,” Trump added, saying his nominee “deserves a swift confirmation and robust bipartisan support.”

Kavanaugh has amassed a solidly conservative judicial record since 2006 on the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the same court where three current justices including Chief Justice John Roberts previously served. Some conservative activists have questioned whether he would rule sufficiently aggressively as a justice.

Kavanaugh potentially could serve on the high court for decades. Trump’s other leading candidates for the post were fellow federal appellate judges Thomas Hardiman, Raymond Kethledge and Amy Coney Barrett.

“My judicial philosophy is straightforward: a judge must be independent and must interpret the law, not make the law. A judge must interpret statutes as written. And a judge must interpret the Constitution as written, informed by history, and tradition and precedent,” Kavanaugh said during the ceremony in which he underscored his ties to his family and his Roman Catholic faith.

Kavanaugh served as a senior White House official under Republican former President George W. Bush before Bush picked nominated him to the appeals court in 2003. But some Democrats accused him of excessive partisanship and it took three years before the Senate eventually voted to confirm him.

Kavanaugh worked for Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel whose investigation of Clinton helped spur an effort by congressional Republicans in 1998 and 1999 to impeach the Democratic president and remove him from office. Kavanaugh in 2009 changed his tune on the Starr probe, arguing that presidents should be free from civil lawsuits, criminal prosecutions and investigations while in office.

Trump defeated Clinton’s wife, Hillary Clinton, in the 2016 presidential election and has disparaged both Clintons.

Democrats in the past also have pointed to Kavanaugh’s work for Bush during the recount fight in the pivotal state of Florida in the 2000 presidential election, a controversy that was resolved only after the conservative-majority Supreme Court sided with Bush over Democratic candidate Al Gore, settling the election outcome.

Kavanaugh once served as a Supreme Court clerk under Kennedy.

The appointment will not change the ideological breakdown of a court that already has a 5-4 conservative majority, but nevertheless could move the court to the right. Kennedy sometimes joined the liberal justices on key rulings on divisive social issues like abortion and gay rights, a practice his replacement may not duplicate.

Kennedy, 81, announced on June 27 plans to retire after three decades on the court, effective on July 31.

Republicans hold a slim 51-49 majority in the Senate, though with ailing Senator John McCain battling cancer in his home state of Arizona they currently can muster only 50 votes. Without Republican defections, however, Senate rules leave Democrats with scant options to block confirmation of Trump’s nominee.

‘SUPERB CHOICE’

“President Trump has made a superb choice. Judge Brett Kavanaugh is an impressive nominee who is extremely well qualified to serve as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who earlier in the day accused the “far left” of “scare tactics” to try to thwart the nomination.

A group of Democratic senators from Republican-leaning states – lawmakers who could be pivotal in the confirmation fight – declined Trump’s invitation to attend the White House announcement.

Trump last year appointed Gorsuch, who has already become one of the most conservative justices, after Senate Republicans in 2016 refused to consider Democratic former President Barack Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland to fill a vacancy left by the death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. As a result, Democrats have accused Republicans of stealing a Supreme Court seat. Gorsuch restored the court’s conservative majority.

Democrats are certain to press Trump’s latest nominee on the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion nationwide, a decision some conservatives – particularly conservative Christians – have long wanted to overturn.

Trump has previously said he wanted “pro-life” justices opposed to abortion rights. Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer earlier on Monday said Trump’s nominee should be obligated to make his or her views clear on matters like the Roe ruling.

The new justice can be expected to cast crucial votes on other matters of national importance including gay rights, gun control, the death penalty and voting rights. The court could also be called upon to render judgment on issues of personal significance to Trump and his administration including matters arising from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing Russia-related investigation and several civil lawsuits pending against Trump.

The timing of the nomination means that Kennedy’s replacement could be confirmed before the start of the Supreme Court’s next term on the first Monday in October.

By Ian Simpson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The parents of U.S. college student Otto Warmbier sued North Korea on Thursday over their son’s death in 2017 following his release from captivity there, according to the lawsuit which said their son was “brutally tortured and murdered.”

The wrongful-death suit was filed in U.S. District Court at a diplomatically delicate time, weeks ahead of an expected meeting between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump. Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in also are set to meet on Friday.

“Otto was taken hostage, kept as a prisoner for political purposes, used as a pawn and singled out for exceptionally harsh and brutal treatment by Kim Jong Un,” his father Fred Warmbier said in a statement.

Warmbier, from Wyoming, Ohio, died at age 22 after being imprisoned in North Korea from January 2016 until he was returned to the United States in June 2017 in a coma. He died a few days later, and an Ohio coroner said the cause was lack of oxygen and blood to the brain.

North Korea blamed botulism and ingestion of a sleeping pill and dismissed torture claims. The coroner who examined Warmbier said he found no sign of botulism.

The suit by Fred Warmbier and his wife, Cindy, seeks unspecified damages for personal injury.

“North Korea, which is a rogue regime, took Otto hostage for its own wrongful ends and brutally tortured and murdered him,” the lawsuit said.

A representative of the North Korean mission to the United Nations in New York was not immediately available to comment.

Richard Cullen, a family attorney, declined to comment about the suit beyond Fred Warmbier’s statement.

Otto Warmbier, a student at the University of Virginia, was traveling in North Korea with a tour group, and was arrested at Pyongyang airport as he was about to leave. He was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for trying to steal an item bearing a propaganda slogan from his hotel, North Korea state media said.

The filing says Warmbier falsely confessed to invented charges that he was acting as a spy connected to the Central Intelligence Agency.

Stewart Baker, a former assistant secretary of homeland security, said North Korea had immunity from lawsuits as a sovereign nation but still might be sued because of its U.S. designation as a state sponsor of terrorism.

“But it’s almost impossible to collect any judgment that might be awarded. So it’s doubtful NK will feel sufficiently threatened by the lawsuit to upset the talks. And after all, he (Kim) can settle claims against NK in any US-NK agreement,” Baker said by email.

Kim is set on Friday to cross the heavily militarized border for the first summit with South Korea, setting the stage for the North Korean leader to meet with Trump in late May or early June.

Just months ago, Trump and Kim traded threats and insults during North Korea’s rapid advances in pursuit of nuclear-armed missiles capable of hitting the United States.

(Additional reporting by Ben Klayman in Detroit and Mark Hosenball in Washington; Editing by David Gregorio)

(Reuters) – The National Football League said on Thursday it has extended its deal with Amazon.com Inc to stream Thursday night games during the 2018 and 2019 seasons on Amazon’s Prime Video.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

“The Thursday Night Football games will be made available to the over 100 million Amazon Prime members worldwide in over 200 countries and territories,” the NFL said in a statement.

Amazon and NFL had previously partnered for the broadcast of Thursday Night Football for the 2017 season.

Nearly two million people had logged onto Amazon.com last year for the online retailer’s first livestream of Thursday Night Football.

(Reporting by Anirban Paul in Bengaluru; Editing by Bernard Orr)

By David DeKok

NORRISTOWN, Pa. (Reuters) – Comedian Bill Cosby was convicted on Thursday on all three counts of drugging and molesting a onetime friend in 2004, a decisive victory for prosecutors in one of the first celebrity sexual-assault trials of the #MeToo era.

Cosby, 80, best known as the lovable father from the 1980s TV hit “The Cosby Show,” faces up to 10 years in prison for each of the three counts of aggravated indecent assault of Andrea Constand, who is now 45.

Cosby looked down with a sad expression when the Pennsylvania jury’s verdict was read. Lily Bernard, one of his many accusers, began sobbing. Constand sat stone-faced.

“It’s a victory not just for the 62 of us who have come forward but for all survivors of sexual assault, female and male,” Bernard told reporters, using a high estimate of the number of Cosby’s accusers.

Outside the courtroom, two other Cosby accusers were seen hugging, crying and clapping.

Judge Steven O’Neill ruled that Cosby could remain out of jail on $1 million bail pending sentencing at a later date, and he left the courthouse.

District Attorney Kevin Steele had asked the judge to have Cosby taken into custody immediately, saying he was a flight risk in part because he owned a plane.

“He doesn’t have a plane, you asshole!” Cosby responded.

A former administrator for the women’s basketball team at Temple University, Cosby’s alma mater, Constand is one of about 50 women who have accused him of sexual assault. All of the other allegations are believed to be too old to be prosecuted. Cosby has said any sexual encounters were consensual.

The unanimous decision by the seven-man, five-woman jury came less than a year after a different jury deadlocked in his first trial on the same charges, prompting the judge to declare a mistrial. Prosecutors decided to retry him.

The first trial ended just before a flood of sexual assault and harassment accusations against rich and powerful men in media, entertainment and politics gave rise to the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. Those high-profile revelations have encouraged women in all walks of life to go public with personal stories of abuse, in some cases after years of silence.

(Reporting by David DeKok; Writing by Barbara Goldberg; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Tom Brown)

(Reuters) – An explosion at Husky Energy’s refinery in Superior, Wisconsin, injured at least five people while sending smoke billowing into the sky and shaking a building a mile away, officials at the local fire department and a hospital said on Thursday.

Four people were being treated at nearby Essentia Health-St. Mary’s Medical Center and a fifth was on the way, said a hospital spokeswoman. She described their injuries as varied, but said she could not offer further details.

There were no immediate reports of fatalities.

“The whole building shook. The lights flickered three times and the whole building shook,” Jim Ronning, owner of Hudy’s Tavern in Superior, located about a mile (1.6 km) from the facility.

Local media had earlier reported 20 people injured.

The company was responding to an incident at the refinery and emergency crews were on site, Husky spokesman Mel Duvall said, adding, “We are aware an individual has been transported to the hospital.”

Roads around the refinery have been blocked and employees evacuated, with several ambulances seen leaving the site, local media reported.

“It shook our store. Everyone was wondering what was going on. You could see the lights flickered, it knocked out one of our computers, it shook the ceiling,” said Tammie Carroll, an employee at Super One Foods in Superior, which is located about 135 miles (217 km) from Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The Superior school district, on its website, said it had been advised by police there was no need to evacuate.

Husky purchased the 38,000 barrel per day refinery from Calumet Specialty Products Partners LP last year.

Husky shares were down more than 3 percent at C$18.43 on the Toronto Stock Exchange the same day it reported financial results.

(Reporting by Vijaykumar Vedala and Arpan Varghese in Bengaluru and Stephanie Kelly in New York; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Scott Malone)