People Still Flocking To Chipotle Despite Higher Burrito Prices

Higher prices aren’t enough to keep burrito lovers away from Chipotle.

The Denver-based chain reported a 25-percent jump in profit in the second quarter from the same time a year ago. Same-store sales -- a closely watched retail metric tracking sales of stores open more than a year -- jumped 17.3 percent from a year ago.

All this despite the fact that the company raised prices over the past few months in an aim to counter food inflation.

“It seems that most customers haven’t blinked at a little bit of a menu-price increase,” Mary Chapman, the director of product innovation at Technomic, a food research firm, said before the company reported earnings.

Chipotle’s blockbuster earnings come at a time when other restaurants are struggling. Red Lobster and Olive Garden reported decreases in same-store sales during their most recent earnings reports. KFC and Pizza Hut saw sales at U.S. established stores drop 2 and 4 percent, respectively.

It helps that Chipotle has loyal customers: Chipotle consistently scores highly in “occasion driven by true loyalty,” a wonky term monitored by analysts who follow the food business. It essentially measures how often diners go to a restaurant because they seek it out, not just because it’s convenient, according to Dave Jenkins, a managing director at Datassential, a food research firm. Customers appreciate Chipotle’s “aura of health consciousness,” he said. And because they typically get so much food at Chipotle, diners see it as a good value, even with the price increases.

“For whatever reason, they crave the product,” Jenkins said.

Indeed, though price increases did help boost same-store sales figures, store traffic grew, too, according to the earnings release.

GM Has Replaced Under 20 Percent Of Ignition Switches On Recalled Small Cars

DETROIT (AP) — General Motors says it has replaced faulty ignition switches on just under 20 percent of 2.6 million small cars that are being recalled.

The company has repaired just over 491,000 cars that are covered by the recall announced in February.

Switch maker Delphi Automotive says it has produced over 1 million parts and expects to have made 2 million by the end of August. GM says it expects all parts to be made by late October.

Delphi CEO Rodney O'Neal tells lawmakers his company has added three lines to speed up production.

Some car owners have complained it's taking too long for GM to finish repairs.

The switches can slip into the accessory position and unexpectedly shut off engines. That has caused crashes that killed at least 13 people.

FedEx Charged With Knowingly Delivering Dangerous Drugs To Customers Without Prescriptions

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Federal authorities on Thursday charged FedEx with assisting illegal pharmacies by knowingly delivering painkillers and dangerous drugs to customers without prescriptions.

The indictment filed in federal court in San Francisco alleges that FedEx Corp. conspired with two related online pharmacies for 10 years ending in 2010.

The Department of Justice announced the charges in Washington, D.C. It wants FedEx to forfeit $820 million it says the cargo company earned by assisting the illicit pharmacies.

The Memphis, Tennessee-based delivery company is accused of shipping powerful sleeping aid Ambien, anti-anxiety medications Valium and Xanax, and other drugs to customers who had no legitimate medical need and lacked valid prescriptions.

FedEx insists it did nothing wrong. The world's largest cargo company says it handles 10 million packages a day and shouldn't be in charge of "assuming criminal responsibility" for every delivery.

"We will plead not guilty. We will defend against this attack on the integrity and good name of FedEx and its employees," company spokesman Patrick Fitzgerald said in a written statement.

Fitzgerald said the Drug Enforcement Agency has refused FedEx's request for a list of online pharmacies under investigation. Without such a list, Fitzgerald said it's impossible to know which companies are operating illegally.

The Justice Department alleges that federal officials have been telling FedEx since 2004 that it was shipping dangerous drug without a prescription. The indictment also alleges that FedEx couriers in Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia warned executives about suspicious drug deliveries.

FedEx first disclosed the federal investigation in a regulatory filing in November 2012.

Rival shipping company UPS Inc. paid $40 million last year to resolve similar allegations, and the Atlanta-based company said it would "take steps" to block illicit online drug dealers from using its delivery service.

Both companies said in regulatory filings that they were served with grand jury subpoenas between 2007 and 2009

The investigation of the country's two largest shippers stems from a blitz against the proliferation of online pharmacies launched in 2005 in San Francisco. Since then, dozens of arrests have been made, thousands of websites shuttered, and tens of millions of dollars and pills seized worldwide as investigators continue to broaden the probe beyond the operators.

The executive director of Express Association of America, a trade group created by FedEx, UPS and three other delivery services, said there is no industry-wide effort to address the policing of prescription drug deliveries.

"It's not the kind of issue we deal with as an association," association chief Mike Mullen said.

In 2011, Google Inc. agreed to pay $500 million to settle allegations by the Justice Department that it profited from ads for illegal online pharmacies.

A federal jury in 2012 convicted three men of operating illegal pharmacies that used FedEx and UPS to deliver drugs without proper prescriptions. Seven others were convicted in San Francisco previously.

The Gun Lobby And A Dumb Law Are Keeping Us From Safer Guns

Imagine a gun that a person could leave on his or her kitchen counter, without having to worry that someone else would fire it. That gun exists. A so-called "smart gun" uses biometrics or radio signals to stay locked until it's held by its rightful owner.

Smart guns could save some of the hundreds of lives -- many of them children's -- lost in accidental shootings every year. And they could reduce the number of shootings committed by criminals with stolen guns.

"We see things all the time where guns fall into the wrong hands," San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr told The Huffington Post. "Since we're stuck on getting any sensible gun control legislation like background checks, it seems like there would be no argument against this technology."

Yet thanks to a poorly written gun control law in one state and the efforts of overzealous pro-gun groups -- and in spite of the fact that at least $12.6 million of taxpayer money has been spent researching and developing the technology over the past 20 years -- smart guns are not available for purchase anywhere in America.

That's not for lack of trying. A few gun dealers have recently tried to sell the one model of smart gun that's currently on the market: the Armatix iP1, a .22 caliber smart gun that doesn't fire unless it's within 10 inches of a special watch. In response, they've been threatened with boycotts and violence.

In early May, almost immediately after the Washington Post reported that Engage Armament, a Maryland gun shop, would soon start selling the Armatix iP1, store owner Andy Raymond received phone calls and online messages threatening to kill him and burn his shop to the ground.

“Even by local people, people I thought were my friends,” Raymond told HuffPost. "It was one of the craziest fucking things that's ever happened to me." After being threatened, Raymond said he decided not to sell the gun at all.

Andy Raymond, the owner of a Maryland gun shop, said he got death threats after announcing he would sell the Armatix smart gun.

THE 'SMART' LAW THAT BACKFIRED

The threats on his life, Raymond explained, came from pro-gun fanatics who were afraid that his decision to sell the Armatix smart gun would trigger an obscure, 14-year-old law in New Jersey.

The law, which was passed in 2002 after aggressive lobbying by gun control groups and in anticipation of the sunsetting Federal Assault Weapons Ban, mandates that once a smart gun goes on sale anywhere in the country, all other types of guns in New Jersey will be banned within three years.

The law’s intention was to make child-proof guns more common. “We were just hearing the beginning of the stories of research into that area [of smart guns]. So one reason was to help spread development,” New Jersey Sen. Loretta Weinberg (D), the law’s author, told HuffPost. “Second, we thought once those guns were available, we assumed that most people would want those. So that in case some child finds a way to get into Mom or Dad’s gun locker, the kid can’t use it.”

Yet in practice, the law freaked out the National Rifle Association and other gun groups, who thought it violated their right to bear arms. “The ‘smart guns’ issue clearly has the potential to mesh with the anti-gunner's agenda, opening the door to a ban on all guns that do not possess the government-required technology,” the NRA says on its website.

Even smart gun manufacturers and smart gun advocates interviewed by HuffPost said mandate laws like New Jersey’s, which have been proposed at the federal level and in other states like California and Maryland, are ill-conceived.

Bill Gentry, whose company Kodiak Industries makes the "Intelligun," a fingerprint scanner that can be added to the grip of some handguns, said forcing people to buy a certain kind of weapon is wrongheaded. "This is simply an additional level of safety that people have the right to choose," he said.

Above, the fingerprint scanner made by Kodiak Industries in Utah.

The New Jersey law puts pressure on gun lobby groups to prevent the technology from coming into the marketplace, said Donald Sebastian, the senior vice president for research and development at New Jersey Institute of Technology, where a team is currently developing a gun that stays locked until it recognizes the owner's grip.

"Because the technology has become so wrapped up in mandate legislation, it opens the door to making this a debate about gun control instead of about gun safety," Sebastian said. “It adds logs to the fire.”

Because the New Jersey law ended up chilling the very market it was supposed to create, Weinberg told HuffPost she'll repeal it. But first, she wants the NRA to publicly promise not to block the manufacture or sale of smart guns.

“That would go a long way toward finding common ground,” she said.

Weinberg said she wrote the NRA a letter in May with her offer, but “hasn’t heard a word” from them since. The organization has been equally mum in responding to HuffPost's repeated requests for comment.

Though the NRA says that it's not opposed to smart guns at face value -- only to laws that mandate their use -- it spreads myths and conspiracy theories about smart guns on its popular social media accounts. Those include the idea that smart guns can be remotely disabled by the government or that they would be used as a way to surveil gun owners.

The NRA also has a history of opposing smart gun technology: after Smith and Wesson partnered with the Clinton administration in 2000 to develop a personalized gun, the NRA led a boycott of the company that nearly devastated it. Fourteen years later, gun control advocates say, that episode still has a chilling effect on firearms dealers and manufacturers.

"For the largest handgun maker in America to basically get put out of business," said John Rosenthal of Stop Handgun Violence, "that scared the entire industry."

Smart gun developers have had trouble finding gun makers to partner with. "It's fear of the NRA that seems to be holding them back," Robert McNamara, a founder of technology startup TriggerSmart Technologies, recently told HuffPost. McNamara's startup patented its own smart gun model about two years ago, but hasn't been able to find a gun manufacturer to take on the project.

Robert McNamara of TriggerSmart (right) poses with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

"[Gun manufacturers] say, 'Get the NRA on board and then we'll make guns childproof,'" McNamara said. "Until then, they are too afraid of the backlash."

Jim Schaff, the vice president of Yardarm Technologies, a wireless firearm technology company in northern California, told HuffPost that he changed the course of his company because of the intense opposition to smart guns.

Yardarm originally set out to design a gun that could be remotely disabled through an app, Schaff said. But he "quickly realized" how much resistance there would be from America's pro-gun forces to a consumer firearm that could be remotely shut down.

"The path to the consumer market is a challenging path," he admitted in a recent interview. "Lawmakers make their own issues by being very aggressive, which of course causes the NRA to be very aggressive, which then makes companies like us have to navigate that. As a startup there is only so much risk you can afford."

So last year, Schaff said, Yardarm abandoned plans to make a smart gun for consumers, and decided to develop a new technology for police and military guns instead: a sensor that recognizes when and where the gun is fired and transmits that information back to command centers.

Above, a graphic of Yardarm's gun, which the company will market to police and the military. The green plate in the grip is the sensor, which transmits information from the field to command centers.

SMART ENOUGH?

Critics of the Armatix iP1 say that the time it takes to put on a watch before you can fire a gun could be fatal in a dangerous situation.

One way around that, McNamara said, would be to have the tiny electronic chip that communicates with the gun surgically embedded in a person's hand. The chip, which is used in both Armatix and TriggerSmart’s smart guns, sends a radio signal to unlock the pistol.

For people who don’t want surgery, there are other smart gun models that theoretically eliminate the concern over having to put a watch on in a dangerous situation where time is of the essence. The grip-recognizing sensor in models from both Intelligun and the New Jersey Institute of Technology can unlock a firearm the instant the right person picks it up.

Yet availability is an issue. The New Jersey Institute of Technology's model isn't ready for purchase yet, and the Intelligun fingerprint scanner can only be added onto a specific type of handgun.

The Armatix iP1, a .22 caliber pistol that won't fire unless the shooter is wearing a special watch.

According to a 2013 industry analysis by the National Institute of Justice, the only other smart gun development project said to be "commercializable" -- the iGun, a shotgun that won't fire unless the shooter is wearing a special ring -- was shelved after the company that makes it polled consumers and found limited demand for the product.

Second Amendment advocates say that any gun that relies on a battery to work -- which all the models discussed here do -- poses a risk because batteries can fail. "But who among us has not experienced a drained smart phone battery or had some other piece of electronic gadgetry not work, even a flashlight, fail when we needed it," reads a December blog post by Larry Keane of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade organization for gun manufacturers.

Some also worry that even if a gun's batteries are fully charged, the technology itself will fail, leaving law-abiding citizens vulnerable in dangerous situations. “You can be trained how to overcome the malfunction [of a regular gun] quickly and efficiently,” said Larry Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners Of America, a lobby group with about 400,000 members. “But if it’s inherent in the product, you're stuck.”

WILL PEOPLE BUY THEM?

Even without the threat of mandate laws, the gun industry is notoriously slow to innovate. “It’s a very conservative industry,” said Massad Ayoob, a self defense instructor and the handgun editor at GUNS Magazine. “Proven reliability is a paramount concern, and for that reason [the industry] has been reluctant to go to anything radical.”

The industry also has a history of rebuffing gun safety technology, say gun control advocates. "For decades there have been safety devices that accomplish similar objectives to smart guns that are less tech-advanced and less expensive," said Jonathan Lowy of the Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence. He pointed to magazine disconnect safeties and gun locks, which require keys to unlock the firearm, as examples. "And they are still not the industry norm. The gun industry has essentially ignored them," he said.

A smart gun model made by the New Jersey Institute of Technology detects the unique grip of the person authorized to use it.

Not only could personalized weapons be a boon for gun safety, they could also be a lucrative way for gun makers to reach a new market of "fence sitters" -- people who won't buy a regular gun because they think it's too dangerous, but who might buy a smart gun. A national poll commissioned last year by the National Shooting Sports Foundation found 14 percent of respondents said they would be likely to buy a smart gun if such a product were available. Sebastian said those numbers could be much higher. NJIT did its own polling in New Jersey in 2004, he said, and found over 60-70 percent favorability towards the idea of personalized weapons.

The recent rise in mass shootings has reignited interest in making affordable guns with access control systems that can block unwanted users. Groups from Newtown to Silicon Valley are offering funding for people developing such technology. But in the current climate, it seems unlikely that those efforts will lead to user-recognizing guns becoming widely available anytime soon.

Personalized weapons could also be helpful to undercover police officers, said Suhr, the San Francisco Police chief. "Our uniformed officers already have gun safety mechanisms on their holsters, but our plainclothes officers don't always have those same safety mechanisms. I think smart guns on plainclothes officers would make it safer for them [to do their jobs]," he said.

Meanwhile, TriggerSmart hopes a smaller gun manufacturer, one that doesn't have significant market share to lose, will step up to the plate and license his patent. Until then, he -- like the rest of us -- will have to wait.

"That's the missing piece of the jigsaw," McNamara said. "We have the tech. We know it works. We just need a gun manufacturer to say, 'Let's do it.'"

Apple Teams Up With Long-Time Tech Rival IBM

CUPERTINO, Calif. (AP) — Apple is teaming up with former nemesis IBM in an attempt to sell more iPhones and iPads to corporate customers.

The exclusive partnership announced Tuesday calls for the two technology companies to work together on about 100 different mobile applications designed for a wide range of industries.

The applications, expected to be released this fall, will feature some of the data-crunching tools that IBM Corp. sells to companies trying to get a better grasp on main markets while scouring for new money-making opportunities.

IBM is also pledging to provide better security to reassure companies concerned about hackers stealing vital information off the mobile devices of their employees.

The partnership underscores how technological upheaval can change allegiances. Apple Inc. and IBM were once bitter rivals when they both made personal computers.

Hobby Lobby Wants To Control Which Bathroom A Transgender Woman Can Use, Too

Meggan Sommerville

In the days after the Supreme Court handed Hobby Lobby a sweeping victory in its fight to not provide employee health insurance that covers certain kinds of birth control, many customers came into the store in Aurora, Illinois, where Meggan Sommerville works, and offered their congratulations.

Hobby Lobby is a chain of craft stores whose founder says he tries to run the company in accordance with his Christian principles. Sommerville has worked there for 16 years. She loves her job and the store, which she said pays a good wage and carries supplies that she’s used for many of her own crafting projects.

Still, the congratulations from customers were hard to swallow. "I'd smile and nod and say, 'Yes, it's a victory for the company,' and then I'd push my real feelings down and not think about it anymore."

Sommerville is a transgender woman, and back in 2011, she filed a complaint against Hobby Lobby with the Illinois Department of Human Rights after the company refused to allow her to use the women's bathroom either as a customer or an employee.

She was never given an explanation. But Sommerville said she sees a connection with Hobby Lobby's argument that Christian principles should excuse it from covering some contraceptives.

"I don't believe that any company has the right to deny access to appropriate medical care, same as the reason why I don't believe that they have the right to deny me access to the washroom," she said in a recent phone call with The Huffington Post. "No company has the right to dictate what is decided between me and my doctor."

Sommerville transitioned to living as a woman in 2010. For the most part, colleagues and management were supportive, trying their best to use her new name and the right pronoun. That summer, she formally changed her name in court and received a new Social Security card and driver's license. A month later, Hobby Lobby provided her with a new name tag that finally matched how she saw herself.

But management refused to budge on one issue: They insisted that Sommerville continue to use the men's restroom. According to Sommerville, she was told she would only be allowed to use the women's restroom if she provided proof that she had undergone genital reconstructive surgery. Neither the state of Illinois nor the federal government require this surgery for a person to legally change his or her gender.

"I was devastated," Sommerville said. "I just want to be treated like all the other women. To do anything else diminishes who I am in the eyes of customers and employees."

Going to the bathroom became an embarrassing ordeal, where she was constantly worried about outing herself to customers or colleagues who didn't know her history. "There have been a few times when a customer has come in and I have essentially been trapped in the stall while I wait for the person to leave," she said. "The stories of trans women that have come under attack are always on my mind when I am forced to use the men's room. At the very least, I don't want to make a scene."

Sommerville's human rights complaint alleges that the company discriminated against her and "subjected her to unequal terms and conditions due to her gender identity." Through a representative, Hobby Lobby declined to comment on her case, which is still awaiting a ruling from the Illinois Human Rights Commission.

Hobby Lobby has not argued that religious principles influenced its refusal to allow Sommerville to use the women's bathroom. But her lawyer, Jacob Meister, pointed to a recent Salon.com article on how Hobby Lobby, its executives and affiliated companies are pouring millions of dollars into organizations and causes that seek to advance conservative Christian values and oppose lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights.

"I think the facts speak for themselves. Hobby Lobby has very actively sought to impose what it believes the law should be wherever possible, and it has thrown a lot of money behind these efforts," Meister said.

"I have absolutely no possible explanation for why they would so flagrantly ignore what's very clear in Illinois law," Meister continued. "Meggan is a female, she's been full-time for many years, and they will not allow her to use the women's restroom, which is something that is afforded to every female employee that they have except for Meggan, every female customer they have except for transgender folk."

In the weeks since the Supreme Court's June 30 ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, LGBT advocates and legal experts have picked over Justice Samuel Alito Jr.'s majority opinion, trying to gauge whether it gives corporations or institutions with religious affiliations carte blanche to discriminate against LGBT individuals.

Ilona Turner, legal director at the Transgender Law Center, said she thinks that it does not. Still, she said, "I could imagine that employers will attempt nonetheless to try to push the boundaries of that decision, to argue that their religious values give them a right to discriminate."

Sommerville's issue is one of the most common faced by transgender people in the workplace, Turner said. While religion is not often mentioned explicitly in connection with lawsuits arising from similar scenarios, it is often "in the background," she said.

Last year, California passed a law allowing transgender students to use facilities and participate in programs in accordance with their gender identity. That has fueled fears among conservative Christian groups that the rest of the states would soon follow.

After Phoenix, Arizona, passed a similar law in February 2013, Joseph LaRue, a lawyer with the Alliance Defending Freedom, a national Christian legal organization, wrote a blog post calling the measure "appalling" and arguing that it "provided voyeurs and other sexual predators easy access to the places where children and women are most vulnerable." According to Salon, the Alliance Defending Freedom is one of the groups heavily funded by Hobby Lobby profits.

Sommerville, a Christian herself, hopes that her human rights complaint may help change the culture at Hobby Lobby, at least on this particular issue. "I think any time somebody stands up for their rights to be respected, to be treated equally, it can make a change."

National Teachers' Union Expected To Join Staples Boycott

In an expected show of solidarity with postal employee unions, the 1.6 million-member American Federation of Teachers will vote Saturday on a proposal to boycott Staples.

A leading postal employee union launched a boycott of the office supplies retailer earlier this year, after the U.S. Postal Service announced a new pilot program that would offer certain postal services at select Staples stores. With those services to be handled by non-union Staples employees, the American Postal Workers Union and its allies have criticized the move as a deliberate step toward privatization of the post office.

With the AFT possibly entering the fray, the boycott stands a reasonable chance of hurting Staples' bottom line, especially just ahead of back-to-school season. Nearly all U.S. teachers shell out some of their own money to buy school supplies. According to one survey, the typical teacher spends hundreds of dollars per year to help stock the classroom.

The AFT will consider the boycott Saturday during the union's convention in Los Angeles. A draft of the resolution states that union members, as well as their family members and friends, would be "urged to no longer shop at Staples stores until further notice."

Due to the pilot program, "nonunion 'postal' jobs at Staples will inevitably replace living-wage, union jobs of U.S. Postal Service employees," the resolution says. "[T]he American Federation of Teachers supports the American Postal Workers Union in its efforts to protect well-paying jobs and its insistence on the highest possible standards of customer service."

Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, previously told HuffPost that the union didn't object to the pilot program per se -- only to the fact that Staples' postal counters wouldn't be "staffed with United States postal employees, in uniform, under oath and accountable to the people and sworn to protect the sanctity, security and safety of the mail."

A Staples spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.

USA Today first reported that the AFT was weighing the boycott. According to the paper, the president of the National Education Association, the other leading teachers' union with roughly 3 million members, has notified the postmaster general that his union supports the postal employees.

The AFT was also planning a Staples protest in Los Angeles for Saturday.

At the convention, AFT President Randi Weingarten was expected to announce that the union had added more than 64,000 new members on net since its last gathering in 2012, according to a union spokesperson. The new members came from both inside and outside education, as the union has organized more nurses and health care workers, as well as non-school public employees. Last year, four state nurses' unions affiliated with the AFT, adding 30,000 members.

The new members have helped offset losses due to education budget cuts during the recession and weak recovery, as well as new laws aimed at weakening public sector unions in places like Wisconsin.

Crumbs Bake Shop Closes: Cupcake Chain Shuttering Stores In 12 States And Washington D.C.

NEW YORK (AP) — Crumbs says it is shuttering all its stores, a week after the struggling cupcake shop operator was delisted from the Nasdaq.

The New York City-based company said all employees were notified of the closures Monday. A representative for Crumbs could not immediately say how many workers were affected or how many stores it had remaining on its last day.

"Regrettably Crumbs has been forced to cease operations and is immediately attending to the dislocation of its employees while it evaluates its limited remaining options," the company said in an emailed statement. That will include filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation.

A press release from its website in March listed 65 locations in 12 states and Washington, D.C. The website had not been updated with notification of the closures late Monday.

Crumbs was founded in 2003 and went public in 2011, selling giant cupcakes in flavors including Cookie Dough and Girl Scouts Thin Mints. More recently, however, it had been suffering from a steep decline in sales. For the three months ending March 31, Crumbs Bake Shop Inc. reported a loss of $3.8 million, steeper than the loss of $2 million from the same period a year ago.

The company had warned in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission this past May that it "may be forced to curtail or cease its activities" if its operations didn't generate enough cash flow.

As of the end of last year, Crumbs listed about 165 full-time employees and about 655 part-time hourly employees working in its stores.

Google Restores Links To Some News Articles After Outcry

(Reuters) - Google Inc GOOGL.O GOOG.O on Thursday reversed its decision to remove several links to stories in Britain's Guardian newspaper, underscoring the difficulty the search engine is having implementing Europe's "right to be forgotten" ruling.

The Guardian protested the removal of its stories describing how a soccer referee lied about reversing a penalty decision. It was unclear who asked Google to remove the stories.

Separately, Google has not restored links to a BBC article that described how former Merrill Lynch Chief Executive Officer E. Stanley O'Neal was ousted after the investment bank racked up billions of dollars in losses.

The incidents underscore the uncertainty around how Google intends to adhere to a May European court ruling that gave its citizens the "right to be forgotten:" to request the scrubbing of links to articles that pop up under a name search.

Privacy advocates say the backlash around press censorship highlight the potential dangers of the ruling and its unwieldiness in practice. That in turn may benefit Google by stirring debate about the soundness of the ruling, which the Internet search leader criticized the ruling from the outset.

Google, which has received more than 70,000 requests, began acting upon them in past days. And it notified the BBC and the Guardian, which in turn publicized the moves.

The incidents suggest that requesting removal of a link may actually bring the issue back into the public spotlight, rather than obscure it. That possibility may give people pause before submitting a "right to be forgotten" request.

"At least as it looks now, there are definitely some unworkable components," said Electronic Frontier Foundation activist Parker Higgins. "We've seen a number of situations in the past few days, where somebody in an effort to get a certain thing forgotten has brought more attention to it than ever was there before."

"It does make you think that maybe if you're actually trying to make an episode of your history be forgotten, this channel maybe isn’t the best way."

Google's objective is to protect the reliability and effectiveness of its search franchise. It remains uncertain how it adjudicates requests, or how they intend to carry them out going forward.

"Their current approach appears to be an overly broad interpretation," a spokeswoman for the Guardian said. "If the purpose of the judgment is not to enable censorship of publishers by the back door, then we'd encourage Google to be transparent about the criteria it is using to make these decisions, and how publishers can challenge them."

Google, which controls more than 90 percent of European online searches, said it was a learning process.

“This is a new and evolving process for us. We’ll continue to listen to feedback and will also work with data protection authorities and others as we comply with the ruling,” the company said in a statement.

Notifying media outlets about scrubbed links has the effect of enhancing transparency, privacy advocates say. It might also prompt European courts to re-examine aspects of the ruling, including how it affects media outlets' coverage.

"It’s terra incognito for everyone," said Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "If sites that receive the notices choose to publicize them in ways that end up boomeranging against the people requesting, that might cause the courts to examine what those sites are doing."

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic in San Francisco and Aurindom Mukherjee in Bangalore; Editing by Kirti Pandey and Lisa Shumaker)

Burger King Supports LGBT Rights With 'Proud Whopper' And 'Be Your Way' Campaign

In what could be a first for a global fast food outlet, Burger King is making a bold proclamation in support of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community with the launch of a specially packaged burger.

The "Be Your Way" project was created at a Burger King franchise in San Francisco, where a limited edition "Proud Whopper" sandwich was added to the menu to coincide with the city's annual pride festivities. According to press materials, guests who ordered the "Proud Whopper" found that the sandwich was the same as a classic Whooper, but came wrapped in a rainbow-colored wrapper with the inscription, "We are all the same inside."

Take a look at the "Proud Whopper" below, then scroll down to keep reading:

The burger's release was documented in a short "Be Your Way" film, which was released on Burger King's YouTube page and can be viewed at top.

We are always looking to engage our guests on a local level and be part of regionally relevant events,” said Kelly Gomez, Director of West Coast Field Marketing, Burger King West Division, in an email statement. Given that a Burger King franchise was perfectly situated along the San Francisco Pride Parade route, she added, "It was a natural fit to be involved and celebrate by giving something back to the community.”

The "Proud Whopper" is available exclusively at the Burger King restaurant located at 1200 Market Street in San Francisco through July 3. Meanwhile, proceeds from the sales of the sandwich will be donated to the Burger King McLamore Foundation for scholarships benefiting LGBT college-bound high school students who graduate next year.

Last month, Baked by Melissa introduced a special Wildberry Pride cupcake to express their support for the LGBT community, while Charm City Cakes (made famous on "Ace of Cakes") designed a speciality T-shirt emblazoned with a rainbow logo.

Meanwhile, Starbucks marked the 40th anniversary of Seattle Pride by raising an enormous 800 square foot rainbow flag over its headquarters in the Evergreen State, while Lucky Charms and Levi's Jeans also introduced special LGBT-relevant campaigns in June.