POLICY & JUSTICE — Amazon will pay $8.25 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the District of Columbia over delivery practices affecting customers in two majority-Black neighborhoods, with the settlement calling for $7.25 million in refunds to roughly 69,000 D.C. customers and a $1 million penalty paid to the District. The dispute centered on ZIP codes 20019 and 20020, which cover portions of Wards 7 and 8 east of the Anacostia River, as the lawsuit alleged Amazon excluded those ZIP codes from its in-house delivery network beginning in 2022 while continuing to charge residents the standard Prime membership price. The District alleged customers were not adequately informed that Amazon had shifted deliveries in the area to third-party carriers, including UPS and the U.S. Postal Service, contributing to longer delivery times.
LAND & LEGACY — Rev. Edward Moultrie of St. Paul CME Church and his congregation filled county meetings for nine months urging officials to reject a proposal for a massive data center near their church and homes near Walterboro, South Carolina, warning that the project would threaten the waterways they rely on and bring pollution to their doorstep—and on Monday, they won. The Southern Environmental Law Center reached an agreement with the county to establish a "Data Center Exclusion Area" that prohibits data centers across the majority of the ACE Basin in Colleton County. However, a new fossil fuel plant, partially proposed to keep data centers running, is moving forward in a majority-Black area located in Colleton County, with the methane gas power plant resulting in more than $30 million in local health care costs as residents struggle through respiratory illnesses.
BLACK EXCELLENCE — Channing Dungey is poised to oversee Paramount's cable networks, including MTV, BET, Nickelodeon, and Comedy Central, as Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery prepare to combine under the Skydance banner, with the deal scheduled to close October 6. The expanded role puts Dungey at the center of a major corporate restructuring in Hollywood, with George Cheeks, Paramount's chair of TV media, positioned above her to oversee the merged company's television studios and linear networks, including CBS, while Dungey handles the day-to-day operation of the cable brands. The move represents another significant chapter in Dungey's extraordinary career, as she became the first Black executive to lead a major U.S. broadcast network's entertainment division when she was named president of ABC Entertainment in 2016.
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