But don’t worry, the beverage company apparently just thinks human slavery is hilarious.
Sobe / Via sobe.com
Facebook / Via Facebook: sobe
The Sheriff of Cook County, Illinois, asked Visa and MasterCard to cut ties with the site, alleging its service contributes to “increasing the enslavement of prostituted individuals, including children.”
Via backpage.com
Both MasterCard and Visa have stopped processing payments for the adult personals site Backpage.com, cutting the site's access to the world's two dominant payment networks.
Visa said in a statement that it had "taken action to stop processing payments for backpage.com," and that the company's rules "prohibit our network from being used for illegal activity. Visa has a long history of working with law enforcement to safeguard the integrity of the payment system."
Seth Eisen, a MasterCard spokesperson, told BuzzFeed News that the company "has rules that prohibit our cards from being used for illegal or brand-damaging activities."
American Express has also voluntarily cut off its support for Backpage, a spokesperson confirmed.
Backpage's local classifieds sites include sections advertising escorts, body rubs, strippers and "adult jobs." The site, which was spun off from Village Voice Media Holdings in 2012, has long been accused by politicians and activists of facilitating human trafficking, especially of children.
The Sheriff of Cook Country, Thomas Dart, sent letters to Visa and MasterCard requesting the cut off on Monday. The letter addressed to Visa chief executive Charlie Scharf said Backpage was "objectively found to promote prostitution and facilitate online sex trafficking," and that "the unfettered proliferation of websites like Backpage.com has provided this violent industry with a mask of normalcy, driving demand ever higher and increasing the enslavement of prostituted individuals, including children."
Backpage could not be reached for comment.
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart
M. Spencer Green / AP
Sheriff Dart, whose county is the second-largest in the United States by population and covers Chicago and surrounding areas, has taken an aggressive stance against sex trafficking, leading a "National Day of Johns Arrests" earlier this year.
"I was stunned at how quickly Visa and MasterCard moved to say they weren't going to be involved in that anymore, they were incredible corporate citizens," Dart told BuzzFeed News.
While Dart celebrated his success in isolating the site from the financial system, some said it extended a troubling precedent of government figures using the financial system, instead of the legal process, to crack down on businesses or individuals. Most famously, Wikileaks was cut off from the Visa and MasterCard networks after publishing confidential government documents, although the organization and its leaders were not charged with any crimes over the publication.
"We shouldn't have informal pressure from public officials forcing financial service companies into deciding which types of speech should and shouldn't be allowed," Rainey Reitman, activism director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told USA Today in response to the Backpage news. "MasterCard and Visa are not supposed to be the arbiters of free speech on the Internet."
Dart's letters said there are 20,000 ads posted on Backpage in the Chicago area each month and that each of the 800 times Dart's office has responded to them, "we have made an arrest for crimes ranging from prostitution to child trafficking."
"I don't want to say we exhausted all the other strategies, but we tried the lawsuit angle and that did not work, we tried ongoing negotiation with Backpage about making this a responsible site that was not facilitating crimes that got us absolutely nowhere," Dart said.
Dart sued Craigslist in 2009 over its own adult services page, which was ultimately unsuccessful. While Craigslist shut down its adult services page voluntarily in 2010, legal efforts to go after Backpage have been unsuccessful because the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 law, has generally protected web services that host outside content posted by third parties.
Sex workers and those posting adult ads on Backpage will no longer be able to pay for the ads with credit cards. "It will make the average trafficker or pimp's life much more difficult, which was my goal," Dart said.
Winton in 2009.
Peter Macdiarmid / Getty Images
Sir Nicholas Winton — the British man who saved more than 650 children from certain death in Holocaust concentration camps by smuggling them out of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and into Britain, only to keep his heroism a secret for more than half a century — died Wednesday at age 106.
His death was confirmed by the Rotary Club in the English town of Maidenhead, of which he was a former president.
"It is with much sadness we have to report that Sir Nicky Winton died peacefully early this morning," the club said in a statement. "Nicky’s daughter Barbara and two grandchildren were with him when he died and Barbara said that he was aware of their presence."
It is estimated some 6,000 people around the world have descended from the 669 Jewish children whose escape from the Nazis Winton helped to mastermind.
According to his local Maidenhead newspaper, Winton died exactly 76 years to the day that a train left Prague carrying 241 children he helped to save.
“Your life is an example of humanity, selflessness, personal courage, and modesty," Czech President Miloš Zeman said to Winton in announcing his decision to award him the Order of the Lion, his country's highest honor in 2014.
Petr David Josek / AP
Born May 19, 1909, Winton was a 29-year-old stockbroker when he decided to cancel a planned skiing trip in Switzerland in late 1938 and instead visit Prague, the Czech capital, to assist refugee workers following the Nazi occupation.
The British government had recently voted to allow Jewish refugees under 17 into the country, in response to the series of co-ordinated attacks against Jews in November 1939 known as Kristallnacht. However, authorities also mandated that the children's entry into Britain was conditional upon their having a family with which to stay, as well as a deposit of £50 to be used to eventually return them to their home country.
Dreading what fate awaited the children should they remain in a Nazi-controlled territory, Winton worked in Britain to raise funds, navigate the complex international bureaucracy, and convince families to take in the children, while colleagues worked in Prague as part of the 'Kindertransport' program.
"One day my father called my brother and me and he said, 'Sit down boys, you're going on a long journey'," one of the rescued childred, John Fieldsend, now 84, told the BBC. "As the train was leaving my mother took her wristwatch off, passed it through the window and simply said, 'Remember us.'"
The original legal documents of one of the so-called "Winton's children."
Toby Melville / Reuters
He was ultimately successful in having eight trainloads of children arrive in London, but a ninth train carrying 250 children was unsuccessful, having been scheduled to leave Prague on Sep. 1, 1939 -- the day the Nazis invaded Poland and all borders were closed.
The families of many of the children Winton helped to save would eventually perish in the Holocaust.
"We didn't know we wouldn't see our parents again," another rescued child, Lia Lesser, now 84, told the BBC. "I think they must have known there was a good chance they wouldn't see us again, and they were very brave to let us go."
Winton's heroism was often compared to that of Oskar Schindler, a Nazi party member who secretly helped to save the lives of more than one thousand Jews by employing them in his wartime factories and who was the subject of the 1993 Steven Spielberg film Schindler's List.
He did not speak publicly about his actions, even to his wife Greta, until she discovered a scrapbook in their attic listing the names of the children saved.
Winton was then was featured on a 1988 British television show -- and surprised by numerous people who stood as one when asked, "Is there anyone in our audience tonight who owes their life to Nicholas Winton?"
Among the official recognition he received for his heroism, Winton was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2003 and was honored with a commendation by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2007.
"The world has lost a great man," British Prime Minister David Cameron said Wednesday. "We must never forget Sir Nicholas Winton's humanity in saving so many children from the Holocaust."
In a 1939 letter, penned as he worked to help the children escape, Winton wrote: "There is a difference between passive goodness and active goodness, which is, in my opinion, the giving of one's time and energy in the alleviation of pain and suffering. It entails going out, finding and helping those in suffering and danger and not merely in leading an exemplary life in a purely passive way of doing no wrong."'
