Washington Post building purchased for $159 million

Graham Holdings, the former parent of The Washington Post, has reached a deal to sell the newspaper’s longtime headquarters in downtown Washington to Carr Properties for $159 million.

The newspaper, now owned by Amazon.com founder Jeffrey Bezos, will continue to rent space in the building until it identifies a new headquarters location, a search that began before Bezos bought the paper.

Graham Holdings, which includes a mix of businesses such as Kaplan educational services, is the new post-sale name for the company owned by Donald Graham and his family.

The sale also includes the land beneath an office building Carr already owns, a 12-story, 144,000-square-foot property on 15th St.

Manager offered job back after refusing holiday work

Pizza Hut has offered to rehire the manager of a northern Indiana restaurant who was fired over his refusal to open on Thanksgiving Day.

Tony Rohr said he has worked at the Elkhart restaurant since starting as a cook more than 10 years ago, but was told to write a letter of resignation after his refusal to open. He said he declined in a meeting with his boss and instead wrote a letter explaining that he believed the company should care more about its employees.

Rohr said he was thinking about the other workers at the restaurant.

“Thanksgiving and Christmas are the only two days that they’re closed in the whole year, and they’re the only two days that those people are guaranteed to have off and spend it with their families,” Rohr said.

Pizza Hut’s corporate office issued a statement Wednesday saying it respects an employee’s right to not work on the holiday and that the store owner has agreed to reinstate Rohr.

Google accused of breaking Dutch law on data privacy

A privacy watchdog said Thursday that Google has been breaching Dutch law on personal data protection since it introduced a new privacy policy last year.

Jacob Kohnstamm, chairman of the College for the Protection of Personal Data, said that Google’s combining of data from different services, including surfing multiple websites, to tailor ads and personalize services like YouTube “spins an invisible web of our personal information, without our permission, and that is outlawed.”

In a written statement, the watchdog said Google “does not adequately inform users about the combining of their personal data from all these different services,” as required by Dutch law.

Google spokesman Al Verney said the company’s privacy policy “respects European law and allows us to create simpler, more effective services.”

– From news service reports

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