New Mexicans to Know: Colliers New Mexico-El Paso hires a new managing director from the East Coast

A key driver has been "over-buying for a pandemic-related demand peak that was unsustainable in any environment," according to an Evercore analyst. Retailers bought so much stuff during the pandemic that it may be causing a 'freight recession,' an analyst says.Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Executives at trucking giant JB Hunt recently sounded the alarm about a freight recession. The pullback is impacting the prices of commodities such as diesel. Over-buying during the pandemic is depressing the demand for goods, which is impacting freight and transport.  Executives at trucking giant JB Hunt sounded the alarm over a "freight recession" at a first-quarter conference call last week.A freight recession basically means there are fewer trucks delivering goods across America. The pullback is impacting the prices of commodities such as diesel, a key industrial fuel, Insider's Phil Rosen reported Wednesday.One of the key factors contributing to the freight recession is a demand slump resulting from retailers jacking up purchases during the COVID-19 pandemic, Jonathan Chappell, a senior managing director at global advisory firm Evercore, told Insider. This is even overburdening warehouses."The primary drivers have been over-buying for a pandemic-related demand peak that was unsustainable in any environment, let alone amid a slowing macro backdrop rife with elevated inflation and a weakening consumer," Chappell said.The destocking process for retail inventories has been "much longer and more painful than anticipated," he added. All these factors are also hitting freight rates. The American Trucking Association's for-hire contract truck tonnage index dropped by about 6% month-on-month to 95.8 in March, hitting the lowest level since August 2021.The impact on the trucking network comes as ocean freight orders are falling. Consider the latest data from two of the biggest ports in the US, as scraped by CNBC.The Port of New York and New Jersey — the longest container port on the east coast — saw container-handling rates drop from about 862,000 20-foot equivalent units in March 2022 to around 575,000 last month. The Port of Los Angeles, one of the busiest ports on the west coast, handled around 960,000 20-foot equivalent units in March 2022. That dropped to about 623,000 units this March.Notably, the freight recession is not a US-only problem. "The freight recession is global, starting in Europe, moving to Asia, and now most directly impacting the US market," Chappell said, adding that the recession has been ongoing "in some form" for the last 12 months.An impending economic recession is also weighing on demand."We're seeing contractions in global manufacturing PMIs and I think it correlates to less spending on goods and the need to work down excess inventories," Peter Boockvar, the chief investment officer of Bleakley Financial Group, told CNBC in a Monday report. The Purchasing Managers' Index is a measure of how purchasing managers view market conditions in the manufacturing and service sectors.Consumers are still spending on experiences like travel, leisure, and restaurants, but they are leaning towards non-discretionary goods, leading to less stuff being produced and thus transported, Boockvar added.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

 GFP Real Estate, LLC is pleased to announce it has closed on a $191,000,000 interest-only permanent/construction loan for 40 Worth St., an 800,000-square-foot, full-block office building located between West Broadway & Church Street in TriBeCa.   The new seven-year loan—provided by a group of banks led by Wells Fargo that includes... The post GFP Real Estate Closes on $191M Loan for 40 Worth St. in TriBeCa appeared first on Real Estate Weekly.  GFP Real Estate, LLC is pleased to announce it has closed on a $191,000,000 interest-only permanent/construction loan for 40 Worth St., an 800,000-square-foot, full-block office building located between West Broadway & Church Street in TriBeCa.   The new seven-year loan—provided by a group of banks led by Wells Fargo that includes TD Bank and BankUnited—will be used primarily to facilitate the construction of The Legal Aid Society’s new 198,900-square-foot offices at the building.  The initial funding of approximately $155,700,000 was fixed at closing, while the remaining $35,300,000 will be drawn over the next 18 to 24 months as construction continues.  The Legal Aid Society is expected to occupy the majority of its newly built space (125k SF) in August 2022 and the remaining balance of the space (75k SF) in March 2023. The Legal Aid Society, known as the “largest, most influential social justice law firm in New York City,” signed a 30-year commercial office condominium lease at 40 Worth St. in June 2021, expanding its footprint at the building from 75,000 square feet—a move that consolidates the non-profit’s offices from nearby locations at 199 Water St. and 80 Pine St., respectively. The new loan replaces an existing $150,000,000 loan provided by Capital One and TD Bank in 2015 that was to mature in July of 2025.  Paul Talbot, senior managing director of Newmark, represented GFP Real Estate in securing the new loan.   “Arranging a loan that required both construction and permanent funding for an office building in NYC made it imperative that the lenders understood the makeup and structure of the building’s tenants, as well as the strong, long-term ownership of GFP Real Estate,” said Talbot. Major tenants at the 100-percent leased building include the east coast headquarters of iconic fashion brand The Gap, The Acumen Fund, The Innocence Project, Legal Services NYC, Public Health Solutions, Weill Cornell and The Center for Family Representation, among others.  40 Worth St. has been a magnet for major non-profits and large corporations for many years and has continued to see strong leasing activity throughout—and following—the pandemic, leasing more than 300,000 square feet of new leases over the past year alone. “40 Worth has continued to attract major companies and non-profits that are drawn to the building’s incredible downtown location, open floor plans and eclectic tenant mix,” said Jeffrey Gural, Chairman and Principal of GFP Real Estate.  “Despite challenges faced by the pandemic, the building has remained an incredibly stable asset.” 40 Worth Street is a neo-classical building, also known as the Merchants Square Building, that was built in 1929 by the architectural firm of Jardine, Hill & Murdock. Situated in upscale Tribeca in Manhattan, the building totals nearly 800,000 square feet, and occupies a full block from Worth Street to Thomas Street between West Broadway & Church Street.  With large, efficient floorplates and oversized windows throughout, the building offers abundant natural light and exceptional city views, catering to small, medium and large tenants alike.   The post GFP Real Estate Closes on $191M Loan for 40 Worth St. in TriBeCa appeared first on Real Estate Weekly......»»

(To receive weekly emails of conversations with the world’s top CEOs and business decisionmakers, click here.) Nearly two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, business leaders are heading into 2022 facing the strong headwinds of the Omicron variant, continued pressure on supply chains, and the great resignation looming over the labor market. TIME asked top leaders… (To receive weekly emails of conversations with the world’s top CEOs and business decisionmakers, click here.) Nearly two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, business leaders are heading into 2022 facing the strong headwinds of the Omicron variant, continued pressure on supply chains, and the great resignation looming over the labor market. TIME asked top leaders from across the world of business to share their priorities and expectations for the year ahead. Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, wants to leverage the advances his pharmaceutical company has made in fighting COVID-19 to tackle other diseases, while Rosalind “Roz” Brewer, CEO of Walgreens Boots Alliance, has made improving access to healthcare one of her goals over the next year. GoFundMe CEO Tim Cadogan says building trust will be at the heart of decision-making at the crowdfunding platform—both with workers and its wider community. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Innovation is key to Intel CEO Patrick P. Gelsinger and Forerunner Ventures founder and managing partner Kirsten Green. And Rothy’s CEO Stephen Hawthornthwaite, Albemarle CEO Kent Masters, and Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, shared their suggestions for how companies and policymakers can respond to persistent supply chains problems. Read on to see how some of the most powerful people in business envision the coming year. (These answers have been condensed and edited for clarity.) What are the biggest opportunities and challenges you expect in the year ahead? Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer: The scientific advancements made by Pfizer and others over the past year have brought us very powerful tools to battle the worst pandemic of our lives. But, unfortunately, we don’t see everyone using them. I am concerned about the limited infrastructure and resources in the poorest countries as they struggle to administer their supply of COVID-19 vaccines to their people. Some of these countries have asked us to pause our deliveries of doses while they work to address these issues. While I am proud of the work Pfizer has done to make vaccines available to low- and lower middle-income countries over the past year, we need to find new ways to support the World Health Organization as they work with NGOs and governments to address these infrastructure issues. Getty ImagesAlbert Bourla, CEO, Pfizer Over the next year I’d like us to help find solutions to issues like the shortage of medical professionals, vaccine hesitancy due to limited educational campaigns, lack of equipment and even roads to allow timely delivery of vaccines. Throughout every chapter of this pandemic, we have been reminded of the importance of collaboration and innovative thinking. We need to work harder than ever before to address these health inequities so that people around the globe are protected from the virus. Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel: Throughout the history of technology, we’ve seen the pendulum swinging between centralized and decentralized computing. And there is still a tremendous untapped opportunity in edge computing as we bring greater intelligence to devices such as sensors and cameras in everything from our cars to manufacturing to the smart grid. Edge computing will not replace cloud; we’re swinging back to where decentralized compute becomes the primary growth for new workloads because the inference and AI analysis will take place at the edge. Technology has the power to improve the lives of every person on earth and Intel plays a foundational role within. We aim to lead in the opportunity for every category in which we compete. Roz Brewer, CEO of Walgreens: The pandemic affirmed Walgreens as a trusted neighborhood health destination to help our customers and patients manage their health. We provide essential care to our communities, including administering more than 50 million COVID-19 vaccines as of early December 2021. The opportunity ahead of us at Walgreens Health—our new segment launched this past fall—is to create better outcomes for both consumers and partners, while lowering costs across the care continuum. A year from now I want to look back on this time as an inflection point and a moment in time where real, lasting change happened—that we will all have collectively banded together to get through the pandemic and at the same time delivered real change toward improving accessible and affordable healthcare. I feel inspired and hopeful that some good will come out of this very difficult time in our country and the world’s history. Jason Redmond—AFP/Getty ImagesRosalind Brewer, CEO of Walgreens, speaks in Seattle, Washington on Mar. 20, 2019. Tim Cadogan, CEO of GoFundMe: We’re going to see continued disruption in the world and the workplace in 2022—this will require more people to come together to help each other. Our opportunity is to use our voice and platform to bring more people together to help each other with all aspects of their lives. Asking for help is hard but coming together to help each other is one of the most important and rewarding things we can do in life. We are continuously improving our product to make it easier for more people to both ask for and give help, whether it’s helping an individual fulfill a dream, working on a global cause like climate change, or supporting a family during a difficult time. Kirsten Green, founder and managing partner of Forerunner Ventures: We are nearly two years into the pandemic, and it is still ongoing. We must embrace this new normal and figure out how to make that reality work for our businesses, our consumers, and our people. Thankfully, we often see innovation come out of these periods of change and fluctuation. At the same time, it’s hard to come to terms with the fact that the world has evolved, and it is still important to understand that the ‘reset’ button just got hit for a lot of people. Values, goals, and core needs are being reevaluated and reestablished, and we as a society need to figure out how to move forward during a volatile period. Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles: Our industry needs to help drive the American economic recovery amid the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The top priority remains getting goods to American consumers and creating a more fluid supply chain. We also need to address the growing trade imbalance. Imports are at all-time highs while U.S. exports have declined nearly 40% over the past three years in Los Angeles. We have to help American manufacturers and farmers get their products to global markets. With the passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, our team is working to get our fair share of federal funds to accelerate projects to improve rail infrastructure, local highways and support facilities. The Port of Los Angeles is the nation’s primary trade gateway, yet east and gulf coast ports have received most of the federal funding in the past decade. The best return on port infrastructure investment is in Los Angeles, where the cargo we handle reaches every corner of the country. Kent Masters, CEO of Albemarle: Challenges will likely continue to include competition for top talent, supply chain disruptions due to possible pandemic impacts to raw material availability and logistics, and potential inflation impacts to material and freight costs, all of which we’re monitoring closely so we can respond quickly. With the global EV market growing rapidly, we have a tremendous opportunity ahead of us for years to come. Next year, we’ll advance our lithium business through new capacity ramp-ups in Chile, Australia and China, and restart the MARBL Lithium Wodgina hard rock resource in Australia to help feed our new conversion assets and meet customer needs. We’re also keenly focused on organizational goal alignment and continuous improvement to drive greater productivity through our global workforce next year. What do you expect to happen to supply chains in 2022? Gelsinger: The unprecedented global demand for semiconductors—combined with the impact of the global pandemic—has led to an industry-wide shortage, which is impacting technology providers across the industry. Intel is aggressively stepping in to address these issues and build out more capacity and supply around the globe for a more balanced and stable supply, but it will take time and strong public-private partnerships to achieve. Read more: From Cars to Toasters, America’s Semiconductor Shortage Is Wreaking Havoc on Our Lives. Can We Fix It? Brewer: We learned a lot over the past two years and companies are taking action with investments in capacity, resiliency and agility for supply chains across the world. We will continue finding creative ways to increase manufacturing and shipping capacity. Manufacturers will continue expanding capacity and increasing the diversity in their supplier base to reduce reliance of single sourcing. Companies will continue to invest to increase resiliency through expanded inventory positions, extended planning horizons and lead-times, and increased agility in manufacturing and logistics capabilities to fulfill customer needs. As the marketplace changes, we must be agile and adapt quickly as we respond to shifts in consumer behavior. Investments in technology, such as real time supply chain visibility and predictive/prescriptive analytics, will enable companies to deliver the speed and precision expected by today’s consumer. Seroka: Goods and products will get to market. The maritime logistics industry must raise the bar and make advances on service levels for both our import and export customers. Retailers will be replenishing their inventories in the second quarter of the year. And by summer, several months earlier than usual, we’ll see savvy retailers bringing in products for back to school, fall fashion and the winter holidays. Despite the challenges, retail sales reached new highs in 2021. Collectively, supply chains partners need to step up further to improve fluidity and reliability. Stephen Hawthornthwaite, CEO of Rothy’s: In 2022, pressure from consumers for transparency around manufacturing and production, coupled with pandemic learnings about existing supply chain constraints, will push businesses to condense their supply chains and bring in-house where possible. I also predict that more brands will test make-to-demand models to better weather demand volatility and avoid supply surpluses—a benefit for businesses, consumers and the planet. Nimbleness and a willingness to innovate will be crucial for brands who wish to meet the demands of a post-pandemic world. At Rothy’s, we’ve built a vertically integrated model and wholly-owned factory, enabling us to better navigate the challenges that production and logistics present and unlock the full potential of sustainability and circularity. Courtesy of Rothy’sStephen Hawthornthwaite, chairman and CEO, Rothy’s Green: The pandemic crystallized what a lot of us knew to be true, but hadn’t yet evaluated: There’s not nearly as much innovation in the supply chain as a flexible world is going to need. What we’re seeing now is a giant wake-up call to the entire commerce ecosystem. This is more than a rallying cry; it’s a mandate to reevaluate how we’re managing our production processes, and 2022 will be the start of change. Expect a massive overhaul of the system, and expect to see more investment building innovation, efficiency, and sustainability into the supply chain space. Read more: How American Shoppers Broke the Supply Chain Masters: As the pandemic continues with new variants, we expect global supply chain issues to persist in 2022. To what degree remains to be seen, but I would expect impacts to some raw materials, freight costs, and even energy costs. On a positive note, we can successfully meet our customer obligations largely because of our vertically integrated capabilities. This helps us continue to be a reliable source of lithium, as well as bromine. Worldwide logistics issues are a factor, but more marginal in the supply question when the determining factor is the ability to convert feedstock to product and bolster the supply chain. In lithium, we have active conversion facilities running at full capacity now. As we bring more capacity online (La Negra III/IV, Kemerton I/II, Silver Peak expansion, and our Tianyuan acquisition in China) while making more efficient use of our feedstocks, it will help strengthen the global supply chain. How will the labor market evolve and what changes should workers expect in the coming year? Brewer: The labor market will continue to be competitive in 2022. I often say to my team: as an employer, it’s not about the products we make, it’s not about our brand. It’s about how are we going to motivate team members to feel good about themselves, fulfilled and passionate about their work, to contribute at their highest level of performance. How do we create a culture that means Walgreens Boots Alliance is the best place to work—so our team members say, “Yes, pay me for the work that I do, but help me love my job.” In the coming year and beyond, broadly across the market, we will see that managers will continue to become even more empathetic and listen more actively to their team members as people. Workers will expect that employers and their managers accept who they are as their whole, authentic selves, both personally and professionally. Read more: The ‘Great Resignation’ Is Finally Getting Companies to Take Burnout Seriously. Is It Enough? Gelsinger: Our employees are our future and our most important asset, and we’ve already announced a significant investment in our people for next year. As I’ve said, sometimes it takes a decade to make a week of progress; sometimes a week gives you a decade of progress. As I look to 2022, navigating a company at the heart of many of the pandemic-related challenges, we must all carefully consider what shifts are underway and what changes are yet to come. It will continue to be a competitive market and I expect you’ll continue to see companies establish unique benefits and incentives to attract and retain talent. We expect the “hybrid” mode that’s developed over the past years to become the standard working model going forward. Al Drago/Bloomberg—Getty ImagesPatrick Gelsinger, chief executive officer of Intel Corp., speaks during an interview at an Economic Club of Washington event in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Dec. 9, 2021. Bourla: The past couple of years have challenged our workforce in ways that we never would have imagined. Companies have asked employees to demonstrate exceptional flexibility, commitment, courage and ingenuity over the past two years—and they have risen to the challenge. I predict that we are likely to see an increase in salaries in the coming year due to inflation—and I believe this is a good thing for workers, as it will help close the gap in income inequality. That said, financial rewards are no longer the only thing that employees expect from their employers. Increasingly, people want to work for a company with a strong culture and a defined purpose. As such, companies will need to foster and promote a culture in which employees feel respected and valued for their contributions and made to feel that they are integral to furthering the purpose of their company. Businesses that are able to create such a culture will not only be able to attract the best talent, but also maximize the engagement, creativity and productivity of their people by enabling them to bring their best selves to every challenge. Green: For many years, Forerunner has been saying, “It’s good to be a consumer. Consumers want what they want, when they want it, how they want it, and they’re getting it.” That same evolution of thought has now moved into the labor market: It’s a worker’s market, not a company’s market, and the relationship between the worker and the employer needs to evolve because of that. Workers should expect to get more flexibility, respect, benefits, and pay in some cases—but they still need to show up and deliver impact at work. It’s a two-way street, and we need to tap into a broader cultural work ethic. As a society, we need to be more holistic in our approach to meeting both company and worker needs. Read more: The Pandemic Revealed How Much We Hate Our Jobs. Now We Have a Chance to Reinvent Work Seroka: There’s a need for more truck drivers and warehouse workers in southern California. President Biden’s new Trucking Action Plan funds trucker apprentice programs and recruit U.S. military veterans. It’s an important step forward to attract, recruit and retain workers. Private industry needs to look at improved compensation and benefits for both truckers and warehouse workers. We need to bring a sense of pride and professionalism back to these jobs. On the docks, the contract between longshore workers and the employer’s association expires June 30. Both sides will be hard at work to negotiate and reach an agreement that benefits the workers and companies while keeping cargo flowing for the American economy. Courtesy Port of Los AngelesGene Seroka, executive director, Port of Los Angeles. Masters: I think there will still be a fight for talent next year. It’s a tight labor market overall and Covid-19 restrictions are a challenge in some regions. Albemarle has a really attractive growth story and profile, especially for workers interested in combatting climate change by contributing in a meaningful way to the clean energy transition. We are embracing a flexible work environment, much like other companies are doing, and upgrading some benefits to remain an employer of choice in attracting and retaining the best people on our growth journey. And, of course, we should all expect pandemic protocols to continue next year to ensure everyone’s health and safety. How do you see your role as a leader evolving over the coming year? Bourla: We are entering a golden age of scientific discovery fueled by converging advancements in biology and technology. As an industry, we must leverage these advancements to make disruptive changes in the way we discover, develop and bring new medicines to patients. Since I became CEO of Pfizer, we have been working to reimagine this process by operating as a nimbler, more science-driven organization, focused on delivering true breakthroughs for patients across our six therapeutic areas. In the past few years, we have demonstrated our ability to deliver on this promise of bringing true scientific breakthroughs through our colleagues’ tireless work in COVID-19. But there is more work to be done to address the unmet need in other disease areas—and now is the time to do it. In the year ahead, my leadership team and I will focus on leveraging these advancements in biology and technology, as well as the lessons learned from our COVID-19 vaccine development program, so that we may continue to push this scientific renaissance forward. This is critical work that we must advance for patients and their families around the world who continue to suffer from other devastating diseases without treatment options. Gelsinger: We are in the midst of a digital renaissance and experiencing the fastest pace of digital acceleration in history. We have immense opportunities ahead of us to make a lasting impact on the world through innovation and technology. Humans create technology to define what’s possible. We ask “if” something can be done, we understand “why,” then we ask “how.” In 2022, I must inspire and ensure our global team of over 110,000 executes and continues to drive forward innovation and leadership on our mission to enrich the lives of every person on earth. Brewer: Purpose is the driving force at this point in my career. I joined Walgreens Boots Alliance as CEO in March of 2021, what I saw as a rare opportunity to help end the pandemic and to help reimagine local healthcare and wellbeing for all. Seven months later, we launched the company’s new purpose, vision, values and strategic priorities. My role as CEO now and in 2022 is to lead with our company’s purpose—more joyful lives through better health—at the center of all we do for our customers, patients and team members. I’m particularly focused on affordable, accessible healthcare for all, including in traditionally medically underserved communities. Healthcare is inherently local, and all communities should have equitable access to care. John Lamparski—Getty Images for Advertising Week New YorkTim Cadogan, CEO of GoFundMe, speaks in New York City on Sept. 26, 2016. Cadogan: The last two years were dominated by a global pandemic and social and geopolitical issues that will carry over into 2022. The role of leaders in this new and uncertain environment will be to deliver value to their customers, while helping employees navigate an increasingly complex world with a completely new way of working together. Trust will be at the center of every decision we make around product development and platform policies—do the decisions we are making align with our mission to help people help each other and do they build trust with our community and our employees? Green: Everything around us is moving at an accelerated pace, and being a leader requires you to operate with a consistent set of values while still leaning into opportunity. Arguably, the pandemic has been the most disruptive time in decades—a generational disruption on par with the Depression or WWII. People’s North Stars are in the process of transforming, and leaders need to figure out what that means for their companies, their cultures, and their work processes. How does this change require leaders to shift their priorities as a business? Courtesy, Forerunner VenturesKirsten Green, founder and managing partner, Forerunner Ventures Masters: My leadership style is to make decisions through dialogue and debate. I encourage teams to be curious about other perspectives, be contrarian, actively discuss, make decisions, and act. I wasn’t sure how well we could do this from a strictly remote work approach during the pandemic, but watching our teams thrive despite the challenge changed my mind. Our people adapted quickly to move our business forward. We’ve worked so well that we’re integrating more flexibility into our work environment in 2022. With this shift to hybrid work, it will be important for all leaders, myself included, to empower employees in managing their productivity, and ensure teams stay engaged and focused on our key objectives. We’re facing rapid growth ahead, so our culture is vital to our success. I’ll continue to encourage our teams to live our values, seek diverse viewpoints, be decisive, and execute critical work to advance our strategy. Courtesy of Albemarle Kent Masters, CEO of Albemarle Seroka: Overseeing the nation’s busiest container port comes with an outsized responsibility to help our nation—not just the Port of Los Angeles—address the challenges brought about by the unprecedented surge in consumer demand. That means taking the lead on key fronts such as digital technology, policy and operational logistics. On the digital front, our industry needs to use data better to improve the reliability, predictability, and efficiency in the flow of goods. Policy work will focus on improving infrastructure investment, job training and advocating for a national export plan that supports fair trade and American jobs. Operationally, we’ll look for new ways to improve cargo velocity and efficiency......»»

FBI Director Says Terror Threats Elevated To All-Time High Since Hamas Attacks Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times, FBI Director Christopher Wray on Tuesday told lawmakers that the United States is facing unprecedented terrorist threats since the start of the Israel–Hamas conflict in October. "What I would say that is unique about the environment that we're in right now in my career is that while there may have been times over the years where individual threats could have been higher here or there than where they may be right now, I've never seen a time where all the threats or so many of the threats are all elevated, all at exactly the same time," the FBI director said in a Senate hearing after he was pressed by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) about the threats facing the United States. In response, Mr. Graham said that the "blinking red lights analogy about 9/11 ... all the lights were blinking red before 9/11, apparently." He then asked the FBI director: "Would you say there's multiple blinking red lights out there?" "I see blinking red lights everywhere," Mr. Wray answered, without elaborating. The FBI chief's comments on Tuesday come as Israeli forces stormed southern Gaza's main city in what they called the most intense day of combat in five weeks of ground operations against Hamas. In what appeared to be the biggest ground assault in Gaza since a truce with Hamas ended last week, Israel said its forces reached the heart of Khan Younis. "We are in the most intense day since the beginning of the ground operation," the commander of the Israeli military's Southern Command, General Yaron Finkelman, said in Jerusalem. He said Israeli forces were also fighting in Jabalia, a large urban refugee camp and Hamas stronghold in northern Gaza next to Gaza City, and in Shuja'iyya, east of the city. "We are in the heart of Jabalia, in the heart of Shuja'iyya, and now also in the heart of Khan Younis," he said. Previous Remarks The Tuesday warning comes several weeks after he told lawmakers that the Hamas–Israel war could spark terrorism within the United States and said that Hamas could inspire ISIS-like attacks. Since the start of the conflict on Oct. 7, multiple designated terrorist groups have called for attacks on U.S. targets, he said. “The actions of Hamas and its allies will serve as an inspiration the likes of which we haven’t seen since ISIS launched its so-called caliphate several years ago,” Mr. Wray said on Oct. 31 At the time, he told lawmakers that Hamas, a State Department-designated terrorist organization, does not have "the intent or capability to conduct operations inside the U.S., though we cannot, and do not, discount that possibility.” “This is not a time for panic, but it is a time for vigilance,” Mr. Wray added, responding to public fears about potential terrorist attacks. “You often hear the expression if you see something, say something … that’s never been more true than now,” he added, referring to a slogan that has often been used at U.S. transportation hubs and airports in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. There has also been a rise in incidents targeting Jewish people across the United States, he said, adding that while the White House has expressed alarm reports of incidents at American universities as tensions have prompted university officials to tighten security. “This is a threat that is reaching, in some way, sort of historic levels,” Mr. Wray said. He said it’s because “the Jewish community is targeted by terrorists really across the spectrum." Tensions Rising? This week, the United States blamed the Houthi terrorist group in Yemen for a series of attacks in Middle Eastern waters since war broke out between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas on Oct. 7. In several recent incidents over the past weekend, three commercial vessels came under attack in international waters in the southern Red Sea. The Houthis acknowledged launching drone and missile attacks against what they said were two Israeli vessels in the area. The USS Carney, a U.S. Navy destroyer, shot down three drones on Sunday as it answered distress calls from the commercial vessels. The U.S. military says the three vessels were connected to 14 separate nations. "The Carney took action as a drone was headed in its direction. But again, we can't assess that the Carney at this time was the intended target," said Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh. The Houthi group, which controls most of Yemen's Red Sea coast, had previously fired ballistic missiles and armed drones toward Israel and vowed to target more Israeli vessels. The organization was taken off the U.S. State Department's terror list in 2021. But White House officials have said this week that they are leaving open the possibility of potentially designating the Houthis as a terrorist organization again. Tyler Durden Thu, 12/07/2023 - 17:00.....»»

A unidentified group of attackers seized the Isareal-linked Central Park tanker that was sailing off the coast of Aden, Yemen, on Sunday. In an undated photo released by Zodiac Maritime, the tanker Central Park is seen.Zodiac MaritimeAn unidentified group of attackers seized an Israel-linked tanker off the coast of Yemen on Sunday.A US Navy warship responded to a distress call and secured the seized ship, an official said.Zodiac Maritime, which manages the ship, said the seizure was a "suspected piracy incident."Attackers seized a tanker linked to Israel off the coast of Yemen on Sunday, authorities said. While no group immediately claimed responsibility, it comes after at least two other maritime attacks in recent days have been linked to the Israel-Hamas war.The attackers seized the Liberian-flagged Central Park, managed by Zodiac Maritime, in the Gulf of Aden, the company and private intelligence firm Ambrey said. An American defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, confirmed to The Associated Press that the attack took place.Zodiac called the seizure "a suspected piracy incident.""Our priority is the safety of our 22 crew onboard," Zodiac said in a statement. "The Turkish-captained vessel has a multinational crew consisting of a crew of Russian, Vietnamese, Bulgarian, Indian, Georgian and Filipino nationals. The vessel is carrying a full cargo of phosphoric acid."A US Navy warship responded to a distress call from the tanker and secured the ship, US officials told Reuters.Zodiac described the vessel as being owned by Clumvez Shipping Inc., though other records directly linked Zodiac as the owner. London-based Zodiac Maritime is part of Israeli billionaire Eyal Ofer's Zodiac Group. British corporate records listed two men with the last name Ofer as a current and former director of Clumvez Shipping, including Daniel Guy Ofer, also a director at Zodiac Maritime.It wasn't immediately clear who was behind the attack. Nearby Aden is held by forces allied to Yemen's internationally recognized government and a Saudi-led coalition that has battled Yemen's Iranian-backed Houthi rebels for years. In theory, that part of the Gulf of Aden is controlled by those forces and is relatively distant from Houthi-controlled territory in the country. Somali pirates also are not known to operate in that area.The US defense official said that it appeared "an unknown number of unidentified armed individuals" seized the ship.One senior US official told Fox News Chief National Security Correspondent Jennifer Griffin that five gunmen were involved in the attempted hijacking.Crew members of the Central Park tanker locked themselves in the ship's safe room for safety, the official told Griffin. The gunmen failed to beat the door down.NEW Senior U.S. official:US Navy personnel from the USS Mason responded to a distress call from the crew onboard an Israeli linked tanker. 5 armed gunmen tried to hijack the ship in Gulf of Aden. US Navy pursued toward Yemen. Warning shots fired. Gunmen now being interrogated.— Jennifer Griffin (@JenGriffinFNC) November 26, 2023 According to Griffin, the official also stated that a Japanese destroyer helped the US Navy while two Chinese Navy warships in the vicinity did not render assistance.The gunmen exited the vehicle and were sailing back to Yemen shores when US Navy personnel made the arrest, Griffin reported."US and coalition forces responded to a distress call from the M/V Central Park. The crew of the M/V Central Park is currently safe," a US defense official told Business Insider.The official did not address questions regarding the details of the incident, including whether 5 armed gunmen were involved in the attack and if Chinese Navy ships were near the area.Zodiac Maritime has been targeted previously amid a wider yearslong shadow war between Iran and Israel. In 2021, a drone attack assessed by the US and other Western nations to have been carried out by Iran killed two crew members aboard Zodiac's oil tanker Mercer Street off the coast of Oman.The British military's United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, which provides warnings to sailors in the Middle East, had earlier warned sailors that "two black-and-white craft carrying eight persons in military-style clothing" had been seen in the area. It issued another warning, saying that radio traffic suggested a possible attack had occurred before acknowledging the seizure.The UKMTO put the ship's location over 60 kilometers (35 miles) south of Yemen's coast, some 80 kilometers (50 miles) east of Djibouti, and about 110 kilometers (70 miles) northeast of Somalia in the Gulf of Aden, a key shipping route.The Central Park seizure comes after a container ship, CMA CGM Symi, owned by another Israeli billionaire, came under attack Friday by a suspected Iranian drone in the Indian Ocean. Iran has not acknowledged carrying out the attack, nor did it respond to questions from the AP about that assault.Both the Symi and the Central Park had been behaving as if they faced a threat in recent days.The ships had switched off their Automatic Identification System trackers, according to data from MarineTraffic.com analyzed by the AP. Ships are supposed to keep their AIS active for safety reasons, but crews will turn them off if they appear to be targeted. In Central Park's case, the vessel had last transmitted four days ago after it left the Suez Canal heading south into the Red Sea.The attacks come as global shipping increasingly finds itself targeted in the weekslong war that threatens to become a wider regional conflict — even as a truce has halted fighting and Hamas exchanges hostages for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.With the Israel-Hamas war — which began with the militant Palestinian group's October 7 attack — raging on, the Houthis seized a vehicle transport ship in the Red Sea off Yemen. The Houthis did not immediately acknowledge the seizure of the Central Park.The Associated Press contributed to this story.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

New SVP joins commercial team at Pittsburgh's ninth-largest bank from a bigger financial institution......»»

Air travel is getting more turbulent thanks to climate change. And the problem isn't going away. Air turbulence is on the rise. And it's going to make flights a whole lot bumpier. Ben Hickey for Business InsiderThe plane suddenly dropped several feet, flew up, then lurched back down. I held my breath, bracing for the inevitable bobbing to repeat. The flight attendant offered me a barf bag and a conciliatory smile. The turbulence wasn't her fault — it wasn't even the pilot's. Yet for 20 minutes on my flight from Denver to my home in Indianapolis, the plane jerked up and down, sometimes so violently passengers let out a collective gasp that rattled me — I'm frightened of both flying and heights — to my core. I wondered if it was the last flight I'd ever take.My experience was not an outlier. Air turbulence is becoming more common and more intense. On this particular flight, we experienced mountain-wave turbulence — the bumpiness that sometimes happens when flying over mountainous regions. Other kinds of turbulence include the bumps caused by thunderstorms and clear-air turbulence. Researchers say this last one is on the rise, and it may have made my regular 'ol mountain-wave turbulence more fraught.Clear-air turbulence happens without bad weather, mountains, or mechanical issues with a plane. It's caused by wind shear — sudden changes in wind speed often associated with the jet stream, a strong band of wind high up in the atmosphere, Isabel Smith, a meteorology Ph.D. student at the University of Reading in England, told me. Smith and her advisor, Paul Williams, a professor of atmospheric science, have found that since 1979 — when satellites first started observing the atmosphere — clear-air turbulence has jumped 15%.That's caused flights around the world to get bumpier. This past March, a Lufthansa flight from Austin, Texas, to Frankfurt, Germany, was so bumpy that seven passengers were injured. The plane had to be diverted to Washington, DC.The culprit behind the newly turbulent skies is climate change, Smith said. As greenhouse-gas emissions like carbon dioxide rise, so do global temperatures, making the jet stream carry more wind shear that translates to "speed bumps in the sky" — or turbulence. It's a problem that isn't going away. In 2017, Williams used climate model simulations to predict future turbulence. He found that clear-air turbulence in the Northern Hemisphere could triple in the next three to six decades. And as emissions increase, so will overall turbulence. It's a vicious cycle that's ushering in a new reality for air travel, which has already been plagued by problems since the pandemic hit. So next time you travel, be sure to pack your Ambien, because it's going to get bumpy.Speed bumps in the skyHere's how it works: As emissions from greenhouse gases spread through the atmosphere, the upper levels of the sky develop unpredictable patterns of warm and cold air spots, which make the air bumpier for planes. The rising temperatures caused by greenhouse gases also drive more extreme weather, which disrupts the jet stream further.Bill Duncan, the aviation-forecast operations leader at The Weather Company, told me the jet stream has changed from what we saw 20 to 30 years ago. "The jet stream is now wobbling, so to speak," he said. "You've likely heard articles speak of polar vortex, for example. As the jet stream buckles a bit because it's not as strong as it was in the past, now you have all this energy associated with the jet stream up 30,000 feet or so. It's allowing colder air to spill south, so we're seeing major weather events happening more and more than we did in the past." No flight path or airport is really safe from increasing turbulence This increase in clear-air turbulence is supercharging other kinds of turbulence, such as the mountain-air turbulence that I experienced over Denver. "This type of turbulence is generated from air flow being forced over a mountainous terrain and becoming very unstable, leading to waves in the atmosphere that can break and become chaotic and dangerous to encounter," Smith, the Ph.D. student, said. Given its position downwind of the Rocky Mountains, Denver is a hot spot for mountain-wave turbulence. And any flight path that goes over a mountainous area or along a coast, where temperatures can shift unexpectedly, is prone to turbulence.After my last flight, Denver may no longer be on my list of vacation spots. But no flight path or airport is really safe from increasing turbulence. "All types of aviation turbulence are likely to increase in the future, in all seasons in most places in the world," John K. Williams, the head of weather AI sciences at The Weather Company, explained. "Perhaps even doubling in some places." Weather conditions in the fall and spring are typically more stable, so flying conditions are generally calmer, Smith said, but those seasons could become increasingly erratic as the air pressure changes.A turbulent futureIt's possible airlines could decrease the chances of hitting clear-air turbulence by avoiding the Earth's four main jet streams altogether. Commercial airlines tend to rely on these strong wind corridors as a kind of boost to reduce flight times and fuel use — kind of like walking on a moving sidewalk. But changes to the atmosphere mean these corridors are getting bumpier, so avoiding them could result in smoother flights. However, the experts I spoke with didn't think this was a real solution. Without the jet streams, flights would be longer and require more fuel, making them more expensive and worse for the environment — not really an appealing option for airlines.Even so, pilots will likely have to take different flight paths to avoid turbulence. Duncan explained that meteorologists, dispatchers, and pilots can adjust a flight path based on timely weather data. Right now, this information is often too delayed to make a difference, but as the weather-modeling tech improves, that could change. And that's what John K. Williams is betting on."In recent years, our ability to predict the location, timing and severity of turbulence have also improved, and those predictions can be used by airlines and pilots to select less bumpy routes, or at least prepare passengers and flight crews for flight segments into turbulent air," he said. Some flights might have to cancel meal service, restrict passengers' ability to stand up or use the restroom, and limit the availability of flight attendants. At the core of these improvements is AI. "Machine-learning algorithms are used to find relationships between historical weather and observations of turbulence, improving themselves as more data are collected," Williams explained. "Those algorithms can then be run using the latest weather forecast model data to pinpoint areas of potentially hazardous turbulence."But while we can get better at avoiding air turbulence, we won't be able to avoid it altogether. That's why some companies are going back to the drawing board to design airplanes that can better adjust to turbulent air. The Swiss company Neural Concept, which uses AI-generated simulations to help industrial companies improve their engineering, is currently working with the airplane manufacturer Airbus to improve its aircraft design.Designing an airplane that's more steady in turbulent air is tricky because there are so many variables to account for, Pierre Baqué, Neural Concept's cofounder and CEO, told me. "This is where AI becomes critical," he said. "By applying deep learning models to the database of simulations, aircraft manufacturers can gain real-time insights into the correlation between tens of statistically averaged variables that might impact turbulence."The project is still in its early stages, so it could be years before we see the results of this work in commercial aircraft. And in the meantime, unpredictable air remains a problem. According to the National Transportation Safety Board, 163 serious injuries have been caused by turbulence since 2009. To keep flight attendants and passengers safe, some flights might have to cancel meal service, restrict passengers' ability to stand up or use the restroom, and limit the availability of flight attendants."I fly quite a bit, and I see people walk around all the time even when the seatbelt sign is on," Duncan said. "Turbulence is tricky — sometimes turbulence can come out of the blue. And you never know what kind of shear that aircraft will go through."Alyson Smith, the managing director of emotional health and well-being programs at Delta, said passengers have a better chance of avoiding a turbulent flight if they fly very early in the morning or late at night. "Turbulence is generally the lowest during these time periods," she said.Ultimately, the most important thing passengers can do is to listen to the flight crew and pay attention to the seatbelt sign. For me at least, I'll be staying buckled up while I'm in the sky.Michelle Mastro is a writer who covers lifestyle, travel, architecture, and culture.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

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In a war with China over Taiwan, "the first target that we're going to have to deal with is the ships," a US Air Force general said earlier this year. A Type 052D-class destroyer with the aircraft carrier Liaoning and other Chinese warships in April 2018.REUTERS/Stringer China's navy has rapidly increased the size and capability of its fleet. That expansion worries the US military, and it has reemphasized anti-ship warfare in its training. That's not a new task for US pilots, but they now face a "wicked" threat from China's air defenses. The US Air Force is working on improving its ability to sink well-defended warships, a reflection of the US military's concern about the growing size and increasing capability of China's navy.Strikes against maritime targets are nothing new for US pilots, but China's military has spent decades developing its air defenses, installing thickets of surface-to-air missiles on land and on its warships that now pose a "wicked" problem for US forces, commanders say.China has launched new, more advanced ships at steady clip in recent years, building what is now the world's largest navy. It has also sent those ships on more complex operations across a wider swath of the Pacific. That larger, more capable force was on display in August 2022 during exercises of unprecedented size around Taiwan following House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to the island.Were there a clash with China over Taiwan, "the first target that we're going to have to deal with is the ships, because you saw when Speaker Pelosi went to Taiwan what they did with their ships. They put them on the east side of Taiwan as a sort of blockade," Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, commander of US Pacific Air Forces, said at an Air and Space Forces Association conference in March."Those ships can put up an anti-access/area-denial engagement zone, which comes from their surface-to-air missiles that they can shoot from the ships. So in order for us to get past those, we've got to sink the ships," Wilsbach said.'Wicked dangerous'A Type 055-class guided-missile cruiser in the Pacific in October 2021.Sun Zifa/China News Service via Getty ImagesWilsbach's comments reflect concerns about the arsenal China has built to counter US military operations, which includes "the world's densest and most integrated air-defense system" along China's east coast, according to Brendan Mulvaney, director of the China Aerospace Studies Institute, which is part of the Department of the Air Force.That air-defense system is part of China's "counter-intervention" strategy, which is "focused on not necessarily how to defeat the United States piecemeal but how to keep the United States and our allies and partners out of the region," Mulvaney said on a podcast in September.China's navy plans to fight under the cover of those defenses, and its Type 052D-class destroyers and Type 055-class cruisers could extend that umbrella.A Type 055-class cruiser fires its close-in weapon system at mock targets during a drill in May.eng.chinamil.com.cn/Photo by Yang Yunxiang"The surface-to-air-missile systems they have on those tier-one surface-action-group assets is wicked, wicked dangerous territory — significantly more dangerous than anything that's fielded in and around Ukraine," Gen. Mark Kelly said of those warships during an Air and Space Forces Conference in September."If you then look at the fact that they have the same systems up and down the coast, if you look at what they can do in terms of jamming across the electromagnetic spectrum, if you look at their inventory of air-to-air missiles, and the list goes on and on," added Kelly, who leads the training and organizing of Air Force units as head of Air Combat Command.China's military hasn't fought a war since 1979, and its new naval and air forces are untested in combat, but Chinese strategists have studied other wars and learned from other militaries — that likely includes lessons from America's use of "rings of air- and missile-defense management," ranging from combat air patrols by carrier aircraft down to each ship's close-in weapon systems, said Lyle Goldstein, director of Asia engagement at Defense Priorities, a think tank.Visitors stand around missile tubes aboard a Type 052D-class destroyer in Hong Kong in July 2017.TENGKU BAHAR/AFP via Getty Images"I think it's fair to say that they may even be on par with us," Goldstein said in an interview in May. "China generally gets high marks in air defense, and they've come a long way, and they've gotten a lot of coaching from the Russians."A weakness in China's naval air-defense network is the inability of its current aircraft carriers, Liaoning and Shandong, to launch airborne-early-warning-and-control aircraft like those that fly from US carriers to direct friendly forces and monitor enemy ships and aircraft.Those carriers would likely stay near Taiwan during a conflict, protected by China's air force and the "very robust air defense and missile defense" of Type 052D- and Type 055-class ships, Goldstein said.But China's newest carrier, Fujian, has an electromagnetic catapult that will allow it to launch the KJ-500 airborne-early-warning-and-control plane, extending China's radar coverage and providing "a major jump" in capability, Goldstein said.Old skills, new focusA captured German cruiser being bombed by US aircraft during a test in July 1921.US Naval History and Heritage CommandUS pilots have trained to sink warships since the early 1920s, well before the Air Force's founding in 1947. That mission has remained part of the service's repertoire, even during recent ground wars."I can tell you from experience in 2007, although my unit was in the thick of considering waging warfare in Iraq or Afghanistan at the time, we executed a Pacific theater deployment and specifically integrated with the Navy and other partners," John Baum, a former US Air Force F-16 pilot, said in an interview in March."And of course, maritime strike was a training skill set that we worked on then," added Baum, now a senior resident fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.The Air Force's attention to the maritime-strike mission has varied over time, however, and recent milestones in training and weapons development indicate a renewed focus on being able take down enemy ships.US Air Force A-10s at Naval Air Station North Island in California for Green Flag-West in November 2022.US Air Force/Senior Airman Zachary RufusA major exercise in November 2022, called Green Flag-West, departed from its traditional focus on air-to-ground missions with the US Army and saw Air Force pilots work with the Navy "on facilitating air operations in maritime surface warfare missions, air-to-surface," the service said.In another exercise a few weeks later, Air Force Weapons School students worked with Navy units on the school's "largest-ever over-water joint counter maritime exercise." Col. Daniel Lehoski, the Weapons School commandant, said afterward that a war in the Pacific would be "a maritime fight" and that it was the school's responsibility "to produce graduates who have both the capability and confidence to build, teach, and lead in the joint, maritime environment."A maritime focus was also evident this year in the major air-combat exercises known as Red Flag at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.Red Flag 23-1 in February expanded its training area to include airspace over the Pacific for the first time. Red Flag 23-3, held this summer, incorporated a US Navy carrier strike group as it conducted a pre-deployment exercise. It was "the largest adaptation" of Red Flag in its 50-year history, Kelly, of Air Combat Command, said on social media.F-16 pilots with the 64th Aggressor Squadron, which replicates enemy tactics, at Red Flag 23-1 in January.US Air Force/William R. LewisAnother Air Force official said Red Flag and other drills have made "an exponential leap" toward Pacific-focused scenarios over the past decade, adopting training that includes the "unique challenges" of "flying sorties over exposed ocean."The Air Force is also updating its arsenal for maritime operations. It has tested a modified version of its Joint Direct Attack Munition, known as "Quicksink," to meet "an urgent need to neutralize maritime threats" and studied the use of other weapons in austere environments like those in the Pacific region.The service is also looking for new anti-ship missiles. This spring, it announced plans to buy 268 Joint Strike Missiles over the next five years, which an official said would "bridge that gap" until it acquires more of the larger Long Range Anti-Ship Missile, which the Navy and Air Force both want and Lockheed Martin is scrambling to build.New targeting systems have only made it easier "to find, fix, track, and target a ship," Baum said. "Now we have all-weather capabilities with new sensors on airplanes and also new weapons and fusing options available, so the targeting scenario, frankly, is much easier today than it was in the past, even 15 or 20 years ago."While there are "different considerations" for finding targets on land and at sea, "from a technology standpoint, the Air Force has been committed to be able to hold any target at risk at any time on the planet," Baum added. "I don't think that that's any different considering the [Indo-Pacific Command] area and maritime targets."A GBU-31 Joint Direct Attack Munition used in a Quicksink experiment in April 2022.US Air Force/1st Lt. Lindsey HeflinAir Force officials know China's military will try to use the Pacific's vast distances to challenge their operations and are making adaptations, including developing more dispersed air bases and investing in more efficient tanker aircraft and in drones that could fly ahead of crewed jets.But the recent focus on integrating with naval forces is a sign the Air Force knows jets and bombs alone may not be enough to sink better-defended warships operating over greater ranges. Wilsbach said in September that training by Pacific Air Forces has emphasized "stacking effects" to bring more weapons to bear."The stacking of effects starts in cyber, then there's a space, then there's an air, there may be a surface, and there may be a subsurface component, with electronic combat happening — all needing to arrive on the target coincidentally," Wilsbach said."In a dynamic environment where aircraft and ships and perhaps ground units from the Army, with satellites traveling through space, all have to synchronize in time and space so the effects occur at the same time on the target — so you get munitions on the target to destroy and hopefully sink the ship, as an example — that we are working on constantly," Wilsbach said.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

Tesla has spent the past year slashing its prices to try and drive away the competition. That's a losing strategy. Elon Musk has started slashing prices on Tesla's electric cars. That's going to come back to burn him.Mike Windle/Getty Images; Jenny Chang-Rodriguez/InsiderElon Musk has started an electric-vehicle price war that Tesla can't finish.Under increasing pressure from new competition, Tesla spent the past year slashing the average price of its models by roughly 25%. The Model 3 fell from $48,000 to $44,380. The luxury Model S, meanwhile, plunged from a high of $130,000 to $96,380. The cars, as they say, have been priced to move.It's an unusual business strategy, to put it mildly. "I can't think of another point in the history of automotive when a brand that wasn't going out of business cut prices 20% a year," Mark Schirmer, the director of communications at the research firm Cox Automotive, told me. Tesla is hoping that lower prices will drive up sales and slow the advance of the company's rivals — maybe even scare some of them out of the market altogether.But that's not what's happening. Lower prices are not translating into higher sales. The number of cars Tesla delivered to customers in the third quarter actually declined. Revenue is dropping, and the company's once fat profit margins are getting squeezed — down to 17.9% in the third quarter, compared with 25.1% a year ago. Competitors aren't being driven out of business, either. Once totally dominant in the EV space, Tesla's share of the US market has fallen from 62% at the beginning of the year to only 50% today.To make matters worse, the public's appetite for EVs isn't growing as fast as automakers expected. That means Tesla has set off a protracted battle for a piece of a pie that's growing crumb by crumb."If you do the price war, you have to make sure you have enough volume to increase and maintain profitability," John Zhang, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School, said. "It has to be a continuous battle. This war you have to wage all the way. And you need to plan ahead. That's how you win."Conversely, some experts will tell you that price wars are unwinnable — that they're a race to the bottom that serves only to kill profitability for the entire industry. And in an industry where the underlying technology — and, thus, the costs of production — are changing rapidly, no one can be sure where the bottom is. Winnable or not, Musk chose a terrible time to pick a fight. As legacy automakers walk the tightrope to our electric future, they can rely on sales of their traditional combustion-engine vehicles to provide them with a safety net. Tesla has no safety net. For Musk, it's go electric, or bust.Tesla creates a cash problem — againMusk's decision to offer deep discounts on his vehicles was an act of pure desperation. That became apparent earlier this month when Tesla reported its third-quarter numbers. The results were frightful across the board: Tesla missed Wall Street's expectations on revenue, vehicle deliveries, and free cash flow, which was down to $848 million from $3.4 billion a year before. Most importantly, the company reported that its gross margins — a measure of the company's profitability after costs — continued to shrink. This horrified investors who had just gotten used to Tesla making money.Over the past two years, despite Tesla's addition of more moderately priced vehicles such as the Model 3 sedan and the Model Y compact SUV, its margins have grown to be some of the fattest in the car business. That has bolstered the argument that Tesla wasn't a traditional car company such as Ford or GM and deserved its much, much higher stock price. Naturally, this is a status Musk would like Tesla to keep, so he's promised to do everything he can to cut costs. (On the conference call on third-quarter earnings, he said it's like "'Game of Thrones,' but with pennies.")Unfortunately, cost cuts can't be spoken into existence, not even by Musk. In the third quarter, Tesla's capital expenditures actually ballooned to their highest level in a year — $2.4 billion, up from $1.8 billion a year ago. If prices are going down, and costs are going up, even the most fervent of Musk's Wall Street believers will tell you that margins don't have a prayer. Months into his pricing campaign, Musk has nothing to show for it, and no plans to change. Musk gave no indication of when this cash drought would end or how margins would improve. He could not say when the company's Cybertruck would be available to the public and even admitted that Tesla had "dug its own grave" trying to build the new vehicle. He also could not provide details on when there would be a meaningful update to the aging models that currently make up Tesla's fleet. But there was one thing Musk was clear on: Prices need to keep coming down. In a call that Wall Street widely acknowledged as one of Tesla's worst in some time, it was like a mantra Musk repeated over and over again, with a certainty borne more of faith than facts."So I just can't emphasize again how important cost is," Musk said. "It's not an optional thing for most people. It is a necessary thing. We have to make our cars more affordable so that people can buy them."The only real hope Musk offered investors was a suggestion that driverless-car technology would (eventually, someday) offset Tesla's falling prices. But how exactly the math would work on that trade-off was unclear. Months into his pricing campaign, Musk has nothing to show for it, and no plans to change. The market responded to Musk's disappearing profits by dragging Tesla's stock down 15%.The whole EV market is in a cash bleedTesla's dismal results illuminated Musk's short-term reason for the desperate pricing strategy. But the underlying reason is even more alarming: Despite increasing demand and bountiful government investment, the world's transition from gas to electric cars is not going as smoothly as automakers expected.Experts will tell you with certainty that EVs are the future and that internal-combustion engines will eventually disappear from America's driveways and parking lots. But the march to electrified highways isn't proceeding in a straight line. There are two main reasons that consumer appetite for EVs hasn't been as robust as automakers initially expected. One is the uneven way new technologies are adopted; it inevitably takes awhile to sell people on even the most amazing innovation. The other is the slowing global economy. Customers around the world have become more price-sensitive, which is bad news for EVs: While the average selling price of an electric vehicle is going down — from $65,000 last year to $53,633 in July — it's still higher than the average selling price for new vehicles overall, which hovers around $48,451.While other automakers like Ford and BMW can coast on older models, Tesla doesn't have that option.Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty ImagesTraditional carmakers, from Ford and GM to BMW and Mercedes, have responded to the EV price challenge by doing what they do best: building the gas cars that customers still want. "Ford is able to balance production of gas, hybrid, and electric vehicles to match the speed of EV adoption in a way that others can't," John Lawler, Ford's chief financial officer, said during the company's latest earnings call. "That's obviously good for customers, who get the products they want — and good for us, too, because disciplined capital allocation and not chasing scale at all costs maximizes profitability and cash flow."But while the traditional automakers can coast on their older models, Tesla doesn't have that option. Cue the price cuts."Musk's starting a price war," Schirmer of Cox Automotive said. "I do think there was nothing else he could do, in that he doesn't have anything really new to compete against these other companies. He says it isn't because he has a demand problem. But I've been in this business a long time, and I have never seen anyone cut prices without having a demand problem."Musk's goal to undercut the rest of the market on price is no secret — and it's made other car companies none too happy. Given the uncertainty around the future of EVs, almost every other automaker is reluctant to slash prices on their models because doing so would make continued investment in EV tech an even tougher business case to make. In April, Ford CEO Jim Farley said Tesla's cuts could start an unsustainable price war. But the company still felt forced to cut the price of its Mustang Mach-E SUV at least twice this year. If Elon was smart, he would not drop the price. Instead, he should justify the cost of ownership. Many auto executives are refusing to engage in Musk's fight because they know from experience that the best way to win a price war is not to get into one in the first place. "We have no interest in sinking prices to gain market share," BMW CEO Oliver Zipse said in a recent call with investors. "That's not our strategy."There are other, more imaginative, more savvy ways to entice customers without a fire sale. During the 2008 recession, rather than slashing prices, Hyundai tried to figure out what was holding customers back from buying a new car. Turns out, it was worries over getting laid off. So Hyundai offered customers a guarantee: Anyone who bought a car and then lost their job could sell it back to the company. That's the kind of creative work-around that gets a car company through hard times unscathed. It's an exercise in market research and advertising. Tesla has given little indication that it does the former and has flatly rejected doing the latter. Musk has always maintained that his outsize public profile makes advertising for Tesla a waste."Rationally, he doesn't have to drop prices so fast. He can only delay the competition," Navdeep Sodhi, a managing director at the pricing consultancy Sodhi Pricing, said. "If Elon was smart, he would not drop the price. Instead, he should justify the cost of ownership."Part of the point of advertising — and the reason investors are pushing Tesla to start spending money on it — is to educate customers about why Tesla's vehicles are worth their higher price tags. According to Sodhi, Tesla has a compelling argument to make about how much money EVs can save customers over time. Why slash prices if you can persuade customers to pay more? Building a market for a product such as an electric vehicle is a marathon, not a sprint. Traditional carmakers expect to lose money on their EVs for the foreseeable future. Tesla just became profitable in 2021. If it slides back into the red because of its price cuts, expect investors to run in another direction.A losing battleIf the short-term point of Tesla's price cuts is to maintain its market share and sell more cars, it's not working. At the same time, the move could damage Tesla in the long term. When companies play with price, Zhang said, they're playing with customer expectations. Once customers get used to paying $40,000 for a standard EV, they're not going to go back to $60,000. In a price war, you may prompt a few more people to buy from you today, but you'll be sacrificing millions of dollars in future sales. Making cars is an expensive business, and if the price cuts don't generate more demand, Tesla's fortune could change rather quickly. Then there are all the customers who paid that $60,000 in the past. Learning that they could have saved thousands of dollars if they'd waited a few months to make their purchase has a negative impact on brand loyalty. In China, Tesla's price cuts even sparked protests among owners who paid more for their vehicles.But Musk isn't thinking about the future. He needs the money he hopes to make from price cuts — and he needs it now. Making cars is an expensive business, and if the price cuts don't generate more demand, Tesla's fortune could change rather quickly. "If you have a factory that makes something and you're not selling it, you're losing huge money in automotive," Schirmer said.This is a moment when you want an experienced team of automotive executives at the helm of your company. Instead, Tesla is onboarding a new chief financial officer. Zach Kirkhorn — a Tesla veteran of 13 years who presided over the most profitable quarters in the company's history — stepped down as chief financial officer in August. According to company documents, his severance package included the kind of payoff and strict nondisparagement requirements that reek of a C-suite firing.In the end, price cuts won't be enough to drive sales. If Tesla is going to keep its business healthy, it needs to appeal to new customers beyond Musk fans and early adopters. It needs to conduct research and launch advertising that makes the right argument, to the right customers, that one of Tesla's four models is the right car for them. Discounting the sticker price may drive a few sales. But in the long run, you can't build a global automotive juggernaut without cash flow. Musk himself has admitted that Tesla narrowly evaded death by cash burn in both 2008 and 2018.Waging price war during a downturn is a challenge unlike any Tesla has faced before. The company has survived for years on a first-mover advantage, on being small and nimble, and on the willingness of investors to bail it out. But today's Tesla is increasingly a normal car company, with normal car-company problems. Musk's unfulfilled promises of robo-taxis and unmatched artificial intelligence may dazzle the market for a while, but they're not driving the sales Tesla needs to win the price war it started. The company has a growing fleet of competition, an expensive manufacturing process, and shareholders who have grown used to fat profits. If cutting prices is all Tesla can do to survive this new reality, it will continue to bleed money every time the rubber hits the road. And at some point, turning it around may no longer be an option.Linette Lopez is a senior correspondent at Insider.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

Economists Warn Of "Bigger" Middle East War, But Yellen Downplays Its Economic Impact Authored by Andrew Moran via The EPoch Times, The war between Hamas and Israel is unlikely to spill over into the global economy, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told delegates at the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, in Morocco. Despite the initial volatility in global financial markets on Oct. 9, investors have largely dismissed concerns that the latest conflict in the Middle East will impact the international economy, pricing in various scenarios. Ms. Yellen does not think the events will result in anything "very significant" for the global economic outlook. "While we are monitoring potential economic impacts from the crisis [in Israel], I’m not really thinking of that as a major driver of the global economic outlook," she said. "Thus far, I don’t think we’ve seen anything suggesting it will be very significant." In her prepared remarks to the IMF roundtable, Ms. Yellen championed America's commitment to strengthen the fund and advocated more support for the organization as economic shocks "often hit low-income countries the hardest." "The IMF’s continued relevance depends on its ability to adapt its policy advice and provide lending that will support countries’ efforts to restore macroeconomic stability," she said. Gita Gopinath, the IMF's first deputy managing director, told Bloomberg TV on Oct. 11 that it is still too early to determine if the war between Israel and Hamas will exacerbate inflation pressures and hamper global growth. “If it turns into a wider conflict, and that causes oil prices to go up, that does have an effect on the economies,” Ms. Gopinath said in an interview with the business news network. “That’s usually one of the channels through which we see that affecting global numbers.” Also appearing in Morocco this week, IMF chief economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas noted that the global economy is “limping along, not sprinting.” The IMF forecasts that the global economy will expand 3 percent this year and 2.9 percent in 2024. Concern Over War's Length Other economists warn that the longer the war goes on, there will be worries that it will threaten the worldwide economic outlook. "All eyes clearly remain on the tragic scenes out of Israel, and there is deep concern over what’s to come. Likely this story goes quiet for a while, but it’s clearly far from over. More likely the beginning in fact, given the voices out of Israel," wrote ING strategists in a research note. "Even if it remains localized, there will be concern that it becomes much bigger and more dangerous." Ultimately, it will depend on how far the conflict intensifies and extends, says Heritage Foundation economist Peter St Onge. "For the real economy, everything depends on how far the conflict spreads. If it is contained, we will get drama and markets but little on the real economy,” Mr. St. Onge explained in his daily commentary posted to X. “If, on the other hand, regional powers and the United States are drawn into a deeper war, we could be looking at oil dealing a catastrophic hit to inflation, which would drive the Fed to pull out all the stops and hike interest rates to economy-crushing levels we have not seen since [former Fed Chair] Paul Volcker," he wrote. On the market front, the leading U.S. benchmark indexes have risen around 2 percent in the last week. The fear trade quickly dissipated after sending traders into safe assets like the greenback and U.S. Treasurys. The U.S. Dollar Index (DXY), a gauge of the greenback against a basket of currencies, fell below 106.00. Treasury yields also slipped to their lowest levels in about two weeks. Gold, a conventional haven asset during volatile times, has held steady in recent sessions, inching back toward the $1,900 mark. An oil facility on Khark Island off Iran's coast, on March 12, 2017. (Atta Kenare/AFP via Getty Images) Iran and Oil The U.S. government has not linked Tehran to the events of this past week. However, Ms. Yellen warned that nothing is "off the table" if Iran is found to have supported the assault on Israel. Still, Washington has not made any decisions on renewed economic sanctions on the Iranian regime. "I wouldn’t take anything off the table in terms of future possible actions, but I certainly don’t want to get ahead of where we are on that," she said. Last month, the White House released $6 billion in frozen Iranian crude oil assets, transferring the funds from South Korea to an account in Qatar as part of broader efforts to ease tensions with Iran. Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) has called for a Senate Banking Committee hearing with Ms. Yellen and a federal investigation into the release of the $6 billion. "In the face of evil, we must use every tool, weapon, and economic sanction available to provide for our nation's security and the security of Israel," said Mr. Scott in a statement. “We should be signaling strength—not leniency—when it comes to Iran. That’s why now is the time to pass my Solidify Iran Sanctions Act and send the message that Iran should not expect U.S. sanctions to lapse." (Since then, the United States and Qatar, where the money was held, re-froze the assets.) Energy markets mostly shrugged off the geopolitical strife following a 4 percent rally to start the trading week, despite the potential consequences for oil prices if Iran is found to have played a role in Hamas’ attacks on Israel. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil futures plunged about 2 percent on Oct. 11, to about $84 per barrel. Brent, the international benchmark for oil prices, also slumped around 2 percent, to $86 a barrel, on London's ICE Futures exchange. At the Pump Gasoline prices also have not felt the effects of the war 5,600 miles away. According to the American Automobile Association (AAA), the national average for a gallon of gas is $3.66, down 3 percent from a week ago. The problem is that investors are largely ignoring the supply risk, says Phil Flynn, senior market analyst at The PRICE Futures Group. "It is clear the impact on oil and the risk to supplies is still incredibly high," he wrote in a note. "The market is going to have to get more comfortable that the imminent risk to supply is not going to go away in an already tight global oil market." This year, Iran’s crude exports and production have returned to their highest levels since 2018. But as many as 500,000 barrels per day of Iranian crude could be removed from the economy, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights analysts. While the White House wants more oil traveling through the global energy market, the situation in the Middle East could “override” this desire, they added. "Before the war, U.S.-Iranian tensions had eased, which facilitated higher Iranian oil exports. Iranian crude oil production increased 500,000 b/d from March to September 2023—to 3.1 million b/d from 2.6 million," the analysts wrote. "[President] Biden will be under pressure to enforce sanctions and curtail Iranian export revenue. This is a challenging situation for the Biden administration, which wants more oil on the market, not less. The attacks on Israel could override the oil issue," they added. In the United States, market observers have been paying close attention to the Strategic Petroleum Preserve (SPR). As a chorus of Wall Street experts sounds the alarm about oil prices surpassing $100 per barrel again due to geopolitical uncertainty, some are wondering if the current administration could tap into the nation's emergency stockpiles. Following a six-week build in the SPR in August and September, replenishing efforts have stagnated in the last three weeks. The SPR stands at 351.28 million barrels, equal to approximately 17 days of supply. Tyler Durden Fri, 10/13/2023 - 13:20.....»»

On Aug. 28, Colliers New Mexico-El Paso hired a new managing director with over 30 years of experience in commercial real estate......»»

US cruise companies will have to decide to join — or compete with — China in the fight for the Asian cruise market. China's first domestic-built cruise ship, the Adora Magic city, will begin international cruises from Shanghai in early 2024.  Yin Liqin/China News Service/VCG via Getty ImagesAfter a three-year hiatus, international cruise lines can resume sailings from China. But now, China has its own cruise line — and it's building its own mega-ships.US and European cruise giants are divided between partnering with China or competing against them. Royal Caribbean's Wonder of the Seas, once the world's largest cruise ship, was originally scheduled for year-round sailing from China.Then COVID-19 shut down the cruise industry and China blocked sailings from international cruise lines.Instead of launching its highly-anticipated Shanghai debut, Wonder of the Seas moved its home port across the world to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Royal Caribbean canceled plans for a hot pot restaurant on the ship, and instead installed a Southern-themed dining room serving fried chicken and jalapeño cornbread.Now, after a three-year hiatus, international cruise lines can resume sailings from China. But this time, they'll have a new competitor.While most Western cruise companies distanced themselves from the Asian market as they canceled sailings and took on massive debt, China moved forward on a 10-year plan to break into the multi-billion dollar industry with its own cruise line.Enter the Adora Magic City, the first Chinese-built and operated cruise ship. The 5,200-passenger ship concluded its second sea trials in September and is scheduled to launch commercial service later this year.The ship, which took four years to build, is part of a broader plan to boost Chinese tourism and manufacturing through the construction and operation of cruise ships.China's entrance into the industry changes the landscape for foreign cruise lines. It's no longer a "free playground for the established international cruise operators," Kun Cao, a senior manager at the Finnish consulting firm Reddal, told Insider."The cruising industry is reviving in China, but this time, it starts with a different setup," he said. "The Chinese want a share of the cake."China's cruise tourists are also big spenders on board, Royal Caribbean International's CEO said.James D. MorganChina has a massive market of potential cruise customers The size of the Chinese market "is just so significant that nobody can really ignore it," Cao said, adding that with Caribbean and European routes sufficiently tapped, Asia routes hold the most potential for growth.With sailings resuming from Chinese ports, Joel Katz — Cruise Lines International Association's (CLIA) managing director in Australasia and Asia — said he expects China to "reclaim its position as a dominant cruise market very swiftly."In 2019 (before the COVID-19 shutdowns), 2.4 million people in China went on a cruise, according to data from CLIA. That's the second largest share behind United States, which contributed 11.9 million passengers that year.China's cruise tourists are also big spenders on board the ships, Michael Bayley, CEO of Royal Caribbean International, said on a May earnings call."The value of a Chinese customer is very high," Bayley told investors. "When you look at the net revenue from a Chinese consumer, it's typically around the same level as an American and slightly higher."All the cruise giants agree: China is a jackpot worth fighting for. But they are all taking different approaches to win.Cruise companies weigh joining or competing against ChinaChina's first domestically built cruise ship is the result of a joint venture between state-owned China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC) and Miami-based Carnival Corporation.CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty ImagesUS and European cruise companies attempting to grow their footprint in Asia are now faced with a choice: partner with China's state-backed cruise enterprise or compete against them.Adora Cruises, which will offer international voyages from China, is a joint venture between state-owned China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC) and Miami-based Carnival Corporation.Separately, Viking Cruises, a European cruise line with main headquarters in Switzerland, partnered with China Merchants Group to create another domestic brand with cruises along China's coast and to various Chinese islands.Both joint ventures have scheduled cruises this year, while purely international operators like Royal Caribbean and MSC are further behind — with China operations scheduled to resume in spring 2024.In some cases, a China partnership is necessary. International companies are prohibited from operating purely domestic routes along China's coast, for example. Large cruise ships cost more than $1 billion to build and are made of 20 million parts, Yang Guobing, chairman of CSSC Carnival Cruise Shipping, told state media. Xinhua via Getty ImagesDespite the hype around China's potential for cruise tourism, there's still unknowns about the local market."The question is, how big is the domestic market?" Cao said. "The next 10 years will be quite interesting. A lot of things can go right or go wrong."The cruise industry is uniquely positioned to make some risky bets, however, since its assets are mobile. In 2018, Norwegian Cruise Line moved the Norwegian Joy — a ship specifically designed for Chinese passengers — from China to Alaska. Following the move and $50 million in renovations, Andy Stuart, the cruise line's CEO at the time, told Skift that "China's a good market. But it's not as good as Alaska."China built its first cruise ship, but can it supply its 20 million parts?Large cruise ships cost more than $1 billion to build and require 20 million parts from hundreds of suppliers, Yang Guobing, chairman of CSSC Carnival Cruise Shipping, told the state-owned Global Times. That's 10 times more parts than large aircraft and 50 times more parts than high-speed trains, he said.China has been expanding local supply chains in high-tech industries, such as electric vehicles and commercial aircraft, with the goal of becoming less reliant on foreign suppliers. But it still has a ways to go when it comes to building cruise ships.While the Adora Magic City was constructed in a Chinese shipyard, many parts were likely imported from different countries, Cao told Insider. But the government has long-term plans to create their own domestic supply chain, he said."It's part of [China's] economic ambition," Cao said. "There's no turning back. It took them over 10 years to prepare and finally get to where they are today."Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

Bosses are trying to bring staff back to the office and increase engagement by appealing to younger crowds, though these efforts often seem out of touch. Drag bingo during work hours may not be the kind of bonding your team is looking for.Klaus Vedfelt/Getty ImagesOffices are putting on everything from '90s-themed nights to drag bingo to get employees engaged.Some Gen Z and millennial employees told Insider these efforts were out of touch.Bosses need to ask employees what they want out of work — which may mean fewer happy hours.Earlier this summer, Emma received a calendar invite for a Monday afternoon. Given it was for the middle of the day, she expected it to read something like "team meeting" or "one-on-one chat."Instead, it read "drag bingo."Emma, a millennial who works for a media company, said seeing the event pop up on her calendar made her eyes roll. Since her company was busy and short-staffed, Emma couldn't believe she was being asked to give up an hour of her already-packed day for the kind of event typically reserved for a weekend with friends."I was like, well, I don't want to go to drag bingo with my coworkers on the computer," Emma said. "That sounds remarkably not fun, especially in the middle of the day. I'm not a child."A few minutes before the event, after just a handful of employees responded yes to the invite, the company canceled it.Insider verified the identity and employment status of Emma, who asked to remain anonymous and use a pseudonym for fear of retribution at her workplace.Emma acknowledged her bosses were trying to encourage a more friendly, less stressful team atmosphere, though she feels her bosses aren't addressing the core reasons behind her coworkers' stress. And considering many people she works with are part of the LGBTQ+ community, the gesture also seemed corny and out of touch, she said.Recently, bosses have been trying to get employees back into the office and increase engagement, whether it's through free breakfasts, happy hours, or ax-throwing nights.While managers have planned initiatives that aim to appeal to everyone from fresh-out-of-college hires to 30-year company veterans, some Gen Z and millennial employees told Insider that such gestures aren't helping and instead feel out of touch. In fact, they said most employees at their companies don't even want to go but feel they must to appease their bosses.It's a fine line for managers to walk, though. Emma and Mephy, a Gen Zer who asked for partial anonymity for fear of retribution at his workplace, said mandatory "fun" events during or after the workday aren't helping younger employees feel more connected with their companies."We need to get to know Gen Z better so we can help them be more successful," Tim Cozier, a managing director at the talent-solutions company Vaco, told Insider.Appreciating the effort but falling shortEmma, whose company is remote and mainly employs workers evenly distributed between Gen Z, millennials, and Gen X, said company restructuring meant her bosses were looking for ways to make staff more engaged. However, she said when her bosses were planning interactive activities, they didn't take into account how busy their employees were — and how many didn't want to blend their work and personal lives.As her bosses added events to their employees' calendars to improve work-life balance, Emma said a lot of it felt like "lip service" and represented a cultural divide between younger and older generations.Her bosses tried multiple times to encourage staff to plan meetup events, though they never panned out. The office also started a voluntary club that planned cultural outings for staff nearby, though only a few new hires joined."To have a good work culture, you need to make space for bridging those generational divides as much as racial divides and gender divides," Emma said. "Otherwise, you're just reproducing the same systems, the same hierarchies, the same resentment."While not every office is hosting drag bingo, even simple gestures like a Friday team lunch could rub employees the wrong way.Mephy, who works at a consulting firm, said his boss hosts a "Happy Friday lunch" every week that most employees dislike. During the meeting, employees share their success stories of the week, followed by a group Q&A session, though he said many employees are reluctant to participate. These supposedly relaxing lunches have become stressful, unpaid lectures to keep staff on their toes, Mephy told Insider."The lunch is more like a university lecture nobody likes to listen to," Mephy said.While he appreciates his boss trying to bring everyone together and strengthen their bond in the workplace, he said there are more impactful ways to do that."I believe that if we just sat in that room and started talking to each other, we'd be much more comfortable with each other's presence, communication in the workplace would improve, and everyone's Friday afternoon would be more enjoyable," Mephy said.How bosses can do fun events rightBosses are more stressed than their staff, thanks to factors like budget cuts and restructuring, a recent Gallup survey found. With workers split on whether in-person, hybrid, or fully remote employment works for them, managers have to handle varying preferences while maintaining team cohesivity.To keep teams tight-knit as engagement levels are near pandemic lows, bosses have launched more initiatives and programming to make staff feel more at home.Getting input from workers rather than imposing top-down events based on a boss' idea of fun can lead to more success, said Kelly Maxwell, another managing director at Vaco. She said bosses have been successful when there are frequent check-ins between bosses and employees to discuss shared goals surrounding team building.Team-bonding activities work when companies say, "We really want to have team building so everyone knows each other, but what would be some good ideas that can maybe be voted on as a group," Maxwell told Insider.Because Gen Z workers tend to make career moves more frequently than their predecessors, bosses are adjusting their management styles, Maxwell said. This may be causing some bosses to be more cautious but approachable, as workers are more willing to quit for better opportunities that fit their needs."I've noticed that Gen Z wants even a higher level of connection than what I've seen previously as far as personally being able to connect, share their opinions," Maxwell said. She's noticed some bosses have "planned a party and then didn't ask anyone if they were into that kind of thing, so that's where I've seen it fall short," she added.Perhaps this means avoiding the '90s-themed night or wellness meetings named for Gen Z slang and instead going for something staff actually want — which may mean being able to log off at 5 p.m. and not thinking about work.Have you felt your bosses were trying too hard to make you feel comfortable or welcomed at the office? What's your ideal workplace bonding activity? Reach out to this reporter at nsheidlower@insider.com.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

Bosses are trying to bring staff back to the office and increase engagement by appealing to younger crowds, though these efforts often seem out of touch. TKKlaus Vedfelt/Getty ImagesOffices are putting on everything from '90s-themed nights to drag bingo to get employees engaged.Some Gen Z and millennial employees told Insider these efforts were out of touch.Bosses need to ask employees what they want out of work — which may mean fewer happy hours.Earlier this summer, Emma received a calendar invite for a Monday afternoon. Given it was for the middle of the day, she expected it to read something like "team meeting" or "one-on-one chat."Instead, it read "drag bingo."Emma, a millennial who works for a media company, said seeing the event pop up on her calendar made her eyes roll. Since her company was busy and short-staffed, Emma couldn't believe she was being asked to give up an hour of her already-packed day for the kind of event typically reserved for a weekend with friends."I was like, well, I don't want to go to drag bingo with my coworkers on the computer," Emma said. "That sounds remarkably not fun, especially in the middle of the day. I'm not a child."A few minutes before the event, after just a handful of employees responded yes to the invite, the company canceled it.Insider verified the identity and employment status of Emma, who asked to remain anonymous and use a pseudonym for fear of retribution at her workplace.Emma acknowledged her bosses were trying to encourage a more friendly, less stressful team atmosphere, though she feels her bosses aren't addressing the core reasons behind her coworkers' stress. And considering many people she works with are part of the LGBTQ+ community, the gesture also seemed corny and out of touch, she said.Recently, bosses have been trying to get employees back into the office and increase engagement, whether it's through free breakfasts, happy hours, or ax-throwing nights.While managers have planned initiatives that aim to appeal to everyone from fresh-out-of-college hires to 30-year company veterans, some Gen Z and millennial employees told Insider that such gestures aren't helping and instead feel out of touch. In fact, they said most employees at their companies don't even want to go but feel they must to appease their bosses.It's a fine line for managers to walk, though. Emma and Mephy, a Gen Zer who asked for partial anonymity for fear of retribution at his workplace, said mandatory "fun" events during or after the workday aren't helping younger employees feel more connected with their companies."We need to get to know Gen Z better so we can help them be more successful," Tim Cozier, a managing director at the talent-solutions company Vaco, told Insider.Appreciating the effort but falling shortEmma, whose company is remote and mainly employs workers evenly distributed between Gen Z, millennials, and Gen X, said company restructuring meant her bosses were looking for ways to make staff more engaged. However, she said when her bosses were planning interactive activities, they didn't take into account how busy their employees were — and how many didn't want to blend their work and personal lives.As her bosses added events to their employees' calendars to improve work-life balance, Emma said a lot of it felt like "lip service" and represented a cultural divide between younger and older generations.Her bosses tried multiple times to encourage staff to plan meetup events, though they never panned out. The office also started a voluntary club that planned cultural outings for staff nearby, though only a few new hires joined."To have a good work culture, you need to make space for bridging those generational divides as much as racial divides and gender divides," Emma said. "Otherwise, you're just reproducing the same systems, the same hierarchies, the same resentment."While not every office is hosting drag bingo, even simple gestures like a Friday team lunch could rub employees the wrong way.Mephy, who works at a consulting firm, said his boss hosts a "Happy Friday lunch" every week that most employees dislike. During the meeting, employees share their success stories of the week, followed by a group Q&A session, though he said many employees are reluctant to participate. These supposedly relaxing lunches have become stressful, unpaid lectures to keep staff on their toes, Mephy told Insider."The lunch is more like a university lecture nobody likes to listen to," Mephy said.While he appreciates his boss trying to bring everyone together and strengthen their bond in the workplace, he said there are more impactful ways to do that."I believe that if we just sat in that room and started talking to each other, we'd be much more comfortable with each other's presence, communication in the workplace would improve, and everyone's Friday afternoon would be more enjoyable," Mephy said.How bosses can do fun events rightBosses are more stressed than their staff, thanks to factors like budget cuts and restructuring, a recent Gallup survey found. With workers split on whether in-person, hybrid, or fully remote employment works for them, managers have to handle varying preferences while maintaining team cohesivity.To keep teams tight-knit as engagement levels are near pandemic lows, bosses have launched more initiatives and programming to make staff feel more at home.Getting input from workers rather than imposing top-down events based on a boss' idea of fun can lead to more success, said Kelly Maxwell, another managing director at Vaco. She said bosses have been successful when there are frequent check-ins between bosses and employees to discuss shared goals surrounding team building.Team-bonding activities work when companies say, "We really want to have team building so everyone knows each other, but what would be some good ideas that can maybe be voted on as a group," Maxwell told Insider.Because Gen Z workers tend to make career moves more frequently than their predecessors, bosses are adjusting their management styles, Maxwell said. This may be causing some bosses to be more cautious but approachable, as workers are more willing to quit for better opportunities that fit their needs."I've noticed that Gen Z wants even a higher level of connection than what I've seen previously as far as personally being able to connect, share their opinions," Maxwell said. She's noticed some bosses have "planned a party and then didn't ask anyone if they were into that kind of thing, so that's where I've seen it fall short," she added.Perhaps this means avoiding the '90s-themed night or wellness meetings named for Gen Z slang and instead going for something staff actually want — which may mean being able to log off at 5 p.m. and not thinking about work.Have you felt your bosses were trying too hard to make you feel comfortable or welcomed at the office? What's your ideal workplace bonding activity? Reach out to this reporter at nsheidlower@insider.com.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

Lateral career moves have allowed Mel Batchelor to be better prepared for the next opportunity, instead of "being too focused on 'the next step." A row of Aperol Spritzes are seen on a table.Craig Barritt/Getty Images for AYS Sports MarketingMel Batchelor is managing director of Campari Americas, overseeing around 500 people.She's been "really focused on experience versus just climbing the corporate ladder."She wants people to feel they can give honest feedback and not have to worry about retaliation.Melanie Batchelor isn't afraid to ask what she can do better.She's also not afraid to embrace the lateral career move.As managing director of Campari Americas, she oversees around 500 people. Batchelor told me she doesn't wait for her annual review to get feedback or only ask her direct manager for how she could improve."I've built some trusted relationships, and got some really good advice from people," Batchelor said. "You need to use the formal and informal process to get feedback and advice on how to build your career."Lateral career moves have allowed her to be better prepared for the next opportunity, to get "good critical experiences" instead of being too focused on 'the next step, she said.Now she's trying to bring this approach to Campari, the Italian alcohol and spirits company that owns several brand including the eponymous orange liqueur, Aperol, Skyy Vodka, Wild Turkey and Grand Marnier.Batchelor has been at the company for 12 years, and aims to enable her team to be "ultimately responsible for their own career development" by providing opportunities so that people "really feel like they're in the driver's seat."Mel BatchelorCampariBatchelor said she was "really focused on experience versus just climbing the corporate ladder" and stresses that she looks at attitudes and past behaviors when evaluating new hires or new members of her team. "I think for me, resilience is very important," she said."Past behaviors are always a good indication of future behavior," she explained, and she leans into asking people for examples of how they managed situations. "I'm always watching and I really try to open up opportunities for the people that want them."Of course, feedback goes both ways, and Batchelor is aware she must create an environment where people feel like they can give the feedback and not have to worry about retaliation. And when someone gives her a rigorous critique, "I really made an effort to really thank them for giving me tough feedback, because that created a situation where we just could have a more honest dialogue all the time. I think it's important to always make people feel good about telling the truth."Together, all of this helps Batchelor find success, which for her is achieving the financial goals, but "doing it in the right way" that, she said, keeps in mind the welfare of Campari's baristas.Batchelor credits the company's growth to key acquisitions and brand building, particularly around the growth of Aperol and the Aperol Spritz. "We actually do see the opportunity because we've obviously seen the Aperol Spritz phenomenon starting in Italy, spreading throughout Europe. But then we saw Australia, the UK — we saw that the opportunity was real." (Batchelor's favorite drink is the negroni, sometimes with bourbon — the boulevardier.)Another key acquisition: Wild Turkey. "When I moved to the US with Campari in 2012, that was my first assignment," Batchelor said. Wild Turkey is "so rooted in tradition as a very high-quality whiskey" but "as a brand, it didn't have very premium connotations." Batchelor guided the brand through 10 years of investments around packaging innovation and helping potential customers "understand what a great product it was."Batchelor remains excited by the possibilities at Campari, but knows the responsibility can be daunting. "I now have a very big team of people and I want them to have a really positive journey with us. And so for me, that's a huge responsibility," she said. " And I take that seriously."Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

The most likely activity, place, and time for a shark attack would be to go surfing off of Volusia County on a September afternoon, per the ISAF. New Smyrna Beach, Florida and a Tiger shark.Walt Harden / 500px/Getty Images and Gregory Sweeney/Getty Images Florida's Volusia County is known as the "shark bite capital of the world." The area is a hot spot for shark attacks, especially on September afternoons, per the ISAF. The director of The Florida Program of Shark Research told Insider what attracts them to the area. Florida tourists who make for the Sunshine State's popular beaches could be entering some of the most dangerous waters in the world.Data from the Florida Museum's International Shark Attack File (ISAF), which describes itself as "the world's only scientifically documented, comprehensive database of all known shark attacks," shows that Florida is the global leader in shark attacks, with 259 from 2012 to 2021, well ahead of Australia in second place.But it is in Volusia County — which includes the renowned Daytona Beach and New Smyrna Beach — on Florida's east coast that has been dubbed the "shark bite capital of the world." It is where swimmers and surfers are most at risk in the state, with 343 recorded shark bites from 1882-2023, more than double that of  neighboring Brevard, the county with the next most reported attacks, according to the ISAF.Gavin Naylor, the director of The Florida Program of Shark Research, told Insider in an email that this was due to the area off the coast of Volusia having a high density of Mullet and Menhaden baitfish and a lot of good waves for surfing."Water flowing out of Ponce Inlet immediately north of where most shark bites occur is usually a haven for high densities of bait fishes," Naylor said in the email. "It's also a high energy environment — a lot of wave action. This churns up the water, making the visibility poor and attracts surfers."He added that the baitfish attracted the sharks, but the poor visibility in the area made catching them difficult — leading the sharks to go for arms and legs "dangling off" surfboards.ISAF data suggests that the most likely activity, place, and time for a shark attack would be surfing off the coast of Volusia County between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. in September.The sharks that hunt the waters of Volusia County and are mostly involved in biting incidents include Blacktip, Bull, and Requiem sharks.Photo of a Bull shark taken during a diving expedition in Tiger Beach, Bahamas.Carlos Grillo/Getty ImagesThere have been seven shark bites in the county so far in 2023, the Daytona Beach News-Journal reported.A surfer was reportedly bitten in the face in the waters off of New Smyrna Beach on September 12, per the outlet.Mark Summersett, 38, was attacked while surfing at the beach's jetty, Ocean Rescue Capt. Alex Miller said, per the News-Journal."He did not see what it was, but the assumption was that it was a shark," Miller added.Summersett was left with a severe gash to his face that required around 20 stitches, WESH 2 News reported."It was the scariest thing I've probably ever been through in my life. I've been in bad car accidents. Nothing like this," Sumersett said, reported the outlet.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»

Spinning The Press On Hunter Biden: Lee Fang Authored by Lee Fang via RealClear Wire, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, announcing that the House of Representatives will pursue an impeachment inquiry, suggested that the probe will hinge in part on deceiving the American public about Hunter Biden’s foreign business ventures. “President Biden did lie to the American people about his own knowledge of his family’s foreign business deals,” McCarthy said at a press conference. GOP lawmakers, he added, have “uncovered credible allegations into President Biden’s conduct.” Such an investigation will likely force an examination of the public narrative regarding Hunter Biden’s consulting deals that go back at least a decade. During President Obama’s second term, then-Vice President Joe Biden was the administration’s point man on the nation’s policy toward Ukraine, a perch he used to urge the country to resist “the cancer of corruption” and enact sweeping ethics reforms. At the time, some American journalists began to question whether the vice president’s stern message was undermined by his son Hunter Biden’s employment at the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, which was owned by a notorious local oligarch. Emails on Hunter’s laptop reveal that the inquiries sparked an internal debate within his team of consultants and public relations agents. Ultimately, they devised a series of responses about Hunter’s work with Burisma that were, at best, misleading and, at worst, outright falsehoods. The Biden team has constructed a careful image of Hunter Biden’s business ventures, sometimes employing a sophisticated myth-making operation aided by allies in the media who rarely challenged or investigated their false claims. The laptop emails show that the team closely monitored critical reporting and pushed to shape coverage with reporters from the New York Times, Time magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and the Associated Press. Their spin informed much of the ensuing coverage in the mainstream press, defusing the issue, even as President Trump and other Republicans insisted that Ukraine was a hotbed of Biden family corruption. Although he had no background in the energy field and little experience in corporate governance, Hunter Biden, who had a law degree, was appointed to the board of Burisma in May 2014. It was revealed later that he was paid about $1 million per year – as was his business partner Devon Archer. In a press release announcing his appointment, Hunter Biden is quoted as saying, “I believe that my assistance in consulting the Company on matters of transparency, corporate governance and responsibility, international expansion and other priorities will contribute to the economy and benefit the people of Ukraine.”   That same month, journalist Michael Scherer reached out with questions about the arrangement. Several consultants employed by Burisma, including Ryan Toohey of FTI Consulting and Heather King, a partner at the law firm Boies, Schiller, & Flexner, where Hunter worked as counsel, strategized over how to respond to Scherer, a reporter then with Time magazine who has since joined the Washington Post.  For the Scherer inquiry, laptop emails show, Hunter’s business associates settled on a strategy to deflect the most direct questions and obfuscate the true intent of Burisma’s attempts to sway U.S. government officials. One of Hunter’s associates noted that they planned to respond to Scherer’s attempts to reach David Leiter, a former aide to then-Secretary of State John Kerry, hired to work for Burisma. The plan was to use an assistant to make Leiter “unavailable to comment, as opposed to some sort of statement that made it seem like we were unwilling or refusing to engage with the reporter.” Leiter, the emails show, was in fact available, but the public relations team wanted to keep him out of reach. Scherer wanted to know why Burisma was on a hiring spree of well-connected American lobbyists, including Leiter and others. In response, Toohey planned to tell Scherer that the hired guns were simply working on issues related to energy independence, economic growth, as well as “transparency and good governance.” In response to other questions posed by Scherer, Toohey prepared a statement claiming that Hunter Biden will “not be engaged with the U.S. government” on anything related to Burisma. The response belied a detailed lobbying agenda spelled out in other emails. Burisma had made clear that the company had hired Leiter, Hunter Biden, and other political operatives as part of a focused plan to obtain Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky a U.S. visa as well as to persuade American officials to intervene with Ukrainian government officials to drop an investigation of his business interests. In a May 2014 email, Vadym Pozharskyi, a close adviser to Zlochevsky, explained to Hunter that he needed his “advice on how you could use your influence to convey a message/signal, etc. to stop what we consider to be politically motivated actions,” a reference to an ongoing investigation of Zlochevsky by Ukrainian prosecutors. That month, Pozharskyi again wrote to Hunter, spelling out the “working plan for both FTI and David,” reiterating that he wanted the lobbyists to intervene against the “politically motivated proceedings initiated against us in Ukraine” and to overcome the “US entry ban” for the Burisma owner. “The immediate plan is to reach out to the Energy and Ukraine desks, respectively, at State Dept,” wrote Heather King, the attorney working closely with Hunter Biden at the time. “That will include outreach to Carlos Pascual, he is the top US energy diplomat,” she added.  Scherer printed the denials, but to his credit, reported on the odd circumstances surrounding Biden’s hiring, at a time when Joe Biden was the Obama administration’s point person for Ukraine, with a special focus on energy policy in the region.  In many cases, Hunter Biden’s associates cast him as simply an auditor with a special focus on renewable energy sourced from geothermal vents. That was the strategy in response to an inquiry from Stephen Braun, a reporter for the Associated Press. “Mr. Biden will not lobby on behalf of Burisma. His role is to advise the company’s legal and compliance unit, including guidance on corporate governance standards.”   Behind the scenes, Hunter Biden’s team knew otherwise. In emails conferring over how to deal with Braun’s questions, one lobbyist reiterated the plan to provide Braun with “minimum information.”  Like many other articles from this time, the AP story focused on the conflict of interest issues, noting the denials around any lobbying with a degree of skepticism:    A former Washington lobbyist, the vice president’s son is effectively exempt from most rules that would require him to describe publicly the legal work he does on behalf of Burisma.   Hunter Biden will not lobby for the company, said Lawrence Pacheco, an official with FTI Consulting, a Washington government affairs company recently hired by Burisma.   Pacheco did not say whether Biden might oversee or advise on any future Burisma lobbying strategy in the U.S. Pacheco said the company “does not take positions on political matters.”   Braun could not be reached for comment. Scherer declined an opportunity to comment on the Hunter Biden emails. Biden, Toohey, and King did not respond to a request for comment.  However, the emails clearly indicate that substantial resources were allocated to managing both Burisma and Hunter’s personal image. Pozharskyi pointed out that Burisma had retained American consultants to reach out to “the most reputable European and American journalists/newspapers, magazines, websites, blogs,” while assistance was required to handle Wikipedia, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other online platforms. Burisma, wrote Pozharskyi, sought a “detailed algorithm on how the Company should act in case of bad publicity.” The effort included scrubbing negative details from Hunter Biden’s Wikipedia, while bolstering the online credentials of Burisma, emails show.     A highly focused effort to monitor and shape news media coverage helped maintain the public profile. Even with relatively low visibility, independent media were closely watched. Hunter and his team monitored Vice News as well as the gadfly website ZeroHedge. In response to critical reporting from Vice, one colleague noted approvingly that the article was not being “reposted or republished” in Ukrainian media. In July 2014, Toohey circulated an investigative piece I wrote for Salon about Hunter Biden’s hiring at Burisma, which noted that the vice president’s son had been retained amid a string of nepotistic hires likely aimed at influencing natural gas and energy policy.   In the article, I noted that Joe Biden had traveled to Ukraine to “announce a $50 million aid package that included technical support for increasing the country’s natural gas production – an investment that could bolster profits at Burisma Holdings, where his son is a director.” What was not known at the time, however, was that Hunter Biden was already working with a team of public affairs consultants to channel U.S. government technical assistance to his client.  The laptop emails show that even this relatively brief mention of Hunter Biden and a potential conflict of interest with his father raised concerns.  “All, please see below a piece that mentions Hunter’s appointment as part of a broader trend, mostly within the context of relatives of eleceds [sic] engaged to lobby for the energy industry,” wrote Toohey, attaching a copy of the text of my piece. But, he added, “This was a freelanced piece picked up in a number of web-based outlets including Salon, but nothing with significant reach.”   Pozharskyi replied that he had seen the piece earlier and “wanted to have a discussion in this regard.” In some cases, the team celebrated media coverage that elevated its desired narrative. Politico reported Hunter’s hiring at Burisma and simply printed quotes from the company’s official statements:  “The company’s strategy is aimed at the strongest concentration of professional staff and the introduction of best corporate practices, and we’re delighted that Mr. Biden is joining us to help us achieve these goals,” Alan Apter, Burisma Holdings’ chairman of the board of directors, said in a statement, which was reported by The Moscow Times on Tuesday.   Biden, joining the board, will be in charge of the legal unit, the company said. He will also provide support for Burisma Holdings “among international organizations.”   Biden said the company will help strengthen Ukraine’s economy.   Pozharskyi circulated a link to the Politico article to Hunter and his associates, noting the “positive coverage.”  Hunter’s membership on the Burisma board received renewed attention in late 2015, as then-Vice President Biden was set to visit Ukraine where he planned to address the parliament on the need to adopt new reforms against a culture of corruption in the country. James Risen of the Times, among others, renewed inquiries directed toward Hunter and his associates about the rationale behind his appointment to the company, Burisma, and why the company appeared to be buying access to high levels of government.   In one email found on Hunter’s laptop, Risen asked, “What lobbying activities is the company engaged in the US?” among other questions to Hunter Biden. In response, a Burisma spokesperson straightforwardly claimed that “no one is lobbying on their behalf.”  The company’s lobbying efforts were not covered in the story ultimately published by the New York Times, which featured Risen’s piece on Dec. 8, 2015. The article included a statement from the Hunter Biden team, crafted by the strategy firm FTI Consulting, asserting that the company’s focus was on “corporate governance and transparency.” Risen’s article did not address whether Hunter’s business career demonstrated such expertise or his lack of experience in the energy field. Although Risen identified Hunter as “a former Washington lobbyist,” he accepted the denial that no lobbying was involved.   In reality, just a month prior to the email exchange with the Times, Burisma, following Hunter Biden’s advice, had hired Blue Star Strategies, a Democratic lobbying firm, to influence the Obama administration. A copy of the agreement, belatedly filed with the Justice Department, reveals that the firm, which aided in lobbying State Department officials on Ukrainian energy policy, received a monthly retainer of $30,000.  Blue Star Strategies was even copied on the emails with the Hunter Biden team on its response plan to Risen.  Risen also allowed a Burisma spokesman to decline to state Hunter’s compensation while claiming it was “not out of the ordinary” for such board positions. It was later disclosed that he was paid about $1 million per year, which is far higher than the typical compensation. As a point of comparison, median annual compensation of board members at Fortune 500 companies is around $110,000.  Risen, now with The Intercept, did not respond to a request for comment.   Political operatives of all ideological backgrounds frequently manipulate public perception – often employing specialized “crisis communication” firms to suppress negative coverage and shape desired narratives. What is remarkable about the Hunter Biden episode is how successful it was, and how uncritically most media organizations treated this unorthodox relationship between a president’s son and a controversial foreign corporation.  In response to the Wall Street Journal, Toohey worked closely with Blue Star Strategies’ Sally Painter and Karen Tramontano to craft a message defusing questions around a conflicting message between Hunter and his father. They settled on a strategy of presenting the Ukrainian gig as perfectly “aligned” with an anti-corruption agenda, laptop emails show. The lobbyists suggested that they release a statement to the Journal claiming that Hunter’s work for the Ukrainian energy giant, to supposedly strengthen corporate governance, are “also goals the United States.”  The Journal printed the statement, attributing it to a spokesperson.   Such coverage – which suggested Hunter Biden had engaged in questionable but ultimately harmless behavior that did not involve, much less implicate, his father – set the narrative for most coverage in mainstream outlets. When President Trump told Ukraine’s president in 2018 that “there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son” and asked him to look into Joe Biden’s demand that the prosecutor looking into Burisma be fired, Democrats moved to impeach him.   The Biden spin continued even after the New York Post published the first articles based on material from Hunter’s laptop in October 2020. The Washington Post’s fact checker, Glenn Kessler, sought to discredit the New York Post’s reporting that Hunter Biden had arranged a dinner meeting between his Ukrainian associates at Burisma and his father when he served as vice president. At the time, the Biden presidential campaign claimed that it “reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time, and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.” Kessler reiterated this denial as though it were an established fact. It turned out to be false. The July testimony by former Hunter Biden associate Devon Archer confirmed that Hunter Biden had arranged a secret dinner with his Ukrainian business partner and his father, as the New York Post had originally reported. The ongoing saga over the Washington Post’s role in discrediting the Biden revelations was detailed last month by RealClearInvestigation’s Paul Sperry.  Also last month, Washington Post columnist Philip Bump, who has dismissed any hint of scandal regarding Biden business dealings, appeared on Live at the Table, a podcast hosted by Noam Dworman, the owner of New York City’s Comedy Cellar. The show went viral as Dworman challenged Bump’s claims that there was “no evidence” of wrongdoing by Joe Biden. In a heated exchange, Bump conceded that Hunter Biden’s text messages that claim, “unlike pop, I won’t make you give me half your salary,” was one form of “evidence.” Moments later, Bump ended the interview and walked off the set.  The interaction provided a rare moment of visible accountability for the establishment press, which has largely followed the Biden spin for an entire decade on this issue.    Yet the White House is still hoping it can still instruct journalists on how to cover the story. Shortly after McCarthy’s impeachment inquiry announcement, President Biden’s White House staff circulated a memo, instructing media outlets on how to cover the news. In bold type, the memo claimed that the entire Hunter Biden conflict of interest scandal had been “refuted” and “debunked” – language that was adopted in media reports about the inquiry in Vox, NBC News and CNN.    Lee Fang is an independent journalist based in San Francisco. He writes an investigative newsletter on Substack via www.leefang.com. Tyler Durden Tue, 09/19/2023 - 17:25.....»»

Growing Maze Of State And Local Laws Challenging Biden's Energy Push Authored by Steve Miller via RealClear Wire, Grassroots resistance to the Biden administration’s ambitious push for a “zero-carbon” economy is coalescing in varied new state laws and local ordinances that threaten to bog down solar and wind development in a multi-front legal and regulatory war on a scale not seen before.  Until recently and with few exceptions, squabbles pitted loosely organized local residents against renewable developers, with an average of two major projects a month facing protests and legal action in mostly rural areas, according to a database of renewable rejections compiled by Robert Bryce, a former fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute.  But the escalation of local protests has gradually drawn more elected officials into the fray, with new laws and regulations auguring ever-varying multi-dimensional contests at the federal, state, and local levels to gain approvals, often involving international players:  Laws passed in Ohio and Kansas in 2021 and 2022, respectively, give stronger input to towns and villages that are often the target of well-heeled power companies seeking to use rural land to construct large-scale renewable energy projects.  In Michigan, a group called Michigan Citizens for the Protection of Farmland plans a ballot proposal that would ban large-scale solar farms on agriculturally zoned land across the state, combating a strong renewable lobby in the Democrat-controlled state.  In Maine, lawmakers heeded the formidable fishing lobby and passed a law in 2021 banning wind farms in state waters off the coast.  In the crucial early primary state of Iowa, where farming interests are powerful, opponents are pursuing legislation halting solar plants on land suitable for agriculture within 150 feet of a neighboring property. The bill was introduced earlier this year but did not move past subcommittee approval.  Meanwhile, lawmakers in 12 states, including Republican strongholds Florida and Iowa, have passed measures that limit or remove local control of renewable projects, handing more authority to the state.  “States get to set their own energy policy,” James Coleman, a law professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, told RealClearInvestigations. “For example, New York has left a lot of money on the table with natural gas because it doesn’t like fracking, and the federal government has allowed that.”  “We need to replace all fossil fuels plants with renewables … so my suggestion is that we need some kind of federal intervention for that,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. “I think it is possible given the magnitude of the need.”  There’s little question that states and towns are chafing at the rush to development and full deployment of wind and solar.  “Our county is under assault,” Bill Hicks, a resident of Franklin County, population 10,000, in east Texas, said at a March hearing in Austin for a proposed legislative measure that would give more power to Texas landowners who resist renewable energy developers.  Hicks noted six pending solar plants, adding: “Folks, one of them is 5,000 acres and stretches for nine miles along a highway.”  Opponents of the Texas bill represented interests from as far away as Norway and Spain, with billions of dollars in revenue and investments from multi-national corporations.  “This is an anti-renewable energy bill,” one opponent, Jeff Clark, president of the Advanced Power Alliance, an advocacy group for an international consortium of renewable producers, said in written testimony. “Senate Bill 624 is designed to stop renewable energy development … everywhere in Texas.”  Conflicts over renewable source placement from Vermont to Nevada have put locals at odds with the Biden administration’s dream of a carbon-free electric sector by 2035 to combat a “climate crisis” that it claims is driven by fossil fuels.  Regulations on renewable plant siting vary widely by state, ranging from a hybrid of local and state authority to outright local or state control. State approval is required of most any energy project, be it oil, gas, wind, or solar. Some states require additional scrutiny of projects over a specified size, while others apply uniform standards regardless of scope.  While 31 states have adopted requirements that a percentage of electricity come from renewable sources in the future, where the plants for this electric generation are situated largely rests with private developers, noted Gerrard of Columbia University.  “They will decide where to buy and rent the land and where it will work the best,” Gerrard said. “Private developers are very good at that, and it is subject to government approval.”  Opposition has a strong element of so-called NIMBY-ism, an acronym for “not in my backyard,” and both sides have turned to the courts on some occasions, with mixed results.  Local opponents cite some of the same arguments used against the oil industry for decades: Development means the potential loss of farmland, the impact of developing roads and infrastructure on the environment, and water runoff that endangers the water supply.  “A big part of this tears communities apart,” said Jack Van Kley, a Columbus, Ohio-based attorney who has represented groups of residents opposing solar and wind developments. “It becomes a green energy civil war in some places.”  With the heft of state law giving these citizens broader say in locating projects on large tracts of wilderness or farmland, energy companies will have to be more diligent when selecting locations.  The corporations say large tracts are ideal for siting solar and wind farms close to transmission conveyances, and therefore more profitable.  “They also want an area with flat ground, which often means farm ground,” said Van Kley, the Ohio lawyer, whose clients are mostly farmers.  Connie Ehrlich has staved off solar development in Pulaski County, Indiana, for three years with a tenacious fight that has included lawsuits, social media blitzes, and overtures to state leaders for help.  But Indiana’s political leadership has not cooperated. “They’re all in on solar,” she said, including the state’s Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb, who joined executives from Israeli-owned Doral Renewables at a solar plant groundbreaking last year in Pulaski County. Even the Indiana Farm Bureau, which is supposed to represent farmers in such situations, “has been a real disappointment,” Ehrlich said. “They have been more involved with solar developers than us, hosting events with them. It will cost them membership.”  In the state legislature, Indiana Republicans proposed taxpayer-funded payouts to municipalities that allow solar and wind farms. But residents are outspoken against them: “This bill would take our own Indiana taxpayer dollars and offer them back to us as a bribe,” Judith Noll, a resident of rural Whitley County, told legislators during a hearing on the measure.  Indiana Farm Bureau President Randy Kron and Vice President Kendell Culp – also a state representative whose political donors include out-of-state solar industry entities – did not respond to interview requests.  Utility siting, be it for fossil fuels or renewable energy, is a political art with huge stakes that has yet to be perfected.  The issue has been studied for decades, starting with the designation of land for oil and gas exploration, and is decried for the alleged potential of groundwater pollution. Nuclear facilities are disparaged for the possibility of meltdowns and leaks.  Today, objectors look at renewables as a danger to the environment from consuming valuable agricultural or recreational land. Solar developers have flocked to the hinterlands of Nevada, with flat tracts of sunny land viewed as the perfect landscape for vast panel arrays.  The area is even more attractive because most of it is federal property, controlled now by an administration foisting billion-dollar breaks on the renewables industry. In July, Warren Buffet’s NV Energy bought 7,200 desert acres from the feds for $82 million in an auction. The land, set to be covered with solar panels, is close to the town of Beatty, Nevada, which leverages its proximity to Death Valley National Park as a recreation and tourism draw.  The town’s leaders fear that even though Beatty has so far managed to stave off largescale solar development, the new land deal 11 miles south is a dark portent.  “When NextEra Energy came to the town and wanted to put a facility in, they asked us, ‘What do you want?’” said Erika Gerling, who chairs the Beatty Town Advisory Board. “They offered to build some big fancy visitor center thing, but we don’t want any of that. We want to have our own economy.” NextEra wanted to build a 3,000-acre solar plant that would go right up to the entrance to Death Valley, on a scenic desert-scape that defines the region’s stark natural beauty.  To fight large corporate interests, “people have to stand up and be strong and be outraged,” said Gerling, who has been pleased by the support of two Democratic state senators, Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto. “It’s one thing if I write a letter for the advisory board but another when 100 citizens from the town come out to talk about it.”   Several of the major renewable corporations, including NextEra and Invenergy, did not respond to requests to speak about their siting policies.   Several communities in Michigan have passed moratoriums on solar development, some under a 1974 law that allowed farmland to be protected by the state for a specified period ranging up to 90 years. But Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer ordered the statute amended in 2019, allowing solar panels to be placed on the protected land. A spokeswoman for the state of Michigan did not respond to emailed questions on the Democratic governor’s action.  Her order rankles some members of the state’s farming community, who are working on a ballot proposal to protect farmland.  “Making sure these renewable projects are done right is about protecting the country, and at the end of the day we have to protect our farmland,” said Erin Hamilton, who is leading an effort to enforce Michigan’s protection of agricultural land. “Look at history, and any civilization that has gone under … One of the things that broke it is that they lost control of their food supply.” Tyler Durden Wed, 09/13/2023 - 19:20.....»»

Executive Trent Innes said in a 2019 podcast that he always offers job interview candidates a drink to test their attitude and etiquette. A cup of Espresso coffee at Falassarna beach near Chania, Crete Island, Greece on August 14, 2022.NurPhoto/GettyImagesOne executive uses a hiring strategy called the "coffee cup test" on candidates in job interviews.He said in a resurfaced 2019 clip that he doesn't hire people who don't offer to wash their cup after the interview.Social media users are calling him out for playing a "deeply disturbing psycho-social game." A boss has gone viral on social media after sharing an interview process he calls the "coffee cup test" to filter candidates in job interviews, with some users accusing him of playing mind games with jobseekers.Trent Innes, a chief growth officer at SiteMinder, appeared on The Venture Podcast with Lambros Photios in 2019 when he was still the managing director of Xero Australia to discuss his hiring strategy. Innes said he only hires people if they offer to take their coffee cups to the kitchen at the end of an interview. In the podcast, Innes explained that he always takes candidates for a walk to the kitchen to offer them a drink whether it be water, coffee, a cup of tea, or a soft drink. "Then we take that back and have our interview and one thing I'm always looking for is at the end of the interview is that the person doing the interview wants to take their empty cup back to the kitchen," he said. "You can develop skills, you can gain knowledge, and gain experience but it really does come down to attitude," Innes told Photios about why such a minor task is so significant to him.He said: "What I was trying to find was what was the lowest level task I could find that regardless of what you do inside the organization was still super important." Most candidates did offer to take back their cup with only a few that didn't, Innes noted at the time. The podcast episode has now resurfaced on social media, being shared on both TikTok and Reddit, with some users saying that Innes' strategy is manipulative. Under one TikTok video about the podcast with over 24,000 likes, a user wrote: "I feel like it's weird to wash your own cup at an interview when you're a guest there. I'd prob just ask what they want me to do with the cup."Another user commented: "Good to know. If an employer plays mindgames like this. It's an immediate red flag for me. I end the interview right there." The episode is making the rounds on Reddit too, with one thread accumulating over 100 comments. One person wrote in the thread: "The boss actually said he actively manipulates potential hires into taking a drink, all so he can play his deeply disturbing psycho-social game." Another agreed saying: "So he doesn't communicate his needs, and punishes people for not reading his mind? Sounds like a shitty boss." Although Innes' hiring method appears harmless in theory, social media users are convinced that it signals a toxic work culture.Read the original article on Business Insider.....»»