BrownCafe

Defendants allegedly sold thousands of stolen phones for top dollar in Mexico and other foreign countries.

As a UPS truck driver delivered boxes of new cell phones to a T-Mobile store in Vacaville, California this year, the unexpected happened.

An SUV pulled up and two men jumped out, ran over to the driver, and grabbed the boxes of new phones, shoving them into their car before pulling away.

Little did they know, undercover agents for the Fremont Police Department were filming the whole ordeal.

A federal appeals court found United Parcel Service Inc liable to New York state and New York City for shipping hundreds of thousands of cartons of untaxed cigarettes, but reduced its payout for damages and unpaid taxes to about $97.6 million from $247 million.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan agreed with a trial judge that UPS violated a federal anti-cigarette trafficking law and New York’s public health law by shipping the contraband cigarettes, which often came from Indian reservations.

In a 115-page decision, Circuit Judge Gerard Lynch wrote that UPS also violated its October 2005 Assurance of Discontinuance with the state not to ship cigarettes to consumers and unlicensed dealers, and that shielding it from liability “would thwart the AOD’s purpose.”

Nine years after their first e-bike pilot kicked off in Hamburg, Germany, United Parcel Service (UPS) is still testing whether or not electric-and-pedal assisted trikes can replace traditional delivery trucks in dense urban areas. Today at the South Park Blocks on the Portland State University Campus, the delivery giant hosted a large event to launch what they refer to as the “UPS Urban Solutions E-Bike” initiative.

In partnership with PSU and the City of Portland Bureau of Transportation, the initiative will deploy one electric-assisted cargo trike for a year. According to PSU officials at this morning’s event, UPS currently has two dedicated trucks that deliver packages within the university district. The intention of this new effort is to see if they can replace one of those trucks with an electric trike. UPS has launched similar pilot programs in recent years in Pittsburgh and Seattle and currently operates an e-bike deliver program in several cities around the globe including Paris, Berlin, London, Dublin, Rome, and others.